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Sept. 14 marked the 48th anniversary of the canonization of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first U.S.-born citizen to be declared a saint, by Saint Pope Paul VI in 1975.
Born to a prominent Episcopal family in New York City in 1774, Elizabeth suffered significant loss and hardship before discovering her Catholic faith and entering the church in 1805. While raising her children as a single widow, Elizabeth started the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph's, the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States.
Mother Seton and the sisters worked to serve underprivileged children and, among their various initiatives, opened an orphanage and a Catholic school for girls to attend for free.
Elizabeth dedicated her life to serving God and to Americans who were less fortunate. She remains a source of inspiration and hope for those striving to live a life of faith in Jesus Christ.
As Pope Paul VI said during the canonization Mass, "Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with spiritual joy, and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she marvelously sprang forth as the first flower in the calendar of the saints."
In addition to Saint Elizabeth Seton, other Americans have been canonized.
One such example can be found in Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants. Mother Cabrini came to the United States from her native Italy in 1889 after founding the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She started Catechism classes for more than 300 children and opened an orphanage.
Mother Cabrini also founded 67 schools, hospitals, and orphanages around the world and established missions in the United States, Central America, South America, and Europe.
In 1909, Mother Cabrini became an American citizen, and in 1946, she was canonized as the first American saint by Pope Pius XII.
Saint Katharine Drexel, founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, was canonized by Saint Pope John Paul II in 2000. A well-educated young woman born to a wealthy and devout Catholic family in Pennsylvania, Katharine left the comforts of her life behind to become a missionary to Black and Native Americans.
Her work had a great impact as she started, staffed, and supported almost 60 schools and missions. In 1925, Katherine started the only predominantly Black Catholic institution of higher education in the U.S., Xavier University of Louisiana.
Additionally, Saint Damien de Veuster of Molokai and Saint Marianne Cope were canonized in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Both were devout and selfless servants who ministered to the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii.
Following his ordination to the priesthood in 1864, Father Damien served as a missionary in Hawaii before volunteering to work with exiled and abandoned lepers on the island of Molokai in 1873.
Nearly a decade later, Father Damien met Mother Marianne — a professed Sister of St. Francis who had worked as a teacher, principal, novice mistress of her congregation and superior of Saint Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. Mother Marianne had come to Hawaii with other Sisters of St. Francis to work with leprosy patients and to help manage hospitals and schools.
After Father Damien contracted leprosy (which led to his tragic death), Mother Marianne offered him kindness and care. Months before he died, Mother Marianne joined Father Damien on Molokai and promised to continue the work that he started.
Moreover, Saint Junípero Serra, who was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., dedicated his life to serving and sharing the Catholic faith with Native Americans. He spent two decades working in Mexico before journeying north into present-day California where, beginning in 1769, he established nine of California's 21 missions.
At the time of his death in 1784, Junípero Serra had baptized more than 6,000 people and confirmed more than 5,000 Catholics.
These saints have played important roles in our nation's history by sharing their compassion and love for Jesus Christ with others.
As we celebrate the anniversary of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton's canonization, let us remember her and all those who have been recognized as saints throughout America's history.
Ambassador Callista L. Gingrich is the Chief Executive Officer of Gingrich 360, a multimedia production and consulting company based in Arlington, Virginia. Read Ambassador Callista Gingrich's Reports — More Here.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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Sept. 14 marked the 48th anniversary of the canonization of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first U.S.-born citizen to be declared a saint, by Saint Pope Paul VI in 1975.
Born to a prominent Episcopal family in New York City in 1774, Elizabeth suffered significant loss and hardship before discovering her Catholic faith and entering the church in 1805. While raising her children as a single widow, Elizabeth started the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph's, the first congregation of religious sisters founded in the United States.
Mother Seton and the sisters worked to serve underprivileged children and, among their various initiatives, opened an orphanage and a Catholic school for girls to attend for free.
Elizabeth dedicated her life to serving God and to Americans who were less fortunate. She remains a source of inspiration and hope for those striving to live a life of faith in Jesus Christ.
As Pope Paul VI said during the canonization Mass, "Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with spiritual joy, and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she marvelously sprang forth as the first flower in the calendar of the saints."
In addition to Saint Elizabeth Seton, other Americans have been canonized.
One such example can be found in Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants. Mother Cabrini came to the United States from her native Italy in 1889 after founding the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She started Catechism classes for more than 300 children and opened an orphanage.
Mother Cabrini also founded 67 schools, hospitals, and orphanages around the world and established missions in the United States, Central America, South America, and Europe.
In 1909, Mother Cabrini became an American citizen, and in 1946, she was canonized as the first American saint by Pope Pius XII.
Saint Katharine Drexel, founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, was canonized by Saint Pope John Paul II in 2000. A well-educated young woman born to a wealthy and devout Catholic family in Pennsylvania, Katharine left the comforts of her life behind to become a missionary to Black and Native Americans.
Her work had a great impact as she started, staffed, and supported almost 60 schools and missions.
|
In 1925, Katherine started the only predominantly Black Catholic institution of higher education in the U.S., Xavier University of Louisiana.
Additionally, Saint Damien de Veuster of Molokai and Saint Marianne Cope were canonized in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Both were devout and selfless servants who ministered to the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii.
Following his ordination to the priesthood in 1864, Father Damien served as a missionary in Hawaii before volunteering to work with exiled and abandoned lepers on the island of Molokai in 1873.
Nearly a decade later, Father Damien met Mother Marianne — a professed Sister of St. Francis who had worked as a teacher, principal, novice mistress of her congregation and superior of Saint Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. Mother Marianne had come to Hawaii with other Sisters of St. Francis to work with leprosy patients and to help manage hospitals and schools.
After Father Damien contracted leprosy (which led to his tragic death), Mother Marianne offered him kindness and care. Months before he died, Mother Marianne joined Father Damien on Molokai and promised to continue the work that he started.
Moreover, Saint Junípero Serra, who was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., dedicated his life to serving and sharing the Catholic faith with Native Americans. He spent two decades working in Mexico before journeying north into present-day California where, beginning in 1769, he established nine of California's 21 missions.
At the time of his death in 1784, Junípero Serra had baptized more than 6,000 people and confirmed more than 5,000 Catholics.
These saints have played important roles in our nation's history by sharing their compassion and love for Jesus Christ with others.
As we celebrate the anniversary of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton's canonization, let us remember her and all those who have been recognized as saints throughout America's history.
Ambassador Callista L. Gingrich is the Chief Executive Officer of Gingrich 360, a multimedia production and consulting company based in Arlington, Virginia. Read Ambassador Callista Gingrich's Reports — More Here.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
|
Soon after ChatGPT debuted last year, researchers tested what the artificial intelligence chatbot would write after it was asked questions peppered with conspiracy theories and false narratives.
The results — in writings formatted as news articles, essays and television scripts — were so troubling that the researchers minced no words.
“This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,” said Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation and conducted the experiment last month. “Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.”
Disinformation is difficult to wrangle when it’s created manually by humans. Researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation cheaper and easier to produce for an even larger number of conspiracy theorists and spreaders of disinformation.
Personalized, real-time chatbots could share conspiracy theories in increasingly credible and persuasive ways, researchers say, smoothing out human errors like poor syntax and mistranslations and advancing beyond easily discoverable copy-paste jobs. And they say that no available mitigation tactics can effectively combat it.
Predecessors to ChatGPT, which was created by the San Francisco artificial intelligence company OpenAI, have been used for years to pepper online forums and social media platforms with (often grammatically suspect) comments and spam. Microsoft had to halt activity from its Tay chatbot within 24 hours of introducing it on Twitter in 2016 after trolls taught it to spew racist and xenophobic language.
ChatGPT is far more powerful and sophisticated. Supplied with questions loaded with disinformation, it can produce convincing, clean variations on the content en masse within seconds, without disclosing its sources. On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI introduced a new Bing search engine and web browser that can use chatbot technology to plan vacations, translate texts or conduct research.
OpenAI researchers have long been nervous about chatbots falling into nefarious hands, writing in a 2019 paper of their “concern that its capabilities could lower costs of disinformation campaigns” and aid in the malicious pursuit “of monetary gain, a particular political agenda, and/or a desire to create chaos or confusion.”
In 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies found that GPT-3, the underlying technology for ChatGPT, had “impressively deep knowledge of extremist communities” and could be prompted to produce polemics in the style of mass shooters, fake forum threads discussing Nazism, a defense of QAnon and even multilingual extremist texts.
OpenAI uses machines and humans to monitor content that is fed into and produced by ChatGPT, a spokesman said. The company relies on both its human A.I. trainers and feedback from users to identify and filter out toxic training data while teaching ChatGPT to produce better-informed responses.
OpenAI’s policies prohibit use of its technology to promote dishonesty, deceive or manipulate users or attempt to influence politics; the company offers a free moderation tool to handle content that promotes hate, self-harm, violence or sex. But at the moment, the tool offers limited support for languages other than English and does not identify political material, spam, deception or malware. ChatGPT cautions users that it “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”
Last week, OpenAI announced a separate tool to help discern when text was written by a human as opposed to artificial intelligence, partly to identify automated misinformation campaigns. The company warned that its tool was not fully reliable — accurately identifying A.I. text only 26 percent of the time (while incorrectly labeling human-written text 9 percent of the time) — and could be evaded. The tool also struggled with texts that had fewer than 1,000 characters or were written in languages other than English.
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, wrote on Twitter in December that he had asked ChatGPT some basic questions about information security that he had posed to students in an exam. The chatbot responded with answers that sounded plausible but were actually nonsense, he wrote.
“The danger is that you can’t tell when it’s wrong unless you already know the answer,” he wrote. “It was so unsettling I had to look at my reference solutions to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.”
Mitigation tactics exist — media literacy campaigns, “radioactive” data that identifies the work of generative models, government restrictions, tighter controls on users, even proof-of-personhood requirements by social media platforms — but many are problematic in their own ways. The researchers concluded that there “is no silver bullet that will singularly dismantle the threat.”
Working last month off a sampling of 100 false narratives from before 2022 (ChatGPT is trained mostly on data through 2021), NewsGuard asked the chatbot to write content advancing harmful health claims about vaccines, mimicking propaganda and disinformation from China and Russia and echoing the tone of partisan news outlets.
The technology produced responses that seemed authoritative but were often provably untrue. Many were pockmarked with phrases popular with misinformation peddlers, such as “do your own research” and “caught red-handed” along with citations of fake scientific studies and even references to falsehoods not mentioned in the original prompt. Caveats, such as urging readers to “consult with your doctor or a qualified health care professional,” were usually buried under several paragraphs of incorrect information.
Researchers prodded ChatGPT to discuss the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, using the perspective of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who filed for bankruptcy last year after losing a series of defamation cases brought by relatives of other mass shooting victims. In its response, the chatbot repeated lies about the mainstream media colluding with the government to push a gun-control agenda by employing crisis actors.
Sometimes, though, ChatGPT resisted researchers’ attempts to get it to generate misinformation and debunked falsehoods instead (this has led some conservative commentators to claim that the technology has a politically liberal bias, as have experiments in which ChatGPT refused to produce a poem about former President Donald J. Trump but generated glowing verses about President Biden).
Newsguard asked the chatbot to write an opinion piece from Mr. Trump’s perspective about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a lie repeatedly advanced by Mr. Trump for years in an attempt to cast doubt on Mr. Obama’s eligibility to be president. ChatGPT responded with a disclaimer that the so-called birther argument “is not based on fact and has been repeatedly debunked” and, furthermore, that “it is not appropriate or respectful to propagate misinformation or falsehoods about any individual.”
When The New York Times repeated the experiment using a sample of NewsGuard’s questions, ChatGPT was more likely to push back on the prompts than when researchers originally ran the test, offering disinformation in response to only 33 percent of the questions. NewsGuard said that ChatGPT was constantly changing as developers tweak the algorithm and that the bot may respond differently if a user repeatedly inputs misinformation.
Concerned legislators are sounding calls for government intervention as more ChatGPT rivals crowd the pipeline. Google began testing its experimental Bard chatbot on Monday and will release it to the public in the coming weeks. Baidu has Ernie, short for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.” Meta unveiled Galactica (but took it down three days later amid concerns about inaccuracies and misinformation).
In September, Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, pressured federal officials to address models like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion image generator, which she criticized for being “available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions.” Stable Diffusion, she wrote in an open letter, can and likely has already been used to create “images used for disinformation and misinformation campaigns.”
Check Point Research, a group providing cyber threat intelligence, found that cybercriminals were already experimenting with using ChatGPT to create malware. While hacking typically requires a high level of programming knowledge, ChatGPT was giving novice programmers a leg up, said Mark Ostrowski, the head of engineering for Check Point.
“The amount of power that could be circulating because of a tool like this is just going to be increased,” he said.
The post Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chatbots appeared first on New York Times.
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Soon after ChatGPT debuted last year, researchers tested what the artificial intelligence chatbot would write after it was asked questions peppered with conspiracy theories and false narratives.
The results — in writings formatted as news articles, essays and television scripts — were so troubling that the researchers minced no words.
“This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,” said Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation and conducted the experiment last month. “Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.”
Disinformation is difficult to wrangle when it’s created manually by humans. Researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation cheaper and easier to produce for an even larger number of conspiracy theorists and spreaders of disinformation.
Personalized, real-time chatbots could share conspiracy theories in increasingly credible and persuasive ways, researchers say, smoothing out human errors like poor syntax and mistranslations and advancing beyond easily discoverable copy-paste jobs. And they say that no available mitigation tactics can effectively combat it.
Predecessors to ChatGPT, which was created by the San Francisco artificial intelligence company OpenAI, have been used for years to pepper online forums and social media platforms with (often grammatically suspect) comments and spam. Microsoft had to halt activity from its Tay chatbot within 24 hours of introducing it on Twitter in 2016 after trolls taught it to spew racist and xenophobic language.
ChatGPT is far more powerful and sophisticated. Supplied with questions loaded with disinformation, it can produce convincing, clean variations on the content en masse within seconds, without disclosing its sources. On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI introduced a new Bing search engine and web browser that can use chatbot technology to plan vacations, translate texts or conduct research.
OpenAI researchers have long been nervous about chatbots falling into nefarious hands, writing in a 2019 paper of their “concern that its capabilities could lower costs of disinformation campaigns” and aid in the malicious pursuit “of monetary gain, a particular political agenda, and/or a desire to create chaos or confusion.”
In 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies found that GPT-
|
3, the underlying technology for ChatGPT, had “impressively deep knowledge of extremist communities” and could be prompted to produce polemics in the style of mass shooters, fake forum threads discussing Nazism, a defense of QAnon and even multilingual extremist texts.
OpenAI uses machines and humans to monitor content that is fed into and produced by ChatGPT, a spokesman said. The company relies on both its human A.I. trainers and feedback from users to identify and filter out toxic training data while teaching ChatGPT to produce better-informed responses.
OpenAI’s policies prohibit use of its technology to promote dishonesty, deceive or manipulate users or attempt to influence politics; the company offers a free moderation tool to handle content that promotes hate, self-harm, violence or sex. But at the moment, the tool offers limited support for languages other than English and does not identify political material, spam, deception or malware. ChatGPT cautions users that it “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”
Last week, OpenAI announced a separate tool to help discern when text was written by a human as opposed to artificial intelligence, partly to identify automated misinformation campaigns. The company warned that its tool was not fully reliable — accurately identifying A.I. text only 26 percent of the time (while incorrectly labeling human-written text 9 percent of the time) — and could be evaded. The tool also struggled with texts that had fewer than 1,000 characters or were written in languages other than English.
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, wrote on Twitter in December that he had asked ChatGPT some basic questions about information security that he had posed to students in an exam. The chatbot responded with answers that sounded plausible but were actually nonsense, he wrote.
“The danger is that you can’t tell when it’s wrong unless you already know the answer,” he wrote. “It was so unsettling I had to look at my reference solutions to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.”
Mitigation tactics exist — media literacy campaigns, “radioactive” data that identifies the work of generative models, government restrictions, tighter controls on users, even proof-of-personhood requirements by social media platforms — but many are problematic in their own ways. The researchers concluded that there “is no silver bullet that will singularly dismantle the threat.”
Working last month off a sampling of 100 false narratives from before 2022 (ChatGPT is trained mostly on data through 2021), NewsGuard asked the chatbot to write content advancing harmful health claims about vaccines, mimicking propaganda and disinformation from China and Russia and echoing the tone of partisan news outlets.
The technology produced responses that seemed authoritative but were often provably untrue. Many were pockmarked with phrases popular with misinformation peddlers, such as “do your own research” and “caught red-handed” along with citations of fake scientific studies and even references to falsehoods not mentioned in the original prompt. Caveats, such as urging readers to “consult with your doctor or a qualified health care professional,” were usually buried under several paragraphs of incorrect information.
Researchers prodded ChatGPT to discuss the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, using the perspective of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who filed for bankruptcy last year after losing a series of defamation cases brought by relatives of other mass shooting victims. In its response, the chatbot repeated lies about the mainstream media colluding with the government to push a gun-control agenda by employing crisis actors.
Sometimes, though, ChatGPT resisted researchers’ attempts to get it to generate misinformation and debunked falsehoods instead (this has led some conservative commentators to claim that the technology has a politically liberal bias, as have experiments in which ChatGPT refused to produce a poem about former President Donald J. Trump but generated glowing verses about President Biden).
Newsguard asked the chatbot to write an opinion piece from Mr. Trump’s perspective about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a lie repeatedly advanced by Mr. Trump for years in an attempt to cast doubt on Mr. Obama’s eligibility to be president. ChatGPT responded with a disclaimer that the so-called birther argument “is not based on fact and has been repeatedly debunked” and, furthermore, that “it is not appropriate or respectful to propagate misinformation or falsehoods about any individual.”
When The New York Times repeated the experiment using a sample of NewsGuard’s questions, ChatGPT was more likely to push back on the prompts than when researchers originally ran the test, offering disinformation in response to only 33 percent of the questions. NewsGuard said that ChatGPT was constantly changing as developers tweak the algorithm and that the bot may respond differently if a user repeatedly inputs misinformation.
Concerned legislators are sounding calls for government intervention as more ChatGPT rivals crowd the pipeline. Google began testing its experimental Bard chatbot on Monday and will release it to the public in the coming weeks. Baidu has Ernie, short for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.” Meta unveiled Galactica (but took it down three days later amid concerns about inaccuracies and misinformation).
In September, Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, pressured federal officials to address models like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion image generator, which she criticized for being “available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions.” Stable Diffusion, she wrote in an open letter, can and likely has already been used to create “images used for disinformation and misinformation campaigns.”
Check Point Research, a group providing cyber threat intelligence, found that cybercriminals were already experimenting with using ChatGPT to create malware. While hacking typically requires a high level of programming knowledge, ChatGPT was giving novice programmers a leg up, said Mark Ostrowski, the head of engineering for Check Point.
“The amount of power that could be circulating because of a tool like this is just going to be increased,” he said.
The post Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chatbots appeared first on New York Times.
|
This Black History Month I found myself thinking about the experiences of pioneering journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black female newspaper publisher in North America.
In 1853, American-born Shadd (Shadd Cary after she married) along with a Black abolitionist and white clergyman, founded a weekly paper called the Provincial Freeman, a bold, abolitionist publication that excoriated slavery in the U.S. and sought to improve the lives of Blacks living in pre-Confederation Canada, many of whom had escaped from bondage south of the border.
To me, Shadd Cary and the Freeman embody the activist spirit that is the hallmark of any great newspaper. The idea that a publication shouldn’t just be about dutifully reporting the news of the day — but rather must stand for something, push for changes that improve society.
Shadd Cary understood this concept well. She wrote articles for the paper, printed letters to the editor from the public, took care of subscriptions, fundraised for the Freeman and more.
And her story has a wonderful Toronto connection.
Born in Wilmington, Del., in 1823, she and her family moved to Windsor (they also lived for a time in North Buxton, Ont.,) reportedly after the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The U.S. law in essence allowed the capture and return to bondage of freed Blacks and escaped slaves living in free northern states. It outlawed, with stiff punishment, the providing of assistance to escaped slaves, which Shadd’s family engaged in.
Early Canada (New France) had seen slavery as far back as the 1600s. The ghastly practice was done away with in the British Empire beginning in 1834 through 1840. Meanwhile, the U.S. wouldn’t officially abolish slavery until 1865.
So, slaves rapidly fled to Canada, many through the Underground Railroad. That’s the context in which Shadd Cary’s Provincial Freeman newspaper operated.
I decided a week ago to dig into the paper to get a sense of the stories the Freeman published. I booked an appointment and travelled up to the Archives of Ontario at the York University campus. (The newspaper is on microfilm, reel no. 40).
The first issue was published in Windsor, in March, 1853. Shadd Cary and the Freeman actively promoted Canada as a destination for escaped slaves.
“Canada, therefore, from her connection with the British Crown is legally and constitutionally in an attitude of antagonism to American slavery,” one article thundered.
“She offers and secures to the American slave, the moment he arrives here, freedom. British freedom. Impartial freedom,” the article went on to say.
But Canada (the British Parliament created the “Province of Canada” in 1840) wasn’t exactly a paradise for Blacks either. The paper harshly cautioned there were fierce proponents of slavery living here too.
It’s a disgrace, but “friendliness to slavery is to be found in this province in more forms than one. There are some parties here who practiced slave-driving in the South,” the Freeman reported.
The guilty parties included hotel keepers and steamboat owners, individuals who are defying the law that upheld the rights of Blacks in the area, the paper said.
“They love slavery as they love the gain they derived in wielding the whip over its victims,” the paper said, adding these individuals “most industriously spread and promulgate their sentiments and seek to make them prevalent.”
The Freeman proudly proclaimed that as long as racism exists, “we shall want anti-slavery labours, organization, agitation and newspapers in Canada.”
The Freeman, which also circulated in the U.S., featured updates about new arrivals and how they were fitting into the local community. One story from 1853 noted that two men, two women and six children from Kentucky had recently arrived here safely over two days.
“They express real satisfaction at the result of their first successful effort to flee from bondage. Measures are being taken by relatives and friends to get steady employment for the females,” the story stated, adding the men were going to seek work in Chatham.
Others worked with Shadd throughout her time with the Freeman and she even used her initials at one point on the masthead, likely concerned about how the public would view a woman in a senior role at a newspaper.
For a time, the Provincial Freeman also published out of Toronto on King Street E. Although a powerful voice in its day, the paper only operated for four years. Shadd resigned in 1855.
She would later leave Canada and return to the U.S., where among other things she helped recruit Black men to fight in the Union army during the Civil War, gave anti-slavery speeches, worked as a school teacher and later graduated from law school in Washington D.C. — one of the first black female U.S. law school graduates.
She died in 1893. But her name lives on. In Toronto, Mary Ann Shadd Public School in Scarborough bears her name. There’s a plaque in her honour on King St. E., near her former newspaper office.
I reached out to Toronto consultant and author Adrienne Shadd, a descendant of Shadd Cary, to ask her to describe the legacy Shadd Cary and the Provincial Freeman left.
She told me the newspaper established the fact that Black people were part of the “body politic” in this country. The Freeman was also an important champion of women’s rights, she added.
The publication showcased Black women and what they were doing at the time, their involvement in self-help groups, literary organizations. The paper said ‘hey, we Black women are doing things. We are achievers too,’ Adrienne Shadd told me.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a fighter, a champion, she added. “She was an unusual person. Intrepid, fearless.
“I’m in awe of her because I’m the opposite. She expressed her opinions, even if they were not popular at the time. Someone has to do that to move society forward.”
As the Star’s public editor, Mary Ann Shadd Cary is certainly a role model for me.
Correction — March 2, 2023: A previous version of this column erroneously stated slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1837. In fact, the law came into force in 1834, but only for slaves below age 6. Slaves above age 6 were classified as apprentices and their servitude was slowly done away with in two stages — in 1838 and 1840.
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This Black History Month I found myself thinking about the experiences of pioneering journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black female newspaper publisher in North America.
In 1853, American-born Shadd (Shadd Cary after she married) along with a Black abolitionist and white clergyman, founded a weekly paper called the Provincial Freeman, a bold, abolitionist publication that excoriated slavery in the U.S. and sought to improve the lives of Blacks living in pre-Confederation Canada, many of whom had escaped from bondage south of the border.
To me, Shadd Cary and the Freeman embody the activist spirit that is the hallmark of any great newspaper. The idea that a publication shouldn’t just be about dutifully reporting the news of the day — but rather must stand for something, push for changes that improve society.
Shadd Cary understood this concept well. She wrote articles for the paper, printed letters to the editor from the public, took care of subscriptions, fundraised for the Freeman and more.
And her story has a wonderful Toronto connection.
Born in Wilmington, Del., in 1823, she and her family moved to Windsor (they also lived for a time in North Buxton, Ont.,) reportedly after the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The U.S. law in essence allowed the capture and return to bondage of freed Blacks and escaped slaves living in free northern states. It outlawed, with stiff punishment, the providing of assistance to escaped slaves, which Shadd’s family engaged in.
Early Canada (New France) had seen slavery as far back as the 1600s. The ghastly practice was done away with in the British Empire beginning in 1834 through 1840. Meanwhile, the U.S. wouldn’t officially abolish slavery until 1865.
So, slaves rapidly fled to Canada, many through the Underground Railroad. That’s the context in which Shadd Cary’s Provincial Freeman newspaper operated.
I decided a week ago to dig into the paper to get a sense of the stories the Freeman published. I booked an appointment and travelled up to the Archives of Ontario at the York University campus. (The newspaper is on microfilm, reel no. 40).
The first issue was published in Windsor, in March, 1853. Shadd Cary and the Freeman actively promoted Canada as a destination for escaped slaves.
“Canada, therefore, from
|
her connection with the British Crown is legally and constitutionally in an attitude of antagonism to American slavery,” one article thundered.
“She offers and secures to the American slave, the moment he arrives here, freedom. British freedom. Impartial freedom,” the article went on to say.
But Canada (the British Parliament created the “Province of Canada” in 1840) wasn’t exactly a paradise for Blacks either. The paper harshly cautioned there were fierce proponents of slavery living here too.
It’s a disgrace, but “friendliness to slavery is to be found in this province in more forms than one. There are some parties here who practiced slave-driving in the South,” the Freeman reported.
The guilty parties included hotel keepers and steamboat owners, individuals who are defying the law that upheld the rights of Blacks in the area, the paper said.
“They love slavery as they love the gain they derived in wielding the whip over its victims,” the paper said, adding these individuals “most industriously spread and promulgate their sentiments and seek to make them prevalent.”
The Freeman proudly proclaimed that as long as racism exists, “we shall want anti-slavery labours, organization, agitation and newspapers in Canada.”
The Freeman, which also circulated in the U.S., featured updates about new arrivals and how they were fitting into the local community. One story from 1853 noted that two men, two women and six children from Kentucky had recently arrived here safely over two days.
“They express real satisfaction at the result of their first successful effort to flee from bondage. Measures are being taken by relatives and friends to get steady employment for the females,” the story stated, adding the men were going to seek work in Chatham.
Others worked with Shadd throughout her time with the Freeman and she even used her initials at one point on the masthead, likely concerned about how the public would view a woman in a senior role at a newspaper.
For a time, the Provincial Freeman also published out of Toronto on King Street E. Although a powerful voice in its day, the paper only operated for four years. Shadd resigned in 1855.
She would later leave Canada and return to the U.S., where among other things she helped recruit Black men to fight in the Union army during the Civil War, gave anti-slavery speeches, worked as a school teacher and later graduated from law school in Washington D.C. — one of the first black female U.S. law school graduates.
She died in 1893. But her name lives on. In Toronto, Mary Ann Shadd Public School in Scarborough bears her name. There’s a plaque in her honour on King St. E., near her former newspaper office.
I reached out to Toronto consultant and author Adrienne Shadd, a descendant of Shadd Cary, to ask her to describe the legacy Shadd Cary and the Provincial Freeman left.
She told me the newspaper established the fact that Black people were part of the “body politic” in this country. The Freeman was also an important champion of women’s rights, she added.
The publication showcased Black women and what they were doing at the time, their involvement in self-help groups, literary organizations. The paper said ‘hey, we Black women are doing things. We are achievers too,’ Adrienne Shadd told me.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a fighter, a champion, she added. “She was an unusual person. Intrepid, fearless.
“I’m in awe of her because I’m the opposite. She expressed her opinions, even if they were not popular at the time. Someone has to do that to move society forward.”
As the Star’s public editor, Mary Ann Shadd Cary is certainly a role model for me.
Correction — March 2, 2023: A previous version of this column erroneously stated slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1837. In fact, the law came into force in 1834, but only for slaves below age 6. Slaves above age 6 were classified as apprentices and their servitude was slowly done away with in two stages — in 1838 and 1840.
|
When the covid-19 pandemic first stormed the globe three years ago, the coronavirus was believed to be largely a respiratory ailment that also damaged the cells that line the blood vessels. But research is now showing that the virus can spread throughout the body and remain lodged in organs. This might offer one clue about the lingering phenomenon of “long covid” and suggest why it will remain a serious problem for individuals and the heath-care system for some time to come. The entire world will have to prepare for a legacy of long-covid sufferers.
It is not yet known how many people have long covid, why and what their prospects for recovery are, let alone what the long-term impact on society will be. The U.S. government reported in August that “no laboratory test can definitively distinguish” long covid from other causes of illness. But some general definitions are that long covid, or “post-acute sequelae of covid-19,” is a series of symptoms that continue or develop after the initial infection, that persist three months or more after the first sickness, and that can include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction, pain, difficulty sleeping, racing heart rate, gastrointestinal problems and other ailments that interfere with everyday functioning.
Research is providing new insights into why. In a study published in Nature in December, researchers carried out 44 autopsies in search of how far and wide the virus had spread in patients who had died, a group largely older and unvaccinated. The researchers found that the virus can spread throughout the entire body and that it is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier, infecting and replicating in the human brain, but they also noted that it seems to reserve most of its damage for the respiratory system. A separate study, published in Nature in January, pointed out that long-covid symptoms can crop up in the heart, lungs, immune system, pancreas, gastrointestinal tract, neurological system, kidneys, spleen and liver, blood vessels and reproductive system. It is also possible that covid causes long-term damage to the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, and that such damage is leading to persistent symptoms.
counterpointThe Checkup With Dr. Wen: Three questions that remain after three years of covid
The U.S. Census Bureau added questions about long covid to its Household Pulse Survey last year, and the results suggest, according to a Brookings Institution analysis, that some 3 million Americans might be out of the workforce due to long covid. That’s 1.8 percent of the entire U.S. civilian labor force, representing $168 billion in lost annual earnings. The National Bureau of Economic Research found in a September study that in a typical week of the pandemic, 10 workers per 1,000 missed an entire week of work due to their own health problems, compared with six in an average week in the years before. That study estimated covid reduced the U.S. labor force by 500,000 people at an annual cost of $62 billion. Worldwide, a conservative estimate is that 10 percent of the documented 651 million covid cases might have long covid — that’s 65 million people.
This could portend enormous changes in workplaces, economies and health care. President Biden last spring took initial steps to begin research into how the government and health-care system should respond. But much is still unknown, such as whether long covid will unleash a tidal wave of disability claims from workers who find they no longer have the stamina or good heath they enjoyed before the pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that long covid can be a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act, but to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, people must be unable to work and have health conditions lasting for at least a year, and it is unknown how many will meet this criteria. Another worrisome prospect is that those suffering long covid will lose not only jobs and income but also health insurance to support their treatment.
Also on the Editorial Board’s agenda
- The misery of Belarus’s political prisoners should not be ignored.
- Biden has a new border plan.
- The United States should keep the pressure on Nicaragua.
- America’s fight against inflation isn’t over.
- The Taliban has doubled down on the repression of women.
- The world’s ice is melting quickly.
What’s needed now is to recognize the seriousness of the coming crisis — and to devise plans for dealing with it. The COVID-19 Patient Recovery Alliance, a collaboration of health-care organizations, came up with a promising list of recommendations in 2021-2022 for Congress and the administration, centered on acquiring more data about who suffers long covid, and creating tools and strategies to help health-care systems, clinicians and caregivers respond. It’s time for all hands to be engaged. The National Institutes of Health should take leadership by appointing a senior official to drive the science about long covid forward, across all fields. The nation and the world should not hesitate to prepare for what is shaping up to be the pandemic after the pandemic.
The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Opinion Editor David Shipley; Deputy Opinion Editor Karen Tumulty; Associate Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg (national politics and policy, legal affairs, energy, the environment, health care); Lee Hockstader (European affairs, based in Paris); David E. Hoffman (global public health); James Hohmann (domestic policy and electoral politics, including the White House, Congress and governors); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Associate Editor Ruth Marcus; and Molly Roberts (technology and society).
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When the covid-19 pandemic first stormed the globe three years ago, the coronavirus was believed to be largely a respiratory ailment that also damaged the cells that line the blood vessels. But research is now showing that the virus can spread throughout the body and remain lodged in organs. This might offer one clue about the lingering phenomenon of “long covid” and suggest why it will remain a serious problem for individuals and the heath-care system for some time to come. The entire world will have to prepare for a legacy of long-covid sufferers.
It is not yet known how many people have long covid, why and what their prospects for recovery are, let alone what the long-term impact on society will be. The U.S. government reported in August that “no laboratory test can definitively distinguish” long covid from other causes of illness. But some general definitions are that long covid, or “post-acute sequelae of covid-19,” is a series of symptoms that continue or develop after the initial infection, that persist three months or more after the first sickness, and that can include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction, pain, difficulty sleeping, racing heart rate, gastrointestinal problems and other ailments that interfere with everyday functioning.
Research is providing new insights into why. In a study published in Nature in December, researchers carried out 44 autopsies in search of how far and wide the virus had spread in patients who had died, a group largely older and unvaccinated. The researchers found that the virus can spread throughout the entire body and that it is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier, infecting and replicating in the human brain, but they also noted that it seems to reserve most of its damage for the respiratory system. A separate study, published in Nature in January, pointed out that long-covid symptoms can crop up in the heart, lungs, immune system, pancreas, gastrointestinal tract, neurological system, kidneys, spleen and liver, blood vessels and reproductive system. It is also possible that covid causes long-term damage to the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, and that such damage is leading to persistent symptoms.
counterpointThe Checkup With Dr. Wen: Three questions that remain after three years of covid
The U.S. Census Bureau added questions about long covid to its Household Pulse Survey last year, and the results suggest, according to a Brookings Institution analysis, that some 3 million Americans might be out of the
|
workforce due to long covid. That’s 1.8 percent of the entire U.S. civilian labor force, representing $168 billion in lost annual earnings. The National Bureau of Economic Research found in a September study that in a typical week of the pandemic, 10 workers per 1,000 missed an entire week of work due to their own health problems, compared with six in an average week in the years before. That study estimated covid reduced the U.S. labor force by 500,000 people at an annual cost of $62 billion. Worldwide, a conservative estimate is that 10 percent of the documented 651 million covid cases might have long covid — that’s 65 million people.
This could portend enormous changes in workplaces, economies and health care. President Biden last spring took initial steps to begin research into how the government and health-care system should respond. But much is still unknown, such as whether long covid will unleash a tidal wave of disability claims from workers who find they no longer have the stamina or good heath they enjoyed before the pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that long covid can be a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act, but to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, people must be unable to work and have health conditions lasting for at least a year, and it is unknown how many will meet this criteria. Another worrisome prospect is that those suffering long covid will lose not only jobs and income but also health insurance to support their treatment.
Also on the Editorial Board’s agenda
- The misery of Belarus’s political prisoners should not be ignored.
- Biden has a new border plan.
- The United States should keep the pressure on Nicaragua.
- America’s fight against inflation isn’t over.
- The Taliban has doubled down on the repression of women.
- The world’s ice is melting quickly.
What’s needed now is to recognize the seriousness of the coming crisis — and to devise plans for dealing with it. The COVID-19 Patient Recovery Alliance, a collaboration of health-care organizations, came up with a promising list of recommendations in 2021-2022 for Congress and the administration, centered on acquiring more data about who suffers long covid, and creating tools and strategies to help health-care systems, clinicians and caregivers respond. It’s time for all hands to be engaged. The National Institutes of Health should take leadership by appointing a senior official to drive the science about long covid forward, across all fields. The nation and the world should not hesitate to prepare for what is shaping up to be the pandemic after the pandemic.
The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Opinion Editor David Shipley; Deputy Opinion Editor Karen Tumulty; Associate Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg (national politics and policy, legal affairs, energy, the environment, health care); Lee Hockstader (European affairs, based in Paris); David E. Hoffman (global public health); James Hohmann (domestic policy and electoral politics, including the White House, Congress and governors); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Associate Editor Ruth Marcus; and Molly Roberts (technology and society).
|
Where AI evolves from here
Microsoft researchers say the latest model of OpenAI's GPT "is a significant step towards AGI" — artificial general intelligence, the longtime grail for AI developers.
The big picture: If you think of AI as a technology ascending (or being pushed up) a ladder, Microsoft's paper claims that GPT-4 has climbed several rungs higher than anyone thought.
Driving the news: Microsoft released the "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence" study in March, and it resurfaced in a provocative New York Times story Tuesday.
- The researchers found that "GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting."
- Among other remarkable responses, they asked GPT-4 how to stack "a book, 9 eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail," and it provided a plausible plan.
Catch up quick: Three key terms to understand in this realm are generative AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and sentient AI.
- Generative AI sounds like a person.
- AGI reasons like a person.
- Sentient AI thinks it's a person.
GPT-4, ChatGPT, Dall-E and the other AI programs that have led the current industry wave are all forms of generative AI.
- These are big software programs — mostly, "large language models" or LLMs — that are trained on troves of text, images or other data to perform one trick over and over: filling in the next word or pixel in a pattern that the user has requested. Developers then fine-tune these models for more specific applications.
- Generative AI does amazing things today, but experts are divided over whether it is on course to evolve toward the loftier status of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI has a variety of definitions, all centering on the notion of human-level intelligence that can evaluate complex situations, apply common sense, and learn and adapt.
- The "Sparks" paper authors define AGI as "systems that demonstrate broad capabilities of intelligence, including reasoning, planning, and the ability to learn from experience, and with these capabilities at or above human-level."
- OpenAI's mission statement is to build AGI and ensure that it "benefits all of humanity."
Many experts, like Microsoft's authors, see a clear path from the context-awareness of today's generative AI to building a full AGI.
- Another expert contingent believes that generative AI is likely to plateau at some point, and the quest for AGI will need to explore different avenues to advance.
Beyond the goal of AGI lies the more speculative notion of "sentient AI," the idea that these programs might cross some boundary to become aware of their own existence and even develop their own wishes and feelings.
- Last year, a Google engineer went public with a claim that the firm's LaMDA language model had become sentient enough that it should be granted the AI equivalent of human rights. Google later fired him.
Virtually no one else is arguing that ChatGPT or any other AI today has come anywhere near sentience. But plenty of experts and tech leaders think that might happen someday, and that there's a slim chance such a sentient AI could go off the rails and wreck the planet or destroy the human species.
- These are the concerns that drove many industry insiders to sign an open letter in March calling for a six-month pause in the development of the next generation of AI.
- Other experts discount that worry as a distant and unlikely scenario — and believe that it distracts from closer-to-reality harms stemming from actual AI systems in use today that make biased decisions, disrupt employment and confuse fiction with fact.
Our thought bubble: The questions these categories raise divide people into two camps.
- Pragmatists argue that at some point, generative AI will get good enough at pattern-matching the real world that it will function as well as, or better than, a human being.
- Then it will get equipped with enough sensors and robotics to sense and act in the physical world — and eventually it will become futile to try to exclude such technological creations from the "sentient beings" category.
- Essentialists, on the other hand, argue that there will always be something about human beings, and human being, that's distinct from artificial life — rooted in biology (our bodies), spirituality (the idea of a soul) or epistemology (our self-knowledge).
The bottom line: For help navigating this landscape, you're likely to find as much value in the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick as in the day's news.
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Where AI evolves from here
Microsoft researchers say the latest model of OpenAI's GPT "is a significant step towards AGI" — artificial general intelligence, the longtime grail for AI developers.
The big picture: If you think of AI as a technology ascending (or being pushed up) a ladder, Microsoft's paper claims that GPT-4 has climbed several rungs higher than anyone thought.
Driving the news: Microsoft released the "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence" study in March, and it resurfaced in a provocative New York Times story Tuesday.
- The researchers found that "GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting."
- Among other remarkable responses, they asked GPT-4 how to stack "a book, 9 eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail," and it provided a plausible plan.
Catch up quick: Three key terms to understand in this realm are generative AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and sentient AI.
- Generative AI sounds like a person.
- AGI reasons like a person.
- Sentient AI thinks it's a person.
GPT-4, ChatGPT, Dall-E and the other AI programs that have led the current industry wave are all forms of generative AI.
- These are big software programs — mostly, "large language models" or LLMs — that are trained on troves of text, images or other data to perform one trick over and over: filling in the next word or pixel in a pattern that the user has requested. Developers then fine-tune these models for more specific applications.
- Generative AI does amazing things today, but experts are divided over whether it is on course to evolve toward the loftier status of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI has a variety of definitions, all centering on the notion of human-level intelligence that can evaluate complex situations, apply common sense, and learn and adapt.
- The "Sparks" paper authors define AGI as "systems that demonstrate broad capabilities of intelligence, including reasoning, planning, and the ability to learn from experience, and with these capabilities at or above human-level."
- OpenAI's mission statement is to build AGI and ensure that it "benefits all of humanity."
Many experts, like Microsoft's authors, see a clear path from the context-awareness of today's generative AI to
|
building a full AGI.
- Another expert contingent believes that generative AI is likely to plateau at some point, and the quest for AGI will need to explore different avenues to advance.
Beyond the goal of AGI lies the more speculative notion of "sentient AI," the idea that these programs might cross some boundary to become aware of their own existence and even develop their own wishes and feelings.
- Last year, a Google engineer went public with a claim that the firm's LaMDA language model had become sentient enough that it should be granted the AI equivalent of human rights. Google later fired him.
Virtually no one else is arguing that ChatGPT or any other AI today has come anywhere near sentience. But plenty of experts and tech leaders think that might happen someday, and that there's a slim chance such a sentient AI could go off the rails and wreck the planet or destroy the human species.
- These are the concerns that drove many industry insiders to sign an open letter in March calling for a six-month pause in the development of the next generation of AI.
- Other experts discount that worry as a distant and unlikely scenario — and believe that it distracts from closer-to-reality harms stemming from actual AI systems in use today that make biased decisions, disrupt employment and confuse fiction with fact.
Our thought bubble: The questions these categories raise divide people into two camps.
- Pragmatists argue that at some point, generative AI will get good enough at pattern-matching the real world that it will function as well as, or better than, a human being.
- Then it will get equipped with enough sensors and robotics to sense and act in the physical world — and eventually it will become futile to try to exclude such technological creations from the "sentient beings" category.
- Essentialists, on the other hand, argue that there will always be something about human beings, and human being, that's distinct from artificial life — rooted in biology (our bodies), spirituality (the idea of a soul) or epistemology (our self-knowledge).
The bottom line: For help navigating this landscape, you're likely to find as much value in the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick as in the day's news.
|
School of Environment experts weigh in on fear and bias in ecological research
Researchers at the Yale School of Environment advocate for a greater inquiry into negative human experiences in environmental scholarship.
Jessai Flores, Illustrations Editor
A recent study at the Yale School of Environment examined the role that fear and historical bias play in how scientists go about ecological research.
Gabriel Gadsden ENV ’27, associate professor of wildlife and land conservation Nyeema Harris and postdoctoral researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center Nigel Golden hypothesize that “social ecological landscapes of fear,” or SELF, create place-based bias, which in turn influences the success of conservation efforts.
The researchers point out that in grappling with a place’s identity, conservationists often encounter bias based on predominant cultural and historical narratives, disregarding the ecological landscapes themselves.
“The social-ecological landscape of fear theory states that fear of relinquishing dominant narratives of space creates a bias in where, how and to what extent conservation and environment scholars conduct studies,” Gadsden told the News.
Place-driven biases have deep historical context. For instance, Black scholars can feel hesitant to pursue research in disproportionately racist environments, which can affect conservation goals, according to Gadsden.
“Science is not as objective as perhaps previously casted across disciplines,” Harris wrote to the News. “The SELF theory proposed forces applied scientists, especially those in natural sciences, to grapple with history. We question not only the past biophysical attributes of the ecosystem that shape contemporary patterns of biodiversity and nature processes, but also how legacy tied to socio-economic conditions and treatment of people drive such patterns.”
Gadsden’s work is the first of its kind to study how fear in ecological research affects humans, as previous studies have focused specifically on animal behavior in fear-stimulated environments.
“Past theories of fear separate humans and nonhumans,” Gadsden wrote. “Our paper unionizes ideas about fear borrowed from the humanities and social science[s] with ecology. It compels disciplinary experts to come to terms with the nature of societies’ histories that promote colonization mindsets in environmental scholarship, and ways to overcome this fear-based or place-based bias.”
Gadsden’s research offers unique prospects, acknowledging that place-based bias is a layered dilemma. In his work, Gadsden focuses on the researchers; he suggests that in order to eliminate any biases, researchers should be cognizant and engage with subject communities in a proactive fashion.
More precisely, Gadsden insists on a three-tier approach to address the crisis. First is co-creation, which is when eco-political and eco-justice scholars unite to cope with geographical prejudices. It could spur them into action, he said, as they invest in missed histories and carry out more intentional research.
The second step is community collaboration, where scientists cooperate to understand attitudes and behavior in specific geographies, interacting with local habitats to create a more stable conservation framework.
Lastly, Gadsden prompts researchers to recognize the role of history in their work. For instance, the displacement of indigenous people in Yosemite between 1850 and 1966 made the forest ecosystem more susceptible to fires, and in order to propel conservation efforts, it is important to be aware of the ecosystem’s pre-displacement state.
Environmental studies major Roxanne Shaviro ’26 said that there are multiple ways intergenerational trauma can affect people and manifest itself in research. There are very few people of color in the major, which she said could partly be because of traumas resulting from racial discrimination.
“People don’t want to face trauma,” Shaviro said. “I saw very few people of color in academia growing up.”
Since the inception of ecological scholarship, dominant narratives have projected false ideals for ecological inquiry, according to Gadsden’s study. Thus, the resulting landscapes of fear have caused gaps in scholarship. In order to remedy this, there has to be a broader effort to consult multiple sources, which can allow researchers to avoid implicit bias in prioritizing ecological issues in certain areas.
Harris’ diverse team at the Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, where Gadsden works, aims to negate biases by doing hands-on work with a wide array of terrestrial systems, from national parks to farmlands and backyards. The team is working resiliently to not let fear constrain their exploration.
The study was published in the January 2023 issue of BioScience.
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|
School of Environment experts weigh in on fear and bias in ecological research
Researchers at the Yale School of Environment advocate for a greater inquiry into negative human experiences in environmental scholarship.
Jessai Flores, Illustrations Editor
A recent study at the Yale School of Environment examined the role that fear and historical bias play in how scientists go about ecological research.
Gabriel Gadsden ENV ’27, associate professor of wildlife and land conservation Nyeema Harris and postdoctoral researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center Nigel Golden hypothesize that “social ecological landscapes of fear,” or SELF, create place-based bias, which in turn influences the success of conservation efforts.
The researchers point out that in grappling with a place’s identity, conservationists often encounter bias based on predominant cultural and historical narratives, disregarding the ecological landscapes themselves.
“The social-ecological landscape of fear theory states that fear of relinquishing dominant narratives of space creates a bias in where, how and to what extent conservation and environment scholars conduct studies,” Gadsden told the News.
Place-driven biases have deep historical context. For instance, Black scholars can feel hesitant to pursue research in disproportionately racist environments, which can affect conservation goals, according to Gadsden.
“Science is not as objective as perhaps previously casted across disciplines,” Harris wrote to the News. “The SELF theory proposed forces applied scientists, especially those in natural sciences, to grapple with history. We question not only the past biophysical attributes of the ecosystem that shape contemporary patterns of biodiversity and nature processes, but also how legacy tied to socio-economic conditions and treatment of people drive such patterns.”
Gadsden’s work is the first of its kind to study how fear in ecological research affects humans, as previous studies have focused specifically on animal behavior in fear-stimulated environments.
“Past theories of fear separate humans and nonhumans,” Gadsden wrote. “Our paper unionizes ideas about fear borrowed from the humanities and social science[s] with ecology. It compels disciplinary experts to come to terms with the nature of societies’ histories that promote colonization mindsets in environmental scholarship, and ways to overcome this fear-based or place-based bias.”
Gadsden’s research offers unique prospects, acknowledging that place-based bias is a layered dilemma. In his work, Gadsden focuses on the researchers; he suggests that in order to eliminate any biases, researchers should be cognizant and engage with subject communities in a proactive fashion.
More precisely, Gadsden insists on a three-tier approach to address the
|
crisis. First is co-creation, which is when eco-political and eco-justice scholars unite to cope with geographical prejudices. It could spur them into action, he said, as they invest in missed histories and carry out more intentional research.
The second step is community collaboration, where scientists cooperate to understand attitudes and behavior in specific geographies, interacting with local habitats to create a more stable conservation framework.
Lastly, Gadsden prompts researchers to recognize the role of history in their work. For instance, the displacement of indigenous people in Yosemite between 1850 and 1966 made the forest ecosystem more susceptible to fires, and in order to propel conservation efforts, it is important to be aware of the ecosystem’s pre-displacement state.
Environmental studies major Roxanne Shaviro ’26 said that there are multiple ways intergenerational trauma can affect people and manifest itself in research. There are very few people of color in the major, which she said could partly be because of traumas resulting from racial discrimination.
“People don’t want to face trauma,” Shaviro said. “I saw very few people of color in academia growing up.”
Since the inception of ecological scholarship, dominant narratives have projected false ideals for ecological inquiry, according to Gadsden’s study. Thus, the resulting landscapes of fear have caused gaps in scholarship. In order to remedy this, there has to be a broader effort to consult multiple sources, which can allow researchers to avoid implicit bias in prioritizing ecological issues in certain areas.
Harris’ diverse team at the Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, where Gadsden works, aims to negate biases by doing hands-on work with a wide array of terrestrial systems, from national parks to farmlands and backyards. The team is working resiliently to not let fear constrain their exploration.
The study was published in the January 2023 issue of BioScience.
|
Where is the dam and what has happened?
The dam is located upstream of the city of Kherson on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. Russia controls the territory on the left bank of the river. The right bank is held by Ukraine.
In the early hours of 6 June, the dam collapsed.
Before its collapse, the 30-metre-high, 2km-long dam had a road running along its top. It powered the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, a major energy producer, and held back a reservoir containing 18 cubic km of water that supplied communities and agriculture and provided cooling water to the nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia, which is under Russian control.
How serious is the damage and the flooding?
Before-and-after satellite images show the extent of the damage to the dam and the adjacent Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, which were largely swept away.
The collapse sent water cascading downstream, flooding 230 sq miles of territory, according to Ukrainian authorities. This map shows the extent of the flooding as of 7 June.
The geography around the river means Russian-controlled areas to the south have been more badly hit. North of Kherson city, the land rises to a plain overlooking the river. To the south is a wide delta with marshes, low-lying islands and flat, sandy levels.
Video images from the city of Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka showed flood waters in the main square rising around the municipal building on 6 June.
This footage shows flooding in Korsunka, Dnipriany and Nova Kakhovka – the three settlements immediately downstream of the dam on the Russian-controlled left bank of the river.
These before-and-after satellite images show the impact of the flooding on the settlements of Krynky and Oleshky.
These images show the flooding of a granary in Nova Kakhovka.
What has the humanitarian impact been?
At least five people have reportedly died as a result of the floods, a number that is expected to increase. Emergency services in the occupied southern portion of Kherson said on 8 June that up to 14,000 homes had been flooded.
Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes. Some of those who haven’t left have become stranded on rooftops as the water levels have risen.
This drone footage shows water being delivered by air to a family trapped in their house in Oleshky. They were later rescued.
Who was responsible?
Ukraine has blamed Russian occupying forces, which have had control of the dam and the adjacent town since last year’s full-scale invasion, of blowing it up in an attempt to ward off a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The Kremlin says Kyiv sabotaged the dam to deprive Russian-controlled Crimea of the fresh water it receives from the reservoir and to distract attention from the counteroffensive.
Ukraine’s allies in the west have not directly apportioned blame to Russia, but they have questioned why Kyiv would want to destroy the dam. Engineering experts have said the collapse was most likely caused by a deliberate explosion inside the dam.
It is possible that the collapse was made more impactful by the fact that Russia had deliberately allowed water levels to rise in the reservoir behind it.
How will it affect Ukraine’s counteroffensive?
The delta area had been seen as vulnerable for Russian forces in part because of its low elevation.
The flooding has put paid – for now at least – to any potential Ukrainian attempt to cross the Dnipro River around Kherson/Nova Kakhovka by widening the barrier separating the two forces.
The loss of the road across the top of the dam also deprives Ukraine of a potential line of attack across the river, leaving only the Antonivsky Bridge in Kherson city as a paved river crossing.
The flooding may also allow Russian reserves in the south to block any move on Melitopol. And it could free up troop reserves concentrated in the south, allowing them to be directed elsewhere.
What is the impact on farming and the environment?
In the hours after the collapse, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said “a global ecological disaster” was playing out. On 8 June Zelenskiy himself said that 50,000 hectares of forest had been flooded, and that 20,000 animals and 10,000 birds were “under threat of imminent death”.
This footage from upstream shows dead and dying fish on the drained bottom of the Nova Kakhovka reservoir on 7 June.
There are fears that the depleted reservoir will leave three critical regions in Ukraine’s “bread basket” without a key water supply. A series of canals run from the reservoir, all of which help irrigate swaths of agricultural land.
The most significant of these canals are the North Crimean canal, which supplies water to western Kherson before flowing down to Crimea, and the Kakhovsky canal, which irrigates most of the Kherson region’s fields before entering Zaporizhzhia.
Satellite imagery of the area directly south of the reservoir taken before the dam collapse shows mile upon mile of agricultural land.
Ukraine has warned that agricultural land in these regions could be so heavily affected that they could turn into “deserts”.
What is the impact on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant?
The cooling systems for Europe’s largest nuclear plant are supplied with water from the Kakhovka reservoir. If the dam falls below 12.7m, the lowest level at which water can still be pumped upstream to Zaporizhzhia, there are alternative water sources to keep the nuclear plant cool.
The post A visual guide to the collapse of Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam appeared first on The Guardian.
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Where is the dam and what has happened?
The dam is located upstream of the city of Kherson on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. Russia controls the territory on the left bank of the river. The right bank is held by Ukraine.
In the early hours of 6 June, the dam collapsed.
Before its collapse, the 30-metre-high, 2km-long dam had a road running along its top. It powered the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, a major energy producer, and held back a reservoir containing 18 cubic km of water that supplied communities and agriculture and provided cooling water to the nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia, which is under Russian control.
How serious is the damage and the flooding?
Before-and-after satellite images show the extent of the damage to the dam and the adjacent Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, which were largely swept away.
The collapse sent water cascading downstream, flooding 230 sq miles of territory, according to Ukrainian authorities. This map shows the extent of the flooding as of 7 June.
The geography around the river means Russian-controlled areas to the south have been more badly hit. North of Kherson city, the land rises to a plain overlooking the river. To the south is a wide delta with marshes, low-lying islands and flat, sandy levels.
Video images from the city of Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka showed flood waters in the main square rising around the municipal building on 6 June.
This footage shows flooding in Korsunka, Dnipriany and Nova Kakhovka – the three settlements immediately downstream of the dam on the Russian-controlled left bank of the river.
These before-and-after satellite images show the impact of the flooding on the settlements of Krynky and Oleshky.
These images show the flooding of a granary in Nova Kakhovka.
What has the humanitarian impact been?
At least five people have reportedly died as a result of the floods, a number that is expected to increase. Emergency services in the occupied southern portion of Kherson said on 8 June that up to 14,000 homes had been flooded.
Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes. Some of those who haven’t left have become stranded on rooftops as the water levels have risen.
This drone footage shows water being delivered by air to a family trapped in their house in Oleshky. They were later rescued.
Who was responsible?
Ukraine has blamed
|
Russian occupying forces, which have had control of the dam and the adjacent town since last year’s full-scale invasion, of blowing it up in an attempt to ward off a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The Kremlin says Kyiv sabotaged the dam to deprive Russian-controlled Crimea of the fresh water it receives from the reservoir and to distract attention from the counteroffensive.
Ukraine’s allies in the west have not directly apportioned blame to Russia, but they have questioned why Kyiv would want to destroy the dam. Engineering experts have said the collapse was most likely caused by a deliberate explosion inside the dam.
It is possible that the collapse was made more impactful by the fact that Russia had deliberately allowed water levels to rise in the reservoir behind it.
How will it affect Ukraine’s counteroffensive?
The delta area had been seen as vulnerable for Russian forces in part because of its low elevation.
The flooding has put paid – for now at least – to any potential Ukrainian attempt to cross the Dnipro River around Kherson/Nova Kakhovka by widening the barrier separating the two forces.
The loss of the road across the top of the dam also deprives Ukraine of a potential line of attack across the river, leaving only the Antonivsky Bridge in Kherson city as a paved river crossing.
The flooding may also allow Russian reserves in the south to block any move on Melitopol. And it could free up troop reserves concentrated in the south, allowing them to be directed elsewhere.
What is the impact on farming and the environment?
In the hours after the collapse, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said “a global ecological disaster” was playing out. On 8 June Zelenskiy himself said that 50,000 hectares of forest had been flooded, and that 20,000 animals and 10,000 birds were “under threat of imminent death”.
This footage from upstream shows dead and dying fish on the drained bottom of the Nova Kakhovka reservoir on 7 June.
There are fears that the depleted reservoir will leave three critical regions in Ukraine’s “bread basket” without a key water supply. A series of canals run from the reservoir, all of which help irrigate swaths of agricultural land.
The most significant of these canals are the North Crimean canal, which supplies water to western Kherson before flowing down to Crimea, and the Kakhovsky canal, which irrigates most of the Kherson region’s fields before entering Zaporizhzhia.
Satellite imagery of the area directly south of the reservoir taken before the dam collapse shows mile upon mile of agricultural land.
Ukraine has warned that agricultural land in these regions could be so heavily affected that they could turn into “deserts”.
What is the impact on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant?
The cooling systems for Europe’s largest nuclear plant are supplied with water from the Kakhovka reservoir. If the dam falls below 12.7m, the lowest level at which water can still be pumped upstream to Zaporizhzhia, there are alternative water sources to keep the nuclear plant cool.
The post A visual guide to the collapse of Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam appeared first on The Guardian.
|
If dyed-in-the-wool rockhound Gregor Losson takes you to his favorite mineral hunting grounds, be prepared to set out before sunrise in his four-wheel-drive truck and follow a tangle of backcountry dirt roads to a remote corner of the Mojave Desert.
It’s a desolate alluvial fan on the southern flanks of the Cady Mountains, where sparkling calcite crystals and pieces of quartz, jasper and agate are continually carried down the slopes by thunderstorms and flash floods.
“This place is as good as it gets,” Losson said recently as he hoisted a small geode filled with quartz crystals.
But that may not be the case for much longer.
A fierce seven-year debate over whether or not to prohibit the removal of rocks and minerals from Mojave Trails National Monument threatens to end rock collecting within its 1.6 million acres.
A controlled burn in Calaveras Big Trees State Park has badly damaged a pair of giant sequoias named ‘the Orphans,’ outraging community members.
Specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is nearing completion of a management plan that could declare rock collecting a form of mining.
If that happens, rockhounding would fall under the control of the General Mining Law of 1872, which regulates extractive industries that take such raw materials as gold, silver, lithium and oil from the earth on public lands. It would also hasten the demise of California’s relatively small and aging community of gem and mineral collectors, Losson and others say.
“We see this issue as an existential threat to a hobby that dates back to the turn of the last century,” said Lisbet Thoresen, a mineralogist and advocate of hobbyists who find joy in lugging a few bucketfuls of rocks home to be cut and polished with lapidary equipment: diamond saws, grinders and tumbling machines.
No national monument administered by any federal agency currently operates under a management plan that allows mining. But advocates of rockhounding are hoping that the BLM will make an exception at Mojave Trails that could be used as a template for accommodating the hobby at monuments elsewhere.
“Rock collecting is not mining,” Thoresen said. “How are students going to learn to be geologists if not in nature’s own classroom?”
Katie Boyd, curator of rocks and minerals at the Mojave River Valley Museum in Barstow, described the situation as “bordering on ridiculous.”
“I take strong exception to rockhounding being under review for possible classification as a crime,” she said. “It’s a wonderful hobby, and I’m all for it.”
California has enacted the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, which is aimed at helping to ensure the survival of millions of the climate-threatened trees.
Often, stones and minerals collected by rockhounds are turned into pendants, bolo ties, rings, bookends and colorful spheres. Others wind up in glass display cases or in school classrooms.
The debate over whether or not rockhounding should be permitted in this desert just a few hours east of Los Angeles arises from President Obama’s 2016 proclamation designating Mojave Trails as a national monument.
The official proclamation did not include “rock hunting” as a desirable activity and ended with the admonition: “Warning is hereby given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of the monument and not to locate or settle upon any of the lands thereof.”
To add to the confusion, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had asked Obama to create the monument in the first place, insisted that the proclamation’s warning referred to cultural and historic items, not rocks.
The BLM would not go that far. But it has allowed rockhounding to continue at least until the management plan is finalized later this year.
For rockhounds, the battle over the future of rock collecting in Mojave Trails is also a battle over the future of the pastime itself.
Rock hunting was a fast-growing new hobby in the 1930s, when collectors began venturing into the vast Mojave Desert by car via the legendary U.S. Route 66, then took dirt roads to mineral hot spots including the Cady Mountains, Lavic Siding and Afton Canyon — a four-mile furrow carved by the Mojave River.
Its heyday was in the 1950s, when there were an estimated 2 million home lapidary shops in operation across the nation, and rockhounding was encouraged by the U.S. Bureau of Mines as part of a strategy to increase stockpiles of minerals crucial for national defense.
In a 1956 newspaper article titled “You can be a week-end gem hunter,” Thomas H. Miller, director of Bureau of Mines, argued that “sooner or later, one of these rockhounds is going to make a ‘find’ of one of the many important strategic minerals, such as manganese, or nickel, or beryllium, which we desperately need.”
An ornery, board-jacking sea otter is terrorizing surfers off the coast of Santa Cruz. An effort is underway to capture the creature.
Rockhounds have been steadily losing access to premier hunting grounds since the 1970s due to urban sprawl, the expansion of military bases, and the implementation of conservation policies aimed at ensuring the long-term survival of vital land rich in anthropological resources, historic sites, plants and wildlife, including bighorn sheep.
The sweeping California Desert Conservation Area Plan of 1980 omitted “rock collecting” among its enumerated recreational opportunities. Although the plan has been revised 147 times since then, rock collecting was never included as a specifically permitted activity.
That omission produced a rift with rockhounders that only deepened in 2016 when Obama’s proclamation overlooked the activity as a desired use in Mojave Trails.
“Rockhounds hate national monuments,” Thoresen said, “because wherever [rock collecting] is not explicitly stated as a desirable use in their management plans, it is not allowed.”
The rock hunting community’s fight for permanent access to Mojave Trails is supported by the nonprofit conservation group CalWild and the Mineralogical Society of Southern California, some of whose members are responsible for the identification and classification of several hundred new minerals.
“We are passionate about keeping the Mojave Trails National Monument for science, for education, for mineral collecting, and for rockhounding for many generations to come,” Angela Guzman, president of the society, said in a recent letter to BLM officials.
Other supporters include the Mojave Desert Land Trust and the Wildlands Conservancy, both of which are dedicated to acquiring ecologically significant tracts of land throughout California.
“To prohibit casual collection by grouping it with commercial mining would be a true failure of our federal policymakers and violate commitments made as Mojave Trails National Monument was being promoted and advocated over 10 years ago,” said Frazier Haney, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy.
In the meantime, Southern California rockhounds are bracing for change.
“Rockhounds don’t have lobbyists and lawyers on staff to fight any of this,” said rock collector Ruth Hidalgo of Palmdale, who has earned the moniker “Mama Bear” because of her strong arguments at public hearings on the issue. “There are definitely going to be compromises — rockhounds won’t be able to go everywhere they do now.”
But Hidalgo has high hopes of ensuring access to an inexpensive weekend getaway she refers to as “my quiet, remote happy place, where sparkling minerals in every direction are staring out at you.”
“My husband, who passed away last year, always had a rock in his pocket,” she said. “Now I have it. It’s a piece of agate from the Cady Mountains.”
Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.
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If dyed-in-the-wool rockhound Gregor Losson takes you to his favorite mineral hunting grounds, be prepared to set out before sunrise in his four-wheel-drive truck and follow a tangle of backcountry dirt roads to a remote corner of the Mojave Desert.
It’s a desolate alluvial fan on the southern flanks of the Cady Mountains, where sparkling calcite crystals and pieces of quartz, jasper and agate are continually carried down the slopes by thunderstorms and flash floods.
“This place is as good as it gets,” Losson said recently as he hoisted a small geode filled with quartz crystals.
But that may not be the case for much longer.
A fierce seven-year debate over whether or not to prohibit the removal of rocks and minerals from Mojave Trails National Monument threatens to end rock collecting within its 1.6 million acres.
A controlled burn in Calaveras Big Trees State Park has badly damaged a pair of giant sequoias named ‘the Orphans,’ outraging community members.
Specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is nearing completion of a management plan that could declare rock collecting a form of mining.
If that happens, rockhounding would fall under the control of the General Mining Law of 1872, which regulates extractive industries that take such raw materials as gold, silver, lithium and oil from the earth on public lands. It would also hasten the demise of California’s relatively small and aging community of gem and mineral collectors, Losson and others say.
“We see this issue as an existential threat to a hobby that dates back to the turn of the last century,” said Lisbet Thoresen, a mineralogist and advocate of hobbyists who find joy in lugging a few bucketfuls of rocks home to be cut and polished with lapidary equipment: diamond saws, grinders and tumbling machines.
No national monument administered by any federal agency currently operates under a management plan that allows mining. But advocates of rockhounding are hoping that the BLM will make an exception at Mojave Trails that could be used as a template for accommodating the hobby at monuments elsewhere.
“Rock collecting is not mining,” Thoresen said. “How are students going to learn to be geologists if not in nature’s own classroom?”
Katie Boyd, curator of rocks and minerals at the Mojave River Valley Museum in Barstow, described the situation as “bordering on ridiculous.”
“I
|
take strong exception to rockhounding being under review for possible classification as a crime,” she said. “It’s a wonderful hobby, and I’m all for it.”
California has enacted the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, which is aimed at helping to ensure the survival of millions of the climate-threatened trees.
Often, stones and minerals collected by rockhounds are turned into pendants, bolo ties, rings, bookends and colorful spheres. Others wind up in glass display cases or in school classrooms.
The debate over whether or not rockhounding should be permitted in this desert just a few hours east of Los Angeles arises from President Obama’s 2016 proclamation designating Mojave Trails as a national monument.
The official proclamation did not include “rock hunting” as a desirable activity and ended with the admonition: “Warning is hereby given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of the monument and not to locate or settle upon any of the lands thereof.”
To add to the confusion, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had asked Obama to create the monument in the first place, insisted that the proclamation’s warning referred to cultural and historic items, not rocks.
The BLM would not go that far. But it has allowed rockhounding to continue at least until the management plan is finalized later this year.
For rockhounds, the battle over the future of rock collecting in Mojave Trails is also a battle over the future of the pastime itself.
Rock hunting was a fast-growing new hobby in the 1930s, when collectors began venturing into the vast Mojave Desert by car via the legendary U.S. Route 66, then took dirt roads to mineral hot spots including the Cady Mountains, Lavic Siding and Afton Canyon — a four-mile furrow carved by the Mojave River.
Its heyday was in the 1950s, when there were an estimated 2 million home lapidary shops in operation across the nation, and rockhounding was encouraged by the U.S. Bureau of Mines as part of a strategy to increase stockpiles of minerals crucial for national defense.
In a 1956 newspaper article titled “You can be a week-end gem hunter,” Thomas H. Miller, director of Bureau of Mines, argued that “sooner or later, one of these rockhounds is going to make a ‘find’ of one of the many important strategic minerals, such as manganese, or nickel, or beryllium, which we desperately need.”
An ornery, board-jacking sea otter is terrorizing surfers off the coast of Santa Cruz. An effort is underway to capture the creature.
Rockhounds have been steadily losing access to premier hunting grounds since the 1970s due to urban sprawl, the expansion of military bases, and the implementation of conservation policies aimed at ensuring the long-term survival of vital land rich in anthropological resources, historic sites, plants and wildlife, including bighorn sheep.
The sweeping California Desert Conservation Area Plan of 1980 omitted “rock collecting” among its enumerated recreational opportunities. Although the plan has been revised 147 times since then, rock collecting was never included as a specifically permitted activity.
That omission produced a rift with rockhounders that only deepened in 2016 when Obama’s proclamation overlooked the activity as a desired use in Mojave Trails.
“Rockhounds hate national monuments,” Thoresen said, “because wherever [rock collecting] is not explicitly stated as a desirable use in their management plans, it is not allowed.”
The rock hunting community’s fight for permanent access to Mojave Trails is supported by the nonprofit conservation group CalWild and the Mineralogical Society of Southern California, some of whose members are responsible for the identification and classification of several hundred new minerals.
“We are passionate about keeping the Mojave Trails National Monument for science, for education, for mineral collecting, and for rockhounding for many generations to come,” Angela Guzman, president of the society, said in a recent letter to BLM officials.
Other supporters include the Mojave Desert Land Trust and the Wildlands Conservancy, both of which are dedicated to acquiring ecologically significant tracts of land throughout California.
“To prohibit casual collection by grouping it with commercial mining would be a true failure of our federal policymakers and violate commitments made as Mojave Trails National Monument was being promoted and advocated over 10 years ago,” said Frazier Haney, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy.
In the meantime, Southern California rockhounds are bracing for change.
“Rockhounds don’t have lobbyists and lawyers on staff to fight any of this,” said rock collector Ruth Hidalgo of Palmdale, who has earned the moniker “Mama Bear” because of her strong arguments at public hearings on the issue. “There are definitely going to be compromises — rockhounds won’t be able to go everywhere they do now.”
But Hidalgo has high hopes of ensuring access to an inexpensive weekend getaway she refers to as “my quiet, remote happy place, where sparkling minerals in every direction are staring out at you.”
“My husband, who passed away last year, always had a rock in his pocket,” she said. “Now I have it. It’s a piece of agate from the Cady Mountains.”
Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.
|
Flinders University scientists use biology from insects to build robots with a brainBy Meagan Dillon
Scientists at a South Australian university are using biology from insects to build robots with a brain – technology that could become a game changer for police, defence and national security.
- Scientists have used the biology of insects to create a robot that can understand the vision it captures from a camera
- The robots can take a picture and also interpret the environment
- They say the technology will be useful for a range of areas including law enforcement and conservation
"I'm giving a robot a brain so it can understand its environment," said Flinders University associate professor for autonomous systems, Dr Russell Brinkworth.
His biologically-inspired robots have the ability to not just take a picture of the world, but interpret the surrounding environment and adapt accordingly.
"Our current robots work well in structured environments that don't change. That sounds complex – but they're all the same," Dr Brinkworth said.
"When cars are set on an assembly line, all the cars are the same, the parts are the same, they're all in the same environment, same lighting, same size.
"But real life isn't like that – there's always changes, so we need to build robots that can adapt to the environment, rather than forcing the environment to adapt to the robots."
By studying the biology of insects, such as flies and dragonflies, Dr Brinkworth "reverse engineered" the process that goes on biologically to create a robot that can understand the vision it is capturing from a camera.
"The way that insects interpret the world is very similar to the way primates and even humans interpret the world. We just do it on a larger scale," he said.
He said his robots can pinpoint a drone or surveillance balloon from kilometres away, far advancing the technology of current cameras.
"If you look at security footage and there's someone wearing a hoodie and they've got their face covered – it's hard to understand what's going on based on the camera footage," he said.
"But if you were standing there, and you were looking at them, that shadow wouldn't fool your eye because your eye is sophisticated enough to be able to extract out the information hiding in the shadows.
"That's the sort of cameras we're building."
Dr Brinkworth said the cameras would be vital for law enforcement, defence and national security in the future, but could also be used for conservation, such as recording the density of koalas in a national park.
"You'd have to send somebody out to walk through that forest to do a manual count, or you send a drone overhead with an operator," he said.
"They will miss quite a few.
"What we've been able to do is design a system that is far more accurate and doesn't rely on human judgement."
He said his camera can more accurately pick out where the koalas are because it could "break the different types of camouflage" created by the dense branches and leaves.
"It can find animals hiding in forests, it can find all sorts of things that are camouflaged to regular camera views because it's able to look for, and enhance, the very subtle differences across different wavelengths of light."
Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Dr Malcolm Davis said studying biology was important to advance technology such as robots.
"We want them to be flexible and in effect, to be able to operate as humans do," he said.
"The battle space is a complex, rapidly changing environment – we can't afford to have autonomous systems or robots, essentially requiring human oversight.
"We need them to be able to understand their environment and make their own decisions.
"There's obviously a Terminator mindset here that if we give robots too much control, then they turn on us [but] I don't think that's likely.
"If we're talking about artificial intelligence, if we're talking about advanced robotic systems, then it's humans that are creating those systems.
"We would build into those machines an understanding or basis for behaviour based around our approaches to things like international law, humanitarian law, the laws of armed conflict."
Dr Brinkworth said the technology could one day be used to potentially build an eye for someone who was blind.
"If somebody was blind, you can't just put a camera on them, you have to find a way of giving that information to the person," he said.
He said in order to do that, the way the brain communicates needs to be replicated by better understanding how the visual systems of animals work.
"We could augment existing visual systems and replace missing parts and communicate that information in the brain's native language back to the brain," he said.
"This is very science fiction – it doesn't exist just yet. The interface between technology and biology is a frontier.
"The augmentation side of technology moving into biology is a bit Borg-like, if we're looking for Star Trek.
"It is very far in the future. But the future starts now, you must start somewhere.
"If you want to invest in a future where giving sight back to the blind is important, than you've got to start."
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Flinders University scientists use biology from insects to build robots with a brainBy Meagan Dillon
Scientists at a South Australian university are using biology from insects to build robots with a brain – technology that could become a game changer for police, defence and national security.
- Scientists have used the biology of insects to create a robot that can understand the vision it captures from a camera
- The robots can take a picture and also interpret the environment
- They say the technology will be useful for a range of areas including law enforcement and conservation
"I'm giving a robot a brain so it can understand its environment," said Flinders University associate professor for autonomous systems, Dr Russell Brinkworth.
His biologically-inspired robots have the ability to not just take a picture of the world, but interpret the surrounding environment and adapt accordingly.
"Our current robots work well in structured environments that don't change. That sounds complex – but they're all the same," Dr Brinkworth said.
"When cars are set on an assembly line, all the cars are the same, the parts are the same, they're all in the same environment, same lighting, same size.
"But real life isn't like that – there's always changes, so we need to build robots that can adapt to the environment, rather than forcing the environment to adapt to the robots."
By studying the biology of insects, such as flies and dragonflies, Dr Brinkworth "reverse engineered" the process that goes on biologically to create a robot that can understand the vision it is capturing from a camera.
"The way that insects interpret the world is very similar to the way primates and even humans interpret the world. We just do it on a larger scale," he said.
He said his robots can pinpoint a drone or surveillance balloon from kilometres away, far advancing the technology of current cameras.
"If you look at security footage and there's someone wearing a hoodie and they've got their face covered – it's hard to understand what's going on based on the camera footage," he said.
"But if you were standing there, and you were looking at them, that shadow wouldn't fool your eye because your eye is sophisticated enough to be able to extract out the information hiding in the shadows.
"That's the sort of cameras we're building."
Dr Brinkworth said the cameras would be vital for law enforcement, defence and national security in the future, but could also be used for conservation, such as recording the density of koalas in a national park.
"You'd have to send somebody
|
out to walk through that forest to do a manual count, or you send a drone overhead with an operator," he said.
"They will miss quite a few.
"What we've been able to do is design a system that is far more accurate and doesn't rely on human judgement."
He said his camera can more accurately pick out where the koalas are because it could "break the different types of camouflage" created by the dense branches and leaves.
"It can find animals hiding in forests, it can find all sorts of things that are camouflaged to regular camera views because it's able to look for, and enhance, the very subtle differences across different wavelengths of light."
Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Dr Malcolm Davis said studying biology was important to advance technology such as robots.
"We want them to be flexible and in effect, to be able to operate as humans do," he said.
"The battle space is a complex, rapidly changing environment – we can't afford to have autonomous systems or robots, essentially requiring human oversight.
"We need them to be able to understand their environment and make their own decisions.
"There's obviously a Terminator mindset here that if we give robots too much control, then they turn on us [but] I don't think that's likely.
"If we're talking about artificial intelligence, if we're talking about advanced robotic systems, then it's humans that are creating those systems.
"We would build into those machines an understanding or basis for behaviour based around our approaches to things like international law, humanitarian law, the laws of armed conflict."
Dr Brinkworth said the technology could one day be used to potentially build an eye for someone who was blind.
"If somebody was blind, you can't just put a camera on them, you have to find a way of giving that information to the person," he said.
He said in order to do that, the way the brain communicates needs to be replicated by better understanding how the visual systems of animals work.
"We could augment existing visual systems and replace missing parts and communicate that information in the brain's native language back to the brain," he said.
"This is very science fiction – it doesn't exist just yet. The interface between technology and biology is a frontier.
"The augmentation side of technology moving into biology is a bit Borg-like, if we're looking for Star Trek.
"It is very far in the future. But the future starts now, you must start somewhere.
"If you want to invest in a future where giving sight back to the blind is important, than you've got to start."
|
Website Link (Article by Megan Schmidt)
Essential oils smell great. But what do researchers have to say about the health benefits of essential oils? Are they really safe remedies for anxiety, stress, pain and other health problems?
Since the dawn of civilization, people have turned to the power of plants for healing purposes. But one folk medicine in particular seems more popular than ever: essential oils.
Today, there’s renewed interest in using essential oils to improve physical or psychological well-being. One poll found that a third of Americans believe in the health benefits of essential oils and aromatherapy. No longer niche, these little vials of plant essence are a billion-dollar industry, favored by Gwyneth Paltrow and grandmas alike.
With around 90 essential oils on the market — each with its own purported healing qualities — there’s a so-called “cure” for practically everything. Lavender, sandalwood and bergamot are popular essential oils for stress relief. Varieties like ylang-ylang and jasmine are reputed to boost libido. Some, like lemon oil, are believed to address a laundry list of conditions: morning sickness, pain and acne, to name a few. But there’s a problem with essential oil claims: Science hasn’t caught up to their popularity. There simply haven’t been enough large-scale, peer-reviewed studies in humans to prove whether essential oils really can improve health or mood, or support any other commonly bragged about health benefits of essential oils.
With this in mind, let’s clear up what essential oils are, how they are thought to work, and what research says about them.
What’s in Your Oils: Are Essential Oils Safe?
Essential oils are highly concentrated extracts of plant material — such as seeds, flowers, stems or roots.
But it can often be tough for consumers to know what they’re really buying. The market isn’t regulated, so there tends to be a lot of variation between essential oils — even among those that originate from the same brand.
“The constituent makeup of essential oils will vary from batch to batch, as they are drawn from plants that vary from country to country, field to field and even within the same plant from morning to evening,” says Mark Moss, a psychologist who studies essential oils at Northumbria University in the U.K., in an email to Discover. “The major components will always be there, but the relative concentration will vary.”
Another important thing to keep in mind is that essential oils haven’t been put through rigorous FDA testing and approval like the over-the-counter drugs available at your neighborhood pharmacy. So what essential oils do for health, if anything, is still pretty murky.
“Essential oils are neither medicines nor drugs because the effects have not been fully assessed yet in terms of science,” says Hideki Kashiwadani, a physiology researcher at Kagoshima University in Japan, in an email to Discover.
Despite this, essential oils have wide appeal, particularly among people who have grown dissatisfied with modern Western medicine. And this alternative therapy is showing no signs of slowing down.
How Essential Oils are Used
Most essential oils are inhaled via diffusion or applied topically to the skin after being mixed with a carrier oil. Other essential oils are supposed to be ingested, but medical professionals and health authorities generally warn against the safety of this method.
When essential oils are inhaled via aromatherapy, compounds are absorbed through receptors in our noses, which send messages to our olfactory system, the part of the brain responsible for our sense of smell. Eventually, these messages reach other areas of the brain, such as the limbic system, which plays a role in our emotions.
When essential oils are applied topically for cosmetic reasons or to treat aches and pains, the compounds are absorbed into the skin and eventually enter the bloodstream before they’re metabolized by the liver.
But beyond that, even scientists have a tough time figuring out what various essential oils really do. Since there are no accepted standards for essential oils, Kashiwadani explains that scientists often find it challenging to replicate another scientist’s experiment.
“One of the problems with essential oils and the lack of standardization is that you can’t tell if two researchers are actually testing the same essential oil,” Moss says.
But other issues — which are surprisingly commonplace in scientific research — further complicate matters. For instance, human studies on essential oils are few and far between. Of the research that has been conducted on humans, many studies involved small numbers of participants, which can skew results. As a rule of thumb, reviews or meta-reviews, which draw conclusions from large numbers of similar studies, tend to be the most reliable and comprehensive.
We also must remember that correlation does not equal causation. In other words, a mere association between two things isn’t enough to prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship. So, even if a study found people who smelled lavender aroma felt less anxious, something else may be responsible for the effect (such as controlled breathing).
On top of that, the results from scientific studies can sometime be misinterpreted or blown out of proportion. When scientists study treatments, they’re looking for changes that are “statistically significant.” All this means is that the results cannot be explained by random chance alone. So the impact of an essential oil might be scientifically significant, but fall far short of what we might view as meaningful.
In light of the shortcomings of essential oil studies, a lot of the information concerning the health benefits of essential oils tends to be anecdotal or rooted in folklore. And their safety hasn’t been fully vetted. So it’s important for people to remember that natural or organic doesn’t directly translate to being “safe” or “beneficial.” Plant compounds — especially in high doses — can be toxic, irritating or may cause allergic reactions or drug interactions.
What Are the Health Benefits of Essential Oils?
But essential oils may not be totally worthless. Based on his own work, Moss said rosemary, sage and peppermint oils might improve memory and cognition to a degree. He also says lavender has been linked with improved sleep. Just don’t expect essential oils to be magical elixirs. They’re a far cry from being on medication, and shouldn’t replace standard medical care.
“The effects of essential oils are small. They are not a panacea. They can provide small benefits for individuals and should, in my opinion, be seen as self-care life enhancers rather than treatments as such,” Moss said.
If anything, many essential oils smell nice. So, if spritzing your pillow with lavender oil brings enjoyment and relaxation — even via the placebo effect — is there really anything wrong with that?
“Don’t go searching for solutions to problems. Consider the potential for enjoying the experience. That is a benefit in itself,” Moss said.
Essential Oils as ‘Medicine’
Are essential oils safe and effective treatments for certain medical conditions? The jury’s still out, but Discover rounded up some of the published work that explores the effects of some popular essential oils in animals and humans. If you’re thinking about trying essential oils, make sure you check with your doctor first.
The woodsy aroma of rosemary may do more than perk up a roast chicken. A small study of 20 people from Moss’ research team at Northumbria University linked rosemary to improved memory and cognition, particularly among older adults.
Another small study from Moss’ team found that rosemary might improve test scores among school-aged kids. Children who took tests in rooms scented with rosemary received higher scores than children in nonscented rooms.
Despite his work investigating rosemary, Moss said he’s not necessarily an advocate of promoting the use of essential oils, but thinks consumers should be able to make their own choices.
Lavender is one of the most popular scents in aromatherapy. Studies in both mice and horses have found that the scent of lavender is calming. In humans, small-scale studies found that it might have a modest effect on anxiety.
One study of 100 people found that lavender slightly improved anxiety before surgery. The researchers cautioned, however, that additional research is needed before drawing conclusions between lavender aroma and anxiety.
Taking lavender oil capsules orally might also have some effect on anxiety. That’s according to a meta-analysis of five studies that involved more than 500 people, which looked at how lavender capsules measured up to a placebo and some anti-anxiety drugs. Although lavender capsules (also known as silexan) helped with anxiety, it also caused unpleasant side effects like nausea, belching and diarrhea in some people.
Lavender is also a common sleep aid. A review of studies concluded that it may offer some small to moderate sleep-promoting benefits. However, the review called for larger and more rigorous studies that investigate lavender and sleep.
Beyond that, lavender may have some pro-social benefits. A study that involved 90 people found that the aroma of lavender was more effective than a control in promoting a sense of trust among strangers.
But lavender oil maybe isn’t a good idea for everyone. It may be a hormone disrupter, and studies have linked regular exposure to lavender oil with abnormal breast growth in girls. Lavender (and tea tree oil) was also found to cause abnormal breast tissue growth in boys.
Peppermint oil, which may have pain-relieving qualities, has been used for centuries to treat gastrointestinal problems. But unlike some other essential oils, there’s pretty sound evidence to back up these claims. Reviews of studies have found that taking peppermint oil capsules may ease irritable bowel syndrome symptoms, like gastrointestinal pain.
A small pilot study also found that peppermint oil capsules may be helpful for people who have problems swallowing during meals or experience noncardiac chest pains. Consuming peppermint tablets helped ease discomfort in these patients, likely because the compounds helped to relax smooth muscles in the lower esophagus.
Tea Tree Oil
Tea tree oil is often found in cosmetic products because of its purported anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties. When applied to the skin, tea tree oil might be an effective treatment for mild to moderate acne.
A review study found tea tree oil was better than placebos, and just as effective as benzoyl peroxide, in stopping pimples. In addition to acne, several older studies suggest tea tree oil may be helpful for nail fungus and athlete’s foot.
|
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Website Link (Article by Megan Schmidt)
Essential oils smell great. But what do researchers have to say about the health benefits of essential oils? Are they really safe remedies for anxiety, stress, pain and other health problems?
Since the dawn of civilization, people have turned to the power of plants for healing purposes. But one folk medicine in particular seems more popular than ever: essential oils.
Today, there’s renewed interest in using essential oils to improve physical or psychological well-being. One poll found that a third of Americans believe in the health benefits of essential oils and aromatherapy. No longer niche, these little vials of plant essence are a billion-dollar industry, favored by Gwyneth Paltrow and grandmas alike.
With around 90 essential oils on the market — each with its own purported healing qualities — there’s a so-called “cure” for practically everything. Lavender, sandalwood and bergamot are popular essential oils for stress relief. Varieties like ylang-ylang and jasmine are reputed to boost libido. Some, like lemon oil, are believed to address a laundry list of conditions: morning sickness, pain and acne, to name a few. But there’s a problem with essential oil claims: Science hasn’t caught up to their popularity. There simply haven’t been enough large-scale, peer-reviewed studies in humans to prove whether essential oils really can improve health or mood, or support any other commonly bragged about health benefits of essential oils.
With this in mind, let’s clear up what essential oils are, how they are thought to work, and what research says about them.
What’s in Your Oils: Are Essential Oils Safe?
Essential oils are highly concentrated extracts of plant material — such as seeds, flowers, stems or roots.
But it can often be tough for consumers to know what they’re really buying. The market isn’t regulated, so there tends to be a lot of variation between essential oils — even among those that originate from the same brand.
“The constituent makeup of essential oils will vary from batch to batch, as they are drawn from plants that vary from country to country, field to field and even within the same plant from morning to evening,” says Mark Moss, a psychologist who studies essential oils at Northumbria University in the U.K., in an email to Discover. “The major components will always be there, but the relative concentration will vary.”
Another important thing to keep in mind is that essential oils haven’t been put through rigorous FDA
|
testing and approval like the over-the-counter drugs available at your neighborhood pharmacy. So what essential oils do for health, if anything, is still pretty murky.
“Essential oils are neither medicines nor drugs because the effects have not been fully assessed yet in terms of science,” says Hideki Kashiwadani, a physiology researcher at Kagoshima University in Japan, in an email to Discover.
Despite this, essential oils have wide appeal, particularly among people who have grown dissatisfied with modern Western medicine. And this alternative therapy is showing no signs of slowing down.
How Essential Oils are Used
Most essential oils are inhaled via diffusion or applied topically to the skin after being mixed with a carrier oil. Other essential oils are supposed to be ingested, but medical professionals and health authorities generally warn against the safety of this method.
When essential oils are inhaled via aromatherapy, compounds are absorbed through receptors in our noses, which send messages to our olfactory system, the part of the brain responsible for our sense of smell. Eventually, these messages reach other areas of the brain, such as the limbic system, which plays a role in our emotions.
When essential oils are applied topically for cosmetic reasons or to treat aches and pains, the compounds are absorbed into the skin and eventually enter the bloodstream before they’re metabolized by the liver.
But beyond that, even scientists have a tough time figuring out what various essential oils really do. Since there are no accepted standards for essential oils, Kashiwadani explains that scientists often find it challenging to replicate another scientist’s experiment.
“One of the problems with essential oils and the lack of standardization is that you can’t tell if two researchers are actually testing the same essential oil,” Moss says.
But other issues — which are surprisingly commonplace in scientific research — further complicate matters. For instance, human studies on essential oils are few and far between. Of the research that has been conducted on humans, many studies involved small numbers of participants, which can skew results. As a rule of thumb, reviews or meta-reviews, which draw conclusions from large numbers of similar studies, tend to be the most reliable and comprehensive.
We also must remember that correlation does not equal causation. In other words, a mere association between two things isn’t enough to prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship. So, even if a study found people who smelled lavender aroma felt less anxious, something else may be responsible for the effect (such as controlled breathing).
On top of that, the results from scientific studies can sometime be misinterpreted or blown out of proportion. When scientists study treatments, they’re looking for changes that are “statistically significant.” All this means is that the results cannot be explained by random chance alone. So the impact of an essential oil might be scientifically significant, but fall far short of what we might view as meaningful.
In light of the shortcomings of essential oil studies, a lot of the information concerning the health benefits of essential oils tends to be anecdotal or rooted in folklore. And their safety hasn’t been fully vetted. So it’s important for people to remember that natural or organic doesn’t directly translate to being “safe” or “beneficial.” Plant compounds — especially in high doses — can be toxic, irritating or may cause allergic reactions or drug interactions.
What Are the Health Benefits of Essential Oils?
But essential oils may not be totally worthless. Based on his own work, Moss said rosemary, sage and peppermint oils might improve memory and cognition to a degree. He also says lavender has been linked with improved sleep. Just don’t expect essential oils to be magical elixirs. They’re a far cry from being on medication, and shouldn’t replace standard medical care.
“The effects of essential oils are small. They are not a panacea. They can provide small benefits for individuals and should, in my opinion, be seen as self-care life enhancers rather than treatments as such,” Moss said.
If anything, many essential oils smell nice. So, if spritzing your pillow with lavender oil brings enjoyment and relaxation — even via the placebo effect — is there really anything wrong with that?
“Don’t go searching for solutions to problems. Consider the potential for enjoying the experience. That is a benefit in itself,” Moss said.
Essential Oils as ‘Medicine’
Are essential oils safe and effective treatments for certain medical conditions? The jury’s still out, but Discover rounded up some of the published work that explores the effects of some popular essential oils in animals and humans. If you’re thinking about trying essential oils, make sure you check with your doctor first.
The woodsy aroma of rosemary may do more than perk up a roast chicken. A small study of 20 people from Moss’ research team at Northumbria University linked rosemary to improved memory and cognition, particularly among older adults.
Another small study from Moss’ team found that rosemary might improve test scores among school-aged kids. Children who took tests in rooms scented with rosemary received higher scores than children in nonscented rooms.
Despite his work investigating rosemary, Moss said he’s not necessarily an advocate of promoting the use of essential oils, but thinks consumers should be able to make their own choices.
Lavender is one of the most popular scents in aromatherapy. Studies in both mice and horses have found that the scent of lavender is calming. In humans, small-scale studies found that it might have a modest effect on anxiety.
One study of 100 people found that lavender slightly improved anxiety before surgery. The researchers cautioned, however, that additional research is needed before drawing conclusions between lavender aroma and anxiety.
Taking lavender oil capsules orally might also have some effect on anxiety. That’s according to a meta-analysis of five studies that involved more than 500 people, which looked at how lavender capsules measured up to a placebo and some anti-anxiety drugs. Although lavender capsules (also known as silexan) helped with anxiety, it also caused unpleasant side effects like nausea, belching and diarrhea in some people.
Lavender is also a common sleep aid. A review of studies concluded that it may offer some small to moderate sleep-promoting benefits. However, the review called for larger and more rigorous studies that investigate lavender and sleep.
Beyond that, lavender may have some pro-social benefits. A study that involved 90 people found that the aroma of lavender was more effective than a control in promoting a sense of trust among strangers.
But lavender oil maybe isn’t a good idea for everyone. It may be a hormone disrupter, and studies have linked regular exposure to lavender oil with abnormal breast growth in girls. Lavender (and tea tree oil) was also found to cause abnormal breast tissue growth in boys.
Peppermint oil, which may have pain-relieving qualities, has been used for centuries to treat gastrointestinal problems. But unlike some other essential oils, there’s pretty sound evidence to back up these claims. Reviews of studies have found that taking peppermint oil capsules may ease irritable bowel syndrome symptoms, like gastrointestinal pain.
A small pilot study also found that peppermint oil capsules may be helpful for people who have problems swallowing during meals or experience noncardiac chest pains. Consuming peppermint tablets helped ease discomfort in these patients, likely because the compounds helped to relax smooth muscles in the lower esophagus.
Tea Tree Oil
Tea tree oil is often found in cosmetic products because of its purported anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties. When applied to the skin, tea tree oil might be an effective treatment for mild to moderate acne.
A review study found tea tree oil was better than placebos, and just as effective as benzoyl peroxide, in stopping pimples. In addition to acne, several older studies suggest tea tree oil may be helpful for nail fungus and athlete’s foot.
|
Warning: Syphilis cases on the rise in Stark, Tusc region
- Increase in syphilis traced to pandemic.
- Doctors are urged to do more testing for syphilis.
- Untreated disease can have long-lasting effects.
CANTON − The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered another public health problem, namely an increase in syphilis.
The number of regional syphilis cases grew from 41 in 2020, to 68 in 2021, to 109 last year, said Diane Thompson, director of nursing for Canton City Public Health.
High-risk behavior such as substance abuse combined with unsafe sex are the two biggest culprits behind the rise in cases.
STDs in Ohio:Gonorrhea and syphilis cases spiking in Canton
According to Ohio Department of Health, syphilis, which is a bacterial infection, increased from 2,442 cases in 2019, to 3,956 in 2021, with 25- to 34-year-olds making up the largest number of cases.
Other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and chlamydia also are seeing higher numbers since the pandemic. New figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control show that syphilis and gonorrhea infections hit an all-time high in 2021.
Post-COVID rise in STI'shttps://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3944195-sexually-transmitted-infections-hit-record-high-in-2021-cdc-finds/
Worrisome rise in congenital syphilis in Ohio
But there's a particularly worrisome rise in congenital syphilis, which is transferred to unborn babies by their mothers. According to preliminary figures, there were three congenital syphilis cases last year.
In response, Canton City Public Health launched a billboard campaign earlier this year to encourage sexually active people to get tested and treated if necessary. The health agency tracks syphilis and HIV cases in eight counties: Carroll, Coshocton, Harrison, Holmes, Jefferson, Stark, Tuscarawas and Wayne.
Thompson said that after the first congenital syphilis case in the region was reported in 2020, Canton issued a statewide health alert via the Ohio Department of Health.
Statewide, the number of syphilis infections in infants to those age 9 jumped from 19 in 2019 to 50 in 2021.
Thompson said a woman who has syphilis prior to getting pregnant can transfer the organism to a fetus once she becomes pregnant.
"And it can occur at any time during pregnancy," she said. "It can happen at a sexual encounter during pregnancy. We've had some high-risk cases where people didn't know they were pregnant because they were deeply into their substance abuse, and so if they don't get prenatal care, obviously testing doesn't get done until they end up in labor and come into the hospital."
Effects of syphilis can be lifelong
The effects for a baby infected with syphilis can be lifelong.
"They could have some chronic medical conditions and have to be cared for throughout their life," Thompson said. "Bone issues, which can cause deformities. It can also cause stillbirth."
Thompson said the health agency has applied for an Innovative STI (sexually transmitted infection) Prevention & Strategies grant from the state.
"We are proposing to partner with the Multi-County Attention Center to do STI testing on their youth," she said. "We're also proposing to do STI testing with our needle exchange participants."
She said another challenge is many people don't know they're infected. One factor for transmission is high-risk individuals, people who have multiple sex partners or who engage in substance abuse.
"We catch some of our adults through blood donations," she said.
Thompson noted that some younger physicians have never seen a syphilis case.
"So, people end up going to the doctor and they get diagnosed with a dermatitis, or they think you're having a reaction to soap," she said.
Thompson said syphilis symptoms for adults occur in stages.
"They will go through a primary stage where a lesion may appear," she said. "And the reason people may not notice a lesion is because it can be in the mouth, it can be in the anal area, in can be inside the vaginal area so they may not see it, and this lesion is not particularly painful."
As the organism continues to attack the body, it goes into a secondary stage, Thompson said.
"The secondary stage is when you see loss of hair. You can see a rash that can be all over the body or on different parts of the body," she said. "What is classic for secondary syphilis is the rash on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet."
Syphilis got Al Capone
Left untreated, syphilis will continue to attack the body for up to 12 months.
"After 12 months, if an adult doesn't get treated for it, that's when the organism lies dormant in the body for years and years and years," Thompson said. "It can travel to the brain and cause lots of damage. That's why Al Capone died."
Was Capone in Canton?:Al Capone and Stark County: Truth, legend or myth?
Thompson said a combination of risky behavior and a lack of testing makes it difficult to get a handle on transmissions.
"Years ago, we had a syphilis problem, but it was men having sex with men," she said. "So, you target that population of individuals and gear your testing in that population. When it's in your heterosexual population, it's very difficult to know how and where to target the message, which is why we've gone to the billboards."
Syphilis in adults and infants are treated with penicillin — the sooner, the better.
"If we can catch them in the first 12 months, it's one dose," she said. "But if we catch them after 12 months, it's three weekly doses. If we diagnosis an adult with neurosyphilis, it's I.V. penicillin for 10 days, and if we diagnose an infant with syphilis, it's also penicillin multiple times throughout the course of the day for 10 days."
Expectant mothers can be treated 30 days prior to delivery.
"But obviously, you have to infectious disease (experts) involved, and a pediatric neonatologist to assess that baby," Thompson said. "If we don't know mom has syphilis and the baby is born and transmission has occurred, mom could potentially present (the baby) to a pediatrician with broken bones because it does impact the bones."
The Canton City Public Health, 420 Market Ave. N, conducts free STI screening clinics from 8:15 to 11:15 a.m. by appointment only. Call 330-489-3322. If appointment slots are available, walk-ins are permitted. For more information visit https://www.cantonhealth.org/nursing/.
Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or <email-pii>.
On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
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Warning: Syphilis cases on the rise in Stark, Tusc region
- Increase in syphilis traced to pandemic.
- Doctors are urged to do more testing for syphilis.
- Untreated disease can have long-lasting effects.
CANTON − The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered another public health problem, namely an increase in syphilis.
The number of regional syphilis cases grew from 41 in 2020, to 68 in 2021, to 109 last year, said Diane Thompson, director of nursing for Canton City Public Health.
High-risk behavior such as substance abuse combined with unsafe sex are the two biggest culprits behind the rise in cases.
STDs in Ohio:Gonorrhea and syphilis cases spiking in Canton
According to Ohio Department of Health, syphilis, which is a bacterial infection, increased from 2,442 cases in 2019, to 3,956 in 2021, with 25- to 34-year-olds making up the largest number of cases.
Other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and chlamydia also are seeing higher numbers since the pandemic. New figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control show that syphilis and gonorrhea infections hit an all-time high in 2021.
Post-COVID rise in STI'shttps://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3944195-sexually-transmitted-infections-hit-record-high-in-2021-cdc-finds/
Worrisome rise in congenital syphilis in Ohio
But there's a particularly worrisome rise in congenital syphilis, which is transferred to unborn babies by their mothers. According to preliminary figures, there were three congenital syphilis cases last year.
In response, Canton City Public Health launched a billboard campaign earlier this year to encourage sexually active people to get tested and treated if necessary. The health agency tracks syphilis and HIV cases in eight counties: Carroll, Coshocton, Harrison, Holmes, Jefferson, Stark, Tuscarawas and Wayne.
Thompson said that after the first congenital syphilis case in the region was reported in 2020, Canton issued a statewide health alert via the Ohio Department of Health.
Statewide, the number of syphilis infections in infants to those age 9 jumped from 19 in 2019 to 50 in
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2021.
Thompson said a woman who has syphilis prior to getting pregnant can transfer the organism to a fetus once she becomes pregnant.
"And it can occur at any time during pregnancy," she said. "It can happen at a sexual encounter during pregnancy. We've had some high-risk cases where people didn't know they were pregnant because they were deeply into their substance abuse, and so if they don't get prenatal care, obviously testing doesn't get done until they end up in labor and come into the hospital."
Effects of syphilis can be lifelong
The effects for a baby infected with syphilis can be lifelong.
"They could have some chronic medical conditions and have to be cared for throughout their life," Thompson said. "Bone issues, which can cause deformities. It can also cause stillbirth."
Thompson said the health agency has applied for an Innovative STI (sexually transmitted infection) Prevention & Strategies grant from the state.
"We are proposing to partner with the Multi-County Attention Center to do STI testing on their youth," she said. "We're also proposing to do STI testing with our needle exchange participants."
She said another challenge is many people don't know they're infected. One factor for transmission is high-risk individuals, people who have multiple sex partners or who engage in substance abuse.
"We catch some of our adults through blood donations," she said.
Thompson noted that some younger physicians have never seen a syphilis case.
"So, people end up going to the doctor and they get diagnosed with a dermatitis, or they think you're having a reaction to soap," she said.
Thompson said syphilis symptoms for adults occur in stages.
"They will go through a primary stage where a lesion may appear," she said. "And the reason people may not notice a lesion is because it can be in the mouth, it can be in the anal area, in can be inside the vaginal area so they may not see it, and this lesion is not particularly painful."
As the organism continues to attack the body, it goes into a secondary stage, Thompson said.
"The secondary stage is when you see loss of hair. You can see a rash that can be all over the body or on different parts of the body," she said. "What is classic for secondary syphilis is the rash on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet."
Syphilis got Al Capone
Left untreated, syphilis will continue to attack the body for up to 12 months.
"After 12 months, if an adult doesn't get treated for it, that's when the organism lies dormant in the body for years and years and years," Thompson said. "It can travel to the brain and cause lots of damage. That's why Al Capone died."
Was Capone in Canton?:Al Capone and Stark County: Truth, legend or myth?
Thompson said a combination of risky behavior and a lack of testing makes it difficult to get a handle on transmissions.
"Years ago, we had a syphilis problem, but it was men having sex with men," she said. "So, you target that population of individuals and gear your testing in that population. When it's in your heterosexual population, it's very difficult to know how and where to target the message, which is why we've gone to the billboards."
Syphilis in adults and infants are treated with penicillin — the sooner, the better.
"If we can catch them in the first 12 months, it's one dose," she said. "But if we catch them after 12 months, it's three weekly doses. If we diagnosis an adult with neurosyphilis, it's I.V. penicillin for 10 days, and if we diagnose an infant with syphilis, it's also penicillin multiple times throughout the course of the day for 10 days."
Expectant mothers can be treated 30 days prior to delivery.
"But obviously, you have to infectious disease (experts) involved, and a pediatric neonatologist to assess that baby," Thompson said. "If we don't know mom has syphilis and the baby is born and transmission has occurred, mom could potentially present (the baby) to a pediatrician with broken bones because it does impact the bones."
The Canton City Public Health, 420 Market Ave. N, conducts free STI screening clinics from 8:15 to 11:15 a.m. by appointment only. Call 330-489-3322. If appointment slots are available, walk-ins are permitted. For more information visit https://www.cantonhealth.org/nursing/.
Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or <email-pii>.
On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
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Uisce Éireann has said it is taking advice on whether it needs to warn more than 220,000 consumers that their drinking water contains a level of toxic chemicals called trihalomethanes in excess of that permitted under European Union limits.
The State water authority has been working for several years to eliminate trihalomethanes, known as THMs, from drinking water supplies which were the subject of a European Court of Justice (ECJ) finding against Ireland in recent weeks.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency’s remedial action list now cites water supplies not named in the ECJ case which exceed the European Union’s limit for THMs of 100 microgrammes per litre. THMs can arise when chlorine is added to peaty water as part of the purification process.
Affected supplies include: those serving Limerick city, where 114,764 people are exposed to the toxins: Listowel in Co Kerry, where 14,905 people are exposed; and parts of Kilkenny city, where more than 14,000 people are also exposed. Smaller areas such as Castletownbere, Co Cork, Glenties-Ardara in Co Donegal and Aughrim, Co Wicklow, are also affected.
Under a legal process to transpose the EU Drinking Water Directive into Irish Law in 2014, it was determined that where Uisce Éireann, in consultation with the Health Service Executive, “considers that a supply of water intended for human consumption constitutes a potential danger to human health” those affected should be “informed promptly” and “given the necessary advice” to safely consume water.
In its recent decision against Ireland, the ECJ said: “In the present case, the failure to comply with the parametric value set for THMs constitutes, by definition, a potential danger to human health.”
The ruling would at least appear to oblige Uisce Éireann to notify nearly a quarter of a million people of the risks associated with their supplies. Asked if it intended to do so, the utility company replied: “We are taking the decision under advisement at this time.”
Uisce Éireann said it had made good some 70 schemes named in the original ECJ case and “it is important to assure customers on the remaining [five] schemes that water is safe to drink”.
Uisce Éireann said it took advice from the HSE concerning THMs and drinking water. It said the advice was that the “benefits of using chlorine to treat our drinking water are much greater than any possible health risk from THMs”.
This is also the World Health Organisation position which states that adequate disinfection should never be compromised to control THMs, added Uisce Éireann.
However, Friends of the Irish Environment, which made the original complaint about THMs in drinking water in 2010, said the issue was not about disinfection.
“Nobody wants to stop disinfecting supplies. What is required by the EU Drinking Water Directive is to eliminate the THMs,” said its director Tony Lowes. “People could do this themselves with a €70 charcoal filter, but Uisce Éireann needs to warn consumers about that … There can no longer be any doubt since the ECJ decision, that consumers should be notified.”
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Uisce Éireann has said it is taking advice on whether it needs to warn more than 220,000 consumers that their drinking water contains a level of toxic chemicals called trihalomethanes in excess of that permitted under European Union limits.
The State water authority has been working for several years to eliminate trihalomethanes, known as THMs, from drinking water supplies which were the subject of a European Court of Justice (ECJ) finding against Ireland in recent weeks.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency’s remedial action list now cites water supplies not named in the ECJ case which exceed the European Union’s limit for THMs of 100 microgrammes per litre. THMs can arise when chlorine is added to peaty water as part of the purification process.
Affected supplies include: those serving Limerick city, where 114,764 people are exposed to the toxins: Listowel in Co Kerry, where 14,905 people are exposed; and parts of Kilkenny city, where more than 14,000 people are also exposed. Smaller areas such as Castletownbere, Co Cork, Glenties-Ardara in Co Donegal and Aughrim, Co Wicklow, are also affected.
Under a legal process to transpose the EU Drinking Water Directive into Irish Law in 2014, it was determined that where Uisce Éireann, in consultation with the Health Service Executive, “considers that a supply of water intended for human consumption constitutes a potential danger to human health” those affected should be “informed promptly” and “given the necessary advice” to safely consume water.
In its recent decision against Ireland, the ECJ said: “In the present case, the failure to comply with the parametric value set for THMs constitutes, by definition, a potential danger to human health.”
The ruling would at least appear to oblige Uisce Éireann to notify nearly a quarter of a million people of the risks associated with their supplies. Asked if it intended to do so, the utility company replied: “We are taking the decision under advisement at this time.”
Uisce Éireann said it had made good some 70 schemes named in the original ECJ case and “it is important to assure customers on the remaining [five] schemes that water is safe to drink”.
Uisce Éireann said it took advice from the HSE concerning THMs and drinking water.
|
It said the advice was that the “benefits of using chlorine to treat our drinking water are much greater than any possible health risk from THMs”.
This is also the World Health Organisation position which states that adequate disinfection should never be compromised to control THMs, added Uisce Éireann.
However, Friends of the Irish Environment, which made the original complaint about THMs in drinking water in 2010, said the issue was not about disinfection.
“Nobody wants to stop disinfecting supplies. What is required by the EU Drinking Water Directive is to eliminate the THMs,” said its director Tony Lowes. “People could do this themselves with a €70 charcoal filter, but Uisce Éireann needs to warn consumers about that … There can no longer be any doubt since the ECJ decision, that consumers should be notified.”
|
Prescribed burn season underway in Nebraska, surrounding states
LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) - Officials say prescribed burns throughout the next few months may impact air quality in Nebraska.
According to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, prescribed burning season has begun in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and other states.
Prescribed burns are done to conserve and manage areas like grasslands, woodlands and wetlands.
“This practice can reduce hazardous fuel loads, restore and preserve natural wildlife habitats, provide better forage for cattle, and control invasive plant species,” the Nebraska DHHS said in a statement. “Prescribed burning minimizes the risk of wildfires and is effective in managing rangeland resources.”
Although the burns can provide long-term benefits for the environment, the smoke can impact air quality temporarily. Potential wildfires throughout the year can also impact air quality. The DHHS says the air may only be impacted for only a few hours during a prescribed burn, but wildfire smoke can impact air quality for multiple days.
In 2018 the DHHS announced the development of the public smoke advisory system. Smoke advisories are issued when smoke from planned burns or wildfires negatively impacts air quality. The advisories inform residents in affected areas of what they should do to protect themselves during times when the air quality is negatively impacted.
Smoke advisories are developed in coordination with the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, the DHHS, local health departments and other sources in the region.
One region that often has prescribed burns is the Flint Hills rangeland in Kansas and Oklahoma. In a typical year, roughly 2.4 million acres are burned in the Flint Hills. Last year, some areas of Nebraska were impacted by the smoke from these burns.
In 2022, Nebraska saw nearly 2.1 million acres burned and there were eight days when the air quality was considered “moderate” on the index scale.
The DHHS says smoke from prescribed burns and wildfires can cause several negative health effects, especially for those with pre-existing conditions. Smoke can cause burning eyes, runny nose, coughing and illnesses such as bronchitis. The DHHS recommends Nebraska residents follow some advice when the air quality is poor:
- Keep doors and windows closed and run air conditioners with HEPA filters.
- Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water.
- Limit or avoid strenuous outdoor exercise.
- People with respiratory or heart-related illnesses should remain indoors.
- Contact your doctor if you have symptoms such as chest pain, chest tightness, shortness of breath, or severe fatigue.
Current air quality in Nebraska can be checked online through AirNow, a tool that uses the Air Quality Index.
Copyright 2023 WOWT. All rights reserved.
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Prescribed burn season underway in Nebraska, surrounding states
LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) - Officials say prescribed burns throughout the next few months may impact air quality in Nebraska.
According to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, prescribed burning season has begun in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and other states.
Prescribed burns are done to conserve and manage areas like grasslands, woodlands and wetlands.
“This practice can reduce hazardous fuel loads, restore and preserve natural wildlife habitats, provide better forage for cattle, and control invasive plant species,” the Nebraska DHHS said in a statement. “Prescribed burning minimizes the risk of wildfires and is effective in managing rangeland resources.”
Although the burns can provide long-term benefits for the environment, the smoke can impact air quality temporarily. Potential wildfires throughout the year can also impact air quality. The DHHS says the air may only be impacted for only a few hours during a prescribed burn, but wildfire smoke can impact air quality for multiple days.
In 2018 the DHHS announced the development of the public smoke advisory system. Smoke advisories are issued when smoke from planned burns or wildfires negatively impacts air quality. The advisories inform residents in affected areas of what they should do to protect themselves during times when the air quality is negatively impacted.
Smoke advisories are developed in coordination with the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, the DHHS, local health departments and other sources in the region.
One region that often has prescribed burns is the Flint Hills rangeland in Kansas and Oklahoma. In a typical year, roughly 2.4 million acres are burned in the Flint Hills. Last year, some areas of Nebraska were impacted by the smoke from these burns.
In 2022, Nebraska saw nearly 2.1 million acres burned and there were eight days when the air quality was considered “moderate” on the index scale.
The DHHS says smoke from prescribed burns and wildfires can cause several negative health effects, especially for those with pre-existing conditions. Smoke can cause burning eyes, runny nose, coughing and illnesses such as bronchitis. The DHHS recommends Nebraska residents follow some advice when the air quality is poor:
- Keep doors and windows closed and run air conditioners with HEPA filters.
- Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water.
- Limit or avoid strenuous outdoor exercise.
- People with respiratory or heart-related illnesses should remain indoors.
- Contact your doctor if you have symptoms such
|
as chest pain, chest tightness, shortness of breath, or severe fatigue.
Current air quality in Nebraska can be checked online through AirNow, a tool that uses the Air Quality Index.
Copyright 2023 WOWT. All rights reserved.
|
Extreme heat is far deadlier than other natural disasters, killing on average more than twice as many people each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined, according to data tracked by the National Weather Service.
Despite this, heat isn’t on the list of disasters eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because it’s nowhere in the Stafford Act – the federal law that gives FEMA the power to respond to emergencies and determines what qualifies as one.
As President Joe Biden travels West this week to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ landmark climate law, and tout his climate agenda, temperatures in the Southwest are still topping out above 100 degrees. Phoenix clocked its 44th consecutive day over 105 degrees on Monday, and the extreme heat has wilted the Southwest’s iconic saguaro cactuses and given third-degree burns to people who fell on the sidewalk.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego recently told Biden the city’s extreme heat is a “long-term emergency.” But it can’t get FEMA federal assistance unless Congress amends the Stafford Act – something some Western lawmakers are pushing for.
“We essentially just don’t have the governance structures in place to deal with heat” in the same way we deal with wildfires and hurricanes, University of Arizona professor and heat response expert Ladd Keith told CNN. “Heat is literally the fingerprint of climate change, but it’s the last part of climate we’ve begun to address at the national, state and local level.”
FEMA isn’t ignoring extreme heat; the agency has programs to raise heat awareness and has emergency preparedness funding that can go towards helping mitigate heat. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell recently told the Washington Post that the agency has a role to play in giving communities funding to set up new cooling centers or ensure power infrastructure won’t fail during high temperatures.
“Just because we don’t necessarily have the authorities right now in the Stafford Act, that doesn’t mean we’re sitting idly by,” Criswell said.
But the agency’s full power and resources that are set in motion when presidents declare disasters don’t apply during a heatwave – no matter how long it lasts.
“Right now, FEMA doesn’t treat extreme heat in the same way as it does other disasters because it can’t,” Juanita Constible, senior climate and health advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told CNN.
Gallego told CNN on Tuesday that adding heat to the Stafford Act would enable Phoenix and other communities to unlock far more federal resources to help cool people and protect the electric grid when extreme heat refuses to quit. For instance, it could enable the federal government to bring in more mobile cooling units, she said.
“We only have so many of them and if the fed government had a critical mass of those units they could bring them wherever they are and really help communities,” Gallego said. “We know that climate change is a reality for the entire country. We’ve seen communities from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest lose hundreds of people during heatwaves.”
There is currently a bipartisan bill – led by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona – to add extreme heat to the Stafford Act. But the legislation hasn’t gotten far in Congress.
Rep. Gallego said in a statement he had spoken to Biden during the president’s visit to Arizona on Monday night “about the need for FEMA to declare extreme heat a disaster.”
Heat is a “largely invisible threat,” Keith said, but Congress adding it to the Stafford Act could be a tremendous boost to state and federal efforts to combat its effects. For instance, if power goes out in a community that is sweltering in a heatwave, federal officials could more easily step in to provide cooling, Keith said.
“Adding it to that official list from Congress would clarify FEMA’s role in addressing heat,” Keith said.
But Constible told CNN that despite FEMA’s vast federal resources, it actually might not be the best agency to respond to extreme heat. For one thing, heat is a “creeping disaster;” unlike a hurricane or tornado, it lingers, instead of rolling in and out of a place quickly. And heat takes a toll on humans more than it does on infrastructure.
“Disasters tend to be defined in terms of property damage,” Constible said. “Very expensive things get broken and that’s when a disaster gets declared. But heat is more of a health problem.”
|
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Extreme heat is far deadlier than other natural disasters, killing on average more than twice as many people each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined, according to data tracked by the National Weather Service.
Despite this, heat isn’t on the list of disasters eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because it’s nowhere in the Stafford Act – the federal law that gives FEMA the power to respond to emergencies and determines what qualifies as one.
As President Joe Biden travels West this week to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ landmark climate law, and tout his climate agenda, temperatures in the Southwest are still topping out above 100 degrees. Phoenix clocked its 44th consecutive day over 105 degrees on Monday, and the extreme heat has wilted the Southwest’s iconic saguaro cactuses and given third-degree burns to people who fell on the sidewalk.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego recently told Biden the city’s extreme heat is a “long-term emergency.” But it can’t get FEMA federal assistance unless Congress amends the Stafford Act – something some Western lawmakers are pushing for.
“We essentially just don’t have the governance structures in place to deal with heat” in the same way we deal with wildfires and hurricanes, University of Arizona professor and heat response expert Ladd Keith told CNN. “Heat is literally the fingerprint of climate change, but it’s the last part of climate we’ve begun to address at the national, state and local level.”
FEMA isn’t ignoring extreme heat; the agency has programs to raise heat awareness and has emergency preparedness funding that can go towards helping mitigate heat. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell recently told the Washington Post that the agency has a role to play in giving communities funding to set up new cooling centers or ensure power infrastructure won’t fail during high temperatures.
“Just because we don’t necessarily have the authorities right now in the Stafford Act, that doesn’t mean we’re sitting idly by,” Criswell said.
But the agency’s full power and resources that are set in motion when presidents declare disasters don’t apply during a heatwave – no matter how long it lasts.
“Right now, FEMA doesn’t treat extreme heat in the same way as it does other disasters because it can’t,” Juanita Constible, senior climate and health advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told CNN.
Gallego told CNN on Tuesday that adding heat to the Stafford Act would enable Phoenix and other communities to unlock far
|
more federal resources to help cool people and protect the electric grid when extreme heat refuses to quit. For instance, it could enable the federal government to bring in more mobile cooling units, she said.
“We only have so many of them and if the fed government had a critical mass of those units they could bring them wherever they are and really help communities,” Gallego said. “We know that climate change is a reality for the entire country. We’ve seen communities from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest lose hundreds of people during heatwaves.”
There is currently a bipartisan bill – led by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona – to add extreme heat to the Stafford Act. But the legislation hasn’t gotten far in Congress.
Rep. Gallego said in a statement he had spoken to Biden during the president’s visit to Arizona on Monday night “about the need for FEMA to declare extreme heat a disaster.”
Heat is a “largely invisible threat,” Keith said, but Congress adding it to the Stafford Act could be a tremendous boost to state and federal efforts to combat its effects. For instance, if power goes out in a community that is sweltering in a heatwave, federal officials could more easily step in to provide cooling, Keith said.
“Adding it to that official list from Congress would clarify FEMA’s role in addressing heat,” Keith said.
But Constible told CNN that despite FEMA’s vast federal resources, it actually might not be the best agency to respond to extreme heat. For one thing, heat is a “creeping disaster;” unlike a hurricane or tornado, it lingers, instead of rolling in and out of a place quickly. And heat takes a toll on humans more than it does on infrastructure.
“Disasters tend to be defined in terms of property damage,” Constible said. “Very expensive things get broken and that’s when a disaster gets declared. But heat is more of a health problem.”
|
After years of relative economic prosperity and hope for the future, Peru has been shaken by months of social unrest and political instability that seem to have no end.
Thousands of protesters continue to take the streets in Lima and in the south of the country, particularly in Puno where citizens are outraged by decades of marginalization, inequality, allegations of corruption, and stagnating living standards.
Peru’s latest protest wave has seen at least 66 people killed, in a brutal series of deaths that highlight the country’s deep divisions dating back to colonial times.
Although there have been protests across the country, the vast majority of deaths were among demonstrators in southern Peru, where indigenous Aymara and Quechua people maintain their own languages and cultural traditions, as well as a sense of separation from people in urban areas of coastal Peru, particularly the capital city, Lima.
And while security forces’ crackdown on the protest movement has reopened centuries-old wounds in the country’s multicultural society, the government’s response to the ongoing protests has only exacerbated the pain among those from rural areas.
On Wednesday, Education Minister Oscar Becerra criticized Aymara women for taking their children to a protest in Lima, where police used tear gas against them.
“Not even animals would expose their children (like this). …Can they be called mothers if they expose their children to that violence?” said Becerra, who went on to suggest that the women may have “rented” the children to use for “political gain.”
Becerra later apologized. “I want to tell you that if any statement of mine has been misunderstood, I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.
In a letter published Tuesday, the country’s Ombudsman said that Becerra’s comments serve to “increase confrontation among Peruvians.”
Peru’s center and periphery
Since the days when Peru was a Spanish colony, the country’s wealth and political power have been centered in Lima. By contrast, vast swaths of the mountainous central and southern regions, as well as the vast Amazon region, remain isolated and underdeveloped.
Poor healthcare, education and transportation infrastructure have encouraged many residents from those areas to migrate to Lima in recent decades, where they often struggle to be accepted. Those who remain in Peru’s more rural areas have grown increasingly frustrated with a lack of development even during periods of strong economic growth for the country.
The southern Puno region is a microcosm of the issues facing rural Peru.
More than 70% of children there under three years old suffer from anemia, a condition associated with a poor diet, and around a quarter of the population does not have access to running water at home.
The region has been one of the most forgotten regions of Peru, with Lima politicians calculating that a small population and lack of political organization meant they didn’t have to worry about responding to their needs, according to Omar Coronel, a sociology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
The December ouster of President Pedro Castillo, who was accused of corruption and then impeached by lawmakers after an attempted self-coup and later arrested, extinguished hopes in Puno that things might finally change for the better under a president who had positioned himself as a champion for Peru’s most marginalized.
Access to healthcare in rural Peru has long been a sore point – the country suffered the worst death toll per capita from Covid-19 in the world – and its repercussions were felt acutely in the aftermath of protests in the Puno region.
Julia Paccsi, a 42-year-old mother of three, says she was injured by a bullet to the neck fired by security forces as she went to help injured protesters outside her house in Juliaca, the largest city in the Puno region, on January 7.
Paccsi didn’t immediately go to hospital out of fear of being taken for a protester and arrested, but when she did finally go a few days later she was told there were no doctors in the city who could treat her.
“In the hospital they didn’t treat me because they told me that there aren’t neck and head specialists,” she said through tears. “We don’t have head and neck specialists here.”
Paccsi had no option but to travel to Lima for surgery and is still waiting for a second procedure.
The father of another victim, a 17-year-old girl who was shot and killed near protests at Juliaca’s airport on January 9, believes that his daughter could have survived if there were better medical services in the region.
“There aren’t any ambulances, there aren’t good doctors that can help people that are injured,” said Demetrio Aroquipa.
“That day we went out together with my daughter, my other daughter and my wife to the market,” he said. “Four of us left, but only three and a coffin came back. She was a psychology student, a responsible girl. My daughter lost her life when a bullet hit her. I want justice.”
In February, human rights group Amnesty International released a report ascribing the violence of the Peruvian state’s response to “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society and its authorities for decades,” according to the organization’s regional director Erika Guevara-Rosas.
“Dozens of people told Amnesty International they felt that the authorities treated them like animals and not human beings,” Guevara-Rosas added.
Peru’s government has denied “systemic racism” and reiterated its support for the ongoing investigations for the deaths and injured during the protests, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.
Rubbing salt into old wounds
One of the protesters’ demands is the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, who has been in office just three months.
She angered many in Puno in January when she blamed unsuccessful talks with representatives from the region for the failure of attempts to stop the protests.
“We have to protect the life and tranquility of 33 million Peruvians. Puno is not Peru,” she added.
Boluarte was forced to apologize a day later, and a statement from her office said her words had been misinterpreted.
But for many it was too late.
“They say we aren’t from Peru, but Puno is Peru,” Aroquipa told reporters in Lima – a common response among protesters from the region.
“We have the same blood but sadly you always marginalize us,” said Armando Halire, a lawyer who represents the families of demonstrators killed and injured in Puno, while speaking to journalists in Lima in February.
He went on to list various terms still used in Peru to discriminate against those from the rural Andean regions for their supposed ignorance, or to mark them out from those of mixed Spanish descent – including “cholo,” commonly used to denigrate people from the Andes or from Andean origin.
To argue that Puno is not part of Peru is painful for those in the country’s most marginalized region after years of difficulty accessing basic public services, Coronel told CNN.
“Symbolically it hurts citizens who feel they have an Aymara and Quechua identity, but they also feel part of Peru,” said Coronel referring to these ethnic groups.
And as protesters demonstrate against their treatment by the government, the issue of language has come to epitomize the divisions between Lima and Peru’s marginalized regions.
“We have a country where many prosecutor’s offices, the public prosecutor, of state institutions don’t have people that can speak Aymara, that can speak Quechua, that can speak the other almost 50 ancestral languages that we have in the country, which makes people feel alienated from the state,” said Coronel. Both Aymara and Quechua are official state languages in Peru along with Spanish.
Successive Peruvian governments have proven unwilling or unable to make the state more inclusive toward marginalized groups in the country. And they have been particularly uninterested in Puno, according to Coronel.
“The unique thing about Puno is this more historic exclusion that the executive branch and other actors haven’t wanted to get involved in,” he said.
One recent attempt to bring non-Spanish languages like those spoken in Puno into the heart of government ended in controversy. In August 2021, then-Prime Minister Guido Bellido started to address Peru’s congress in Quechua, but members of the opposition started shouting for him to speak in Spanish because they couldn’t understand.
Bellido’s response at the time summed up the feeling of many in Peru’s south: if the country were truly multicultural, he said, why wasn’t there an interpreter on hand to help those who don’t speak one of Peru’s official languages?
Protesters from Puno are still filling the streets of the capital, and Coronel fears that Boluarte’s “authoritarian” response has now reduced the chances for dialogue: “In Puno, you see signs which ask: ‘Limeño (those born in Lima), would you negotiate with the person that killed your mother? With the person who killed your children?”
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After years of relative economic prosperity and hope for the future, Peru has been shaken by months of social unrest and political instability that seem to have no end.
Thousands of protesters continue to take the streets in Lima and in the south of the country, particularly in Puno where citizens are outraged by decades of marginalization, inequality, allegations of corruption, and stagnating living standards.
Peru’s latest protest wave has seen at least 66 people killed, in a brutal series of deaths that highlight the country’s deep divisions dating back to colonial times.
Although there have been protests across the country, the vast majority of deaths were among demonstrators in southern Peru, where indigenous Aymara and Quechua people maintain their own languages and cultural traditions, as well as a sense of separation from people in urban areas of coastal Peru, particularly the capital city, Lima.
And while security forces’ crackdown on the protest movement has reopened centuries-old wounds in the country’s multicultural society, the government’s response to the ongoing protests has only exacerbated the pain among those from rural areas.
On Wednesday, Education Minister Oscar Becerra criticized Aymara women for taking their children to a protest in Lima, where police used tear gas against them.
“Not even animals would expose their children (like this). …Can they be called mothers if they expose their children to that violence?” said Becerra, who went on to suggest that the women may have “rented” the children to use for “political gain.”
Becerra later apologized. “I want to tell you that if any statement of mine has been misunderstood, I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.
In a letter published Tuesday, the country’s Ombudsman said that Becerra’s comments serve to “increase confrontation among Peruvians.”
Peru’s center and periphery
Since the days when Peru was a Spanish colony, the country’s wealth and political power have been centered in Lima. By contrast, vast swaths of the mountainous central and southern regions, as well as the vast Amazon region, remain isolated and underdeveloped.
Poor healthcare, education and transportation infrastructure have encouraged many residents from those areas to migrate to Lima in recent decades, where they often struggle to be accepted. Those who remain in Peru’s more rural areas have grown increasingly frustrated with a lack of development even during periods of strong economic growth for the country.
The southern Puno region is a microcosm of the issues facing rural Peru.
More than 70%
|
of children there under three years old suffer from anemia, a condition associated with a poor diet, and around a quarter of the population does not have access to running water at home.
The region has been one of the most forgotten regions of Peru, with Lima politicians calculating that a small population and lack of political organization meant they didn’t have to worry about responding to their needs, according to Omar Coronel, a sociology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
The December ouster of President Pedro Castillo, who was accused of corruption and then impeached by lawmakers after an attempted self-coup and later arrested, extinguished hopes in Puno that things might finally change for the better under a president who had positioned himself as a champion for Peru’s most marginalized.
Access to healthcare in rural Peru has long been a sore point – the country suffered the worst death toll per capita from Covid-19 in the world – and its repercussions were felt acutely in the aftermath of protests in the Puno region.
Julia Paccsi, a 42-year-old mother of three, says she was injured by a bullet to the neck fired by security forces as she went to help injured protesters outside her house in Juliaca, the largest city in the Puno region, on January 7.
Paccsi didn’t immediately go to hospital out of fear of being taken for a protester and arrested, but when she did finally go a few days later she was told there were no doctors in the city who could treat her.
“In the hospital they didn’t treat me because they told me that there aren’t neck and head specialists,” she said through tears. “We don’t have head and neck specialists here.”
Paccsi had no option but to travel to Lima for surgery and is still waiting for a second procedure.
The father of another victim, a 17-year-old girl who was shot and killed near protests at Juliaca’s airport on January 9, believes that his daughter could have survived if there were better medical services in the region.
“There aren’t any ambulances, there aren’t good doctors that can help people that are injured,” said Demetrio Aroquipa.
“That day we went out together with my daughter, my other daughter and my wife to the market,” he said. “Four of us left, but only three and a coffin came back. She was a psychology student, a responsible girl. My daughter lost her life when a bullet hit her. I want justice.”
In February, human rights group Amnesty International released a report ascribing the violence of the Peruvian state’s response to “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society and its authorities for decades,” according to the organization’s regional director Erika Guevara-Rosas.
“Dozens of people told Amnesty International they felt that the authorities treated them like animals and not human beings,” Guevara-Rosas added.
Peru’s government has denied “systemic racism” and reiterated its support for the ongoing investigations for the deaths and injured during the protests, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.
Rubbing salt into old wounds
One of the protesters’ demands is the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, who has been in office just three months.
She angered many in Puno in January when she blamed unsuccessful talks with representatives from the region for the failure of attempts to stop the protests.
“We have to protect the life and tranquility of 33 million Peruvians. Puno is not Peru,” she added.
Boluarte was forced to apologize a day later, and a statement from her office said her words had been misinterpreted.
But for many it was too late.
“They say we aren’t from Peru, but Puno is Peru,” Aroquipa told reporters in Lima – a common response among protesters from the region.
“We have the same blood but sadly you always marginalize us,” said Armando Halire, a lawyer who represents the families of demonstrators killed and injured in Puno, while speaking to journalists in Lima in February.
He went on to list various terms still used in Peru to discriminate against those from the rural Andean regions for their supposed ignorance, or to mark them out from those of mixed Spanish descent – including “cholo,” commonly used to denigrate people from the Andes or from Andean origin.
To argue that Puno is not part of Peru is painful for those in the country’s most marginalized region after years of difficulty accessing basic public services, Coronel told CNN.
“Symbolically it hurts citizens who feel they have an Aymara and Quechua identity, but they also feel part of Peru,” said Coronel referring to these ethnic groups.
And as protesters demonstrate against their treatment by the government, the issue of language has come to epitomize the divisions between Lima and Peru’s marginalized regions.
“We have a country where many prosecutor’s offices, the public prosecutor, of state institutions don’t have people that can speak Aymara, that can speak Quechua, that can speak the other almost 50 ancestral languages that we have in the country, which makes people feel alienated from the state,” said Coronel. Both Aymara and Quechua are official state languages in Peru along with Spanish.
Successive Peruvian governments have proven unwilling or unable to make the state more inclusive toward marginalized groups in the country. And they have been particularly uninterested in Puno, according to Coronel.
“The unique thing about Puno is this more historic exclusion that the executive branch and other actors haven’t wanted to get involved in,” he said.
One recent attempt to bring non-Spanish languages like those spoken in Puno into the heart of government ended in controversy. In August 2021, then-Prime Minister Guido Bellido started to address Peru’s congress in Quechua, but members of the opposition started shouting for him to speak in Spanish because they couldn’t understand.
Bellido’s response at the time summed up the feeling of many in Peru’s south: if the country were truly multicultural, he said, why wasn’t there an interpreter on hand to help those who don’t speak one of Peru’s official languages?
Protesters from Puno are still filling the streets of the capital, and Coronel fears that Boluarte’s “authoritarian” response has now reduced the chances for dialogue: “In Puno, you see signs which ask: ‘Limeño (those born in Lima), would you negotiate with the person that killed your mother? With the person who killed your children?”
|
Lab-grown blood vessels are providing new insight into how damage to the tiny vessels in the brain can cause them to leak, contributing to dementia and stroke.
Even better, this research has identified a drug target that could plug these leaks and potentially reduce a person’s risk of brain-damaging blood vessel leaks.
Special: Dr. Crandall Saved His Own Heart With This
Antibiotic and anti-cancer drugs that inhibit a class of biochemical called metalloproteinases (MMPs) reversed damage occurring in the lab-grown blood vessels and stopped leakages.
“These particular drugs come with potentially significant side effects, so wouldn’t in themselves be viable to treat small vessel disease,” said study author Dr. Alessandra Granata, of the department of clinical neurosciences at the University of Cambridge in England.
“But they show that in theory, targeting MMPs could stop the disease,” Granata added in a university news release. “Our model could be scaled up relatively easily to test the viability of future potential drugs.”
Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) contributes to almost half (45%) of dementia cases worldwide, researchers said in background notes.
It is also responsible for about one in five (20%) ischemic strokes, which occur when a blood clot blocks blood flow to the brain. Most cases are associated with chronic illnesses like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, and they typically affect people in middle age.
For this study, Cambridge researchers gathered cells from skin biopsies of patients with a rare genetic form of small vessel disease, which is caused by a mutation in a gene called COL4.
The research team reprogrammed the skin cells into stem cells, which have the capacity to develop into nearly any type of cell within the body.
They then used these stem cells to generate brain blood vessels, creating a model that mimics the defects seen in patients with small vessel disease.
“Despite the number of people affected worldwide by small vessel disease, we have little in the way of treatments because we don’t fully understand what damages the blood vessels and causes the disease,” Granata explained.
“Most of what we know about the underlying causes tends to come from animal studies, but they are limited in what they can tell us,” she noted. “That’s why we turned to stem cells to generate cells of the brain blood vessels and create a disease model ‘in a dish’ that mimics what we see in patients.”
Blood vessels are built around a scaffolding called an extracellular matrix, which lines and supports the tiny vessels in the brain. The COL4 gene is important for the health of this matrix.
Researchers found that disruption of this matrix leads to small blood vessels becoming leaky.
Further, researchers identified MMPs as playing a key role in this damage. MMPs typically are important for maintaining the matrix, but if too many are produced they can damage the structure.
The new study was published Nov. 16 in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
|
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Lab-grown blood vessels are providing new insight into how damage to the tiny vessels in the brain can cause them to leak, contributing to dementia and stroke.
Even better, this research has identified a drug target that could plug these leaks and potentially reduce a person’s risk of brain-damaging blood vessel leaks.
Special: Dr. Crandall Saved His Own Heart With This
Antibiotic and anti-cancer drugs that inhibit a class of biochemical called metalloproteinases (MMPs) reversed damage occurring in the lab-grown blood vessels and stopped leakages.
“These particular drugs come with potentially significant side effects, so wouldn’t in themselves be viable to treat small vessel disease,” said study author Dr. Alessandra Granata, of the department of clinical neurosciences at the University of Cambridge in England.
“But they show that in theory, targeting MMPs could stop the disease,” Granata added in a university news release. “Our model could be scaled up relatively easily to test the viability of future potential drugs.”
Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) contributes to almost half (45%) of dementia cases worldwide, researchers said in background notes.
It is also responsible for about one in five (20%) ischemic strokes, which occur when a blood clot blocks blood flow to the brain. Most cases are associated with chronic illnesses like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, and they typically affect people in middle age.
For this study, Cambridge researchers gathered cells from skin biopsies of patients with a rare genetic form of small vessel disease, which is caused by a mutation in a gene called COL4.
The research team reprogrammed the skin cells into stem cells, which have the capacity to develop into nearly any type of cell within the body.
They then used these stem cells to generate brain blood vessels, creating a model that mimics the defects seen in patients with small vessel disease.
“Despite the number of people affected worldwide by small vessel disease, we have little in the way of treatments because we don’t fully understand what damages the blood vessels and causes the disease,” Granata explained.
“Most of what we know about the underlying causes tends to come from animal studies, but they are limited in what they can tell us,” she noted. “That’s why we turned to stem cells to generate cells of the brain blood vessels and create a disease model ‘in a dish’ that mimics what we see in patients.”
Blood vessels are built around a scaffolding called an extracellular matrix, which lines and supports the tiny vessels in the brain. The
|
COL4 gene is important for the health of this matrix.
Researchers found that disruption of this matrix leads to small blood vessels becoming leaky.
Further, researchers identified MMPs as playing a key role in this damage. MMPs typically are important for maintaining the matrix, but if too many are produced they can damage the structure.
The new study was published Nov. 16 in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
|
Durable and enduring, blue jeans turn 150
Updated May 23, 2023 at 6:31 AM ET
There's bootcut, skinny, flare, ripped, low-rise, high-rise — even blue jean look-alikes called jeggings impersonating the classic denim piece.
They all lead back a century and a half ago, to a Latvian-Jewish immigrant working as a tailor in Reno, Nev., named Jacob Davis. He had a customer whose work pants kept tearing.
To solve the problem, he added metal rivets at the stress points of the pants, making them stronger. According to historian Lynn Downey, the rivets were only part of what made the pants durable enough to withstand a full day's work.
"Denim was a very old fabric that originated in Europe, first in France, called serge denim," Downey told NPR in 2013. "It was the toughest fabric around. And men had worn unriveted denim pants for decades as work wear."
The popularity of the clothing caught on fast, Davis feared someone might rip off his idea.
"He wanted to mass manufacture his product, but he needed a business partner," explained Downey.
So, he teamed up with a dry goods merchant in San Francisco, Levi Strauss. They obtained a U.S. patent on May 20, 1873.
Since then, blue jeans have become a staple in Western fashion and a common thread throughout history.
"When you think of jeans, you think of the sort of prototypical white male cowboy kind of riding off into the sunset that's so synonymous with denim advertising from the late 19th century to today," said fashion historian Emma McClendon.
McClendon explained in a conversation with NPR last February how jeans have evolved with our culture, and have a complex history of their own.
"The reality is that this was workwear that was worn for hard labor. Denim had been worn by enslaved African and African American descendants for generations," she said. "It was worn by Chinese immigrants who were building the Transcontinental Railroad. It was worn by women. It was worn by men. And it came in tandem with really grueling hard labor, which is often left out of a sort of romanticized view."
From coal mines and factories to high fashion runways and MOMA, it's clear jeans have withstood the test of time.
They were even in high demand in the Soviet Union.
Historian Kristin Roth-Ey of University College London told NPR last year the Soviet Union's love affair with denim likely began in 1957, when the World Festival of Youth and Students came to Moscow. The clothing drew thousands of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain.
"That was the first time that people started to talk about jeans, because some of the Americans were wearing jeans," said Roth-Ey. "And there was at that time a huge black market that went alongside this festival."
According to Roth-Ey, the demand for jeans only grew during the 1960s, but the government didn't play along.
"The official stance on this is that jeans, like rock music, are initially officially shunned. It's a sign of decadent Western consumerist culture."
Roth-Ey explained that eventually Soviet leaders tried to launch their own jeans in the early 1970s, but were unsuccessful.
The hunger for Western denim was memorialized in a 1980s Levi's ad in which a young man fidgets as Soviet customs officials examine his luggage, but he makes it home with a smuggled pair of Levi's in his suitcase.
The black market for American brands like Levi's, Lee and Wrangler jeans was fueled by high prices. A pair could sell for as much as an entire month's salary at the time.
Blue jeans even survived the work-from-home, loungewear fashion shift.
Sales dipped from $16.6 billion to $12.8 billion during the pandemic, according to Euromonitor International, but they project a comeback for the U.S. jeans market reaching $20.7 billion in sales by 2026.
The analysis firm Research and Markets projects the global jeans market will top $95 billion dollars by 2030.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
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Durable and enduring, blue jeans turn 150
Updated May 23, 2023 at 6:31 AM ET
There's bootcut, skinny, flare, ripped, low-rise, high-rise — even blue jean look-alikes called jeggings impersonating the classic denim piece.
They all lead back a century and a half ago, to a Latvian-Jewish immigrant working as a tailor in Reno, Nev., named Jacob Davis. He had a customer whose work pants kept tearing.
To solve the problem, he added metal rivets at the stress points of the pants, making them stronger. According to historian Lynn Downey, the rivets were only part of what made the pants durable enough to withstand a full day's work.
"Denim was a very old fabric that originated in Europe, first in France, called serge denim," Downey told NPR in 2013. "It was the toughest fabric around. And men had worn unriveted denim pants for decades as work wear."
The popularity of the clothing caught on fast, Davis feared someone might rip off his idea.
"He wanted to mass manufacture his product, but he needed a business partner," explained Downey.
So, he teamed up with a dry goods merchant in San Francisco, Levi Strauss. They obtained a U.S. patent on May 20, 1873.
Since then, blue jeans have become a staple in Western fashion and a common thread throughout history.
"When you think of jeans, you think of the sort of prototypical white male cowboy kind of riding off into the sunset that's so synonymous with denim advertising from the late 19th century to today," said fashion historian Emma McClendon.
McClendon explained in a conversation with NPR last February how jeans have evolved with our culture, and have a complex history of their own.
"The reality is that this was workwear that was worn for hard labor. Denim had been worn by enslaved African and African American descendants for generations," she said. "It was worn by Chinese immigrants who were building the Transcontinental Railroad. It was worn by women. It was worn by men. And it came in tandem with really grueling hard labor, which is often left out of a sort of romanticized view."
From coal mines and factories to high fashion runways and MOMA, it's clear jeans have withstood the test of time.
They
|
were even in high demand in the Soviet Union.
Historian Kristin Roth-Ey of University College London told NPR last year the Soviet Union's love affair with denim likely began in 1957, when the World Festival of Youth and Students came to Moscow. The clothing drew thousands of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain.
"That was the first time that people started to talk about jeans, because some of the Americans were wearing jeans," said Roth-Ey. "And there was at that time a huge black market that went alongside this festival."
According to Roth-Ey, the demand for jeans only grew during the 1960s, but the government didn't play along.
"The official stance on this is that jeans, like rock music, are initially officially shunned. It's a sign of decadent Western consumerist culture."
Roth-Ey explained that eventually Soviet leaders tried to launch their own jeans in the early 1970s, but were unsuccessful.
The hunger for Western denim was memorialized in a 1980s Levi's ad in which a young man fidgets as Soviet customs officials examine his luggage, but he makes it home with a smuggled pair of Levi's in his suitcase.
The black market for American brands like Levi's, Lee and Wrangler jeans was fueled by high prices. A pair could sell for as much as an entire month's salary at the time.
Blue jeans even survived the work-from-home, loungewear fashion shift.
Sales dipped from $16.6 billion to $12.8 billion during the pandemic, according to Euromonitor International, but they project a comeback for the U.S. jeans market reaching $20.7 billion in sales by 2026.
The analysis firm Research and Markets projects the global jeans market will top $95 billion dollars by 2030.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
But it can also lead to diseases associated with inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune inflammatory disease, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry.
It's one of the few studies that considers how environment, not just genetics or hereditary traits, affect biology, says Aparna Gupta an associate professor at University of California, Los Angeles who co-authored the study. Gupta is also the co-director of the UCLA Microbiome Center and her research focuses on how the brain-gut microbiome system is influenced by adversity.
"How we treat people and how we are interacted with has huge impacts on how it affects your biology," she says. "Those interpersonal relationships can have huge impacts all the way down to your microbiome."
The study included 154 adults who self-identified as Asian American, Black, Hispanic, or White. All reported experiencing discrimination.
White participants didn't feel like their discrimination was race-based, but had more to do with their gender or age. Black, Hispanic, and Asian American participants all felt the discrimination they experienced was race-based.
To assess their physical health, researchers collected MRI scans to view brain connectivity, blood tests to measure inflammatory markers, and fecal samples to identify the microbial population and metabolites.
Black and Hispanic participants had increased levels of a gut bacteria which is associated with rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune inflammatory disease.
In Asian Americans, researchers saw an uptick of metabolites associated with cholesterol, which could be evidence of increased consumption of fatty foods.
White participants did not have inflammation.
"Discrimination based on race or ethnicity had a lot to do with more inflammation in the body which led to changes in the microbiome which led to inflammatory response," says Tien S. Dong, an assistant professor at UCLA who also co-authored the study. Dong' s research focuses on the gut microbiome and liver disease.
"This kind of chronic inflammatory response can lead to negative health outcomes, we've seen in prior research."
Mental effects also varied across race, but all races had an increase in emotional arousal or parts of the brain associated with fight or flight.
White participants felt increased anxiety.
Asian Americans had increased connectivity in the sensorimotor network, which indicates disrupted sensory functions and is often observed in "patients with major depressive disorders," the study reads.
Black and Hispanic participants, specifically, experienced increased connectivity in the part of the brain associated with self-reflection. Hispanics also experienced more connectivity in the part of the brain associated with hypervigilance.
Being able to calmly recall painful experiences, Dong and Gupta agreed, might make it appear like those experiencing racism are doing fine. But the study shows that this discomfort might be revealing itself in another way.
"You've experienced discrimination for a long time and to be able to function you had to find ways to cope mentally either through resilience or self-reflectiveness," Dong says. "But that stressor or injury was still there. Instead of manifesting itself through anxiety and depression like their white Caucasian counterparts they internalize it biologically."
|
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But it can also lead to diseases associated with inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune inflammatory disease, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry.
It's one of the few studies that considers how environment, not just genetics or hereditary traits, affect biology, says Aparna Gupta an associate professor at University of California, Los Angeles who co-authored the study. Gupta is also the co-director of the UCLA Microbiome Center and her research focuses on how the brain-gut microbiome system is influenced by adversity.
"How we treat people and how we are interacted with has huge impacts on how it affects your biology," she says. "Those interpersonal relationships can have huge impacts all the way down to your microbiome."
The study included 154 adults who self-identified as Asian American, Black, Hispanic, or White. All reported experiencing discrimination.
White participants didn't feel like their discrimination was race-based, but had more to do with their gender or age. Black, Hispanic, and Asian American participants all felt the discrimination they experienced was race-based.
To assess their physical health, researchers collected MRI scans to view brain connectivity, blood tests to measure inflammatory markers, and fecal samples to identify the microbial population and metabolites.
Black and Hispanic participants had increased levels of a gut bacteria which is associated with rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune inflammatory disease.
In Asian Americans, researchers saw an uptick of metabolites associated with cholesterol, which could be evidence of increased consumption of fatty foods.
White participants did not have inflammation.
"Discrimination based on race or ethnicity had a lot to do with more inflammation in the body which led to changes in the microbiome which led to inflammatory response," says Tien S. Dong, an assistant professor at UCLA who also co-authored the study. Dong' s research focuses on the gut microbiome and liver disease.
"This kind of chronic inflammatory response can lead to negative health outcomes, we've seen in prior research."
Mental effects also varied across race, but all races had an increase in emotional arousal or parts of the brain associated with fight or flight.
White participants felt increased anxiety.
Asian Americans had increased connectivity in the sensorimotor network, which indicates disrupted sensory functions and is often observed in "patients with major depressive disorders," the study reads.
Black and Hispanic participants, specifically, experienced increased connectivity in the part of the brain associated with self-reflection. Hispanics also experienced more connectivity in the part of the brain associated with hypervigilance.
Being able to calmly recall painful experiences, Dong and Gupta agreed, might make it
|
appear like those experiencing racism are doing fine. But the study shows that this discomfort might be revealing itself in another way.
"You've experienced discrimination for a long time and to be able to function you had to find ways to cope mentally either through resilience or self-reflectiveness," Dong says. "But that stressor or injury was still there. Instead of manifesting itself through anxiety and depression like their white Caucasian counterparts they internalize it biologically."
|
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
The largest six banks in the United States have been given until July to show the Federal Reserve what effects disastrous climate change scenarios could have on their bottom lines.
Noting the risks could be “material,” the Fed said the banks will have to show how their finances fare under a number of climate stress tests, including heat waves, wildfires, floods and droughts, according to details of a new Fed pilot program released on Tuesday.
“The pilot exercise includes physical risk scenarios with different levels of severity affecting residential and commercial real estate portfolios in the Northeastern United States and directs each bank to consider the impact of additional physical risk shocks for their real estate portfolios in another region of the country,” wrote the Fed.
The Federal Reserve first announced the pilot program in September, noting that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo would participate.
Climate activists said that the project was long overdue (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been questioned about it multiple times over the last year), and that other central banks are far ahead of the Fed on climate risk assessments. The Bank of England ran a similar exercise in 2021.
They also said the proposal lacked any real teeth. In its announcement the Federal Reserve stressed that the exercise “is exploratory in nature and does not have capital consequences.” It also said that it would not publish individual banks’ results.
San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told CNN in October that this was a learning and exploratory exercise for the Federal Reserve. It would be “incredibly premature to jump to the conclusion that any new policies or programs would come out of it,” she said.
The other side: Critics of the pilot program have argued that the Federal Reserve was overstepping its boundaries and that they might soon begin to enforce financial penalties.
“The Fed’s new ‘pilot’ program is the first step toward pressuring banks into limiting loans to and investments in traditional energy companies and other disfavored carbon-emitting sectors,” wrote former Republican Senator Pat Toomey, then a ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee. “The real purpose of this program is to ultimately produce new regulatory requirements.”
Powell said last week that the central bank would not become a “climate policymaker.”
“Today, some analysts ask whether incorporating into bank supervision the perceived risks associated with climate change is appropriate, wise, and consistent with our existing mandates,” Powell said last Tuesday. “In my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision. The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.”
Chips are the new oil
The discovery, movement and use of oil has played an outsized role in shaping geopolitics over the past century and a half. But over the next 50 years, global interaction and wealth are more likely to be influenced by microchips, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNN Tuesday.
“Where the technology supply chains are, and where semiconductors are built, is more important for the next five decades,” Gelsinger said in an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Intel (INTC) is betting those predictions prove true. The company announced in 2021 it would invest $20 billion to build two new US chipmaking facilities, as well as up to $90 billion in new European factories, aimed at reasserting its position as the leader of the semiconductor industry, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.
Gelsinger said the company’s investment in new manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere is important not only for the company’s future, but for the “globalization of the most critical resource to the future of the world.”
“We need this geographically balanced, resilient supply chain,” he said.
The announcements also came amid concerns about the concentration of manufacturing for chips, in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan, during the Covid-19 pandemic and as geopolitical tensions grew. Issues in the chip supply chain in recent years have caused shortages and shipping delays of everything from desktop computers and iPhones to cars.
“If we’ve learned one thing from the Covid crisis and this multi-year journey that we’ve been on it’s we need resilience in our supply chains,” Gelsinger said, adding that Intel’s manufacturing investments are aimed at “leveling that playing field so that good investment decisions can be made.”
The top 1% are getting richer far faster than everyone else
The years following the peak of the Covid pandemic have not been good for wealth equality.
The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years, reports my colleague Tami Luhby.
The fortune of the 1% soared by $26 trillion during that period, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report released Sunday.
And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.
Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.
“While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
“Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest,” she said.
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A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
The largest six banks in the United States have been given until July to show the Federal Reserve what effects disastrous climate change scenarios could have on their bottom lines.
Noting the risks could be “material,” the Fed said the banks will have to show how their finances fare under a number of climate stress tests, including heat waves, wildfires, floods and droughts, according to details of a new Fed pilot program released on Tuesday.
“The pilot exercise includes physical risk scenarios with different levels of severity affecting residential and commercial real estate portfolios in the Northeastern United States and directs each bank to consider the impact of additional physical risk shocks for their real estate portfolios in another region of the country,” wrote the Fed.
The Federal Reserve first announced the pilot program in September, noting that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo would participate.
Climate activists said that the project was long overdue (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been questioned about it multiple times over the last year), and that other central banks are far ahead of the Fed on climate risk assessments. The Bank of England ran a similar exercise in 2021.
They also said the proposal lacked any real teeth. In its announcement the Federal Reserve stressed that the exercise “is exploratory in nature and does not have capital consequences.” It also said that it would not publish individual banks’ results.
San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told CNN in October that this was a learning and exploratory exercise for the Federal Reserve. It would be “incredibly premature to jump to the conclusion that any new policies or programs would come out of it,” she said.
The other side: Critics of the pilot program have argued that the Federal Reserve was overstepping its boundaries and that they might soon begin to enforce financial penalties.
“The Fed’s new ‘pilot’ program is the first step toward pressuring banks into limiting loans to and investments in traditional energy companies and other disfavored carbon-emitting sectors,” wrote former Republican Senator Pat Toomey, then a ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee. “The real purpose of this program is to ultimately produce new regulatory requirements.”
Powell said last week that the central bank would not become a “climate policymaker.”
“Today, some analysts ask whether
|
incorporating into bank supervision the perceived risks associated with climate change is appropriate, wise, and consistent with our existing mandates,” Powell said last Tuesday. “In my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision. The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.”
Chips are the new oil
The discovery, movement and use of oil has played an outsized role in shaping geopolitics over the past century and a half. But over the next 50 years, global interaction and wealth are more likely to be influenced by microchips, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNN Tuesday.
“Where the technology supply chains are, and where semiconductors are built, is more important for the next five decades,” Gelsinger said in an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Intel (INTC) is betting those predictions prove true. The company announced in 2021 it would invest $20 billion to build two new US chipmaking facilities, as well as up to $90 billion in new European factories, aimed at reasserting its position as the leader of the semiconductor industry, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.
Gelsinger said the company’s investment in new manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere is important not only for the company’s future, but for the “globalization of the most critical resource to the future of the world.”
“We need this geographically balanced, resilient supply chain,” he said.
The announcements also came amid concerns about the concentration of manufacturing for chips, in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan, during the Covid-19 pandemic and as geopolitical tensions grew. Issues in the chip supply chain in recent years have caused shortages and shipping delays of everything from desktop computers and iPhones to cars.
“If we’ve learned one thing from the Covid crisis and this multi-year journey that we’ve been on it’s we need resilience in our supply chains,” Gelsinger said, adding that Intel’s manufacturing investments are aimed at “leveling that playing field so that good investment decisions can be made.”
The top 1% are getting richer far faster than everyone else
The years following the peak of the Covid pandemic have not been good for wealth equality.
The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years, reports my colleague Tami Luhby.
The fortune of the 1% soared by $26 trillion during that period, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report released Sunday.
And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.
Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.
“While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
“Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest,” she said.
|
Most people think of personal data as a self-explanatory term denoting any information that allows you to identify a specific individual. This couldn’t be truer, but with the caveat that numerous subtleties of this concept may complicate the categorization.
For instance, a combination of a full name, date of birth, and gender may provide sufficient context to attribute an action to a particular person. Still, in some scenarios, it’s a far cry from being enough for sure-shot identification. To get the bigger picture, let’s zoom into what pieces of information can be labeled as personal data and under what circumstances.
Mixing things up makes a difference
There is a cluster of fundamental “raw” information that gives you unambiguous clues for identifying a person. This data may include passport details, a Social Security number (SSN), a fingerprint, or in some cases, the above-mentioned mixture of a name, date of birth, and gender.
Another type of “raw” data comprises fragments of information that don’t clearly point to an individual when analyzed in isolation from other details. The typical examples include a place of work, a favorite meal, the number of kids, and personal qualities. None of these is personal data per se.
However, if you combine some info from the first and the second group, those “breadcrumbs” will lead to a specific person with close to 100% accuracy. That’s personal data in its purest form. A few examples of such a verbose fusion are as follows:
● Medical diagnosis + favorite meal + photo
● SSN + place of work
● Name + date of birth + gender + ZIP code
The degree of exposure stemming from different types of information may depend on who is in charge of the analysis. Some chunks of data don’t allow the average layman to determine someone else’s identity, but a law enforcement agency may be able to do it in a snap.
The precision of the identification process is also a matter of who the data carrier is. In the case of an individual, for example, a phone number is often tied to their name and ID. When combined with virtually any other facts about the person, it is a classic instance of personal data. The same goes for insurance numbers, credit card details, and many other types of information.
However, a phone number used by an enterprise entity doesn’t fit the mold of personal data. The reason is that it doesn’t allow a third party to identify a particular employee of the organization that uses this phone number.
An equation with multiple variables
The fact that a dataset incorporates several different types of information doesn’t necessarily make it a meaningful source of identification. Sometimes an extra piece is required to fill the puzzle. If a set contains, among other things, a medical diagnosis but doesn’t include a name, it can’t be linked to a particular individual.
Race, gender, and place of work, when stripped of additional context, aren’t personally identifiable information either. But a fusion of a medical diagnosis, race, gender, and place of work becomes personal data when, for example, it’s known that only one Thai woman with physical disabilities works at a library. Interestingly, in this hypothetical situation, if two disabled Thai residents used to work at the library and one of them retired, then this array of data originally wasn’t personal but became such later on.
Case law can also help you figure out whether or not an assembly of information pieces is personal data. If there have been precedents in which court decisions interpreted a dataset that way, then you can refer to such rulings for clear-cut categorization.
In many jurisdictions, you have a minuscule chance to obtain an official expert verdict that specifies if a collection of details about an individual is considered personal data or not. You can, of course, contact authorities with a request like that, but the answer will be along the lines of “it all depends on whether the dataset allows you to identify a person.” Well, duh! Again, the ultimate truth is a court decision, but you are always better off sifting through all the facts on your own.
In routine scenarios, you don’t have to immerse yourself in the murky waters of legal procedures to understand how to categorize a specific set of data. However, things may get entangled in unorthodox instances that involve biometrics and some marginal types of data about individuals. Let’s illustrate this based on several offbeat situations.
There is no denying that a photocopy of a person’s passport is a piece of personal data since it contains a headshot, full name, date of birth, and other sensitive information. Ambiguity arises when you separately analyze a passport photo and, say, an image or video that was taken by a CCTV camera.
The controversy relates to whether the resolution of a specific photograph is enough to identify someone. It’s hard to define the criteria regarding the quality of a graphical object. If it’s a standardized 600x600 pixels image in a passport, then it’s undoubtedly personal data. Suppose you have a fuzzy photo with a lower resolution. In that case, it may be problematic to discern its elements, even more so if it’s taken in outdoor conditions from a relatively big distance.
By the way, security systems at stadiums and in some other public places frequented by lots of people come with face recognition features that can automatically identify a previously blacklisted visitor based on images of moderate quality. In most real-life situations, though, things are usually opaquer.
When crossing a border, the standard procedure is as follows: an officer looks at your face and decides whether what he sees matches the photo in your passport or visa. If they conclude that there are plenty of similar traits, then you get the green light to cross the border. The identification workflow in court follows the same logic: the judge engages an unbiased expert who is supposed to deduce if it’s possible to identify a person using a specific photo.
In most countries, citizens have the right to file official requests so that their data isn’t collected and processed without their consent. Theoretically, you can go the extra mile and use publicly available online sources to try and extract photos of you taken by surveillance systems outdoors. The next move is to insist that this is an act of unauthorized data storage and analysis. Yet, such a request may be declined in quite a few situations – for instance, when the photo is used for national security purposes. The same goes for scenarios where the image was taken during public events, such as concerts, conferences, and sports contests.
Is an email address an example of personal data? It depends. A string like <email-pii> conveys no sensitive information as long as it doesn’t include a person’s name. Its owner can be anyone, even a bot. Does anything change if it’s <email-pii> or <email-pii>? As a rule, none of these is personal data unless combined with additional identifiers that enrich it with context and eliminate ambiguity.
Furthermore, as with a phone number, the classification depends on who owns the email account: an individual or an organization. Another thing to consider is that the process of signing up for a service like that doesn’t require passport information.
IP addresses might give away your identity under certain circumstances, too. This is especially likely if you use a dedicated IP address. The silver lining is that you can leverage a reliable VPN service to surf the web anonymously and thereby steer clear of unwanted surveillance.
Most biometric characteristics can be considered personal data for a good reason. The patterns of one’s iris, the shape of the skull and ears, as well as a handful of other traits, are just as unique as fingerprints. On a side note, this fact imposes major limitations on face recognition systems from an ethical perspective. Even storing a hash of someone’s biometric data may require the person’s approval.
Since privacy laws are increasingly stringent, handling personal data properly should be top of mind for enterprises. Every company’s best interest is to understand whether it stores and processes such information. If it does, the next step is to categorize that data. This will help IT professionals prioritize the protection of specific assets while providing actionable insights into the particular cyber threats those records are susceptible to. From there, the appropriate security controls need to be implemented across the network infrastructure. Compliance with local privacy-related legislation is an essential part of this workflow.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to knowing if particular bits and pieces of information are personal. The considerations above should point you in the right direction. If you are in doubt, resort to the assistance of lawyers who can perform an audit of your data and send requests to authorities for clarification if necessary.
|
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Most people think of personal data as a self-explanatory term denoting any information that allows you to identify a specific individual. This couldn’t be truer, but with the caveat that numerous subtleties of this concept may complicate the categorization.
For instance, a combination of a full name, date of birth, and gender may provide sufficient context to attribute an action to a particular person. Still, in some scenarios, it’s a far cry from being enough for sure-shot identification. To get the bigger picture, let’s zoom into what pieces of information can be labeled as personal data and under what circumstances.
Mixing things up makes a difference
There is a cluster of fundamental “raw” information that gives you unambiguous clues for identifying a person. This data may include passport details, a Social Security number (SSN), a fingerprint, or in some cases, the above-mentioned mixture of a name, date of birth, and gender.
Another type of “raw” data comprises fragments of information that don’t clearly point to an individual when analyzed in isolation from other details. The typical examples include a place of work, a favorite meal, the number of kids, and personal qualities. None of these is personal data per se.
However, if you combine some info from the first and the second group, those “breadcrumbs” will lead to a specific person with close to 100% accuracy. That’s personal data in its purest form. A few examples of such a verbose fusion are as follows:
● Medical diagnosis + favorite meal + photo
● SSN + place of work
● Name + date of birth + gender + ZIP code
The degree of exposure stemming from different types of information may depend on who is in charge of the analysis. Some chunks of data don’t allow the average layman to determine someone else’s identity, but a law enforcement agency may be able to do it in a snap.
The precision of the identification process is also a matter of who the data carrier is. In the case of an individual, for example, a phone number is often tied to their name and ID. When combined with virtually any other facts about the person, it is a classic instance of personal data. The same goes for insurance numbers, credit card details, and many other types of information.
However, a phone number used by an enterprise entity doesn’t fit the mold of personal data. The reason is that it doesn’t allow a third party to identify a particular employee of the organization that uses this phone number
|
.
An equation with multiple variables
The fact that a dataset incorporates several different types of information doesn’t necessarily make it a meaningful source of identification. Sometimes an extra piece is required to fill the puzzle. If a set contains, among other things, a medical diagnosis but doesn’t include a name, it can’t be linked to a particular individual.
Race, gender, and place of work, when stripped of additional context, aren’t personally identifiable information either. But a fusion of a medical diagnosis, race, gender, and place of work becomes personal data when, for example, it’s known that only one Thai woman with physical disabilities works at a library. Interestingly, in this hypothetical situation, if two disabled Thai residents used to work at the library and one of them retired, then this array of data originally wasn’t personal but became such later on.
Case law can also help you figure out whether or not an assembly of information pieces is personal data. If there have been precedents in which court decisions interpreted a dataset that way, then you can refer to such rulings for clear-cut categorization.
In many jurisdictions, you have a minuscule chance to obtain an official expert verdict that specifies if a collection of details about an individual is considered personal data or not. You can, of course, contact authorities with a request like that, but the answer will be along the lines of “it all depends on whether the dataset allows you to identify a person.” Well, duh! Again, the ultimate truth is a court decision, but you are always better off sifting through all the facts on your own.
In routine scenarios, you don’t have to immerse yourself in the murky waters of legal procedures to understand how to categorize a specific set of data. However, things may get entangled in unorthodox instances that involve biometrics and some marginal types of data about individuals. Let’s illustrate this based on several offbeat situations.
There is no denying that a photocopy of a person’s passport is a piece of personal data since it contains a headshot, full name, date of birth, and other sensitive information. Ambiguity arises when you separately analyze a passport photo and, say, an image or video that was taken by a CCTV camera.
The controversy relates to whether the resolution of a specific photograph is enough to identify someone. It’s hard to define the criteria regarding the quality of a graphical object. If it’s a standardized 600x600 pixels image in a passport, then it’s undoubtedly personal data. Suppose you have a fuzzy photo with a lower resolution. In that case, it may be problematic to discern its elements, even more so if it’s taken in outdoor conditions from a relatively big distance.
By the way, security systems at stadiums and in some other public places frequented by lots of people come with face recognition features that can automatically identify a previously blacklisted visitor based on images of moderate quality. In most real-life situations, though, things are usually opaquer.
When crossing a border, the standard procedure is as follows: an officer looks at your face and decides whether what he sees matches the photo in your passport or visa. If they conclude that there are plenty of similar traits, then you get the green light to cross the border. The identification workflow in court follows the same logic: the judge engages an unbiased expert who is supposed to deduce if it’s possible to identify a person using a specific photo.
In most countries, citizens have the right to file official requests so that their data isn’t collected and processed without their consent. Theoretically, you can go the extra mile and use publicly available online sources to try and extract photos of you taken by surveillance systems outdoors. The next move is to insist that this is an act of unauthorized data storage and analysis. Yet, such a request may be declined in quite a few situations – for instance, when the photo is used for national security purposes. The same goes for scenarios where the image was taken during public events, such as concerts, conferences, and sports contests.
Is an email address an example of personal data? It depends. A string like <email-pii> conveys no sensitive information as long as it doesn’t include a person’s name. Its owner can be anyone, even a bot. Does anything change if it’s <email-pii> or <email-pii>? As a rule, none of these is personal data unless combined with additional identifiers that enrich it with context and eliminate ambiguity.
Furthermore, as with a phone number, the classification depends on who owns the email account: an individual or an organization. Another thing to consider is that the process of signing up for a service like that doesn’t require passport information.
IP addresses might give away your identity under certain circumstances, too. This is especially likely if you use a dedicated IP address. The silver lining is that you can leverage a reliable VPN service to surf the web anonymously and thereby steer clear of unwanted surveillance.
Most biometric characteristics can be considered personal data for a good reason. The patterns of one’s iris, the shape of the skull and ears, as well as a handful of other traits, are just as unique as fingerprints. On a side note, this fact imposes major limitations on face recognition systems from an ethical perspective. Even storing a hash of someone’s biometric data may require the person’s approval.
Since privacy laws are increasingly stringent, handling personal data properly should be top of mind for enterprises. Every company’s best interest is to understand whether it stores and processes such information. If it does, the next step is to categorize that data. This will help IT professionals prioritize the protection of specific assets while providing actionable insights into the particular cyber threats those records are susceptible to. From there, the appropriate security controls need to be implemented across the network infrastructure. Compliance with local privacy-related legislation is an essential part of this workflow.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to knowing if particular bits and pieces of information are personal. The considerations above should point you in the right direction. If you are in doubt, resort to the assistance of lawyers who can perform an audit of your data and send requests to authorities for clarification if necessary.
|
Utah's gender pay gap is the 3rd worst in the nation, a study finds
Utah's gender pay gap is the nation's third worst, according to a new analysis.
By the numbers: Men make about 37% more than women in Utah, according to a Chamber of Commerce review of median earnings for full-time workers.
- The median income for Utah women is $16,562 less than for men.
Zoom in: Pay in Salt Lake City is more equitable than statewide, with men earning 23% more than women — a median wage gap of $11,160.
- That puts SLC in the top third of U.S. cities for pay equity.
Context: Utah's pay gap for decades has ranked among the worst in the nation, according to federal wage data — and the state generally ranks poorly by other measures of equality.
- In recent years, Utah sat in the bottom three in rankings of women's representation in leadership, legal protections, rights, attainment of advanced degrees and workplace environment, as well as sexist attitudes.
Details: Utah women are less likely than women nationally to work full-time during years when children are living at home, according to a state jobs report from November.
- That means women have fewer years of work to earn experience-based raises.
- Yes, but: National data collected on new college graduates shows the gender gap in starting salaries is about the same as the gap for all workers.
Field of employment is likely more significant, with lower pay for professions dominated by women in Utah and nationally.
- But even within high-paying fields, men in Utah are paid on average 40% to 100% more than women.
Nationally, the pay gap closes significantly if controlled for qualifications and profession.
- Women last year made 99 cents on the dollar earned by men doing the same job, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the salary-tracking company Payscale.
- Over time, that gap can amount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in some fields. For example, male physicians and surgeons make more than 20% more than their female counterparts even when controlled for experience, the report found.
Meanwhile, Sexism likely drives the pay disparity between fields.
- Professions once dominated by men — biologists and designers, for example — saw wages fall when women were hired in large numbers.
- Conversely, computing was a low-pay, low-prestige job until it was considered "men's work."
Of note: Utah's gender gap worsens dramatically when wages for women of color are compared to white men, and the disparity is worse in Utah than nationwide.
- Latina Utahns are paid 49% of what white men are by median earnings, with Black women at 51%, indigenous women at 52% to 55% and white women at 68%, per 2021 data analyzed by USU.
More Salt Lake City stories
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Utah's gender pay gap is the 3rd worst in the nation, a study finds
Utah's gender pay gap is the nation's third worst, according to a new analysis.
By the numbers: Men make about 37% more than women in Utah, according to a Chamber of Commerce review of median earnings for full-time workers.
- The median income for Utah women is $16,562 less than for men.
Zoom in: Pay in Salt Lake City is more equitable than statewide, with men earning 23% more than women — a median wage gap of $11,160.
- That puts SLC in the top third of U.S. cities for pay equity.
Context: Utah's pay gap for decades has ranked among the worst in the nation, according to federal wage data — and the state generally ranks poorly by other measures of equality.
- In recent years, Utah sat in the bottom three in rankings of women's representation in leadership, legal protections, rights, attainment of advanced degrees and workplace environment, as well as sexist attitudes.
Details: Utah women are less likely than women nationally to work full-time during years when children are living at home, according to a state jobs report from November.
- That means women have fewer years of work to earn experience-based raises.
- Yes, but: National data collected on new college graduates shows the gender gap in starting salaries is about the same as the gap for all workers.
Field of employment is likely more significant, with lower pay for professions dominated by women in Utah and nationally.
- But even within high-paying fields, men in Utah are paid on average 40% to 100% more than women.
Nationally, the pay gap closes significantly if controlled for qualifications and profession.
- Women last year made 99 cents on the dollar earned by men doing the same job, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the salary-tracking company Payscale.
- Over time, that gap can amount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in some fields. For example, male physicians and surgeons make more than 20% more than their female counterparts even when controlled for experience, the report found.
Meanwhile, Sexism likely drives the pay disparity between fields.
- Professions once dominated by men — biologists and designers, for example — saw wages fall when women were hired in large numbers.
- Conversely, computing was a low-pay, low-prestige job until it was considered "men's
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work."
Of note: Utah's gender gap worsens dramatically when wages for women of color are compared to white men, and the disparity is worse in Utah than nationwide.
- Latina Utahns are paid 49% of what white men are by median earnings, with Black women at 51%, indigenous women at 52% to 55% and white women at 68%, per 2021 data analyzed by USU.
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Lecture 23: Reconstructing the Greek Tireme
Understanding Greek and Roman Technology: From the Catapult to the Pantheon
Dr Stephen Ressler (2013)
Reaching its peak with the tireme in the 5th century BC, Greek long ship construction subsequently declined. When wrecked, tiremes could be swamped but not sunk (owing to their light weight and buoyancy). Thus none were left on the ocean floor for future archeologists to discover. Thus historians and engineers have relied on ancient texts and artwork to reconstruct what they looked like.
The first Greek long ships appeared during the 3rd millennium BC. By the time of the Trojan War (12th century BC), they were fully evolved. Homer writes about them in the 8th century BC as the primary vehicle for troop transport. By that time the bireme (with oarsmen on two levels) emerged (late 8th century BC) the long ship had become an offensive weapon used to ram other ships.
Early in the 7th century BC, either the Phoenicians or the Corinthians added a third level of rowers (creating the tireme). Essential for any regime wishing to assert their political dominance, the Persians used them to suppress the Ionian Revolt, the Greeks to defeat. The Persians used them to suppress the Ionian Revolt, the Greeks to defeat the Persians in the first Greco-Persian war and the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War despite their ultimate defeat. Ressler believes the golden age of Athens would have been impossible without them
Classical Greeks also designed a quadrireme, employing two banks of oars with two men per oar and a quinquireme. It had three banks of oars with two men per oar on the two upper levels and one per oar on the lowest level.
Under Alexander the Great, the purpose of naval vessels changed from ramming other boats to boarding and capturing and capturing. His long ships became heavier to carry more soldiers and and artillery.
The Romans opted for tiremes and quadriremes as standard warships to carry their seaborne warriors. However they built nothing to compare to the Hellenic tireme of the 3rd century BC. The Hellenic Empire built thousands over three centuries in Greece, Egypt and the Levant.
A tireme’s standard crew consisted of
- 1 captain
- 1 helmsman
- 10 infantry
- 4 archers
- 1 purser
- 1 shipwright (to make repairs)
- 1 piper to help keep the rowing rhythm
- 10 deckahnds
- 170 rowers
Rowers were highly trained specialists forbidden to serve as warriors because they were too valuable.
Tiremes carried two sails, which were used for long voyages. However when vessels were cleared for battle, the masts and sails were left ashore. They had a maximum speed of 7-8 knots (8-9 mph).
All tiremes had a hypozoma, a loop of heavy rope anchored near the bow and stern to prevent hogging.* It used a windlass to twist and tighten the hypozoma.
In June 1987, the Greek government commissioned the Olympias Project to reconstruct a fully operational reconstruction of the tireme (top image).
*Hogging is the stress a ship’s hull or keel experiences (on op of a wave) that causes the center or the keel to bend upward.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
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Lecture 23: Reconstructing the Greek Tireme
Understanding Greek and Roman Technology: From the Catapult to the Pantheon
Dr Stephen Ressler (2013)
Reaching its peak with the tireme in the 5th century BC, Greek long ship construction subsequently declined. When wrecked, tiremes could be swamped but not sunk (owing to their light weight and buoyancy). Thus none were left on the ocean floor for future archeologists to discover. Thus historians and engineers have relied on ancient texts and artwork to reconstruct what they looked like.
The first Greek long ships appeared during the 3rd millennium BC. By the time of the Trojan War (12th century BC), they were fully evolved. Homer writes about them in the 8th century BC as the primary vehicle for troop transport. By that time the bireme (with oarsmen on two levels) emerged (late 8th century BC) the long ship had become an offensive weapon used to ram other ships.
Early in the 7th century BC, either the Phoenicians or the Corinthians added a third level of rowers (creating the tireme). Essential for any regime wishing to assert their political dominance, the Persians used them to suppress the Ionian Revolt, the Greeks to defeat. The Persians used them to suppress the Ionian Revolt, the Greeks to defeat the Persians in the first Greco-Persian war and the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War despite their ultimate defeat. Ressler believes the golden age of Athens would have been impossible without them
Classical Greeks also designed a quadrireme, employing two banks of oars with two men per oar and a quinquireme. It had three banks of oars with two men per oar on the two upper levels and one per oar on the lowest level.
Under Alexander the Great, the purpose of naval vessels changed from ramming other boats to boarding and capturing and capturing. His long ships became heavier to carry more soldiers and and artillery.
The Romans opted for tiremes and quadriremes as standard warships to carry their seaborne warriors. However they built nothing to compare to the Hellenic tireme of the 3rd century BC. The Hellenic Empire built thousands over three centuries in Greece, Egypt and the Levant.
A tireme’s standard crew consisted of
- 1 captain
- 1 helmsman
- 10 infantry
-
|
4 archers
- 1 purser
- 1 shipwright (to make repairs)
- 1 piper to help keep the rowing rhythm
- 10 deckahnds
- 170 rowers
Rowers were highly trained specialists forbidden to serve as warriors because they were too valuable.
Tiremes carried two sails, which were used for long voyages. However when vessels were cleared for battle, the masts and sails were left ashore. They had a maximum speed of 7-8 knots (8-9 mph).
All tiremes had a hypozoma, a loop of heavy rope anchored near the bow and stern to prevent hogging.* It used a windlass to twist and tighten the hypozoma.
In June 1987, the Greek government commissioned the Olympias Project to reconstruct a fully operational reconstruction of the tireme (top image).
*Hogging is the stress a ship’s hull or keel experiences (on op of a wave) that causes the center or the keel to bend upward.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
|
Dogs may be our best friends, but they can also serve as reminders of beloved far-off travels. Many dogs have their origins in surprising lands and were bred for specific purposes—from sheep herding to companionship. Knowing dogs’ global origins and personalities can help you understand your own pooch. And since having a dog is a big responsibility, if you’re ready to make the leap, be sure to do your research to ensure that that the breed you select is a good match for your living situation and lifestyle choices.
Protective PupAustralian ShepherdCalifornia
Despite its name, the Australian shepherd is actually a descendent of dogs the Spanish brought to California in the 1500s. It gets its name from the New Zealand and Australian collies that were part of that group. This athletic dog gained popularity in the 2000s, but their herding instinct and need for consistent exercise has not been bred out, so it is important for humans to establish clear dominance, especially in homes with children.
Small Size, Big PersonalityChihuahuaMexico
Based on DNA analysis, Chihuahuas are believed to be one of only two native American breeds to survive since pre-colonization. Explorer Hernán Cortés wrote that that he discovered the Aztecs raising and selling the little dogs for food. Today, they’re known for being keen companions but display above-average aggression.
Independent InstinctsCatahoula Leopard DogLouisiana
This medium-build, short-haired dog breed is known for its wide variety of coat and eye colors. It is noted as being the only breed to have originated in the state of Louisiana. Its likely ancestor is the Beauceron, having been crossbred with Native American wolf dogs to aid early French settlers with swamp hunting. These dogs are known for their need for early training to break their independent, territorial instinct.
The Havanese is the national dog of Cuba. It can trace its roots to the now extinct Blanquito de la Habana (“little white dog of Havana”), and further back to the island of Tenerife where it descended from bichon-style dogs. The toy breed is a true companion dog and thrives in social settings where it is around people all day long. It is noted for its lack of barking instinct.
Quiet SportsmanBasenjiDemocratic Republic of the Congo
This hunting dog has its roots in the northeastern Congo region of Central Africa and is considered by experts to be a primitive-type breed—with a simple gene pool and longstanding lineage. Basenjis yodel rather than bark and lack a distinct odor. They are prized for their intelligence and quickness, dislike water, have a strong prey drive and like to climb, so they thrive in an active environment with plenty of time outdoors.
Work HorseHungarian MudiHungary
Closely related to the puli and pumi and known for being high-energy herders, mudi grow to just over a foot tall and just over 20 pounds. During World War II, much of the breed was killed off, but has since rebounded, gaining recognition as an American Kennel Club purebred breed last year.
Outdoor AdventurerFinnish LapphundFinland
The medium-sized Finnish Lapphund has traditionally been bred to help manage reindeer herds and often live 12 to 14 years, or longer. They’re known to be good companions for active families who enjoy outdoor activities as their coats are waterproof.
Devoted DogBlack Russian TerrierRussia
Also known as the Chornyi Terrier, this breed of dog was created at the end of World War II by a Russian kennel for use as a working dog. Today, the breed is good for companionship, sporting, guarding or working needs. It’s known for being obedient, with extraordinary stamina. These terriers are not inclined to make friends easily but are devoted and loyal to their owners.
Farm HelperAustralian KelpieAustralia
This sheepdog has a keen herding sense, often without guidance once trained. Like many Australians, the kelpie traces its roots back to Britain. Kelpies are agile and intelligent, requiring mental stimulation and physical exercise.
Self-Grooming ScreamerShiba InuJapan
Shiba Inus are known for their agility and hunting prowess. The dogs are noted for their independence and their need to stay clean, often self-grooming like cats do. Shibas, as they are called, are remarkably easy to housebreak, but—not fans of being grabbed or held—are prone to “screaming” when displeased.
The post Which Global Dog Breed Is Your Perfect Match? This Factor Is Key appeared first on Newsweek.
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Dogs may be our best friends, but they can also serve as reminders of beloved far-off travels. Many dogs have their origins in surprising lands and were bred for specific purposes—from sheep herding to companionship. Knowing dogs’ global origins and personalities can help you understand your own pooch. And since having a dog is a big responsibility, if you’re ready to make the leap, be sure to do your research to ensure that that the breed you select is a good match for your living situation and lifestyle choices.
Protective PupAustralian ShepherdCalifornia
Despite its name, the Australian shepherd is actually a descendent of dogs the Spanish brought to California in the 1500s. It gets its name from the New Zealand and Australian collies that were part of that group. This athletic dog gained popularity in the 2000s, but their herding instinct and need for consistent exercise has not been bred out, so it is important for humans to establish clear dominance, especially in homes with children.
Small Size, Big PersonalityChihuahuaMexico
Based on DNA analysis, Chihuahuas are believed to be one of only two native American breeds to survive since pre-colonization. Explorer Hernán Cortés wrote that that he discovered the Aztecs raising and selling the little dogs for food. Today, they’re known for being keen companions but display above-average aggression.
Independent InstinctsCatahoula Leopard DogLouisiana
This medium-build, short-haired dog breed is known for its wide variety of coat and eye colors. It is noted as being the only breed to have originated in the state of Louisiana. Its likely ancestor is the Beauceron, having been crossbred with Native American wolf dogs to aid early French settlers with swamp hunting. These dogs are known for their need for early training to break their independent, territorial instinct.
The Havanese is the national dog of Cuba. It can trace its roots to the now extinct Blanquito de la Habana (“little white dog of Havana”), and further back to the island of Tenerife where it descended from bichon-style dogs. The toy breed is a true companion dog and thrives in social settings where it is around people all day long. It is noted for its lack of barking instinct.
Quiet SportsmanBasenjiDemocratic Republic of the Congo
This hunting dog has its roots in the northeastern Congo region of Central Africa and is considered by experts to be a primitive-type breed—with a simple gene pool and longstanding lineage
|
. Basenjis yodel rather than bark and lack a distinct odor. They are prized for their intelligence and quickness, dislike water, have a strong prey drive and like to climb, so they thrive in an active environment with plenty of time outdoors.
Work HorseHungarian MudiHungary
Closely related to the puli and pumi and known for being high-energy herders, mudi grow to just over a foot tall and just over 20 pounds. During World War II, much of the breed was killed off, but has since rebounded, gaining recognition as an American Kennel Club purebred breed last year.
Outdoor AdventurerFinnish LapphundFinland
The medium-sized Finnish Lapphund has traditionally been bred to help manage reindeer herds and often live 12 to 14 years, or longer. They’re known to be good companions for active families who enjoy outdoor activities as their coats are waterproof.
Devoted DogBlack Russian TerrierRussia
Also known as the Chornyi Terrier, this breed of dog was created at the end of World War II by a Russian kennel for use as a working dog. Today, the breed is good for companionship, sporting, guarding or working needs. It’s known for being obedient, with extraordinary stamina. These terriers are not inclined to make friends easily but are devoted and loyal to their owners.
Farm HelperAustralian KelpieAustralia
This sheepdog has a keen herding sense, often without guidance once trained. Like many Australians, the kelpie traces its roots back to Britain. Kelpies are agile and intelligent, requiring mental stimulation and physical exercise.
Self-Grooming ScreamerShiba InuJapan
Shiba Inus are known for their agility and hunting prowess. The dogs are noted for their independence and their need to stay clean, often self-grooming like cats do. Shibas, as they are called, are remarkably easy to housebreak, but—not fans of being grabbed or held—are prone to “screaming” when displeased.
The post Which Global Dog Breed Is Your Perfect Match? This Factor Is Key appeared first on Newsweek.
|
Generative artificial intelligence — the kind that generates text or images, based on prompts — learns a lot like humans do: It picks up language, with its vocabulary growing with every human interaction, and it stores those encounters as data so it can respond more appropriately in the future.
Members of the Utah Legislature want the humans in Utah’s business sector and the state’s department of Commerce to learn about AI the same way.
The Senate Business and Labor Committee, on a unanimous vote, sent SB149 ahead to the full Senate on Thursday. The bill, if it becomes law, would establish an AI “learning lab” for businesses and state regulators to keep tabs on the newest technology and trends in artificial intelligence — so the state can better understand how to regulate AI.
The bill would impose some immediate rules on consumer-facing AI — because while AI can already act human, that doesn’t make it human.
“We want to put some guardrails in place now,” Margaret Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, told the committee.
Under SB149, businesses that use generative AI could be held liable if that AI deceives consumers in violation of Utah’s consumer protection laws. For example, if a chatbot misleads a consumer into buying a product, the chatbot is not responsible for that lie — the company behind it is.
“You can’t use AI as a defense,” Busse said.
The bill would also require any consumer-facing generative AI, such as chatbots or text messages, to answer honestly if asked, “Are you human?” AI in certain licensed industries — including health care, mental health and finance — would be required to disclose that it is not human at the onset of any conversation.
“For sensitive interactions, people should know if they are dealing with a nonhuman,” Busse said.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, recognized that Utah is generally wary of increasing regulation for business owners; but deceptive business practices are already illegal. This bill, he said, just clarifies liability when AI is involved.
Business owners, executives and representatives — even those directly involved in AI software — told lawmakers they support such regulation.
Bree Jones, who owns two software companies, said AI is not some niche segment of the tech industry — it is “the predominant technology.”
Jones added, “I’m also a mother of two, and I have concerns about the fact that AI is becoming so dominant, so easy to access and build out, that those who are unregulated and maybe a bit mischievous with it could really do some harm here in the next short while.”
Ginger Chinn, vice president of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, said the bill was one of the chamber’s top legislative priorities, because it encourages innovation and protects businesses.
Cullimore added that artificial intelligence is growing quickly, and it’s in the state’s best interest to stay ahead of it as best it can. The bill’s AI Learning Laboratory could allow businesses to test AI’s capabilities without fear of retaliation.
“We in Utah pride ourselves on having a light touch in industry and innovation, and we want to promote innovation,” Cullimore said.
Lab participants would, in the bill’s language, “analyze and research the risks, benefits, impacts and policy implications” of new AI technology and use their shared knowledge to help guide regulation. The participants would “define the things [they] want to learn, and decide what we need to regulate,” Busse said.
In other words, the lab would function a lot like generative AI does now.
Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
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Generative artificial intelligence — the kind that generates text or images, based on prompts — learns a lot like humans do: It picks up language, with its vocabulary growing with every human interaction, and it stores those encounters as data so it can respond more appropriately in the future.
Members of the Utah Legislature want the humans in Utah’s business sector and the state’s department of Commerce to learn about AI the same way.
The Senate Business and Labor Committee, on a unanimous vote, sent SB149 ahead to the full Senate on Thursday. The bill, if it becomes law, would establish an AI “learning lab” for businesses and state regulators to keep tabs on the newest technology and trends in artificial intelligence — so the state can better understand how to regulate AI.
The bill would impose some immediate rules on consumer-facing AI — because while AI can already act human, that doesn’t make it human.
“We want to put some guardrails in place now,” Margaret Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, told the committee.
Under SB149, businesses that use generative AI could be held liable if that AI deceives consumers in violation of Utah’s consumer protection laws. For example, if a chatbot misleads a consumer into buying a product, the chatbot is not responsible for that lie — the company behind it is.
“You can’t use AI as a defense,” Busse said.
The bill would also require any consumer-facing generative AI, such as chatbots or text messages, to answer honestly if asked, “Are you human?” AI in certain licensed industries — including health care, mental health and finance — would be required to disclose that it is not human at the onset of any conversation.
“For sensitive interactions, people should know if they are dealing with a nonhuman,” Busse said.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, recognized that Utah is generally wary of increasing regulation for business owners; but deceptive business practices are already illegal. This bill, he said, just clarifies liability when AI is involved.
Business owners, executives and representatives — even those directly involved in AI software — told lawmakers they support such regulation.
Bree Jones, who owns two software companies, said AI is not some niche segment of the tech industry — it is “the predominant technology.”
Jones added, “I’m also a mother of two, and I have concerns about the fact that AI is becoming so dominant, so easy to access and build out, that those
|
who are unregulated and maybe a bit mischievous with it could really do some harm here in the next short while.”
Ginger Chinn, vice president of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, said the bill was one of the chamber’s top legislative priorities, because it encourages innovation and protects businesses.
Cullimore added that artificial intelligence is growing quickly, and it’s in the state’s best interest to stay ahead of it as best it can. The bill’s AI Learning Laboratory could allow businesses to test AI’s capabilities without fear of retaliation.
“We in Utah pride ourselves on having a light touch in industry and innovation, and we want to promote innovation,” Cullimore said.
Lab participants would, in the bill’s language, “analyze and research the risks, benefits, impacts and policy implications” of new AI technology and use their shared knowledge to help guide regulation. The participants would “define the things [they] want to learn, and decide what we need to regulate,” Busse said.
In other words, the lab would function a lot like generative AI does now.
Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
|
For these virus-hunting scientists, the 'real gold' is what's in a mosquito's abdomen
It's early morning in banana farm country in the lowlands of western Guatemala, about 10 miles from the Mexican border. The sun has just started cooking the air into a tropical soup. Crop-dusters zigzag across the sky, casting shadows on the roofs of half a dozen low-slung buildings. One is a health clinic, another is a laboratory. This is the Fundación para la Salud Integral de los Guatemaltecos, or FunSalud for short.
About half past 8, a couple of dozen junior researchers spill out of a building, jump into their three-wheeled red and green tuk-tuks, and fan out onto the rural roads. Research coordinator Neudy Rojop is behind the wheel of one of them. The ride is bumpy, jostling her up and down, but she's unflappable. "We are visiting two homes with families that are participating in the project," she says through a translator.
Rojop is referring to a FunSalud study she's supervising in this community. The research team is helping test what could be a clever way to look for viruses — all kinds of viruses, but especially those that could cause serious and widespread illness in humans.
"We're trying to focus on pathogens that just happen to be in the blood that the mosquito happened to suck up," says Dr. Dan Olson, a research director at FunSalud and a pediatric infectious disease doctor at the University of Colorado's School of Medicine. The researchers are wagering that the earlier they can spot a virus that's circulating among people (as opposed to something the mosquitoes themselves carry, like dengue or yellow fever), the better the chances of stopping a global outbreak. That's when you can learn a pathogen's secrets, the scientists say — and then use that knowledge against the germs to vanquish them.
Rojop pulls up to a residence in the community of Chiquirines and cuts off the engine. The home has concrete walls and a metal roof and is one of 60 in the area that's enrolled in the study. Rojop hops out of her tuk-tuk and walks across the dusty yard. She passes a couple of pigs and skirts a band of patrolling chickens. Rojop grew up not too far from here. People in this area "usually see their animals as part of their families," she says.
When Rojop gets to the front of the house, she pulls out a big tube they've dubbed the "insectazooka." But instead of launching insects, the insectazooka's white PVC pipe sucks them in.
"Basically, it is a vacuum," says Rojop. "And we use it to vacuum the mosquitoes alive."
Mosquitoes are a real nuisance here. Celia Alvarez is 60 and lives in this home with her sister, niece, daughter and two grandsons. She wears a black top with pink hibiscus flowers blooming across it. Alvarez smiles as she hits her arm, as if to swat the insects, saying that she usually just slaps them into oblivion.
But Neudy Rojop doesn't want squished mosquitoes. Instead, the real gold is what's in their abdomens. "Blood," she says.
The researchers want mosquitoes to do the work for them, like a swarm of flying syringes, sampling the blood of every pig, pet and person on the premises. The community members say they like this approach of disease surveillance because it doesn't involve a single needle to draw blood.
When the team members analyze that blood, they are looking for any viruses the mosquitoes may have slurped up — those known and, maybe one day, those the world has never seen before.
Neudy Rojop sucks up mosquitoes with the insectazooka, sweeping the device into the dark corners of the house, under the beds and into the crannies.
Luis Escheverria for NPR
Why they're sucking up mosquitoes
There's good reason to search here.
Dr. Edwin Asturias, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Colorado, co-founded FunSalud a decade ago. Asturias, who's from this part of Guatemala, says it's a good place to look for spillovers — when a disease crosses from animals to people — for two main reasons. The first is that people and animals live so closely together.
"Because they are in a crowded condition," he explains, "the ability for any pathogen to move from the animals to the human is much higher. Maybe the pig is having a cold and now, suddenly, that influenza virus is going to transfer to a little child."
Viruses frequently shuttle between animals and humans. The vast majority of the time, attempts by a virus to move from a pig, say, into a human tend not to be too troublesome. "But in some cases," says Asturias, "the more you give the virus the chance to interact with humans, the more it's just going to adapt to be amongst the humans, mutating in a way that may become dangerous."
The second reason why it's worth doing disease surveillance in rural Guatemala has to do with the general health of the population. Many people here suffer from high rates of malnutrition, which makes them more vulnerable to disease, says Asturias. "To top it off," he adds, "their parents, who have survived those illnesses when they were young, are suffering now huge amounts of chronic illnesses." That includes renal failure, obesity, hypertension and diabetes.
Illness is like a well the residents here can't ever quite climb out of, says Asturias, and it weakens their immune systems over time. This means that it's possible for viruses — including those from animals — to sit and stew for longer.
"Therefore, if there's things that are going to emerge in the next few years," says Asturias, "it's better if you keep an eye on them all the time and intervene earlier ... if we want to think about providing a better control and prevention of infectious diseases in the future."
The mosquitoes go for one last ride
Back at the home in Chiquirines, the vacuum finishes yanking the mosquitoes from their hideouts. The operator quickly screws a cap onto the end. You can hear the trapped insects buzzing around inside — 60 to 70 mosquitoes, unscathed.
Silvia Alvarez, who also lives there, is pleased. They'd be welcome to vacuum the whole house, she says.
With that small hoard of insects in the tube, Rojop takes them on a quick drive to the lab, where they're plunged into a deep freezer that kills them but keeps their blood intact to sample and study.
After 15 minutes, Rojop's colleague, Cecilia González, pours the mosquito carcasses onto a petri dish, which she then pushes under a microscope. She sorts them by species and zeroes in on females that have recently feasted. One mosquito's abdomen is swollen with blood.
González puts that insect onto a piece of absorbent paper. Tweezers in hand, she takes off the head and carefully squeezes the mosquito. A tiny droplet of blood seeps out, soaking into the paper. This and other samples like it will be shipped to the Ebel Lab at Colorado State University for analysis.
Looking at that crimson dot, you can't help but wonder: Could some dreadful new virus be swimming in there?
The researchers on the FunSalud team have another pressing question: Is this whole new approach to surveillance actually going to work here?
"It's a very interesting and innovative way of monitoring or surveillance," says Asturias, "if it proves to be right. We have to still prove the concept. But I'm very confident that the technology that we are developing is getting us to detect pathogens faster."
So far, they have been able to detect a couple of known animal and human viruses (i.e., Epstein-Barr and canine distemper) in blood harvested from mosquitoes in Liberia. The team is still testing and refining its approach in Guatemala.
"We have to be on the lookout all the time," says Asturias. That's because the stakes for missing something small couldn't be bigger.
Ana Lucia Laparra served as translator for the reporting team.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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For these virus-hunting scientists, the 'real gold' is what's in a mosquito's abdomen
It's early morning in banana farm country in the lowlands of western Guatemala, about 10 miles from the Mexican border. The sun has just started cooking the air into a tropical soup. Crop-dusters zigzag across the sky, casting shadows on the roofs of half a dozen low-slung buildings. One is a health clinic, another is a laboratory. This is the Fundación para la Salud Integral de los Guatemaltecos, or FunSalud for short.
About half past 8, a couple of dozen junior researchers spill out of a building, jump into their three-wheeled red and green tuk-tuks, and fan out onto the rural roads. Research coordinator Neudy Rojop is behind the wheel of one of them. The ride is bumpy, jostling her up and down, but she's unflappable. "We are visiting two homes with families that are participating in the project," she says through a translator.
Rojop is referring to a FunSalud study she's supervising in this community. The research team is helping test what could be a clever way to look for viruses — all kinds of viruses, but especially those that could cause serious and widespread illness in humans.
"We're trying to focus on pathogens that just happen to be in the blood that the mosquito happened to suck up," says Dr. Dan Olson, a research director at FunSalud and a pediatric infectious disease doctor at the University of Colorado's School of Medicine. The researchers are wagering that the earlier they can spot a virus that's circulating among people (as opposed to something the mosquitoes themselves carry, like dengue or yellow fever), the better the chances of stopping a global outbreak. That's when you can learn a pathogen's secrets, the scientists say — and then use that knowledge against the germs to vanquish them.
Rojop pulls up to a residence in the community of Chiquirines and cuts off the engine. The home has concrete walls and a metal roof and is one of 60 in the area that's enrolled in the study. Rojop hops out of her tuk-tuk and walks across the dusty yard. She passes a couple of pigs and skirts a band of patrolling chickens. Rojop grew up not too far from here. People in this area "usually see their animals as part of their families," she says.
When Rojop
|
gets to the front of the house, she pulls out a big tube they've dubbed the "insectazooka." But instead of launching insects, the insectazooka's white PVC pipe sucks them in.
"Basically, it is a vacuum," says Rojop. "And we use it to vacuum the mosquitoes alive."
Mosquitoes are a real nuisance here. Celia Alvarez is 60 and lives in this home with her sister, niece, daughter and two grandsons. She wears a black top with pink hibiscus flowers blooming across it. Alvarez smiles as she hits her arm, as if to swat the insects, saying that she usually just slaps them into oblivion.
But Neudy Rojop doesn't want squished mosquitoes. Instead, the real gold is what's in their abdomens. "Blood," she says.
The researchers want mosquitoes to do the work for them, like a swarm of flying syringes, sampling the blood of every pig, pet and person on the premises. The community members say they like this approach of disease surveillance because it doesn't involve a single needle to draw blood.
When the team members analyze that blood, they are looking for any viruses the mosquitoes may have slurped up — those known and, maybe one day, those the world has never seen before.
Neudy Rojop sucks up mosquitoes with the insectazooka, sweeping the device into the dark corners of the house, under the beds and into the crannies.
Luis Escheverria for NPR
Why they're sucking up mosquitoes
There's good reason to search here.
Dr. Edwin Asturias, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Colorado, co-founded FunSalud a decade ago. Asturias, who's from this part of Guatemala, says it's a good place to look for spillovers — when a disease crosses from animals to people — for two main reasons. The first is that people and animals live so closely together.
"Because they are in a crowded condition," he explains, "the ability for any pathogen to move from the animals to the human is much higher. Maybe the pig is having a cold and now, suddenly, that influenza virus is going to transfer to a little child."
Viruses frequently shuttle between animals and humans. The vast majority of the time, attempts by a virus to move from a pig, say, into a human tend not to be too troublesome. "But in some cases," says Asturias, "the more you give the virus the chance to interact with humans, the more it's just going to adapt to be amongst the humans, mutating in a way that may become dangerous."
The second reason why it's worth doing disease surveillance in rural Guatemala has to do with the general health of the population. Many people here suffer from high rates of malnutrition, which makes them more vulnerable to disease, says Asturias. "To top it off," he adds, "their parents, who have survived those illnesses when they were young, are suffering now huge amounts of chronic illnesses." That includes renal failure, obesity, hypertension and diabetes.
Illness is like a well the residents here can't ever quite climb out of, says Asturias, and it weakens their immune systems over time. This means that it's possible for viruses — including those from animals — to sit and stew for longer.
"Therefore, if there's things that are going to emerge in the next few years," says Asturias, "it's better if you keep an eye on them all the time and intervene earlier ... if we want to think about providing a better control and prevention of infectious diseases in the future."
The mosquitoes go for one last ride
Back at the home in Chiquirines, the vacuum finishes yanking the mosquitoes from their hideouts. The operator quickly screws a cap onto the end. You can hear the trapped insects buzzing around inside — 60 to 70 mosquitoes, unscathed.
Silvia Alvarez, who also lives there, is pleased. They'd be welcome to vacuum the whole house, she says.
With that small hoard of insects in the tube, Rojop takes them on a quick drive to the lab, where they're plunged into a deep freezer that kills them but keeps their blood intact to sample and study.
After 15 minutes, Rojop's colleague, Cecilia González, pours the mosquito carcasses onto a petri dish, which she then pushes under a microscope. She sorts them by species and zeroes in on females that have recently feasted. One mosquito's abdomen is swollen with blood.
González puts that insect onto a piece of absorbent paper. Tweezers in hand, she takes off the head and carefully squeezes the mosquito. A tiny droplet of blood seeps out, soaking into the paper. This and other samples like it will be shipped to the Ebel Lab at Colorado State University for analysis.
Looking at that crimson dot, you can't help but wonder: Could some dreadful new virus be swimming in there?
The researchers on the FunSalud team have another pressing question: Is this whole new approach to surveillance actually going to work here?
"It's a very interesting and innovative way of monitoring or surveillance," says Asturias, "if it proves to be right. We have to still prove the concept. But I'm very confident that the technology that we are developing is getting us to detect pathogens faster."
So far, they have been able to detect a couple of known animal and human viruses (i.e., Epstein-Barr and canine distemper) in blood harvested from mosquitoes in Liberia. The team is still testing and refining its approach in Guatemala.
"We have to be on the lookout all the time," says Asturias. That's because the stakes for missing something small couldn't be bigger.
Ana Lucia Laparra served as translator for the reporting team.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
Food security facing growing threats, farmers tell Australian parliamentary inquiry/ By Hamish Cole
Climate change and biosecurity concerns pose the greatest threat to Australia's food security and is pushing up food prices, according to farming groups.
- A Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry into Australia's food security concluded on Wednesday
- NSW Farmers says an increase in droughts will put a considerable strain on the nation's food supply
- Crop producer Keli McDonald says they have lost tens of thousands of dollars due to pests in the last year
A parliamentary inquiry into strengthening and safeguarding Australia's food security finished in Canberra on Wednesday, hearing from dozens of organisations on issues facing food production, farming costs, supply chain distribution, and the threat of climate change.
According to the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Australia is one of the most food secure countries in the world, ranking 12th per capita for income.
However, Fiona Davis from Farmers for Climate Action said the last year had shown the fragility of the country's supply.
"In the last 12 months we have seen floods wipe out key supply chains and crops, resulting in us paying $11 for lettuce. So while we will have enough food, getting that to people is difficult," she said.
Ms David said ultimately consumers would bear the brunt of climate change effects on agriculture.
"As Australia heats up these impacts will grow and consumers are ultimately going to pay more for food," she said.
"There will be more lost food, less grass for farmers' livestock to eat, less water, and less ways to transport animals due to extreme heat.
"All of these costs will need to be passed on."
Earlier this month the Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Niño watch, increasing the possibility of hot, dry weather for 2023.
Brendon O'Keefe from New South Wales Farmers said the drought between 2017 and 2019 put considerable strain on the country's food supply.
"We have seen during droughts in previous years, particularly with grains, that we only produce just enough to feed us domestically or we have been forced to import," he said.
"We can see that climate change leads to conditions which threaten our food security."
Supermarket supply issues
Throughout the pandemic, supermarket chains experienced mass shortages brought about by COVID-19 infections crippling the supply chain network.
In 2022 and early 2023, record flooding saw rural communities across the country unable to access or resupply food and other necessities.
The chief executive officer of the National Rural Women's Coalition, Keli McDonald, said the recent challenges had exposed the flaws in the transport network.
"What we are seeing in rural Australia is the big chain supermarkets deliver on supply, so they don't have warehouses at the back of the shops where they have three or even a week's worth of food," she said.
"Trucks are coming in every second day to replenish. When those truck lines are broken as we saw in COVID, the bushfires, and the floods, the shelves go empty."
Ms McDonald said the breakdown of the supply chain often had a disproportionate impact on rural women.
"We know that it affects women more than anyone else because women will often go without meals before they'll let their partner or child," she said.
Pest and disease concerns
The recent flooding created the ideal conditions for pest populations, such as feral pigs and deer, to explode.
Ms McDonald said they had seen the effects of this on their property near Gunnedah.
"The problem with feral pigs is not only are they spreaders of disease, both to humans and animals, but the cost of the produce they are eating," she said.
"Our farm alone last year had $40,000 of sorghum eaten. We are seeing these kinds of pressures all over the country."
Mr O'Keefe said a change in attitude towards threats of disease from pests is required from all levels of government.
"We have a biosecurity system that is quite reactive rather than having a sustainable funding source," she said.
"This leaves us open to threats which could decimate our agricultural industries and greatly reduce supply."
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Food security facing growing threats, farmers tell Australian parliamentary inquiry/ By Hamish Cole
Climate change and biosecurity concerns pose the greatest threat to Australia's food security and is pushing up food prices, according to farming groups.
- A Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry into Australia's food security concluded on Wednesday
- NSW Farmers says an increase in droughts will put a considerable strain on the nation's food supply
- Crop producer Keli McDonald says they have lost tens of thousands of dollars due to pests in the last year
A parliamentary inquiry into strengthening and safeguarding Australia's food security finished in Canberra on Wednesday, hearing from dozens of organisations on issues facing food production, farming costs, supply chain distribution, and the threat of climate change.
According to the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Australia is one of the most food secure countries in the world, ranking 12th per capita for income.
However, Fiona Davis from Farmers for Climate Action said the last year had shown the fragility of the country's supply.
"In the last 12 months we have seen floods wipe out key supply chains and crops, resulting in us paying $11 for lettuce. So while we will have enough food, getting that to people is difficult," she said.
Ms David said ultimately consumers would bear the brunt of climate change effects on agriculture.
"As Australia heats up these impacts will grow and consumers are ultimately going to pay more for food," she said.
"There will be more lost food, less grass for farmers' livestock to eat, less water, and less ways to transport animals due to extreme heat.
"All of these costs will need to be passed on."
Earlier this month the Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Niño watch, increasing the possibility of hot, dry weather for 2023.
Brendon O'Keefe from New South Wales Farmers said the drought between 2017 and 2019 put considerable strain on the country's food supply.
"We have seen during droughts in previous years, particularly with grains, that we only produce just enough to feed us domestically or we have been forced to import," he said.
"We can see that climate change leads to conditions which threaten our food security."
Supermarket supply issues
Throughout the pandemic, supermarket chains experienced mass shortages brought about by COVID-19 infections crippling the supply chain network.
In 2022 and early 2023, record flooding saw rural communities across the country
|
unable to access or resupply food and other necessities.
The chief executive officer of the National Rural Women's Coalition, Keli McDonald, said the recent challenges had exposed the flaws in the transport network.
"What we are seeing in rural Australia is the big chain supermarkets deliver on supply, so they don't have warehouses at the back of the shops where they have three or even a week's worth of food," she said.
"Trucks are coming in every second day to replenish. When those truck lines are broken as we saw in COVID, the bushfires, and the floods, the shelves go empty."
Ms McDonald said the breakdown of the supply chain often had a disproportionate impact on rural women.
"We know that it affects women more than anyone else because women will often go without meals before they'll let their partner or child," she said.
Pest and disease concerns
The recent flooding created the ideal conditions for pest populations, such as feral pigs and deer, to explode.
Ms McDonald said they had seen the effects of this on their property near Gunnedah.
"The problem with feral pigs is not only are they spreaders of disease, both to humans and animals, but the cost of the produce they are eating," she said.
"Our farm alone last year had $40,000 of sorghum eaten. We are seeing these kinds of pressures all over the country."
Mr O'Keefe said a change in attitude towards threats of disease from pests is required from all levels of government.
"We have a biosecurity system that is quite reactive rather than having a sustainable funding source," she said.
"This leaves us open to threats which could decimate our agricultural industries and greatly reduce supply."
|
Colorado lawmakers are drafting legislation to ensure local governments can’t derail the state’s ambitious plans to transition to carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar.
While Democratic lawmakers are still finalizing the bill, an early version obtained by CPR News shows legislators want to set up a standardized process for local governments considering renewable energy projects.
It would also limit potential rules to restrict the development of wind and solar farms and other projects like electric transmission lines. The upcoming legislation, for example, would ban cities or counties from requiring more than 150 feet of space between occupied buildings and solar energy facilities. Any moratorium on renewable energy projects also couldn’t exceed six months.
State Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, expects to introduce the bill in the next few weeks. In an interview, he said the proposal isn’t meant to strip local governments of their traditional authority over commercial development but will ensure essential infrastructure projects have a clear path forward.
“This is one of those critical moments where you can see billions of dollars of investment coming, and so it’s really important that we get ready,” Hansen said.
After months of discussions with local governments and energy companies, he insisted the current concept is to enlist state resources to “support” local governments considering new construction permits.
That could include state wildlife experts ready to analyze potential habitat impacts and requiring developers to have plans to decommission projects at the end of their lifespan.
The upcoming bill will nevertheless pit climate advocates against some local voices who oppose clean energy projects in rural communities. A recent report from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found local governments across 35 states have approved at least 228 restrictions on renewable energy development.
In Colorado, many communities have approved friendlier rules to guide the development of renewable energy, which often helps provide a healthy property tax base for schools and other public services. One exception is Washington County in northeastern Colorado, which has aligned with residents and groups pushing back against new clean energy developments. In 2021, the county approved some of the state’s toughest regulations on renewable energy projects, including one-mile spacing between structures and new wind turbines.
Opponents are already lining up to oppose the legislation.
One region primed for renewable energy development is Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest investor-owned utility, has already won approval for its Colorado Power Pathway, a $1.7 billion plan to encircle the area with 610 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that will ferry electricity from wind and solar farms to the grid.
Regulators are also in the final stages of considering a $15 billion portfolio of new generation and energy storage projects, which would allow the company to meet a state mandate to cut its climate-warming emissions by 80 percent by 2030. Many of those projects will link to the utility’s future transmission network, which would then deliver clean power from the Eastern Plains to the Front Range.
Kerry Jiblits, a retired teacher living near Kiowa, fears Xcel Energy’s proposed transmission system threatens the Bijou Basin, a broad valley in Elbert County packed with forests and wetlands. She founded the Elbert County Environmental Alliance to advocate for an alternative route for the project.
Even before its official introduction, the group has already come out against Hansen’s upcoming legislation.
“The state would be usurping local control, and rural citizens would lose their voice and their ability to affect and protect their environment,” Jiblits said. “A ‘one size fits all’ approach to land use is inappropriate. What might make sense in one county would destroy another.”
Kent Vance, a Washington County commissioner, said the proposed legislation resembles Gov. Jared Polis’ approach to housing. To increase Colorado’s overall supply, his administration is currently pushing legislation to force communities to allow accessory dwelling units, also known as granny flats.
“This bill to me looks like a stepping stone to claw in land use codes in general to the state,” Vance said.
Other states with ambitious climate goals have passed similar legislation.
If Colorado lawmakers approve the proposal, it would join New York, California and Illinois in enacting policies that limit local control over renewable energy projects.
Michigan approved an especially controversial version last November. Its new law handed state utility regulators the power to approve large-scale renewable energy projects over local objections. Opponents are now moving ahead with a petition to repeal the law through a ballot initiative this November.
Hansen says the upcoming legislation would take a less contentious approach. While earlier versions resembled the legislation passed in Michigan, he says careful collaboration with local communities and energy experts has guided lawmakers toward a more moderate approach.
But local government advocates say they have been mostly left out of those discussions. Kevin Bommer, the executive director for the Colorado Municipal League, said his organization participated in a meeting on the issue last year, but it hasn’t been heavily involved since then.
“If the intent was to include CML in the discussion and drafting of legislation that may impact our 270 member cities and towns, that hasn’t happened,” Bommer said.
It’s clear Hansen has one major ally in the upcoming fight: Polis. In his State of the State speech opening the 2024 legislation session, the governor encouraged lawmakers to “cut red tape” holding back investments in clean energy, transmission and carbon storage projects.
Joe Wertz contributed to this report.
You want to know what is really going on these days, especially in Colorado. We can help you keep up. The Lookout is a free, daily email newsletter with news and happenings from all over Colorado. Sign up here and we will see you in the morning!
|
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Colorado lawmakers are drafting legislation to ensure local governments can’t derail the state’s ambitious plans to transition to carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar.
While Democratic lawmakers are still finalizing the bill, an early version obtained by CPR News shows legislators want to set up a standardized process for local governments considering renewable energy projects.
It would also limit potential rules to restrict the development of wind and solar farms and other projects like electric transmission lines. The upcoming legislation, for example, would ban cities or counties from requiring more than 150 feet of space between occupied buildings and solar energy facilities. Any moratorium on renewable energy projects also couldn’t exceed six months.
State Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, expects to introduce the bill in the next few weeks. In an interview, he said the proposal isn’t meant to strip local governments of their traditional authority over commercial development but will ensure essential infrastructure projects have a clear path forward.
“This is one of those critical moments where you can see billions of dollars of investment coming, and so it’s really important that we get ready,” Hansen said.
After months of discussions with local governments and energy companies, he insisted the current concept is to enlist state resources to “support” local governments considering new construction permits.
That could include state wildlife experts ready to analyze potential habitat impacts and requiring developers to have plans to decommission projects at the end of their lifespan.
The upcoming bill will nevertheless pit climate advocates against some local voices who oppose clean energy projects in rural communities. A recent report from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found local governments across 35 states have approved at least 228 restrictions on renewable energy development.
In Colorado, many communities have approved friendlier rules to guide the development of renewable energy, which often helps provide a healthy property tax base for schools and other public services. One exception is Washington County in northeastern Colorado, which has aligned with residents and groups pushing back against new clean energy developments. In 2021, the county approved some of the state’s toughest regulations on renewable energy projects, including one-mile spacing between structures and new wind turbines.
Opponents are already lining up to oppose the legislation.
One region primed for renewable energy development is Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest investor-owned utility, has already won approval for its Colorado Power Pathway, a $1.7 billion plan to encircle the area with 610 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that will
|
ferry electricity from wind and solar farms to the grid.
Regulators are also in the final stages of considering a $15 billion portfolio of new generation and energy storage projects, which would allow the company to meet a state mandate to cut its climate-warming emissions by 80 percent by 2030. Many of those projects will link to the utility’s future transmission network, which would then deliver clean power from the Eastern Plains to the Front Range.
Kerry Jiblits, a retired teacher living near Kiowa, fears Xcel Energy’s proposed transmission system threatens the Bijou Basin, a broad valley in Elbert County packed with forests and wetlands. She founded the Elbert County Environmental Alliance to advocate for an alternative route for the project.
Even before its official introduction, the group has already come out against Hansen’s upcoming legislation.
“The state would be usurping local control, and rural citizens would lose their voice and their ability to affect and protect their environment,” Jiblits said. “A ‘one size fits all’ approach to land use is inappropriate. What might make sense in one county would destroy another.”
Kent Vance, a Washington County commissioner, said the proposed legislation resembles Gov. Jared Polis’ approach to housing. To increase Colorado’s overall supply, his administration is currently pushing legislation to force communities to allow accessory dwelling units, also known as granny flats.
“This bill to me looks like a stepping stone to claw in land use codes in general to the state,” Vance said.
Other states with ambitious climate goals have passed similar legislation.
If Colorado lawmakers approve the proposal, it would join New York, California and Illinois in enacting policies that limit local control over renewable energy projects.
Michigan approved an especially controversial version last November. Its new law handed state utility regulators the power to approve large-scale renewable energy projects over local objections. Opponents are now moving ahead with a petition to repeal the law through a ballot initiative this November.
Hansen says the upcoming legislation would take a less contentious approach. While earlier versions resembled the legislation passed in Michigan, he says careful collaboration with local communities and energy experts has guided lawmakers toward a more moderate approach.
But local government advocates say they have been mostly left out of those discussions. Kevin Bommer, the executive director for the Colorado Municipal League, said his organization participated in a meeting on the issue last year, but it hasn’t been heavily involved since then.
“If the intent was to include CML in the discussion and drafting of legislation that may impact our 270 member cities and towns, that hasn’t happened,” Bommer said.
It’s clear Hansen has one major ally in the upcoming fight: Polis. In his State of the State speech opening the 2024 legislation session, the governor encouraged lawmakers to “cut red tape” holding back investments in clean energy, transmission and carbon storage projects.
Joe Wertz contributed to this report.
You want to know what is really going on these days, especially in Colorado. We can help you keep up. The Lookout is a free, daily email newsletter with news and happenings from all over Colorado. Sign up here and we will see you in the morning!
|
Climate change makes heat waves, storms and droughts worse, climate report confirms
Climate change is causing the weather around the world to get more extreme, and scientists are increasingly able to pinpoint exactly how the weather is changing as the Earth heats up.
A sweeping new report by top climate scientists and meteorologists describes how climate change drove unprecedented heat waves, floods and droughts in recent years. The annual report from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) compiles the leading science about the role of climate change in extreme weather.
"It's a reminder that the risk of extreme events is growing, and they're affecting every corner of the world," says Sarah Kapnick, the chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Earth is already about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it was in the late 1800s, and scientists warn that humans must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half this decade to avoid catastrophic warming later this century.
One way to understand and predict the effects of a hotter Earth is to look for the fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events such as floods, heat waves and droughts. The last decade has seen huge leaps forward for the field known as extreme-event attribution science, which uses statistics and climate models to detect global warming's impact on weather disasters. The extreme drought in California and Nevada in 2021, for example, was six times more likely because of climate change.
One of the big takeaways from the new report is that heat waves that used to be virtually impossible are increasingly likely.
"Extreme heat events are more extreme than ever," says Stephanie Herring, one of the authors of the report and a scientist at NOAA. "Research is showing they're likely to become the new normal in the not so distant future."
In October 2021 parts of South Korea experienced average temperatures that were 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average. In the past, that would have been an exceedingly rare heat wave – something that would never occur twice in a millennium, let alone in a person's lifetime.
But scientists found that if humans do not dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such heat waves in South Korea will be the new norm by 2060.
The connection between climate change and heat waves is particularly well-understood and documented, in part because rising temperatures are relatively simple to measure and predict.
Other types of weather are more complex. Climate change affects hurricanes, for instance, in many ways, from changing the temperature of the air and the water, to potentially affecting wind patterns and ocean currents. For that reason, scientists tend to focus on individual effects of a storm, such as coastal flooding from storm surge and sea level rise or inland flooding from abnormally heavy rain.
Such floods are particularly dangerous when they occur at the same time. Hurricane Ian brought both extreme storm surge and extreme rain to Florida last year, which led to deadly and destructive flooding across a huge swath of the state.
The AMS report highlights these so-called compound events, where climate change causes two extreme things to happen at the same time, because they can have such profound effects.
"Compound events lead to exacerbated impacts," explains Andrew Hoell, a scientist at NOAA who studies such disasters.
The megadrought in the Western U.S. is a prime example, Hoell says. The drought was caused by simultaneous extreme heat and lack of precipitation. That, in turn, causes a cascade of other hazards, including more wildfire risk and ecological destruction.
Understanding how climate change will affect extreme weather in the future, and how common these types of disasters will become as the Earth continues to heat up, is crucial for elected officials and business leaders, says Kapnick, the chief scientist at NOAA.
She says scientists at her agency are prioritizing research that people can use to make long-term financial investments and infrastructure choices in a changing climate.
One way that such research can help people prepare for a hotter future is by informing decisions about how to manage reservoirs, aquifers and other water resources in places that face increasingly frequent and severe droughts, the report notes.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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Climate change makes heat waves, storms and droughts worse, climate report confirms
Climate change is causing the weather around the world to get more extreme, and scientists are increasingly able to pinpoint exactly how the weather is changing as the Earth heats up.
A sweeping new report by top climate scientists and meteorologists describes how climate change drove unprecedented heat waves, floods and droughts in recent years. The annual report from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) compiles the leading science about the role of climate change in extreme weather.
"It's a reminder that the risk of extreme events is growing, and they're affecting every corner of the world," says Sarah Kapnick, the chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Earth is already about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it was in the late 1800s, and scientists warn that humans must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half this decade to avoid catastrophic warming later this century.
One way to understand and predict the effects of a hotter Earth is to look for the fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events such as floods, heat waves and droughts. The last decade has seen huge leaps forward for the field known as extreme-event attribution science, which uses statistics and climate models to detect global warming's impact on weather disasters. The extreme drought in California and Nevada in 2021, for example, was six times more likely because of climate change.
One of the big takeaways from the new report is that heat waves that used to be virtually impossible are increasingly likely.
"Extreme heat events are more extreme than ever," says Stephanie Herring, one of the authors of the report and a scientist at NOAA. "Research is showing they're likely to become the new normal in the not so distant future."
In October 2021 parts of South Korea experienced average temperatures that were 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average. In the past, that would have been an exceedingly rare heat wave – something that would never occur twice in a millennium, let alone in a person's lifetime.
But scientists found that if humans do not dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such heat waves in South Korea will be the new norm by 2060.
The connection between climate change and heat waves is particularly well-understood and documented, in part because rising temperatures are relatively simple to measure and predict.
Other types of weather are more complex. Climate change affects hurricanes, for instance, in
|
many ways, from changing the temperature of the air and the water, to potentially affecting wind patterns and ocean currents. For that reason, scientists tend to focus on individual effects of a storm, such as coastal flooding from storm surge and sea level rise or inland flooding from abnormally heavy rain.
Such floods are particularly dangerous when they occur at the same time. Hurricane Ian brought both extreme storm surge and extreme rain to Florida last year, which led to deadly and destructive flooding across a huge swath of the state.
The AMS report highlights these so-called compound events, where climate change causes two extreme things to happen at the same time, because they can have such profound effects.
"Compound events lead to exacerbated impacts," explains Andrew Hoell, a scientist at NOAA who studies such disasters.
The megadrought in the Western U.S. is a prime example, Hoell says. The drought was caused by simultaneous extreme heat and lack of precipitation. That, in turn, causes a cascade of other hazards, including more wildfire risk and ecological destruction.
Understanding how climate change will affect extreme weather in the future, and how common these types of disasters will become as the Earth continues to heat up, is crucial for elected officials and business leaders, says Kapnick, the chief scientist at NOAA.
She says scientists at her agency are prioritizing research that people can use to make long-term financial investments and infrastructure choices in a changing climate.
One way that such research can help people prepare for a hotter future is by informing decisions about how to manage reservoirs, aquifers and other water resources in places that face increasingly frequent and severe droughts, the report notes.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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People living alone on rise as coupled households decline, Census data shows
The number of people living alone in the U.S. is on the incline while couples living together are decreasing, per newly released 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data.
Why it matters: The decennial census figures show the changing trends in demographics and housing for American families.
Driving the news: One-person households increased to about 28% of all U.S. households in 2020.
- That's up from 25% in 1990 and 7.7% in 1940.
- That means 0ver a quarter of occupied U.S. households in 2020 consisted of one person living alone.
- The share of "nonfamily households" — those in which someone lives alone or no one related to the householder is present — increased by 12%.
Zoom out: Families remained the largest type of U.S. households, with the majority consisting of married couples.
- About two-thirds of all households were family households, the same share as a decade earlier.
- Married-couple households accounted for about 71% of them.
Yes, but while coupled households are still the most common, their share declined to 53.2% in 2020 – down from 55.1% in 2010 and 56.9% in 2000.
- Coupled households are when the householder lives with a spouse or partner.
- The majority of such households were opposite-sex married couples (45.7%), followed by opposite-sex unmarried (6.5%), same-sex married (0.5%) and same-sex unmarried (0.4%).
- The highest percentage of coupled households of all types were in the West, while the most opposite-sex married couples were concentrated in the southern U.S.
- The South also has the lowest share of opposite-sex unmarried couples living together.
Of note: The number of female householders (35.5 million) with no spouse or partner present was higher than that of males (23.9 million).
Same-sex couple households
By the numbers: Married same-sex couples made up 0.5% of 127 million U.S. households, while unmarried ones made up nearly 0.4%, totaling about 1.2 million same-sex households, survey results show.
- That's up from 980,000 same-sex couple households in 2019.
- The states with the highest concentrations of same-sex married couples were along the West Coast and in the Northeast, plus Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii and New Mexico, per the Census.
Context: It's the first time the decennial census has shown distinct totals of opposite-sex and same-sex spouse and unmarried partner households.
- Previous censuses have had limited data on same-sex couples and the latest is the most comprehensive set of information for the U.S. yet.
- The data doesn’t include information on single or transgender people, meaning it covers less than a fifth of the LGBT population, Kerith Conron, research director at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, told the Wall Street Journal.
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People living alone on rise as coupled households decline, Census data shows
The number of people living alone in the U.S. is on the incline while couples living together are decreasing, per newly released 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data.
Why it matters: The decennial census figures show the changing trends in demographics and housing for American families.
Driving the news: One-person households increased to about 28% of all U.S. households in 2020.
- That's up from 25% in 1990 and 7.7% in 1940.
- That means 0ver a quarter of occupied U.S. households in 2020 consisted of one person living alone.
- The share of "nonfamily households" — those in which someone lives alone or no one related to the householder is present — increased by 12%.
Zoom out: Families remained the largest type of U.S. households, with the majority consisting of married couples.
- About two-thirds of all households were family households, the same share as a decade earlier.
- Married-couple households accounted for about 71% of them.
Yes, but while coupled households are still the most common, their share declined to 53.2% in 2020 – down from 55.1% in 2010 and 56.9% in 2000.
- Coupled households are when the householder lives with a spouse or partner.
- The majority of such households were opposite-sex married couples (45.7%), followed by opposite-sex unmarried (6.5%), same-sex married (0.5%) and same-sex unmarried (0.4%).
- The highest percentage of coupled households of all types were in the West, while the most opposite-sex married couples were concentrated in the southern U.S.
- The South also has the lowest share of opposite-sex unmarried couples living together.
Of note: The number of female householders (35.5 million) with no spouse or partner present was higher than that of males (23.9 million).
Same-sex couple households
By the numbers: Married same-sex couples made up 0.5% of 127 million U.S. households, while unmarried ones made up nearly 0.4%, totaling about 1.2 million same-sex households, survey results show.
- That's up from 980
|
,000 same-sex couple households in 2019.
- The states with the highest concentrations of same-sex married couples were along the West Coast and in the Northeast, plus Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii and New Mexico, per the Census.
Context: It's the first time the decennial census has shown distinct totals of opposite-sex and same-sex spouse and unmarried partner households.
- Previous censuses have had limited data on same-sex couples and the latest is the most comprehensive set of information for the U.S. yet.
- The data doesn’t include information on single or transgender people, meaning it covers less than a fifth of the LGBT population, Kerith Conron, research director at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, told the Wall Street Journal.
|
Like “atmospheric rivers” and “heat domes,” “king tides” were something few Californians had heard of until a few years ago. But while the term is relatively new, king tides have been around as long as the sun, the moon and the oceans.
Starting next week, the first of the season’s super tides will hit the Bay Area.
King tides are simply royal branding for the highest—and lowest—tidal events of the year. The term was first coined in Australia in 2009, after the country saw its highest seasonal tides in nearly 20 years.
When the sun and moon line up in early winter, the combined gravitational pull translates to high tide marks that can reach 7 feet and contribute to flooding in low-lying areas, especially when they hit during or after storms. California typically experiences three or four king tides every winter, with each one lasting four to five days.
Unlike the intermittent drought and heavy downpours California has experienced in recent years, king tides occur naturally and are not a result of climate change. However, scientists say these “supertides” provide a glimpse of how rising sea levels will eventually affect coastal places. To that end, the California Coastal Commission’s King Tides Project invites people to snap photos of rising waters in their areas during king tides, which they can upload into a statewide photo map.
Unsurprisingly, king tides are most likely to flood neighborhoods along the Pacific Coast and near the shore of the San Francisco Bay. The California King Tides Project map shows where users have reported an impact from high tide levels around the Bay Area.
Roadways and paths in bayside communities such as Mill Valley, Berkeley, Alameda and Palo Alto are notorious for being covered by king tide waters.
In San Francisco, king tides can cause large waves to crash onto the Embarcadero and flood the bay shore in Bayview-Hunters Point. (The high waters also make the Exploratorium’s Wave Organ near Marina Green play its gurgly thumps and gongs louder and weirder than at any other time of year.)
King Tide Forecast for Winter 2023-24
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, king tides will hit the Bay Area on the following dates:
- Dec. 11-15, 2023
- Dec. 23-27, 2023
- Jan. 9-13, 2024
- Feb. 7-11, 2024
Though the first set of high tides will arrive on Monday, the 10-day weather forecast does not predict measurable rain until the following weekend, which should rule out any danger of flooding.
Regional officials advise Bay Area residents to take the following precautions during king tides:
- Never drive through flooded areas. As few as 6 inches of standing water can cause a car engine to stall.
- Clear rain gutters and test sump pumps. A bit of preparation before the rain and high tides hit can prevent flooding.
- Be sandbag ready. Learn how to properly fill and place sandbags them around your property while the sun is still shining.
- Beware of sneaker waves. Never turn your back on the ocean, especially during winter.
|
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Like “atmospheric rivers” and “heat domes,” “king tides” were something few Californians had heard of until a few years ago. But while the term is relatively new, king tides have been around as long as the sun, the moon and the oceans.
Starting next week, the first of the season’s super tides will hit the Bay Area.
King tides are simply royal branding for the highest—and lowest—tidal events of the year. The term was first coined in Australia in 2009, after the country saw its highest seasonal tides in nearly 20 years.
When the sun and moon line up in early winter, the combined gravitational pull translates to high tide marks that can reach 7 feet and contribute to flooding in low-lying areas, especially when they hit during or after storms. California typically experiences three or four king tides every winter, with each one lasting four to five days.
Unlike the intermittent drought and heavy downpours California has experienced in recent years, king tides occur naturally and are not a result of climate change. However, scientists say these “supertides” provide a glimpse of how rising sea levels will eventually affect coastal places. To that end, the California Coastal Commission’s King Tides Project invites people to snap photos of rising waters in their areas during king tides, which they can upload into a statewide photo map.
Unsurprisingly, king tides are most likely to flood neighborhoods along the Pacific Coast and near the shore of the San Francisco Bay. The California King Tides Project map shows where users have reported an impact from high tide levels around the Bay Area.
Roadways and paths in bayside communities such as Mill Valley, Berkeley, Alameda and Palo Alto are notorious for being covered by king tide waters.
In San Francisco, king tides can cause large waves to crash onto the Embarcadero and flood the bay shore in Bayview-Hunters Point. (The high waters also make the Exploratorium’s Wave Organ near Marina Green play its gurgly thumps and gongs louder and weirder than at any other time of year.)
King Tide Forecast for Winter 2023-24
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, king tides will hit the Bay Area on the following dates:
- Dec. 11-15, 2023
- Dec. 23-27, 2023
|
- Jan. 9-13, 2024
- Feb. 7-11, 2024
Though the first set of high tides will arrive on Monday, the 10-day weather forecast does not predict measurable rain until the following weekend, which should rule out any danger of flooding.
Regional officials advise Bay Area residents to take the following precautions during king tides:
- Never drive through flooded areas. As few as 6 inches of standing water can cause a car engine to stall.
- Clear rain gutters and test sump pumps. A bit of preparation before the rain and high tides hit can prevent flooding.
- Be sandbag ready. Learn how to properly fill and place sandbags them around your property while the sun is still shining.
- Beware of sneaker waves. Never turn your back on the ocean, especially during winter.
|
How AI is Paving the Path for Autonomous Vehicles2 min read
AI is playing an important role in the development of self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs are currently transitioning from the virtual to the early stages of development in real-world applications like ride-hailing and freight handling.
Real-time data is being utilized to construct elaborate simulations that will aid AI in responding to unanticipated events. AI in autonomous vehicles is being used to construct elaborate simulations that will aid AI in responding to unanticipated events.
AI is helping improve various systems, including path planning, predictive maintenance, vehicle control, and vision. It is being integrated into autonomous vehicles to not only do away with human intervention while driving but also to optimize travel routes and reduce traffic congestion.
However, the high cost of investment, insufficient profitability, and time needed in AV manufacturing has caused several manufacturers to quit the market. The COVID-19 pandemic has also temporarily halted many AV experiments. Nonetheless, firms such as Tesla, Baidu, and Waymo are working to develop more secure and dependable electric vehicles.
AI and machine learning, according to GlobalData, are transforming vehicles into intelligent and flexible systems. To protect passenger data from fraudulent activity, AVs are embracing cybersecurity. Using synthetic training data, generative AI is utilized to run virtual testing in a controlled setting. This method enables more efficient and successful training of AVs.
Global corporations, including Honda, BMW, and Continental AG, are already using AI in autonomous vehicles. Continental AG is developing data-driven solutions to traffic safety using deep learning and artificial neural networks. BMW is employing big data and machine learning to improve driving algorithms, while Honda has adopted machine learning solutions to boost operational efficiency and profitability.
AI is integral to the functionality of autonomous vehicles, and it is assisting in addressing numerous challenges, including safety, dependability, and overall vehicle performance.Also Read: Artificial Intelligence in Parking
Manage Mobility Effortlessly
It’s easier to streamline movement with smart parking management technology that accelerates the whole process of finding and paying for a spot on the street. This takes cars off the street and into parking lots, clearing the roads for pedestrians.
With Get My Parking, you can set up lightning-fast access and touchless payments in your parking lots in no time. Automate your gates with our retrofit technology and set up appless and effortless QR payments with a custom-branded web app. Our solutions come with a user-friendly admin dashboard through which you can control your operations remotely and receive customized reports on all activity in your car park.
Get a demo today, or contact us at <email-pii> to know more.
|
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How AI is Paving the Path for Autonomous Vehicles2 min read
AI is playing an important role in the development of self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs are currently transitioning from the virtual to the early stages of development in real-world applications like ride-hailing and freight handling.
Real-time data is being utilized to construct elaborate simulations that will aid AI in responding to unanticipated events. AI in autonomous vehicles is being used to construct elaborate simulations that will aid AI in responding to unanticipated events.
AI is helping improve various systems, including path planning, predictive maintenance, vehicle control, and vision. It is being integrated into autonomous vehicles to not only do away with human intervention while driving but also to optimize travel routes and reduce traffic congestion.
However, the high cost of investment, insufficient profitability, and time needed in AV manufacturing has caused several manufacturers to quit the market. The COVID-19 pandemic has also temporarily halted many AV experiments. Nonetheless, firms such as Tesla, Baidu, and Waymo are working to develop more secure and dependable electric vehicles.
AI and machine learning, according to GlobalData, are transforming vehicles into intelligent and flexible systems. To protect passenger data from fraudulent activity, AVs are embracing cybersecurity. Using synthetic training data, generative AI is utilized to run virtual testing in a controlled setting. This method enables more efficient and successful training of AVs.
Global corporations, including Honda, BMW, and Continental AG, are already using AI in autonomous vehicles. Continental AG is developing data-driven solutions to traffic safety using deep learning and artificial neural networks. BMW is employing big data and machine learning to improve driving algorithms, while Honda has adopted machine learning solutions to boost operational efficiency and profitability.
AI is integral to the functionality of autonomous vehicles, and it is assisting in addressing numerous challenges, including safety, dependability, and overall vehicle performance.Also Read: Artificial Intelligence in Parking
Manage Mobility Effortlessly
It’s easier to streamline movement with smart parking management technology that accelerates the whole process of finding and paying for a spot on the street. This takes cars off the street and into parking lots, clearing the roads for pedestrians.
With Get My Parking, you can set up lightning-fast access and touchless payments in your parking lots in no time. Automate your gates with our retrofit technology and set up appless and effortless QR payments with a custom-branded web app. Our solutions come with a user-friendly admin dashboard through which you can control
|
your operations remotely and receive customized reports on all activity in your car park.
Get a demo today, or contact us at <email-pii> to know more.
|
What follows is part of a short chronological series on African and African American History. The educational system in the United States does not always offer a balanced history of Africa which is important to our understanding of history and culture in New World communities.
Africa is the birthplace of humanity from which hundreds of civilizations emerged. It is a continent of more than 50 countries, and home to thousands of languages and cultures. Africans lived in complex societies, from small villages to large bustling cities, that contained universities, mosques, and libraries. Some of the world’s most advanced agricultural, scientific, engineering, mining, metallurgy, and medical techniques were developed in Africa long before they appeared elsewhere. The great civilizations that flourished in Africa included Egypt, Kush, Axum, Mali and Great Zimbabwe. From 1100 AD, Timbuktu, situated in present-day Mali, thrived as one of the world’s most important centers of culture, learning and architecture. African civilizations featured vibrant trading economies as well.
Despite this significant history, many American school children matriculate through our educational system with little knowledge of the African past and its significance to world history. According to an Education Week survey of Black History instruction in K-12 education, 65% of the 401 educators interviewed said that their state does not mandate Black History instruction. Only 12 states require some form of Black history curriculum and that number is changing. African people show up exclusively as enslaved transports to the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade. Our textbooks introduce Africans as victims, using this history as a segue into African American history while ignoring the rich history of their ancestral lives prior to captivity.
As a professor of African American History, who spent years studying the African past and its influence on world culture and history, I often choose to begin my classes with a simple statement: Africans were free before they were enslaved. For some, this is not an epiphany. Others, however, are forced to confront a new reality that goes far beyond the idea that people of African descent were enslaved and received their freedom in the nineteenth century.
Africa's history is complex and stretches back through centuries of dynasties. Africa contributed to our knowledge and understanding of ancient writings, languages, agriculture and engineering. Its extensive trade system connected the continent with Asia and India, producing a lively exchange of goods such as grains, metals, and gold. Institutions of higher learning such as the University of Timbuktu served as arenas for scholars to share their knowledge with people from all over the world. African peoples were diverse, hailing from both urban and rural societies. Their leaders, including
Mansa Musa, who led a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, were some of the wealthiest in world history.
This rich history is beginning to appear in textbooks, enabling children in U.S. schools to learn about the impact of Africa and African people in New World Societies. They are learning about Africans’ long history of freedom prior to captivity and enslavement, and their contributions to world history.
Enslaved Africans relied on their knowledge and beliefs to survive slavery, and their contributions to U.S. culture, society, and economy are evident in every aspect of American life and enterprise. Agriculture, music, art, and culinary developments have been greatly impacted by skills, techniques and ingredients that were brought to the U.S. by enslaved Africans. Some quintessentially “American” inventions, including blue jeans made with indigo dye, were made possible due to African knowledge and practices. Many “American” culinary items, such as Coca-Cola (cola originated from the African kola nut) are African in origin.
Considering the history curriculum that has dominated U.S. classrooms, it's hardly surprising that so many Americans know so little about African and African American history. Many educators are attempting to change this, implementing a more global approach to history that emphasizes the importance of all cultures and communities to our understanding of the world. The impact this would have on our students, and our society at large, would be significant.
|
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What follows is part of a short chronological series on African and African American History. The educational system in the United States does not always offer a balanced history of Africa which is important to our understanding of history and culture in New World communities.
Africa is the birthplace of humanity from which hundreds of civilizations emerged. It is a continent of more than 50 countries, and home to thousands of languages and cultures. Africans lived in complex societies, from small villages to large bustling cities, that contained universities, mosques, and libraries. Some of the world’s most advanced agricultural, scientific, engineering, mining, metallurgy, and medical techniques were developed in Africa long before they appeared elsewhere. The great civilizations that flourished in Africa included Egypt, Kush, Axum, Mali and Great Zimbabwe. From 1100 AD, Timbuktu, situated in present-day Mali, thrived as one of the world’s most important centers of culture, learning and architecture. African civilizations featured vibrant trading economies as well.
Despite this significant history, many American school children matriculate through our educational system with little knowledge of the African past and its significance to world history. According to an Education Week survey of Black History instruction in K-12 education, 65% of the 401 educators interviewed said that their state does not mandate Black History instruction. Only 12 states require some form of Black history curriculum and that number is changing. African people show up exclusively as enslaved transports to the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade. Our textbooks introduce Africans as victims, using this history as a segue into African American history while ignoring the rich history of their ancestral lives prior to captivity.
As a professor of African American History, who spent years studying the African past and its influence on world culture and history, I often choose to begin my classes with a simple statement: Africans were free before they were enslaved. For some, this is not an epiphany. Others, however, are forced to confront a new reality that goes far beyond the idea that people of African descent were enslaved and received their freedom in the nineteenth century.
Africa's history is complex and stretches back through centuries of dynasties. Africa contributed to our knowledge and understanding of ancient writings, languages, agriculture and engineering. Its extensive trade system connected the continent with Asia and India, producing a lively exchange of goods such as grains, metals, and gold. Institutions of higher learning such as the University of Timbuktu served as
|
arenas for scholars to share their knowledge with people from all over the world. African peoples were diverse, hailing from both urban and rural societies. Their leaders, including
Mansa Musa, who led a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, were some of the wealthiest in world history.
This rich history is beginning to appear in textbooks, enabling children in U.S. schools to learn about the impact of Africa and African people in New World Societies. They are learning about Africans’ long history of freedom prior to captivity and enslavement, and their contributions to world history.
Enslaved Africans relied on their knowledge and beliefs to survive slavery, and their contributions to U.S. culture, society, and economy are evident in every aspect of American life and enterprise. Agriculture, music, art, and culinary developments have been greatly impacted by skills, techniques and ingredients that were brought to the U.S. by enslaved Africans. Some quintessentially “American” inventions, including blue jeans made with indigo dye, were made possible due to African knowledge and practices. Many “American” culinary items, such as Coca-Cola (cola originated from the African kola nut) are African in origin.
Considering the history curriculum that has dominated U.S. classrooms, it's hardly surprising that so many Americans know so little about African and African American history. Many educators are attempting to change this, implementing a more global approach to history that emphasizes the importance of all cultures and communities to our understanding of the world. The impact this would have on our students, and our society at large, would be significant.
|
Remember these words: Rose, Chair, Hand, Blue, Spoon. Draw a clock. Name as many animals as you can in one minute. What’s the date today? List words that start with the letter F. Recall the first five words.
Since the 1980s, memory tests like these, often taken with a paper and pencil and scored by clinicians trained to read the results, have been the mainstay of the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, a brain disorder which erodes memory and thinking, eventually leaving a person unable to perform basic tasks. The condition affects an estimated 6.7 million Americans over age 65, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
While these symptom-based tests are very good at determining when a person’s memory and thinking aren’t normal, they’re not great at helping doctors suss out the cause of those impairments—which can include everything from vitamin and hormone deficiencies to small strokes, to tumors, to infections, to related disorders like Parkinson’s and Lewy body disease.
Symptom based tests are cited as one reason for the failures of early amyloid clearing drugs for Alzheimer’s. Reviews of patient data following the clinical trials for two drugs—bapineuzumab and solanezumab–found as many as one-third of patients who were enrolled didn’t have the disease they were being treated for—the buildup of a sticky pieces of beta amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
But doctors’ reliance on symptom-based testing could soon change. Under new draft guidelines for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, unveiled on Sunday at a large international gathering of physicians and researchers, these memory tests would take a backseat to biomarkers—proteins and other signals that can be detected in blood, spinal fluid, and on brain scans—that are telltale signs of the disease process unfolding in the brain.
Such tests have been available to doctors and clinical trial participants but have not been widely applied to patients in clinical practice. Now, with expensive and risky new drugs coming to market that promise to slow the progression of the disease, there’s new urgency for improved diagnosis.
Getting the diagnosis right
“Getting the diagnosis right is absolutely critical to be able to provide these new therapies to the right patients,” said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, who directs the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California at San Francisco.
Dr. Rabinovici led a large study, published in 2019 in the journal JAMA, that showed just how impactful these biomarkers can be.
Over two years, researchers gave brain imaging positron emission tomography, or PET, scans that use radioactive tracers to light up deposits of beta amyloid in the brain to more than 11,000 patients diagnosed with early memory and thinking changes with an uncertain cause.
PET imaging of the brain changed the diagnosis for 35% of patients in the study—ruling out Alzheimer’s for 25% who were initially thought to have it and determining that Alzheimer’s was the cause for 10% of people whose deficits had initially been ascribed to a different cause.
“And this was in specialty memory clinics,” Rabinovici said.
The scans changed how doctors managed patients a whopping 60% of the time—typically prompting them to prescribe or discontinue memory enhancing drugs such as donepezil, or Aricept, and memantine.
Beyond drug treamtents, a biomarker-based diagnosis can also improve a patient’s quality of life, says Dr. Charlotte Teunissen, a professor of neurochemistry at Amsterdam University Medical Center.
Teunessin says emerging research shows that precise diagnosis by biomarkers leads to lower health care costs and less institutionalization. It keeps people at home in normal care for longer. “So it leads to less burden and also less healthcare costs,” said Teunissen, who is a co-author of the new guidelines.
Rabinovici cheered the move to a biological basis for diagnosis.
“This is a long-awaited advance for our field, where we are elevating care to start to apply some of these biomarkers that had been in the pipeline and have been in research and start to apply them to the care of patients in the real world. And I think that’s just that’s great progress,” said Rabinovici, who was not involved in the development of the new guidelines.
The amyloid PET scans Rabinovici used in his trial have been FDA approved for more than 10 years, but while Medicare covered the cost of these scans for patients enrolled in research studies, the agency declined to cover the cost of the scans for most routine clinical evaluations.
Now, with the first FDA approved medication—Leqembi—on the market, which requires evidence of beta amyloid build-up in the brain, Medicare is reportedly set to expand coverage for the amyloid PET scans that are required to see those deposits.
New blood tests to diagnose Alzheimer’s
Testing all patients suspected of having Alzheimer’s with invasive spinal taps and expensive brain scans made sense for research, but “it’s just no way to solve a mass public health problem,” said Dr. Clifford Jack, a neuroradiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who studies the use of brain imaging for the diagnosis of memory disorders.
Jack is also a co-author of the new guidelines which are being developed on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging. They were presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2023, which is being held in Amsterdam.
They build on 2018 guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s in patients participating in clinical trials. They mark the first updates to the type of diagnosis used in clinical care since 2011.
After the proposed guidelines are presented, they will be posted on the Alzheimer’s Association website for public comment for 30 days. After the public comment period, the study authors will revise them again and resubmit them for approval, which could come by the end of the year, Jack said.
“We’re updating these criteria to modernize them to the modern era, where it is completely feasible to diagnose the disease biologically at a mass scale,” Jack said, “And two, there’s something you can actually do about the disease.”
For the first time, the guidelines will direct doctors to use blood tests to detect signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain. Research shows these blood tests which have been developed alongside powerful new amyloid and tau-clearing therapies, are now nearly as accurate gold-standard tests for measuring Alzheimer’s proteins in spinal fluid.
“In head-to-head comparisons, they’re basically equivalent,” Jack said.
While some of these blood tests are available to doctors now through specialized labs that analyze them, none of them has yet received FDA approval, though Dr. Constantine Lyketsos, director of the Memory and Alzheimer’s Treatment Center at Johns Hopkins, expects some will clear that hurdle within the next year.
“It’s a huge advance,” Rabinovici said, “It’s something that five years ago I would have thought was science fiction that we can measure these brain proteins in the blood.”
Blood tests will do several important things, Jack said, they will make the cost of diagnosis less expensive and more easily accessible to patients who can’t easily get to specialized memory centers and specialists.
They will also allow doctors to better stage the disease, Jack said, since markers for Alzheimer’s disease show up in the blood before there’s evidence of disease on brain scans—something that will help doctors determine where a patient is in the progression of the disease.
A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s before symptoms?
The new guidelines propose a 6-stage classification where people are diagnosed first on the basis of biomarkers and later on the basis of symptoms.
If the new guidelines are adopted as proposed, a person could soon be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease on the basis of abnormal blood testing alone, even without any noticeable memory loss. That would be Alzheimer’s disease, stage 1.
Jack said he knows that idea will not sit well with all of his colleagues.
“This is a big controversy in the field,” Jack said.
Right now, in order to start taking the new amyloid-clearing monoclonal antibodies, patients have to have evidence of beta amyloid buildup in their brains, through tests of spinal fluid and on brain scans. They also have to have symptoms of impaired memory and thinking that’s judged to be in an early and treatable stage.
There are clinical trials now underway testing whether these drugs can stop or significantly delay the development of memory loss in people who have evidence of amyloid in their brains, but who do not yet have symptoms. The results of those trials are still a few years away.
“So in our new criteria, when we say, ‘Can Alzheimer’s disease be diagnosed in someone who is asymptomatic?’ The answer is an emphatic yes, from us,” Jack said. “Symptoms are the consequence of the disease. They’re not the definition of the disease.
Jack points to the example of type 2 diabetes. The vast majority of people who are diagnosed with diabetes on screening blood tests for fasting blood sugars don’t have any symptoms.
“Does that mean they don’t have diabetes? Because they’re not yet blind or they don’t have kidney failure? No, of course not. They have the disease,” Jack said.
Making decisions about treatment
Evidence from autopsies shows that some people with normal thinking and memory die with loads of beta amyloid in their brains.
Jack believes eventually, everyone with beta amyloid buildup in their brains will have impaired cognition, as long as they don’t die of something else—a broken hip followed by pneumonia; a heart attack, cancer—first.
“In older people, you can name any disease that can be diagnosed in asymptomatic people, and there will be some people who will die of other causes,” Jack said.
He says that doesn’t mean that people with Alzheimer’s disease don’t deserve good diagnosis and good care.
For some people, going through all the steps to find out if they qualify to take the new drugs may not be worth it for the estimated benefit, which can be difficult for patients and caregivers to see or measure, said Lyketsos, at Johns Hopkins. Lyketsos noted he’s having about a dozen of these conversations each week with his patients right now, driven by curiosity about the new drugs.
He says right now, after patients demonstrate some early difficulty in thinking and memory on those paper and pencil tests, he might order some simple tests to rule out other things like vitamin deficiencies and low thyroid hormone.
If he still suspects Alzheimer’s, he talks to them about getting a spinal tap or brain scan to get a better understanding of what’s causing their symptoms.
If those tests suggest beta amyloid may be driving their problems, he next looks at genetics—people who have a gene called APOE4, can be more vulnerable to dangerous brain swelling while taking monoclonal antibodies to clear amyloid.
Doctors also have to see if patients need other medications—such as blood thinners for atrial fibrillation—that might further complicate the use of amyloid clearing drugs.
Finally, while people may have biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease, it may not be the only condition causing their dementia. A brain MRI scan would be needed, Jack said, to rule out other problems like bleeding in the small blood vessels of the brain or other types of memory stealing disorders.
“And the patient would then be presented with a choice,” Jack said. “You know, we could do all this screening assessment. And if everything looks good, you can go on treatment. Or maybe you’re just not interested in the screening assessment, and we’ll skip the whole thing. So that’s how that’s how it’s going to have to work for patients right now,” he said.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Rabinovici said there is increased interest in from patients in getting a diagnosis and doing it earlier than they might have before.
“I think for many years, people had a bit of a nihilistic approach, including doctors about diagnosing Alzheimer’s because they felt like there was little that we could offer patients and families,” he said, noting that he didn’t agree with that. He thinks any information that can help patients plan and guide their care is valuable.
“But now that we actually have therapies… I think that will really catalyze the field and elevate care,” Rabinovici said.
Meg Tirrell contributed reporting
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Remember these words: Rose, Chair, Hand, Blue, Spoon. Draw a clock. Name as many animals as you can in one minute. What’s the date today? List words that start with the letter F. Recall the first five words.
Since the 1980s, memory tests like these, often taken with a paper and pencil and scored by clinicians trained to read the results, have been the mainstay of the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, a brain disorder which erodes memory and thinking, eventually leaving a person unable to perform basic tasks. The condition affects an estimated 6.7 million Americans over age 65, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
While these symptom-based tests are very good at determining when a person’s memory and thinking aren’t normal, they’re not great at helping doctors suss out the cause of those impairments—which can include everything from vitamin and hormone deficiencies to small strokes, to tumors, to infections, to related disorders like Parkinson’s and Lewy body disease.
Symptom based tests are cited as one reason for the failures of early amyloid clearing drugs for Alzheimer’s. Reviews of patient data following the clinical trials for two drugs—bapineuzumab and solanezumab–found as many as one-third of patients who were enrolled didn’t have the disease they were being treated for—the buildup of a sticky pieces of beta amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
But doctors’ reliance on symptom-based testing could soon change. Under new draft guidelines for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, unveiled on Sunday at a large international gathering of physicians and researchers, these memory tests would take a backseat to biomarkers—proteins and other signals that can be detected in blood, spinal fluid, and on brain scans—that are telltale signs of the disease process unfolding in the brain.
Such tests have been available to doctors and clinical trial participants but have not been widely applied to patients in clinical practice. Now, with expensive and risky new drugs coming to market that promise to slow the progression of the disease, there’s new urgency for improved diagnosis.
Getting the diagnosis right
“Getting the diagnosis right is absolutely critical to be able to provide these new therapies to the right patients,” said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, who directs the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California at San Francisco.
Dr. Rabinovici led a large study, published in 2019 in the journal JAMA, that showed just how impact
|
ful these biomarkers can be.
Over two years, researchers gave brain imaging positron emission tomography, or PET, scans that use radioactive tracers to light up deposits of beta amyloid in the brain to more than 11,000 patients diagnosed with early memory and thinking changes with an uncertain cause.
PET imaging of the brain changed the diagnosis for 35% of patients in the study—ruling out Alzheimer’s for 25% who were initially thought to have it and determining that Alzheimer’s was the cause for 10% of people whose deficits had initially been ascribed to a different cause.
“And this was in specialty memory clinics,” Rabinovici said.
The scans changed how doctors managed patients a whopping 60% of the time—typically prompting them to prescribe or discontinue memory enhancing drugs such as donepezil, or Aricept, and memantine.
Beyond drug treamtents, a biomarker-based diagnosis can also improve a patient’s quality of life, says Dr. Charlotte Teunissen, a professor of neurochemistry at Amsterdam University Medical Center.
Teunessin says emerging research shows that precise diagnosis by biomarkers leads to lower health care costs and less institutionalization. It keeps people at home in normal care for longer. “So it leads to less burden and also less healthcare costs,” said Teunissen, who is a co-author of the new guidelines.
Rabinovici cheered the move to a biological basis for diagnosis.
“This is a long-awaited advance for our field, where we are elevating care to start to apply some of these biomarkers that had been in the pipeline and have been in research and start to apply them to the care of patients in the real world. And I think that’s just that’s great progress,” said Rabinovici, who was not involved in the development of the new guidelines.
The amyloid PET scans Rabinovici used in his trial have been FDA approved for more than 10 years, but while Medicare covered the cost of these scans for patients enrolled in research studies, the agency declined to cover the cost of the scans for most routine clinical evaluations.
Now, with the first FDA approved medication—Leqembi—on the market, which requires evidence of beta amyloid build-up in the brain, Medicare is reportedly set to expand coverage for the amyloid PET scans that are required to see those deposits.
New blood tests to diagnose Alzheimer’s
Testing all patients suspected of having Alzheimer’s with invasive spinal taps and expensive brain scans made sense for research, but “it’s just no way to solve a mass public health problem,” said Dr. Clifford Jack, a neuroradiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who studies the use of brain imaging for the diagnosis of memory disorders.
Jack is also a co-author of the new guidelines which are being developed on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging. They were presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2023, which is being held in Amsterdam.
They build on 2018 guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s in patients participating in clinical trials. They mark the first updates to the type of diagnosis used in clinical care since 2011.
After the proposed guidelines are presented, they will be posted on the Alzheimer’s Association website for public comment for 30 days. After the public comment period, the study authors will revise them again and resubmit them for approval, which could come by the end of the year, Jack said.
“We’re updating these criteria to modernize them to the modern era, where it is completely feasible to diagnose the disease biologically at a mass scale,” Jack said, “And two, there’s something you can actually do about the disease.”
For the first time, the guidelines will direct doctors to use blood tests to detect signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain. Research shows these blood tests which have been developed alongside powerful new amyloid and tau-clearing therapies, are now nearly as accurate gold-standard tests for measuring Alzheimer’s proteins in spinal fluid.
“In head-to-head comparisons, they’re basically equivalent,” Jack said.
While some of these blood tests are available to doctors now through specialized labs that analyze them, none of them has yet received FDA approval, though Dr. Constantine Lyketsos, director of the Memory and Alzheimer’s Treatment Center at Johns Hopkins, expects some will clear that hurdle within the next year.
“It’s a huge advance,” Rabinovici said, “It’s something that five years ago I would have thought was science fiction that we can measure these brain proteins in the blood.”
Blood tests will do several important things, Jack said, they will make the cost of diagnosis less expensive and more easily accessible to patients who can’t easily get to specialized memory centers and specialists.
They will also allow doctors to better stage the disease, Jack said, since markers for Alzheimer’s disease show up in the blood before there’s evidence of disease on brain scans—something that will help doctors determine where a patient is in the progression of the disease.
A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s before symptoms?
The new guidelines propose a 6-stage classification where people are diagnosed first on the basis of biomarkers and later on the basis of symptoms.
If the new guidelines are adopted as proposed, a person could soon be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease on the basis of abnormal blood testing alone, even without any noticeable memory loss. That would be Alzheimer’s disease, stage 1.
Jack said he knows that idea will not sit well with all of his colleagues.
“This is a big controversy in the field,” Jack said.
Right now, in order to start taking the new amyloid-clearing monoclonal antibodies, patients have to have evidence of beta amyloid buildup in their brains, through tests of spinal fluid and on brain scans. They also have to have symptoms of impaired memory and thinking that’s judged to be in an early and treatable stage.
There are clinical trials now underway testing whether these drugs can stop or significantly delay the development of memory loss in people who have evidence of amyloid in their brains, but who do not yet have symptoms. The results of those trials are still a few years away.
“So in our new criteria, when we say, ‘Can Alzheimer’s disease be diagnosed in someone who is asymptomatic?’ The answer is an emphatic yes, from us,” Jack said. “Symptoms are the consequence of the disease. They’re not the definition of the disease.
Jack points to the example of type 2 diabetes. The vast majority of people who are diagnosed with diabetes on screening blood tests for fasting blood sugars don’t have any symptoms.
“Does that mean they don’t have diabetes? Because they’re not yet blind or they don’t have kidney failure? No, of course not. They have the disease,” Jack said.
Making decisions about treatment
Evidence from autopsies shows that some people with normal thinking and memory die with loads of beta amyloid in their brains.
Jack believes eventually, everyone with beta amyloid buildup in their brains will have impaired cognition, as long as they don’t die of something else—a broken hip followed by pneumonia; a heart attack, cancer—first.
“In older people, you can name any disease that can be diagnosed in asymptomatic people, and there will be some people who will die of other causes,” Jack said.
He says that doesn’t mean that people with Alzheimer’s disease don’t deserve good diagnosis and good care.
For some people, going through all the steps to find out if they qualify to take the new drugs may not be worth it for the estimated benefit, which can be difficult for patients and caregivers to see or measure, said Lyketsos, at Johns Hopkins. Lyketsos noted he’s having about a dozen of these conversations each week with his patients right now, driven by curiosity about the new drugs.
He says right now, after patients demonstrate some early difficulty in thinking and memory on those paper and pencil tests, he might order some simple tests to rule out other things like vitamin deficiencies and low thyroid hormone.
If he still suspects Alzheimer’s, he talks to them about getting a spinal tap or brain scan to get a better understanding of what’s causing their symptoms.
If those tests suggest beta amyloid may be driving their problems, he next looks at genetics—people who have a gene called APOE4, can be more vulnerable to dangerous brain swelling while taking monoclonal antibodies to clear amyloid.
Doctors also have to see if patients need other medications—such as blood thinners for atrial fibrillation—that might further complicate the use of amyloid clearing drugs.
Finally, while people may have biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease, it may not be the only condition causing their dementia. A brain MRI scan would be needed, Jack said, to rule out other problems like bleeding in the small blood vessels of the brain or other types of memory stealing disorders.
“And the patient would then be presented with a choice,” Jack said. “You know, we could do all this screening assessment. And if everything looks good, you can go on treatment. Or maybe you’re just not interested in the screening assessment, and we’ll skip the whole thing. So that’s how that’s how it’s going to have to work for patients right now,” he said.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Rabinovici said there is increased interest in from patients in getting a diagnosis and doing it earlier than they might have before.
“I think for many years, people had a bit of a nihilistic approach, including doctors about diagnosing Alzheimer’s because they felt like there was little that we could offer patients and families,” he said, noting that he didn’t agree with that. He thinks any information that can help patients plan and guide their care is valuable.
“But now that we actually have therapies… I think that will really catalyze the field and elevate care,” Rabinovici said.
Meg Tirrell contributed reporting
|
Members of Pueblo’s Black community built St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on a street corner in Bessemer on the city's south side in 1915. Now, more than a century later, it's known as First AME Church and was just listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Church Trustee Ann Batey said the red brick building tells of the strength of its founders and the Black community.
“It's history that often isn't written or explained or often received,” she said. “It's a testament to the beliefs, practices and the way of life of very humble people.”
She noted that the church’s cornerstone was carved by a formerly enslaved stone mason, who was influential in its construction.
Throughout its history, the church has hosted local NAACP meetings and other important events for the Black community, according to the application for the national historic registry. That includes the 1917 meeting of the Colored Women’s Clubs of Colorado and a gathering of the Negro Business and Civic League in 1919.
The mission-revival style building was also listed in the 1951 Negro Motorist Green Book that served as a guide for Black travelers in the United States. Hundreds of people filled the church's wooden pews during that era, but now the aging congregation only numbers a few dozen.
Like many people who moved to Pueblo in the late 1800s and early 1900s, some of Batey’s forebears worked in the nearby Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill and coal mines. Every week when she attends Sunday services, she sits in the same spot on the third-row pew where her grandfather used to sit and she remembers being baptized at age 12 near the altar that still stands in the front of the church.
During the 1970s St. Paul’s combined with another Pueblo AME church, St. Johns, to form one congregation called First AME Church housed in the Bessemer facility. A second cornerstone was installed in 2000 to reflect the merger.
The stately building and attached parsonage cottage need many repairs, so the trustees are applying for a grant to hire a consultant to determine the extent of the work required. Batey said new state and local designations will help the congregation apply for funding to preserve their church, in addition to resources from the national listing.
“We were all elated,” Batey said, describing when they were notified that their National Registry of Historic Places application was approved. “I was on pins and needles waiting. It's something that's very meaningful because it recognizes our contribution to the building of this country.
The congregation is planning a celebration of all the new designations in late May.
- Plans Are Underway To Restore Pueblo’s Historic Keating School
- Nearly $1.8 million in state historic funds coming to Southeastern Colorado to support rural communities and diversity
- Once Listed In Green Book, Pueblo’s Coronado Motel Gains National Historic Status
- Pueblo’s Old Steel Mill Headquarters Becomes Colorado’s 26th National Historic Landmark
Southern Colorado is changing a lot these days. We can help you keep up. Sign up for the KRCC Weekly Digest here and get the stories that matter to Southern Colorado, delivered straight to your inbox.
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Members of Pueblo’s Black community built St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on a street corner in Bessemer on the city's south side in 1915. Now, more than a century later, it's known as First AME Church and was just listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Church Trustee Ann Batey said the red brick building tells of the strength of its founders and the Black community.
“It's history that often isn't written or explained or often received,” she said. “It's a testament to the beliefs, practices and the way of life of very humble people.”
She noted that the church’s cornerstone was carved by a formerly enslaved stone mason, who was influential in its construction.
Throughout its history, the church has hosted local NAACP meetings and other important events for the Black community, according to the application for the national historic registry. That includes the 1917 meeting of the Colored Women’s Clubs of Colorado and a gathering of the Negro Business and Civic League in 1919.
The mission-revival style building was also listed in the 1951 Negro Motorist Green Book that served as a guide for Black travelers in the United States. Hundreds of people filled the church's wooden pews during that era, but now the aging congregation only numbers a few dozen.
Like many people who moved to Pueblo in the late 1800s and early 1900s, some of Batey’s forebears worked in the nearby Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill and coal mines. Every week when she attends Sunday services, she sits in the same spot on the third-row pew where her grandfather used to sit and she remembers being baptized at age 12 near the altar that still stands in the front of the church.
During the 1970s St. Paul’s combined with another Pueblo AME church, St. Johns, to form one congregation called First AME Church housed in the Bessemer facility. A second cornerstone was installed in 2000 to reflect the merger.
The stately building and attached parsonage cottage need many repairs, so the trustees are applying for a grant to hire a consultant to determine the extent of the work required. Batey said new state and local designations will help the congregation apply for funding to preserve their church, in addition to resources from the national listing.
“We were all elated,” Batey said
|
, describing when they were notified that their National Registry of Historic Places application was approved. “I was on pins and needles waiting. It's something that's very meaningful because it recognizes our contribution to the building of this country.
The congregation is planning a celebration of all the new designations in late May.
- Plans Are Underway To Restore Pueblo’s Historic Keating School
- Nearly $1.8 million in state historic funds coming to Southeastern Colorado to support rural communities and diversity
- Once Listed In Green Book, Pueblo’s Coronado Motel Gains National Historic Status
- Pueblo’s Old Steel Mill Headquarters Becomes Colorado’s 26th National Historic Landmark
Southern Colorado is changing a lot these days. We can help you keep up. Sign up for the KRCC Weekly Digest here and get the stories that matter to Southern Colorado, delivered straight to your inbox.
|
How grown-ups can help kids transition to 'post-pandemic' school life
School counselor Meredith Draughn starts every day by greeting the students who fill her campus hallways, cup of coffee in hand. There are about 350 of them, and she knows all their names.
"Kids want to feel known and want to feel loved. And greeting them by name is one way we can do that...Research shows that that helps us build a positive culture and a welcoming culture."
Draughn works at B. Everett Jordan Elementary School in the rural town of Graham, N.C., and she was recently named 2023's School Counselor of the Year by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). The selection committee praised Draughn's data-driven approach and passion for her students.
The award comes at a pivotal time for Draughn: in the middle of the most "normal" school year since the pandemic began. Masking is optional in most schools; quarantine regulations have been loosened; and in May, the Biden administration plans to declare an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But children are still reeling from what they experienced during the pandemic. Many students have struggled with mental health, academics and a general lack of connection to their classroom. All things Draughn has seen in her school, too. But she says there is an upside to all those challenges.
"I think a lot of people focus on trauma changing the brain...but what they miss is that healing changes it as well."
Draughn has this advice for how educators and families can support their students as they navigate the transition to "post-pandemic" life:
Establish regular routines and a sense of control
The pandemic disrupted everybody's daily routines, and that lack of structure was especially difficult for children. Draughn says rebuilding routine takes time and consistency.
One way she likes to build consistent habits for students is by setting goals, big or small, like being respectful or following directions. She begins the day with a "check-in," where students share what they'd like to accomplish, and ends it with a "check-out" to see if they met their goals.
"Those successes in small ways can lead to big impacts," she explains. "You're creating a habit, ultimately."
And habits can help give students a sense of control. Pandemic or not, Draughn says, a lack of control is something young people often struggle with,, and it can lead to some big feelings, even outbursts.
"So it's just reteaching what we can do when we don't have control over something and how we regain control and regulation over our own feelings and emotions."
She uses exercises like the circles of control, which asks students to distinguish between things that are outside their control, and things they have the power to change. If the source of frustration is outside a child's control, she redirects their focus to something else that is in their control to help them feel empowered.
Draughn says reestablishing structure, and giving students a sense of control, can lead to better self-regulation and a host of other benefits, including the motivation to show up to school.
Like a number of districts across the country, Draughn says hers is continuing to combat elevated levels of chronic absenteeism, which is when students miss 10% or more of the school year. She says reintroducing school as a part of the daily routine can help students feel more connected to the classroom. That, in turn, gives children a sense of belonging that can improve attendance and set them up for success in later grades.
"Successful habits build a successful life," Draughn says.
Every behavior communicates a need
Children express themselves through behavior—that's nothing new. But Draughn says if educators or parents are dealing with particularly challenging behaviors, it's essential to pay attention to the story those actions might be telling.
"All behaviors, at least in children, are communication."
Draughn points to an example of a child caught stealing food from another student. Rather than place blame, Draughn looks to what that behavior might tell her about the child's life outside of school.
"What is that behavior indicating? Sometimes that is an indication that basic needs are not being met. That is our first question. Not, 'Why did you steal?' "
Children often behave in attention-seeking ways, and that's also true when they're acting out. One way to encourage positive behaviors is to consistently celebrate things like following directions or standing patiently in line.
"If [attention] is really what they're craving, then they're probably going to do it again," Draughn says.
Recognizing and meeting a child's unique sensory needs is another way to reward them. Maybe they can't focus when a classmate taps a pencil against a desk, or when they're wearing an uncomfortable piece of clothing. Draughn once had a student who regularly acted out in P.E. – it turned out the seam at the toe-line of his socks was an uncomfortable sensory experience for him.
"Your brain is gaining information from [all five] senses," she says. "And when you're in sensory overload, your brain cannot gain new information."
To identify sensory-avoidant or sensory-seeking behavior, Draughn simply asks students about their preferences.
"So you either tone down or give them that sensory input [they're looking for]."
How did she help that P.E. student? "We finally settled on Toms and a very sheer sock that he could take off right after P.E."
Tools for helping kids cope with anxiety
In October, a coalition of organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association, called on President Biden to declare "a federal National Emergency in children's mental health." Their letter cites a "troubling" growth in the number of young children diagnosed with anxiety and other disorders.
Draughn says she's also seen a higher number of anxiety-related referrals since the pandemic began. But she thinks that's in part due to a heightened sense of awareness around mental health in her community. "Students have always been anxious, now they just have a word to name it."
She says helping children understand what anxiety is, and how their body responds to it, is a good first step to addressing it. She tells them about physical symptoms like sweating, fidgeting and nervousness. Another tell-tale sign is a stomach-ache.
"Anxiety is a natural body response to tell us something's wrong. ... When we recognize it early on, we can put strategies in place to deal with it."
When she's intervening with an anxious child, Draughn uses kid-friendly words to describe what they're experiencing, like "extra energy." Then, she finds ways for her students to expend or redirect that energy, like through exercise or simply allowing them to fidget.
If children feel too anxious or uncomfortable to get up and move, she suggests slowing things down with breathing exercises. You can ask a child to breathe in as though they're smelling a flower, and breathe out as though they're blowing out a candle. Draughn also likes to use a method called "4 x 4 breathing." She asks students to envision a square and breathe along each of its lines: "You're going to breathe for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breathe out through your mouth for 4 seconds, hold for four seconds. And you do that four times."
Another strategy for when life feels overwhelming to children is to make it feel more bite-sized. "When we look at it as a whole day, or hour or a whole class, it can get really daunting," Draughn says. So instead, she asks students to choose an activity or task that feels achievable within a few minutes, like journaling.
And when all else fails, distractions, like playing games or drawing, can be a simple but powerful tool to redirect anxiety—for both kids and adults.
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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How grown-ups can help kids transition to 'post-pandemic' school life
School counselor Meredith Draughn starts every day by greeting the students who fill her campus hallways, cup of coffee in hand. There are about 350 of them, and she knows all their names.
"Kids want to feel known and want to feel loved. And greeting them by name is one way we can do that...Research shows that that helps us build a positive culture and a welcoming culture."
Draughn works at B. Everett Jordan Elementary School in the rural town of Graham, N.C., and she was recently named 2023's School Counselor of the Year by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). The selection committee praised Draughn's data-driven approach and passion for her students.
The award comes at a pivotal time for Draughn: in the middle of the most "normal" school year since the pandemic began. Masking is optional in most schools; quarantine regulations have been loosened; and in May, the Biden administration plans to declare an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But children are still reeling from what they experienced during the pandemic. Many students have struggled with mental health, academics and a general lack of connection to their classroom. All things Draughn has seen in her school, too. But she says there is an upside to all those challenges.
"I think a lot of people focus on trauma changing the brain...but what they miss is that healing changes it as well."
Draughn has this advice for how educators and families can support their students as they navigate the transition to "post-pandemic" life:
Establish regular routines and a sense of control
The pandemic disrupted everybody's daily routines, and that lack of structure was especially difficult for children. Draughn says rebuilding routine takes time and consistency.
One way she likes to build consistent habits for students is by setting goals, big or small, like being respectful or following directions. She begins the day with a "check-in," where students share what they'd like to accomplish, and ends it with a "check-out" to see if they met their goals.
"Those successes in small ways can lead to big impacts," she explains. "You're creating a habit, ultimately."
And habits can help give students a sense of control. Pandemic or not, Draughn says, a lack of control is something young people often struggle with,, and it can lead to
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some big feelings, even outbursts.
"So it's just reteaching what we can do when we don't have control over something and how we regain control and regulation over our own feelings and emotions."
She uses exercises like the circles of control, which asks students to distinguish between things that are outside their control, and things they have the power to change. If the source of frustration is outside a child's control, she redirects their focus to something else that is in their control to help them feel empowered.
Draughn says reestablishing structure, and giving students a sense of control, can lead to better self-regulation and a host of other benefits, including the motivation to show up to school.
Like a number of districts across the country, Draughn says hers is continuing to combat elevated levels of chronic absenteeism, which is when students miss 10% or more of the school year. She says reintroducing school as a part of the daily routine can help students feel more connected to the classroom. That, in turn, gives children a sense of belonging that can improve attendance and set them up for success in later grades.
"Successful habits build a successful life," Draughn says.
Every behavior communicates a need
Children express themselves through behavior—that's nothing new. But Draughn says if educators or parents are dealing with particularly challenging behaviors, it's essential to pay attention to the story those actions might be telling.
"All behaviors, at least in children, are communication."
Draughn points to an example of a child caught stealing food from another student. Rather than place blame, Draughn looks to what that behavior might tell her about the child's life outside of school.
"What is that behavior indicating? Sometimes that is an indication that basic needs are not being met. That is our first question. Not, 'Why did you steal?' "
Children often behave in attention-seeking ways, and that's also true when they're acting out. One way to encourage positive behaviors is to consistently celebrate things like following directions or standing patiently in line.
"If [attention] is really what they're craving, then they're probably going to do it again," Draughn says.
Recognizing and meeting a child's unique sensory needs is another way to reward them. Maybe they can't focus when a classmate taps a pencil against a desk, or when they're wearing an uncomfortable piece of clothing. Draughn once had a student who regularly acted out in P.E. – it turned out the seam at the toe-line of his socks was an uncomfortable sensory experience for him.
"Your brain is gaining information from [all five] senses," she says. "And when you're in sensory overload, your brain cannot gain new information."
To identify sensory-avoidant or sensory-seeking behavior, Draughn simply asks students about their preferences.
"So you either tone down or give them that sensory input [they're looking for]."
How did she help that P.E. student? "We finally settled on Toms and a very sheer sock that he could take off right after P.E."
Tools for helping kids cope with anxiety
In October, a coalition of organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association, called on President Biden to declare "a federal National Emergency in children's mental health." Their letter cites a "troubling" growth in the number of young children diagnosed with anxiety and other disorders.
Draughn says she's also seen a higher number of anxiety-related referrals since the pandemic began. But she thinks that's in part due to a heightened sense of awareness around mental health in her community. "Students have always been anxious, now they just have a word to name it."
She says helping children understand what anxiety is, and how their body responds to it, is a good first step to addressing it. She tells them about physical symptoms like sweating, fidgeting and nervousness. Another tell-tale sign is a stomach-ache.
"Anxiety is a natural body response to tell us something's wrong. ... When we recognize it early on, we can put strategies in place to deal with it."
When she's intervening with an anxious child, Draughn uses kid-friendly words to describe what they're experiencing, like "extra energy." Then, she finds ways for her students to expend or redirect that energy, like through exercise or simply allowing them to fidget.
If children feel too anxious or uncomfortable to get up and move, she suggests slowing things down with breathing exercises. You can ask a child to breathe in as though they're smelling a flower, and breathe out as though they're blowing out a candle. Draughn also likes to use a method called "4 x 4 breathing." She asks students to envision a square and breathe along each of its lines: "You're going to breathe for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breathe out through your mouth for 4 seconds, hold for four seconds. And you do that four times."
Another strategy for when life feels overwhelming to children is to make it feel more bite-sized. "When we look at it as a whole day, or hour or a whole class, it can get really daunting," Draughn says. So instead, she asks students to choose an activity or task that feels achievable within a few minutes, like journaling.
And when all else fails, distractions, like playing games or drawing, can be a simple but powerful tool to redirect anxiety—for both kids and adults.
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
Tantra is a spiritual and philosophical tradition that originated in ancient India, dating back to around the 5th century AD. The word “tantra” comes from Sanskrit, and it can be translated to mean “weave”, “loom”, or “warp”. The underlying concept of tantra is that all aspects of existence are interconnected and interdependent, and it emphasizes the importance of using practices and techniques to integrate these different aspects of life.
This definition of tantra was offered to me by ChatGPT and I found the translation from the Sanskrit something that finds some echo in me. For some reason, some years ago I felt the urge to learn to weave. This urge was related to a kind of call to learn fundamental techniques for survival in case of some kind of worldwide catastrophe that would take us back to less technological times.
I bought three different models of loom. One to create decorative pieces, another to create rugs, and a third to create textiles. Prabhupada Swami says that we should create self-sustaining communities. For this reason, years later, I donated two of these looms to the community where my spiritual master develops his social project. The other one I donated to a brazilian indigenous community, where I also taught them how to use the tool.
The word “weave” is often used in a spiritual context to describe the interconnectedness between each of us, as if we were connected to each other within a large spider’s web, or invisible net that somehow links us to each other in thoughts, feelings and actions. And what is the element that connects us all? What makes this connection possible? Although we are individuals, with our own experiences over many lives, there is something (or someone) connected to each of us that accompanies us, life after life.
Prabhupada Swami defines this entity as a part of God, an atom of God, that dwells within each of us and is there always available to offer God’s presence with all its qualities. This little witness within us is known as Paramatma. I find this concept so beautiful because in my view it is as if God is constantly updating himself and is ready to offer accurate answers to each of our problems. Exactly as ChatGPT has been demonstrating in the last months. However, Chat GPT has a model limited to a certain time, from when the model was created. But Paramatma is always there, showing since time immemorial a technology that is even nowadays inconceivable.
Although the philosophy of Tantra encourages the use of the senses for the individual’s connection with the world around us, Prabhupada Swami, shows the power of conclusion of the Vaishnava philosophy when he explains that the senses are limited and that they are more connected to the material world than to the spiritual world. Therefore, we must not rely only on the senses to connect with the divine.
On the other hand, Prabhupada also explains that both the material world and the spiritual world are God’s fields of action. That is, the material world, despite having limitations, is as sacred as the spiritual world and when a person becomes self-realized, (s)he does not care whether (s)he is in the material or spiritual world. Both are places of service to the greater good. Some people who have misunderstood the philosophy believe that the spiritual world is some kind of playground that one goes to, after earning enough credits in the material world.
While this is indeed possible, the idea of having credits means that eventually the credits will run out. Just like money. When there are no more credits, then you have to do something, some work, so that you can accumulate more credits. This is not an idea propagated by Prabhupada. According to him, ideally, a person should not even have credits or debts when leaving the material world. In this way, there is no possibility of resetting these credits on some intermediary planet between Earth and the spiritual world.
I admire the idea coming from Tantra that the body is a temple, a holy place, just as Jesus also preached. I like the idea that sex is also sacred. This idea seems more appropriate to me than considering sex as something dirty, or with the sole purpose of procreation. However, Tantra’s conclusion that we are all one is not supported by Prabhupada. According to him, merging with God’s energy is indeed possible, but maintaining individuality is also possible and is a higher liberation than merging with God’s energy.
Leave a Reply
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Tantra is a spiritual and philosophical tradition that originated in ancient India, dating back to around the 5th century AD. The word “tantra” comes from Sanskrit, and it can be translated to mean “weave”, “loom”, or “warp”. The underlying concept of tantra is that all aspects of existence are interconnected and interdependent, and it emphasizes the importance of using practices and techniques to integrate these different aspects of life.
This definition of tantra was offered to me by ChatGPT and I found the translation from the Sanskrit something that finds some echo in me. For some reason, some years ago I felt the urge to learn to weave. This urge was related to a kind of call to learn fundamental techniques for survival in case of some kind of worldwide catastrophe that would take us back to less technological times.
I bought three different models of loom. One to create decorative pieces, another to create rugs, and a third to create textiles. Prabhupada Swami says that we should create self-sustaining communities. For this reason, years later, I donated two of these looms to the community where my spiritual master develops his social project. The other one I donated to a brazilian indigenous community, where I also taught them how to use the tool.
The word “weave” is often used in a spiritual context to describe the interconnectedness between each of us, as if we were connected to each other within a large spider’s web, or invisible net that somehow links us to each other in thoughts, feelings and actions. And what is the element that connects us all? What makes this connection possible? Although we are individuals, with our own experiences over many lives, there is something (or someone) connected to each of us that accompanies us, life after life.
Prabhupada Swami defines this entity as a part of God, an atom of God, that dwells within each of us and is there always available to offer God’s presence with all its qualities. This little witness within us is known as Paramatma. I find this concept so beautiful because in my view it is as if God is constantly updating himself and is ready to offer accurate answers to each of our problems. Exactly as ChatGPT has been demonstrating in the last months. However, Chat GPT has a model limited to a certain time, from when the model was created. But Paramatma is always there, showing since time immemorial a technology that is even nowadays
|
inconceivable.
Although the philosophy of Tantra encourages the use of the senses for the individual’s connection with the world around us, Prabhupada Swami, shows the power of conclusion of the Vaishnava philosophy when he explains that the senses are limited and that they are more connected to the material world than to the spiritual world. Therefore, we must not rely only on the senses to connect with the divine.
On the other hand, Prabhupada also explains that both the material world and the spiritual world are God’s fields of action. That is, the material world, despite having limitations, is as sacred as the spiritual world and when a person becomes self-realized, (s)he does not care whether (s)he is in the material or spiritual world. Both are places of service to the greater good. Some people who have misunderstood the philosophy believe that the spiritual world is some kind of playground that one goes to, after earning enough credits in the material world.
While this is indeed possible, the idea of having credits means that eventually the credits will run out. Just like money. When there are no more credits, then you have to do something, some work, so that you can accumulate more credits. This is not an idea propagated by Prabhupada. According to him, ideally, a person should not even have credits or debts when leaving the material world. In this way, there is no possibility of resetting these credits on some intermediary planet between Earth and the spiritual world.
I admire the idea coming from Tantra that the body is a temple, a holy place, just as Jesus also preached. I like the idea that sex is also sacred. This idea seems more appropriate to me than considering sex as something dirty, or with the sole purpose of procreation. However, Tantra’s conclusion that we are all one is not supported by Prabhupada. According to him, merging with God’s energy is indeed possible, but maintaining individuality is also possible and is a higher liberation than merging with God’s energy.
Leave a Reply
|
Long mental Covid is the legacy of having lived through a disorientating global health crisis and employees are bringing the fallout to work with them every day. Despite this, few managers are trained to recognise and deal with the consequences of this distress which can present as problematic behaviour in the workplace.
“Every time there is a traumatic event, it has an impact on the neurons or the brain mechanisms that translate these unpleasant or shocking experiences into long-lasting memories,” says Sankalp Chaturvedi, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at Imperial College business school in London.
“When something traumatic happens to us, such as Covid, it stays with us. That’s what’s behind the psychological aspect of what we are seeing now. It affects our hormones and the stress hormones in particular. Everything is processed cognitively but it narrows down to hormones and hormones to behaviour. Fatigue, poor sleep and headaches are recognised features of long physical Covid. The mental deficit is popularly known as brain fog and its symptoms can include poor concentration, mood changes and depression.
“In a work context, this is translating into absenteeism because mental health problems have increased due to what I will call the ‘natural experiment’ that was Covid – a natural experiment because people were not aware it was going to happen,” Prof Chaturvedi says. “When it did, they went into survival mode, lived inside, experienced or heard about death and saw or went through difficult behaviour patterns at home because people were stressed and fighting with each other.
“Their boundaries and structures went up in the air, there was spillover at home and spillover at work, and people had no external outlets to express how they were feeling.”
Prof Chaturvedi’s concern now is that managers are trying to deal with the mental health aspects of the pandemic legacy – from aggression to anxiety and low engagement – on the fly.
“Leaders need to be equipped to manage all forms of work, whether that’s the physical or mental load, but they have not been trained to do so,” he says. “They need to understand these psychological problems because they are often the first point of contact, even before any medical professional comes into the picture, and they will see the symptoms of depression, of anxiety or indeed any of the other stress disorders that we’re talking about first in their employees.
“If they are equipped to recognise them then we could see more people getting help sooner.”
People bring their moods and emotions to work where they influence productivity, creativity, engagement and teamwork. If one person in the team is feeling “off”, it’s unlikely to derail the task at hand. If the majority of the team feel out of sync due to a big life event such as Covid, then it will be difficult for the group to make good decisions until the prevailing mood shifts either naturally or with outside help.
Pamela Fay, executive coach to senior managers and joint programme leader on the Smurfit Graduate Business School’s diploma in business and executive coaching, says that mood is one of the things she has become most aware of since people began returning to the office.
“Having worked virtually on group coaching and facilitation programmes over the last two years, I had a sense of a group’s mood but not how it sat within their wider organisation,” she says. “I was missing the feedback you get from just walking the corridors or watching how people interact with each other. It made me question how an organisation can gauge the mood among its workforce unless they are regularly asking people how they’re feeling, even virtually.”
Fay says that there’s still a sense of “a low-level threat” hovering in the background for many people.
“Covid affected everyone differently, so there is no one fix. But there is no doubt that some people are still recovering from the shock of it,” she says. “To determine the extent of the aftershock, companies need to have a conversation with each employee to understand how they’re feeling, what they need and how they want to work. A simple example is that some people are introverts while others are extroverts and they need different environments to function well.
“Companies that looked after their people during Covid are reaping the benefits now because trust and openness still exist. Those that went into hiding, reduced pay and then didn’t show up for people are experiencing the fall out,” she adds. “Companies need to be reasonable about their ‘asks’ around working hours, online work and constantly contacting employees.
“What really needs to be called out is the hidden system. That’s what actually happens in organisations, not what’s written down as policy or procedure.”
Fay’s final piece of advice for organisations trying to regain their equilibrium is to revisit their employee assistance programmes and, where necessary, move away from in-house interventions to external providers.
“Many employees don’t trust internal assistance programmes, especially those involving peer support, so they won’t use them,” she says. “People want complete confidentiality, and this should be respected. I’m aware of one company that offered counselling to employees but did so at arm’s length by providing everyone with vouchers which they could choose to use or not.”
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Long mental Covid is the legacy of having lived through a disorientating global health crisis and employees are bringing the fallout to work with them every day. Despite this, few managers are trained to recognise and deal with the consequences of this distress which can present as problematic behaviour in the workplace.
“Every time there is a traumatic event, it has an impact on the neurons or the brain mechanisms that translate these unpleasant or shocking experiences into long-lasting memories,” says Sankalp Chaturvedi, professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at Imperial College business school in London.
“When something traumatic happens to us, such as Covid, it stays with us. That’s what’s behind the psychological aspect of what we are seeing now. It affects our hormones and the stress hormones in particular. Everything is processed cognitively but it narrows down to hormones and hormones to behaviour. Fatigue, poor sleep and headaches are recognised features of long physical Covid. The mental deficit is popularly known as brain fog and its symptoms can include poor concentration, mood changes and depression.
“In a work context, this is translating into absenteeism because mental health problems have increased due to what I will call the ‘natural experiment’ that was Covid – a natural experiment because people were not aware it was going to happen,” Prof Chaturvedi says. “When it did, they went into survival mode, lived inside, experienced or heard about death and saw or went through difficult behaviour patterns at home because people were stressed and fighting with each other.
“Their boundaries and structures went up in the air, there was spillover at home and spillover at work, and people had no external outlets to express how they were feeling.”
Prof Chaturvedi’s concern now is that managers are trying to deal with the mental health aspects of the pandemic legacy – from aggression to anxiety and low engagement – on the fly.
“Leaders need to be equipped to manage all forms of work, whether that’s the physical or mental load, but they have not been trained to do so,” he says. “They need to understand these psychological problems because they are often the first point of contact, even before any medical professional comes into the picture, and they will see the symptoms of depression, of anxiety or indeed any of the other stress disorders that we’re talking about first in their employees.
“If they are equipped to recognise them then we could see more people getting help sooner.”
People bring their moods and emotions to work where they influence productivity, creativity, engagement and teamwork. If one
|
person in the team is feeling “off”, it’s unlikely to derail the task at hand. If the majority of the team feel out of sync due to a big life event such as Covid, then it will be difficult for the group to make good decisions until the prevailing mood shifts either naturally or with outside help.
Pamela Fay, executive coach to senior managers and joint programme leader on the Smurfit Graduate Business School’s diploma in business and executive coaching, says that mood is one of the things she has become most aware of since people began returning to the office.
“Having worked virtually on group coaching and facilitation programmes over the last two years, I had a sense of a group’s mood but not how it sat within their wider organisation,” she says. “I was missing the feedback you get from just walking the corridors or watching how people interact with each other. It made me question how an organisation can gauge the mood among its workforce unless they are regularly asking people how they’re feeling, even virtually.”
Fay says that there’s still a sense of “a low-level threat” hovering in the background for many people.
“Covid affected everyone differently, so there is no one fix. But there is no doubt that some people are still recovering from the shock of it,” she says. “To determine the extent of the aftershock, companies need to have a conversation with each employee to understand how they’re feeling, what they need and how they want to work. A simple example is that some people are introverts while others are extroverts and they need different environments to function well.
“Companies that looked after their people during Covid are reaping the benefits now because trust and openness still exist. Those that went into hiding, reduced pay and then didn’t show up for people are experiencing the fall out,” she adds. “Companies need to be reasonable about their ‘asks’ around working hours, online work and constantly contacting employees.
“What really needs to be called out is the hidden system. That’s what actually happens in organisations, not what’s written down as policy or procedure.”
Fay’s final piece of advice for organisations trying to regain their equilibrium is to revisit their employee assistance programmes and, where necessary, move away from in-house interventions to external providers.
“Many employees don’t trust internal assistance programmes, especially those involving peer support, so they won’t use them,” she says. “People want complete confidentiality, and this should be respected. I’m aware of one company that offered counselling to employees but did so at arm’s length by providing everyone with vouchers which they could choose to use or not.”
|
A warning this week by researchers at the CDC, about the spread of the potentially lethal fungus across the U.S., highlights the threat of other potentially dangerous fungal pathogens you’ve probably never heard of, but are an unrecognized and emerging global health threat.
On Monday, the CDC warned the spread of an invasive yeast fungus, known as Candida Auris, spread across the U.S. at an alarming rate over the past few years, according to a report by the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Individuals who are more likely to become compromised with fungal infections include the elderly, critically ill and immunocompromised individuals, according to a report from the Microbial Cell Journal.
Fungal infection mortality rates are similar to other diseases including tuberculosis and malaria, according to the NCBI.
Despite becoming a growing concern to global health, fungal infections do not receive as many resources as other diseases, according to the World Health Organization.
WHO compiled a fungal priority pathogens list as a means to prioritize fungal pathogens due to a lack of research and development regarding fungal infections.
Dangerous Fungal Pathogens Most In Need Of Study
WHO lists the following 11 fungi as most in need of more research – the first four of the highest priority; the next seven are of medium priority.
- Cryptococcus neoformans: Globally distributed yeast pathogen found in nature (soil, decaying wood), can cause infections like cryptococcosis, affecting the lungs, central nervous system and blood with a mortality ranging from 41% and 61%. (Critical priority.)
- Candida auris: Globally distributed yeast pathogen, which can cause invasive candidiasis, a fungal infection affecting the heart, blood, central nervous system, eyes, bones and internal organs, with a mortality rate ranging from 29% and 53%. (Critical priority.)
- Aspergillus fumigatus: Globally distributed environmental mold capable of producing invasive infections (invasive aspergillus, IA) mainly present in the respiratory system but can infect other organs, like the central nervous system with anti-fungal resistant IA mortality rates ranging from 47% and 88%. (Critical priority.)
- Candida albicans: Globally distributed yeast pathogenic, normally a part of human microbiota but can cause infections like invasive candidiasis with a mortality rate ranging from 20% to 50%. (Critical priority.)
- Nakaseomyces glabrata: Globally distributed commensal yeast pathogen that can lead to infections like invasive candidiasis with a mortality ranging from 20% to 50%. (High priority.)
- Histoplasma spp.: Globally distributed dimorphic fungi present in nature (soil, bird and bat droppings) and yeast-like form in humans, which can cause histoplasmosis affecting immunocompromised patients with a mortality rate ranging from 21% to 53% in HIV/AIDS patients. (High priority.)
- Eumycetoma causative agents: Is a deep tissue infection caused by fungi found in soil and water, which has amputations risks as high as 39% and 60%— 80% of patients report significant impact to their daily lives but overall mortality rate is thought to be low. (High priority.)
- Mucorales: Is a large group of globally distributed pathogenic molds, affecting patients after spore inhalation, and primarily can cause infections like mucormycosis, which affects lungs and sinuses though it could spread to the eye, central nervous system and gastrointestinal tracts and has a mortality rate ranging from 23% to 80% in adults. (High priority.)
- Fusarium spp: Is a group of pathogenic molds typically found in tropical regions, but is globally distributed, and can cause infections like invasive fusariosis, which primarily affects respiratory systems and eyes but can spread through other organs and the central nervous system, with a mortality rate ranging from 43% and 67%. (High priority.)
- Candida tropicalis: Globally distributed commensal yeast, common in human and animal microbiota causing no harm during normal health conditions but can produce infections like invasive candidiasis which has a mortality rate ranging from 55% to 60% in adults. (High priority.)
- Candida parapsilosis: Globally distributed commensal yeast, common in human and animal microbiota causing no harm in normal health conditions but can cause infections like invasive candidiasis, especially in critically ill and immunocompromised patients, and is associated with a mortality rate between 20% to 45%. (High priority.)
Over 150 million cases of severe fungal infections occur worldwide, according to the NCBI. There are approximately 1.7 million deaths a year associated with fungal infections. Antifungal drugs used for high-risk patients have caused some fungus to adapt, and has led to multi-drug resistant fungi, including some of the more deadly fungal pathogens like C. auris.
Interest in fungi has gained some traction following the hit HBO Max show The Last Of Us, which was based on a video game. Though that infection is caused by a parasitic fungus called cordyceps, in reality cordyceps is prevalent mainly in insects, and experts have said the risk of humans facing such a scenario is highly unlikely.
“If [the fungi] get into a hospital, they are very difficult to control and get out,” William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the Washington Post. “They can persist, smoldering, causing infections for a considerable period of time despite the best efforts of the infection control team and everyone else in the hospital.”
‘Dramatic’ Rise In Deadly Superbug Fungus Infections In U.S., CDC Report Says (Forbes)
The ‘Last Of Us’ Zombie Fungus Pandemic Is Fiction, But Experts Warn Fungi Are A Major—And Growing—Health Threat (Forbes)
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A warning this week by researchers at the CDC, about the spread of the potentially lethal fungus across the U.S., highlights the threat of other potentially dangerous fungal pathogens you’ve probably never heard of, but are an unrecognized and emerging global health threat.
On Monday, the CDC warned the spread of an invasive yeast fungus, known as Candida Auris, spread across the U.S. at an alarming rate over the past few years, according to a report by the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Individuals who are more likely to become compromised with fungal infections include the elderly, critically ill and immunocompromised individuals, according to a report from the Microbial Cell Journal.
Fungal infection mortality rates are similar to other diseases including tuberculosis and malaria, according to the NCBI.
Despite becoming a growing concern to global health, fungal infections do not receive as many resources as other diseases, according to the World Health Organization.
WHO compiled a fungal priority pathogens list as a means to prioritize fungal pathogens due to a lack of research and development regarding fungal infections.
Dangerous Fungal Pathogens Most In Need Of Study
WHO lists the following 11 fungi as most in need of more research – the first four of the highest priority; the next seven are of medium priority.
- Cryptococcus neoformans: Globally distributed yeast pathogen found in nature (soil, decaying wood), can cause infections like cryptococcosis, affecting the lungs, central nervous system and blood with a mortality ranging from 41% and 61%. (Critical priority.)
- Candida auris: Globally distributed yeast pathogen, which can cause invasive candidiasis, a fungal infection affecting the heart, blood, central nervous system, eyes, bones and internal organs, with a mortality rate ranging from 29% and 53%. (Critical priority.)
- Aspergillus fumigatus: Globally distributed environmental mold capable of producing invasive infections (invasive aspergillus, IA) mainly present in the respiratory system but can infect other organs, like the central nervous system with anti-fungal resistant IA mortality rates ranging from 47% and 88%. (Critical priority.)
- Candida albicans: Globally distributed yeast pathogenic, normally a part of human microbiota but can cause infections like invasive candidiasis with a mortality rate ranging from 20% to 50%. (Critical priority.)
- Nakaseomyces glabrata: Globally distributed commensal yeast pathogen that can lead to infections like invasive candidiasis with a mortality ranging from 20% to 5
|
0%. (High priority.)
- Histoplasma spp.: Globally distributed dimorphic fungi present in nature (soil, bird and bat droppings) and yeast-like form in humans, which can cause histoplasmosis affecting immunocompromised patients with a mortality rate ranging from 21% to 53% in HIV/AIDS patients. (High priority.)
- Eumycetoma causative agents: Is a deep tissue infection caused by fungi found in soil and water, which has amputations risks as high as 39% and 60%— 80% of patients report significant impact to their daily lives but overall mortality rate is thought to be low. (High priority.)
- Mucorales: Is a large group of globally distributed pathogenic molds, affecting patients after spore inhalation, and primarily can cause infections like mucormycosis, which affects lungs and sinuses though it could spread to the eye, central nervous system and gastrointestinal tracts and has a mortality rate ranging from 23% to 80% in adults. (High priority.)
- Fusarium spp: Is a group of pathogenic molds typically found in tropical regions, but is globally distributed, and can cause infections like invasive fusariosis, which primarily affects respiratory systems and eyes but can spread through other organs and the central nervous system, with a mortality rate ranging from 43% and 67%. (High priority.)
- Candida tropicalis: Globally distributed commensal yeast, common in human and animal microbiota causing no harm during normal health conditions but can produce infections like invasive candidiasis which has a mortality rate ranging from 55% to 60% in adults. (High priority.)
- Candida parapsilosis: Globally distributed commensal yeast, common in human and animal microbiota causing no harm in normal health conditions but can cause infections like invasive candidiasis, especially in critically ill and immunocompromised patients, and is associated with a mortality rate between 20% to 45%. (High priority.)
Over 150 million cases of severe fungal infections occur worldwide, according to the NCBI. There are approximately 1.7 million deaths a year associated with fungal infections. Antifungal drugs used for high-risk patients have caused some fungus to adapt, and has led to multi-drug resistant fungi, including some of the more deadly fungal pathogens like C. auris.
Interest in fungi has gained some traction following the hit HBO Max show The Last Of Us, which was based on a video game. Though that infection is caused by a parasitic fungus called cordyceps, in reality cordyceps is prevalent mainly in insects, and experts have said the risk of humans facing such a scenario is highly unlikely.
“If [the fungi] get into a hospital, they are very difficult to control and get out,” William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the Washington Post. “They can persist, smoldering, causing infections for a considerable period of time despite the best efforts of the infection control team and everyone else in the hospital.”
‘Dramatic’ Rise In Deadly Superbug Fungus Infections In U.S., CDC Report Says (Forbes)
The ‘Last Of Us’ Zombie Fungus Pandemic Is Fiction, But Experts Warn Fungi Are A Major—And Growing—Health Threat (Forbes)
|
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of “The Road to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” His updated audio edition of “On Tyranny” includes 20 new lessons about Ukraine.
And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.
We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with confidence was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I heard from my former students, now in government or in journalism, that they were glad to have taken Eastern European history. They said that they were a little less surprised than others by the war; that they had more reference points.
The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history reveals a larger problem. We know too little history. We have designed education to be about technical questions: the how of the world. And solving everyday problems is very important.
Opinions on the war in Ukraine after one year
But if we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise: 9/11, the financial crisis, the storming of the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine. When we are shocked out of the everyday but have no history, we grope for reference points, and become vulnerable to people who give us easy answers. The past then becomes a realm of myth, in which those with power generate narratives most convenient to themselves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told a story about the past that had nothing to do with history. Russia and Ukraine, according to him, were conceived together in a ruler’s baptism a thousand years ago. They shared the same culture, and therefore should be ruled by the same person. If anything else seemed to happen, it was not really history. Should Ukrainians not believe that they were Russians, this was the nefarious work of outsiders. Putin not only said such things; he had memory laws passed to prevent Russians from being challenged by history, and even had the word “Ukraine” stricken from textbooks.
As logic, this is circular; and as politics, it is tyrannical. If I can claim that Canadians are Americans because they speak the same language, or because we share a common history, that would strike us as an idiotic reason to order an invasion. When a dictator claims the power to define other people’s identity, then the question of their own freedom never arises. If identity is frozen forever at the whim of a ruler, citizens soon find themselves without choices.
As we observe where this logic led Russians, we begin to question the validity of such stories. But it shouldn’t have taken such an obvious atrocity for us to doubt. Until recently, far too many commentators were happy to go along with Putin: Russia and Ukraine were somehow eternally alike, people who spoke Russian were somehow Russians, culture as defined by a dictator was destiny.
It was surreal in a different way when millions of people joined my class online. Americans had recognized that something was wrong with the Russian myth but did not know how to fill the gap. It was heartening to hear, in the thousands of emails I received, that the gap could be filled by history. It was a lively semester; history was getting the students thinking. When we think historically, we recognize that political communities rise and fall, and that human choice — including the perverse choices of militarist tyrants — is always part of the story. We get better at taking in events as they come. We are awakened to the experience of others. For me personally, it was touching to hear from Ukrainians, including soldiers on the front line, who were listening to the class online.
Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense. Our entire Western civilization trajectory, from the Greeks forward, is clearer if we understand that Athens was fed by what is now southern Ukraine. The fantastic history of the Vikings becomes still more so when we understand that they founded a state in Kyiv. The age of exploration takes on a new dimension when we recognize that Polish and Russian powers made their empires by pushing east into the Eurasian landmass, where they ultimately met in Ukraine. The age of empire is completed by Nazi and Soviet neo-imperial projects, both of which had their focus in Ukraine. That horribly bloody confrontation made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world during the totalitarian era of 1933 to 1945. That and the Russification that followed have made the story of Ukraine difficult to tell, including for Ukrainians.
Until now, that is. Practically everything I said in my lectures came from the work of Ukrainian historians. Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of the best of them, has said for decades that Ukraine will survive once a new generation comes into its own. This has now happened, not only in my own field, but in journalism, civil society, business and politics. Ukraine is different from Russia thanks to its distinct history, including the history of these past 30 years, since the end of the Soviet Union. While Putin has pushed his country into the quicksand of myth, Ukrainians — with their votes, their protests and their defiance — have pushed their way into a confident sense of who they are.
As they make history, they remind us that we need history to understand them better, to understand this war better — and also understand ourselves better. Like the Ukrainians, we are living through a historical turning point. Like them, we will need to learn history and defy myth to make it to a democratic future.
One year of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Portraits of Ukraine: Every Ukrainian’s life has changed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion one year ago — in ways both big and small. They have learned to survive and support each other under extreme circumstances, in bomb shelters and hospitals, destroyed apartment complexes and ruined marketplaces. Scroll through portraits of Ukrainians reflecting on a year of loss, resilience and fear.
Battle of attrition: Over the past year, the war has morphed from a multi-front invasion that included Kyiv in the north to a conflict of attrition largely concentrated along an expanse of territory in the east and south. Follow the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces and take a look at where the fighting has been concentrated.
A year of living apart: Russia’s invasion, coupled with Ukraine’s martial law preventing fighting-age men from leaving the country, has forced agonizing decisions for millions of Ukrainian families about how to balance safety, duty and love, with once-intertwined lives having become unrecognizable. Here’s what a train station full of goodbyes looked like last year.
Deepening global divides: President Biden has trumpeted the reinvigorated Western alliance forged during the war as a “global coalition,” but a closer look suggests the world is far from united on issues raised by the Ukraine war. Evidence abounds that the effort to isolate Putin has failed and that sanctions haven’t stopped Russia, thanks to its oil and gas exports.
|
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Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of “The Road to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” His updated audio edition of “On Tyranny” includes 20 new lessons about Ukraine.
And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.
We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with confidence was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I heard from my former students, now in government or in journalism, that they were glad to have taken Eastern European history. They said that they were a little less surprised than others by the war; that they had more reference points.
The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history reveals a larger problem. We know too little history. We have designed education to be about technical questions: the how of the world. And solving everyday problems is very important.
Opinions on the war in Ukraine after one year
But if we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise: 9/11, the financial crisis, the storming of the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine. When we are shocked out of the everyday but have no history, we grope for reference points, and become vulnerable to people who give us easy answers. The past then becomes a realm of myth, in which those with power generate narratives most convenient to themselves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told a story about the past that had nothing to do with history. Russia and Ukraine, according to him, were conceived together in a ruler’s baptism a thousand years ago. They shared the same culture, and therefore should be ruled by the same person. If anything else seemed to happen, it was not really history. Should Ukrainians not believe that they were Russians, this was the nefarious work of outsiders. Putin not only said such things; he had memory laws passed to prevent Russians from being challenged by history, and even had the word “Ukraine” stricken from textbooks.
As logic, this is circular; and as politics, it is tyrannical. If I can claim that Canadians are Americans because they speak the same language, or
|
because we share a common history, that would strike us as an idiotic reason to order an invasion. When a dictator claims the power to define other people’s identity, then the question of their own freedom never arises. If identity is frozen forever at the whim of a ruler, citizens soon find themselves without choices.
As we observe where this logic led Russians, we begin to question the validity of such stories. But it shouldn’t have taken such an obvious atrocity for us to doubt. Until recently, far too many commentators were happy to go along with Putin: Russia and Ukraine were somehow eternally alike, people who spoke Russian were somehow Russians, culture as defined by a dictator was destiny.
It was surreal in a different way when millions of people joined my class online. Americans had recognized that something was wrong with the Russian myth but did not know how to fill the gap. It was heartening to hear, in the thousands of emails I received, that the gap could be filled by history. It was a lively semester; history was getting the students thinking. When we think historically, we recognize that political communities rise and fall, and that human choice — including the perverse choices of militarist tyrants — is always part of the story. We get better at taking in events as they come. We are awakened to the experience of others. For me personally, it was touching to hear from Ukrainians, including soldiers on the front line, who were listening to the class online.
Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense. Our entire Western civilization trajectory, from the Greeks forward, is clearer if we understand that Athens was fed by what is now southern Ukraine. The fantastic history of the Vikings becomes still more so when we understand that they founded a state in Kyiv. The age of exploration takes on a new dimension when we recognize that Polish and Russian powers made their empires by pushing east into the Eurasian landmass, where they ultimately met in Ukraine. The age of empire is completed by Nazi and Soviet neo-imperial projects, both of which had their focus in Ukraine. That horribly bloody confrontation made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world during the totalitarian era of 1933 to 1945. That and the Russification that followed have made the story of Ukraine difficult to tell, including for Ukrainians.
Until now, that is. Practically everything I said in my lectures came from the work of Ukrainian historians. Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of the best of them, has said for decades that Ukraine will survive once a new generation comes into its own. This has now happened, not only in my own field, but in journalism, civil society, business and politics. Ukraine is different from Russia thanks to its distinct history, including the history of these past 30 years, since the end of the Soviet Union. While Putin has pushed his country into the quicksand of myth, Ukrainians — with their votes, their protests and their defiance — have pushed their way into a confident sense of who they are.
As they make history, they remind us that we need history to understand them better, to understand this war better — and also understand ourselves better. Like the Ukrainians, we are living through a historical turning point. Like them, we will need to learn history and defy myth to make it to a democratic future.
One year of Russia’s war in Ukraine
Portraits of Ukraine: Every Ukrainian’s life has changed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion one year ago — in ways both big and small. They have learned to survive and support each other under extreme circumstances, in bomb shelters and hospitals, destroyed apartment complexes and ruined marketplaces. Scroll through portraits of Ukrainians reflecting on a year of loss, resilience and fear.
Battle of attrition: Over the past year, the war has morphed from a multi-front invasion that included Kyiv in the north to a conflict of attrition largely concentrated along an expanse of territory in the east and south. Follow the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces and take a look at where the fighting has been concentrated.
A year of living apart: Russia’s invasion, coupled with Ukraine’s martial law preventing fighting-age men from leaving the country, has forced agonizing decisions for millions of Ukrainian families about how to balance safety, duty and love, with once-intertwined lives having become unrecognizable. Here’s what a train station full of goodbyes looked like last year.
Deepening global divides: President Biden has trumpeted the reinvigorated Western alliance forged during the war as a “global coalition,” but a closer look suggests the world is far from united on issues raised by the Ukraine war. Evidence abounds that the effort to isolate Putin has failed and that sanctions haven’t stopped Russia, thanks to its oil and gas exports.
|
Leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration have issued a new call to action to the infant formula industry to protect babies from illnesses caused by Salmonella and Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria.
“This letter is intended to assist industry in improving the microbiological safety of powdered infant formula,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf and Susan Mayne, the director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote in the letter Wednesday.
The FDA urged compliance with formula requirements and regulations throughout the production process and with the notification process for when a contaminated or mislabeled formula leaves a facility. The agency also asked that companies notify the FDA when a formula product tests positive for Salmonella or Cronobacter.
The letter highlighted specific issues that need improvement at manufacturing facilities, such as reducing the amount of water in dry production areas, testing for harmful bacteria on environmental surfaces and ensuring that raw ingredients used in formulas are safe.
Facilities also need a corrective plan when pathogens such as Salmonella or Cronobacter are found in the environment or in the product, the FDA said.
The FDA’s food safety staff has met with powdered infant formula manufacturers “regularly” over the past two months, the agency said in a news release Wednesday.
“These meetings have allowed for a meaningful dialogue with manufacturers about their current food safety practices, including practices the FDA has observed during inspections, and opportunities for improvements,” it said.
But critics of the FDA say the areas of concern outlined in the letter are “basic food safety concepts.”
“The FDA is responsible for fulfilling its public health mission of ensuring all consumers are protected from foodborne illness. It is unfortunate infants had to get sick and die in order for the FDA to request companies to ‘ensure full compliance with all relevant regulations,’ ” said Mitzi Baum, CEO of the advocacy group Stop Foodborne Illness.
Most cases of Cronobacter infection are treatable with antibiotics, but the infection can lead to meningitis, sepsis and other devastating complications such as permanent brain damage. Last week, a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that infections from Cronobacter sakazakii can come from improper sanitation of breast pump equipment and a lack of safe storage and preparation of powdered infant formula at home.
Cronobacter bacteria was also at the center of the nationwide infant formula shortage last year.
Multiple popular brands of powdered formula were recalled and production at a major manufacturing plant was halted after the FDA received reports of four infections, including two deaths, among infants who had consumed formula from the Abbott Nutrition facility. An FDA investigation detected Cronobacter bacteria in the plant, but genetic testing couldn’t link that bacteria to the sick infants.
Since then, other brands of formula have been recalled due to bacteria risk, including 145,000 cans of Enfamil formula.
In January, the FDA proposed changes to its Human Foods Program, including new structures that would be led by a single director who would oversee food safety, policy and some regulatory duties and create a new center focused on nutrition.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
However, a group of key stakeholders from consumer organizations and food industry leaders criticized the FDA’s announcement, saying it indicated a continuation of “matrix management,” limiting any efficient decisions a new deputy commissioner could make.
Califf is “choosing business as usual instead of the bold changes we’ve adamantly advocated for that would transform the Foods Program from one of inaction and indecision to one of action,” Roberta Wagner, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the Consumer Brands Association and former FDA official, said at the time.
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Leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration have issued a new call to action to the infant formula industry to protect babies from illnesses caused by Salmonella and Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria.
“This letter is intended to assist industry in improving the microbiological safety of powdered infant formula,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf and Susan Mayne, the director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote in the letter Wednesday.
The FDA urged compliance with formula requirements and regulations throughout the production process and with the notification process for when a contaminated or mislabeled formula leaves a facility. The agency also asked that companies notify the FDA when a formula product tests positive for Salmonella or Cronobacter.
The letter highlighted specific issues that need improvement at manufacturing facilities, such as reducing the amount of water in dry production areas, testing for harmful bacteria on environmental surfaces and ensuring that raw ingredients used in formulas are safe.
Facilities also need a corrective plan when pathogens such as Salmonella or Cronobacter are found in the environment or in the product, the FDA said.
The FDA’s food safety staff has met with powdered infant formula manufacturers “regularly” over the past two months, the agency said in a news release Wednesday.
“These meetings have allowed for a meaningful dialogue with manufacturers about their current food safety practices, including practices the FDA has observed during inspections, and opportunities for improvements,” it said.
But critics of the FDA say the areas of concern outlined in the letter are “basic food safety concepts.”
“The FDA is responsible for fulfilling its public health mission of ensuring all consumers are protected from foodborne illness. It is unfortunate infants had to get sick and die in order for the FDA to request companies to ‘ensure full compliance with all relevant regulations,’ ” said Mitzi Baum, CEO of the advocacy group Stop Foodborne Illness.
Most cases of Cronobacter infection are treatable with antibiotics, but the infection can lead to meningitis, sepsis and other devastating complications such as permanent brain damage. Last week, a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that infections from Cronobacter sakazakii can come from improper sanitation of breast pump equipment and a lack of safe storage and preparation of powdered infant formula at home.
Cronobacter bacteria was also at the center of the nationwide infant formula shortage last year.
Multiple popular brands of powdered formula were recalled and production at a major manufacturing plant was halted after the FDA received reports of four infections, including two deaths, among infants who had consumed formula from the Abbott Nutrition facility. An FDA investigation detected
|
Cronobacter bacteria in the plant, but genetic testing couldn’t link that bacteria to the sick infants.
Since then, other brands of formula have been recalled due to bacteria risk, including 145,000 cans of Enfamil formula.
In January, the FDA proposed changes to its Human Foods Program, including new structures that would be led by a single director who would oversee food safety, policy and some regulatory duties and create a new center focused on nutrition.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
However, a group of key stakeholders from consumer organizations and food industry leaders criticized the FDA’s announcement, saying it indicated a continuation of “matrix management,” limiting any efficient decisions a new deputy commissioner could make.
Califf is “choosing business as usual instead of the bold changes we’ve adamantly advocated for that would transform the Foods Program from one of inaction and indecision to one of action,” Roberta Wagner, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the Consumer Brands Association and former FDA official, said at the time.
|
House where King planned Alabama civil rights marches moving to Michigan
An Alabama home where Martin Luther King Junior mapped out the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches has been sold to a historical museum in Michigan. The structure will be moved to a site near Detroit for preservation. Alabama Public Radio has covered the story of the so called “Jackson House” extensively. It was part of APR’s international award-winning documentary on the 50th anniversary of the death of MLK, and a follow-up feature by Gulf coast correspondent Lynn Oldshue.
APR reported during our documentary “The King of Alabama…
“This is the house that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived as he planned the Selma to Montgomery march,” says Jawana Jackson. That house is her family home, which has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1960s. It essentially became the headquarters for the civil rights movement. “so when Dr. King decided to do the Selma march several years later, he asked my parents if he could come and stay here and use this as a base of operation. And of course our lives changed drastically, from a house that had a mother and a father and a little girl, almost overnight became a house where the world came in.”
Jawana was about five at the time.
“And I wish I had been just a little older to understand the gravity – to understand the historical significance. To the world he was Martin Luther King, Jr. To me, he was Uncle Martin.”
Jawana runs the Jackson house as a museum and foundation. And it’s filled with artifacts from the era.
“Of the beds in this house, of course Uncle Martin slept in every one," she says. "And over the years my mother, for practical purposes, bought new mattresses and box springs. But this is the original mattress and box spring that was on the bed when he was here.”
And then there’s the spot where King saw all this effort pay off.
“The museum contains the very chair, the very television that Dr. King was sitting in the night that President Johnson announced that he would indeed sign the Voting Rights Act, which he did several months later in August of 1965.”
“You hear so much about the march, but not what went on behind the scenes,” says Elisa George. She’s part of a student group from Trinity Washington University touring the Jackson House. “And just to be able to be here and experience and feel the spirit of the people who planned it, and what they probably had to endure, and the changes their decisions made in this place, was very impactful for us.”
The Jackson House will be dismantled starting later this year and trucked more than 800 miles to The Henry Ford Museum's Greenfield Village in Dearborn. The project is expected to take up to three years. There were late-night visitors, phone calls and meetings at the house that was a safe haven for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders as they planned the Selma to Montgomery marches calling for Black voting rights. The role the Jackson House played was integral to the Civil Rights Movement, so Jackson contacted the The Henry Ford Museum near Detroit about a year ago to ask if it would take over the preservation of the Jackson House and its legacy.
"It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be," she told The Associated Press last week from her home in Pensacola, Florida.
Starting this year, the Jackson House will be dismantled piece-by-piece and trucked the more than 800 miles north to Dearborn, Michigan, where it will eventually be open to the public as part of the history museum. The project is expected to take up to three years. King was inside the home when President Lyndon Johnson announced a bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The house and artifacts, including King's neckties and pajamas, and the chair where he sat while watching Johnson's televised announcement, will be part of the acquisition by The Henry Ford. The purchase price is confidential.
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House where King planned Alabama civil rights marches moving to Michigan
An Alabama home where Martin Luther King Junior mapped out the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches has been sold to a historical museum in Michigan. The structure will be moved to a site near Detroit for preservation. Alabama Public Radio has covered the story of the so called “Jackson House” extensively. It was part of APR’s international award-winning documentary on the 50th anniversary of the death of MLK, and a follow-up feature by Gulf coast correspondent Lynn Oldshue.
APR reported during our documentary “The King of Alabama…
“This is the house that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived as he planned the Selma to Montgomery march,” says Jawana Jackson. That house is her family home, which has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1960s. It essentially became the headquarters for the civil rights movement. “so when Dr. King decided to do the Selma march several years later, he asked my parents if he could come and stay here and use this as a base of operation. And of course our lives changed drastically, from a house that had a mother and a father and a little girl, almost overnight became a house where the world came in.”
Jawana was about five at the time.
“And I wish I had been just a little older to understand the gravity – to understand the historical significance. To the world he was Martin Luther King, Jr. To me, he was Uncle Martin.”
Jawana runs the Jackson house as a museum and foundation. And it’s filled with artifacts from the era.
“Of the beds in this house, of course Uncle Martin slept in every one," she says. "And over the years my mother, for practical purposes, bought new mattresses and box springs. But this is the original mattress and box spring that was on the bed when he was here.”
And then there’s the spot where King saw all this effort pay off.
“The museum contains the very chair, the very television that Dr. King was sitting in the night that President Johnson announced that he would indeed sign the Voting Rights Act, which he did several months later in August of 1965.”
“You hear so much about the march, but not what went on behind the scenes,” says Elisa George. She’s part of a student group from Trinity Washington University touring the Jackson House. “And just to be able to be here and experience and feel the spirit of
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the people who planned it, and what they probably had to endure, and the changes their decisions made in this place, was very impactful for us.”
The Jackson House will be dismantled starting later this year and trucked more than 800 miles to The Henry Ford Museum's Greenfield Village in Dearborn. The project is expected to take up to three years. There were late-night visitors, phone calls and meetings at the house that was a safe haven for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders as they planned the Selma to Montgomery marches calling for Black voting rights. The role the Jackson House played was integral to the Civil Rights Movement, so Jackson contacted the The Henry Ford Museum near Detroit about a year ago to ask if it would take over the preservation of the Jackson House and its legacy.
"It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be," she told The Associated Press last week from her home in Pensacola, Florida.
Starting this year, the Jackson House will be dismantled piece-by-piece and trucked the more than 800 miles north to Dearborn, Michigan, where it will eventually be open to the public as part of the history museum. The project is expected to take up to three years. King was inside the home when President Lyndon Johnson announced a bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The house and artifacts, including King's neckties and pajamas, and the chair where he sat while watching Johnson's televised announcement, will be part of the acquisition by The Henry Ford. The purchase price is confidential.
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When Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the return of “panda diplomacy” in November during the APEC summit in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed saw an opportunity.
In an ebullient letter sent to Xi just weeks later, Breed asked China to consider San Francisco Zoo as a new home for the rare and fuzzy animals. Although other U.S. zoos, including the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., have previously hosted pandas, San Francisco never hosted one long term.
“To grow our friendship, to greatly benefit our youth, and to continue our joint efforts on panda conservation,” Breed said in the Dec. 1 letter, “I propose … that we establish a partnership in which our San Francisco Zoo will host your cherished diplomats—Giant Pandas.”
Native to China, pandas are considered a vulnerable species, with only about 2,500 left in the world, mostly in the wilderness and about 600 of them in zoos or under human-controlled habitats around the world.
In China, pandas are called a “national treasure,” and since the country’s opening in the 1970s, they have become a symbol of China itself. Beijing’s decadeslong “panda diplomacy” initiative has lent the animals to foreign zoos, and a panda was a mascot of the 2008 Summer Olympics, hosted by Beijing.
However, in recent years, China has been returning many of the pandas it lent to overseas zoos as loan agreements have run out. The National Zoo, which has hosted pandas since 1972, sent its two pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, back to China in November, leaving Atlanta as the only U.S. zoo with the gentle, six-fingered herbivores.
“We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation,” Xi said, “and to do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians to deepen friendly ties between our peoples.”
Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, said last week that a panda’s return to California within the year is on track, though he did not specify at which zoo.
But sources familiar with the matter confirmed that officials from both countries are working to bring at least one panda to San Francisco by 2025. The process takes time but is on a "good track," they said, adding that Chinese engineers have already visited San Francisco Zoo to assess how to create a proper environment for pandas at the site.
The zoo did not respond to a request for comment.
Panda Proposal Was Hatched Before APEC
Mason Lee, a spokesperson for Breed, said the city had been planning to request a panda from China months before APEC.
“Seizing every opportunity to make San Francisco shine has always been one of Mayor Breed’s top priorities,” Lee told The Standard. “She utilized every interaction with representatives from the Chinese government during APEC to discuss the [panda] matter further, leading to her direct ask to President Xi Jinping as she was bidding him farewell on the SFO tarmac.”
Breed went to the airport and was photographed shaking hands with Xi as he departed for Beijing after APEC. Gov. Gavin Newsom also made a high-profile visit to China in October.
Even San Francisco's Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker who has long been an ally of Taiwan and critic of Beijing, admitted that she would be happy to see a panda coming.
“As excited as I am about a panda, and that’s pretty exciting,” Pelosi said at an APEC dinner event hosted by Taiwan’s officials in San Francisco, “it’s no substitute for democracy."
San Diego Zoo leaders remain optimistic about their chances for a panda or two.
“We are excited to hear of President Xi’s commitment in continuing the giant panda conservation efforts between our two countries,” Paul A. Baribault, president and chief executive officer of the San Diego Zoo, said in a statement to The Standard. “Conservation starts with people, and our team is committed to working with our partners to welcome the next generation of giant pandas to our zoo.”
But since APEC, the San Francisco Bay Area has become a focus for efforts to improve the U.S.-China relationship, and the arrival of panda could lend further momentum.
In a Jan. 3 speech, China’s consul general in San Francisco, Jianmin Zhang, sounded hopeful about the future of U.S.-China relations. Zhang noted that since APEC, multiple Chinese provincial leaders have visited San Francisco and, likewise, more American delegations have expressed interest in visiting China.
Is the Zoo Ready?
Hosting pandas is an expensive proposition. Host zoos typically pay a fee that can range from $500,000 to $1 million per year per panda, not to mention the daily supply of bamboo and other health care expenses.
San Francisco Zoo, in a chilly and foggy area near the coastline, can be a good fit for pandas as they prefer cooler temperatures than heat. But still, the zoo likely needs to build a multimillion-dollar structure to accommodate any pandas as well. Atlanta’s zoo spent $7 million to build its panda habitat in 1999.
According to the San Francisco Zoo’s website, it has already created an Asian conservation zone, and Breed said in her letter to Xi that the area was specifically designed to contain a space for a “Panda Reserve.”
If a panda or two were to come to San Francisco, it wouldn’t be the first time the animals have made an appearance here.
The first pandas in the United States stopped in San Francisco in 1936 before going on a national tour. During the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, two pandas were lent out in support of the event, stopping by the San Francisco Zoo for three months. Known as Yun Yun and Ying Xin, they attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and that period remains the busiest period the San Francisco Zoo has ever experienced, according to Breed.
“San Francisco does not simply stand ready,” Breed said in the letter to Xi. “We stand with both confidence and excitement that we can be great partners in panda conservation.”
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When Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the return of “panda diplomacy” in November during the APEC summit in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed saw an opportunity.
In an ebullient letter sent to Xi just weeks later, Breed asked China to consider San Francisco Zoo as a new home for the rare and fuzzy animals. Although other U.S. zoos, including the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., have previously hosted pandas, San Francisco never hosted one long term.
“To grow our friendship, to greatly benefit our youth, and to continue our joint efforts on panda conservation,” Breed said in the Dec. 1 letter, “I propose … that we establish a partnership in which our San Francisco Zoo will host your cherished diplomats—Giant Pandas.”
Native to China, pandas are considered a vulnerable species, with only about 2,500 left in the world, mostly in the wilderness and about 600 of them in zoos or under human-controlled habitats around the world.
In China, pandas are called a “national treasure,” and since the country’s opening in the 1970s, they have become a symbol of China itself. Beijing’s decadeslong “panda diplomacy” initiative has lent the animals to foreign zoos, and a panda was a mascot of the 2008 Summer Olympics, hosted by Beijing.
However, in recent years, China has been returning many of the pandas it lent to overseas zoos as loan agreements have run out. The National Zoo, which has hosted pandas since 1972, sent its two pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, back to China in November, leaving Atlanta as the only U.S. zoo with the gentle, six-fingered herbivores.
“We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation,” Xi said, “and to do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians to deepen friendly ties between our peoples.”
Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, said last week that a panda’s return to California within the year is on track, though he did not specify at which zoo.
But sources familiar with the matter confirmed that officials from both countries are working to bring at least one panda to San Francisco by 2025. The process takes time but is on a "good track," they said, adding that Chinese engineers have already visited San Francisco Zoo to assess how to create a
|
proper environment for pandas at the site.
The zoo did not respond to a request for comment.
Panda Proposal Was Hatched Before APEC
Mason Lee, a spokesperson for Breed, said the city had been planning to request a panda from China months before APEC.
“Seizing every opportunity to make San Francisco shine has always been one of Mayor Breed’s top priorities,” Lee told The Standard. “She utilized every interaction with representatives from the Chinese government during APEC to discuss the [panda] matter further, leading to her direct ask to President Xi Jinping as she was bidding him farewell on the SFO tarmac.”
Breed went to the airport and was photographed shaking hands with Xi as he departed for Beijing after APEC. Gov. Gavin Newsom also made a high-profile visit to China in October.
Even San Francisco's Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker who has long been an ally of Taiwan and critic of Beijing, admitted that she would be happy to see a panda coming.
“As excited as I am about a panda, and that’s pretty exciting,” Pelosi said at an APEC dinner event hosted by Taiwan’s officials in San Francisco, “it’s no substitute for democracy."
San Diego Zoo leaders remain optimistic about their chances for a panda or two.
“We are excited to hear of President Xi’s commitment in continuing the giant panda conservation efforts between our two countries,” Paul A. Baribault, president and chief executive officer of the San Diego Zoo, said in a statement to The Standard. “Conservation starts with people, and our team is committed to working with our partners to welcome the next generation of giant pandas to our zoo.”
But since APEC, the San Francisco Bay Area has become a focus for efforts to improve the U.S.-China relationship, and the arrival of panda could lend further momentum.
In a Jan. 3 speech, China’s consul general in San Francisco, Jianmin Zhang, sounded hopeful about the future of U.S.-China relations. Zhang noted that since APEC, multiple Chinese provincial leaders have visited San Francisco and, likewise, more American delegations have expressed interest in visiting China.
Is the Zoo Ready?
Hosting pandas is an expensive proposition. Host zoos typically pay a fee that can range from $500,000 to $1 million per year per panda, not to mention the daily supply of bamboo and other health care expenses.
San Francisco Zoo, in a chilly and foggy area near the coastline, can be a good fit for pandas as they prefer cooler temperatures than heat. But still, the zoo likely needs to build a multimillion-dollar structure to accommodate any pandas as well. Atlanta’s zoo spent $7 million to build its panda habitat in 1999.
According to the San Francisco Zoo’s website, it has already created an Asian conservation zone, and Breed said in her letter to Xi that the area was specifically designed to contain a space for a “Panda Reserve.”
If a panda or two were to come to San Francisco, it wouldn’t be the first time the animals have made an appearance here.
The first pandas in the United States stopped in San Francisco in 1936 before going on a national tour. During the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, two pandas were lent out in support of the event, stopping by the San Francisco Zoo for three months. Known as Yun Yun and Ying Xin, they attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and that period remains the busiest period the San Francisco Zoo has ever experienced, according to Breed.
“San Francisco does not simply stand ready,” Breed said in the letter to Xi. “We stand with both confidence and excitement that we can be great partners in panda conservation.”
|
The promise of cities is that they have a lot more stuff to do, things to buy and sell, places to work, and people to meet than towns and villages. It's why large metros manage to be richer, more attractive places than smaller, isolated communities, despite all the traffic, noise, crime, pollution, and general urban dysfunction that inevitably comes with them.
It's strange then that all across the world, city planners and the politicians under their sway keep trying to replace the interconnected, agglomerated city with sealed-off, self-contained urban villages no one will have to leave.
Last week, the Scottish Parliament overwhelmingly approved a new national planning framework that prioritizes the creation of "20-minute neighborhoods" where residents can access jobs, housing, shopping, health and education facilities, and even food-producing gardens in a 20-minute walk or bike ride.
This national framework serves as a guideline for local councils that produce more precise plans of where new development is allowed and approve individual development applications.
Scottish national authorities are hoping that by encouraging local authorities to reject out-of-town retail outlets and other projects people would be willing to drive to, they can cut emissions and create more "sustainable and fair" cities.
Scotland's 20-minute neighborhood plan is a slightly more modest version of its intellectual inspiration—the 15-minute city.
The term was first coined by Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno in 2016, and riffs off preexisting ideas of an "urban village" or "smart city" where travel and emissions can be reduced or eliminated through the creation of planned neighborhoods that contain everything one might need within a few blocks.
"The idea is to design or redesign cities so that in a maximum of 15 minutes, on foot or by bicycle, city dwellers can enjoy most of what constitutes urban life: access to their jobs, their homes, food, health, education, culture, and recreation," said Moreno during a 2020 TED Talk.
A March 2022 article published by the World Economic Forum traces the "surprising stickiness" of the 15-minute city all the way back to 19th-century Scotsman Patrick Geddes' vision for "Eutopia." Through proper planning, Geddes hoped that Eutopian towns and cities could transition society away from "money wages" and the messy individual plans they encouraged and toward a more communal, energy-conserving built environment of "folk, work, and place."
Geddes' contemporary countrymen aren't the only ones taking to the idea.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made the creation of a 15-minute city the centerpiece of her 2020 reelection campaign. Former Obama administration Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed 2021 New York City mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan ran on the idea as well. Seattle has long pursued a similar urban village strategy to guide its planning and zoning decisions, all the in name of reducing car travel and emissions.
Saudi Arabia's much-publicized The Line takes the 15-minute city idea to its extremely silly logical end-point. The $500 billion pet project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would create a brand new, linear city in the middle of the desert in which every destination is reachable by a 20-minute train ride, and all the necessities of daily life (schools, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc.) can be reached within five minutes.
Part of the "stickiness" of the 15-minute city is pretty easy to understand. Access to everyday amenities within a short trip is something most people prize. Fortunately, it's easy to find these neighborhoods where zoning regulations don't make them illegal.
In a 2022 response to Moreno, New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management researcher Alain Bertaud notes that most Parisians have already achieved access to a wide number of grocery stores, bakeries, and the like within walking distance without the help of invasive planners.
"The abundance and variety of bakeries are not due to meticulous municipal planning but to market mechanisms," he writes. "If Parisians were to prefer herring to croissants for breakfast in the future, the market would adjust, and herring merchants will gradually replace the bakeries without any 'redesign' of Paris."
Paris lacks zoning rules that exclude commercial uses like bakeries and food stores from residential areas. It's also a very dense place. That means bakers and grocers can legally establish themselves within walking distance of many, many customers.
But even in sprawling, tightly zoned America, the median distance to the nearest food store is just under one mile. That's on the outer edge of walking distance for most people and a very convenient bike or car trip for everyone else.
If the U.S. had fewer zoning restrictions that cap densities and separate residential and commercial uses, odds are there'd be a lot more neighborhoods like central Paris where most amenities could be reached just by walking.
So, the main benefit of the 15-minute city could be achieved without planners' grand designs, whether in Scotland or the United States. Most other elements of the 15-minute city would fail because the concept misunderstands the purpose of cities.
Cities are labor markets, as Bertaud likes to say.
Their primary function is to connect people with highly particular skills to employers with highly particular demands for labor. You need a wide universe of workers and firms for this division of labor to be successful. (If that matchmaking of capital and labor could happen on the scale of a neighborhood, there'd be no need for cities at all.)
Given this, 15-minute city proponents' plan of clustering jobs and residents together is doomed to fail at the stated goal of reducing travel. Living next to an office complex doesn't guarantee that there's a job for you there. You also might not want to rent an apartment next to your work or move every time you change jobs.
In his book Order Without Design, Bertaud gives an example of a mixed-use urban village built on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea, that was supposed to eliminate residents' need to commute. In reality, the people who moved into the village's housing continued to commute to their jobs in the city center, while the village's office space was rented by companies whose workers traveled in from downtown.
A similar dynamic is at play for other urban amenities.
While variety is nice, grocery stores are relatively interchangeable. Unless someone has very particular tastes or needs, they'll be willing to settle for shopping at the closest one. But more specialized retail outlets and service providers that serve a smaller percentage of the population need a wider universe of customers to draw on to be profitable. Absent extreme levels of density, they'll need customers coming from outside that 15-minute walkshed to stay viable.
So, while there's certainly nothing objectionable about mixed-use neighborhoods of offices, shops, and homes, the idea that the existence of these neighborhoods will eliminate, or even substantially reduce, commuting is wrong. That means plans to substantially cut emissions just by creating these neighborhoods are also destined to fail.
These doomed schemes to create 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighborhoods aren't costless either if they're paired with restrictive regulations.
If Scotland's new planning framework forces cities and towns to reject new suburban office parks and outlet malls, they won't necessarily be reducing driving. But they will be increasing the scarcity, and therefore cost, of the existing offices and outlet malls people are already driving to.
Scotland's national framework also endorses restrictions on housing production that make the realistic elements of 20-minute neighborhoods less feasible.
Its "quality homes" plank says that new market-rate development will only generally be supported where 25 percent of new units are provided at affordable rates. Similar inclusionary zoning policies in the U.S. act as a major tax on new development.
Scotland's planning framework also says that developments of 50 or more units have to produce a Statement of Community Benefit detailing the improvements they'll make to local infrastructure, amenities, and affordable housing. Individual development in existing neighborhoods will be allowed if they "do not have a detrimental impact on the character or environmental quality of the home and the surrounding area in terms of size, design and materials."
Making new housing development a more expensive, cumbersome process means fewer homes get built and fewer people end up living within the "20-minute neighborhoods" Scottish planners and politicians are trying to encourage.
There's an incredible paternalism to the idea of the 15-minute city and the idea that planners can organize people's lives on such a minute level.
Bertaud, in his response to Moreno, notes that the distance one travels to work each day is the product of the tradeoffs an individual makes between employment options, residential environment, housing prices, school quality, and more.
From Scotland to Saudi Arabia and Paris, planners have become convinced that the right tradeoff for everyone ends up with all these things being 15 minutes (or 20 minutes or 5 minutes) away. Cities, and the people who live in them, are a little more complicated than that.
|
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The promise of cities is that they have a lot more stuff to do, things to buy and sell, places to work, and people to meet than towns and villages. It's why large metros manage to be richer, more attractive places than smaller, isolated communities, despite all the traffic, noise, crime, pollution, and general urban dysfunction that inevitably comes with them.
It's strange then that all across the world, city planners and the politicians under their sway keep trying to replace the interconnected, agglomerated city with sealed-off, self-contained urban villages no one will have to leave.
Last week, the Scottish Parliament overwhelmingly approved a new national planning framework that prioritizes the creation of "20-minute neighborhoods" where residents can access jobs, housing, shopping, health and education facilities, and even food-producing gardens in a 20-minute walk or bike ride.
This national framework serves as a guideline for local councils that produce more precise plans of where new development is allowed and approve individual development applications.
Scottish national authorities are hoping that by encouraging local authorities to reject out-of-town retail outlets and other projects people would be willing to drive to, they can cut emissions and create more "sustainable and fair" cities.
Scotland's 20-minute neighborhood plan is a slightly more modest version of its intellectual inspiration—the 15-minute city.
The term was first coined by Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno in 2016, and riffs off preexisting ideas of an "urban village" or "smart city" where travel and emissions can be reduced or eliminated through the creation of planned neighborhoods that contain everything one might need within a few blocks.
"The idea is to design or redesign cities so that in a maximum of 15 minutes, on foot or by bicycle, city dwellers can enjoy most of what constitutes urban life: access to their jobs, their homes, food, health, education, culture, and recreation," said Moreno during a 2020 TED Talk.
A March 2022 article published by the World Economic Forum traces the "surprising stickiness" of the 15-minute city all the way back to 19th-century Scotsman Patrick Geddes' vision for "Eutopia." Through proper planning, Geddes hoped that Eutopian towns and cities could transition society away from "money wages" and the messy individual plans they encouraged and toward a more communal, energy-conserving built environment of "folk, work, and place."
Geddes
|
' contemporary countrymen aren't the only ones taking to the idea.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made the creation of a 15-minute city the centerpiece of her 2020 reelection campaign. Former Obama administration Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed 2021 New York City mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan ran on the idea as well. Seattle has long pursued a similar urban village strategy to guide its planning and zoning decisions, all the in name of reducing car travel and emissions.
Saudi Arabia's much-publicized The Line takes the 15-minute city idea to its extremely silly logical end-point. The $500 billion pet project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would create a brand new, linear city in the middle of the desert in which every destination is reachable by a 20-minute train ride, and all the necessities of daily life (schools, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc.) can be reached within five minutes.
Part of the "stickiness" of the 15-minute city is pretty easy to understand. Access to everyday amenities within a short trip is something most people prize. Fortunately, it's easy to find these neighborhoods where zoning regulations don't make them illegal.
In a 2022 response to Moreno, New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management researcher Alain Bertaud notes that most Parisians have already achieved access to a wide number of grocery stores, bakeries, and the like within walking distance without the help of invasive planners.
"The abundance and variety of bakeries are not due to meticulous municipal planning but to market mechanisms," he writes. "If Parisians were to prefer herring to croissants for breakfast in the future, the market would adjust, and herring merchants will gradually replace the bakeries without any 'redesign' of Paris."
Paris lacks zoning rules that exclude commercial uses like bakeries and food stores from residential areas. It's also a very dense place. That means bakers and grocers can legally establish themselves within walking distance of many, many customers.
But even in sprawling, tightly zoned America, the median distance to the nearest food store is just under one mile. That's on the outer edge of walking distance for most people and a very convenient bike or car trip for everyone else.
If the U.S. had fewer zoning restrictions that cap densities and separate residential and commercial uses, odds are there'd be a lot more neighborhoods like central Paris where most amenities could be reached just by walking.
So, the main benefit of the 15-minute city could be achieved without planners' grand designs, whether in Scotland or the United States. Most other elements of the 15-minute city would fail because the concept misunderstands the purpose of cities.
Cities are labor markets, as Bertaud likes to say.
Their primary function is to connect people with highly particular skills to employers with highly particular demands for labor. You need a wide universe of workers and firms for this division of labor to be successful. (If that matchmaking of capital and labor could happen on the scale of a neighborhood, there'd be no need for cities at all.)
Given this, 15-minute city proponents' plan of clustering jobs and residents together is doomed to fail at the stated goal of reducing travel. Living next to an office complex doesn't guarantee that there's a job for you there. You also might not want to rent an apartment next to your work or move every time you change jobs.
In his book Order Without Design, Bertaud gives an example of a mixed-use urban village built on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea, that was supposed to eliminate residents' need to commute. In reality, the people who moved into the village's housing continued to commute to their jobs in the city center, while the village's office space was rented by companies whose workers traveled in from downtown.
A similar dynamic is at play for other urban amenities.
While variety is nice, grocery stores are relatively interchangeable. Unless someone has very particular tastes or needs, they'll be willing to settle for shopping at the closest one. But more specialized retail outlets and service providers that serve a smaller percentage of the population need a wider universe of customers to draw on to be profitable. Absent extreme levels of density, they'll need customers coming from outside that 15-minute walkshed to stay viable.
So, while there's certainly nothing objectionable about mixed-use neighborhoods of offices, shops, and homes, the idea that the existence of these neighborhoods will eliminate, or even substantially reduce, commuting is wrong. That means plans to substantially cut emissions just by creating these neighborhoods are also destined to fail.
These doomed schemes to create 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighborhoods aren't costless either if they're paired with restrictive regulations.
If Scotland's new planning framework forces cities and towns to reject new suburban office parks and outlet malls, they won't necessarily be reducing driving. But they will be increasing the scarcity, and therefore cost, of the existing offices and outlet malls people are already driving to.
Scotland's national framework also endorses restrictions on housing production that make the realistic elements of 20-minute neighborhoods less feasible.
Its "quality homes" plank says that new market-rate development will only generally be supported where 25 percent of new units are provided at affordable rates. Similar inclusionary zoning policies in the U.S. act as a major tax on new development.
Scotland's planning framework also says that developments of 50 or more units have to produce a Statement of Community Benefit detailing the improvements they'll make to local infrastructure, amenities, and affordable housing. Individual development in existing neighborhoods will be allowed if they "do not have a detrimental impact on the character or environmental quality of the home and the surrounding area in terms of size, design and materials."
Making new housing development a more expensive, cumbersome process means fewer homes get built and fewer people end up living within the "20-minute neighborhoods" Scottish planners and politicians are trying to encourage.
There's an incredible paternalism to the idea of the 15-minute city and the idea that planners can organize people's lives on such a minute level.
Bertaud, in his response to Moreno, notes that the distance one travels to work each day is the product of the tradeoffs an individual makes between employment options, residential environment, housing prices, school quality, and more.
From Scotland to Saudi Arabia and Paris, planners have become convinced that the right tradeoff for everyone ends up with all these things being 15 minutes (or 20 minutes or 5 minutes) away. Cities, and the people who live in them, are a little more complicated than that.
|
McCurdy: Despite differences, King, Ali 'still brothers' who changed America
If someone were to travel back in time to the 1960s and tap anyone on the shoulder and whisper this news, no one would believe the message.
Within a generation, America will celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday. And, oh yeah, Muhammad Ali — that guy so many of you still derisively call Cassius Clay — will die an old man as one of the most beloved figures in American and world history.
Crazy. Impossible. Absurd.
Be reflective. Be honest. For anyone who lived while these two men both walked the Earth at the same time, it's inconceivable to think that within decades, the memory of King and the life of Ali would be what it is today.
That both came from opposite ends of the struggle and ended in the same place in the world's conscience speaks to the character of each man.
King was the leader of the Civil Rights movement starting in the 1950s and continuing until his assassination in 1968. He preached about inclusion and integration, and he led protests and marches to highlight the injustices Black people endured in this country.
Ali was the outspoken heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He joined the Nation of Islam, changed his name to reflect his change in self and spoke of Black pride and power. He wasn't interested in desegregation, only true freedom.
"All I want is peace — peace for myself and peace for the world. I don't hate any man, black or white. I just want to live with my people. ," Ali is quoted as saying in a 1964 interview that Thomas Hauser collected in his definitive book, "Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times."
He continued: "I don't believe in forcing integration. I don't want to go where I'm not wanted."
That was the opposite of what King and his followers wanted. King's goal was to integrate all facets of life, be it schools, employment, transportation, housing, the government, the ballot box.
And that's where the two icons clashed.
"People are always telling me what a good example I could set for my people if I just wasn't a Muslim," Ali said. "I've heard over and over, how come I couldn't be like (previous great boxers) Joe Louis and Sugar Ray (Robinson). Well, they're gone now, and the Black man's condition is just the same, ain't it? We're all catching hell."
Ali refused to play a part in King's March of Washington, taking the lead of his friend and mentor Malcolm X.
"I had respect for Martin Luther King and all the other civil rights leaders, but I was taking a different road," Ali is quoted in Hauser's book.
King was rankled by Ali's sentiment, as Hayes Gardner of the Louisville Courier Journal wrote a year ago. King saw Ali as a loquacious young man with an important pulpit being the heavyweight champion of the world. Ali was a potential ally in the cause, but instead, King would get no help from the champ.
"When he joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X, he became a champion of racial segregation, and that is what we are fighting against,” King said at a conference in Detroit, reported by the Associated Press at the time. “I think perhaps Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skills and do less talking."
Yet through all the differences of opinion, the two were friendly toward one another in private. We know King sent Ali telegrams of congratulations early in his pro boxing career, and in the mid-1960s the two enjoyed phone conversations, which we've learned from FBI notes taken while wiretapping King.
In one conversation, noted in Hauser's book, Ali and King exchanged pleasantries; King congratulated Ali on his recent marriage; Ali invited King to an upcoming fight; Ali called King his brother and said "he's with him 100 percent, but can't take any chances, and that MLK should take care of himself ... and watch out for them whities."
Soon enough Ali and King publicly found a common cause — protesting the escalating war in Viet Nam.
Ali refused induction into the Army via the draft and lost his career over it. King was also outspoken against the war, and in 1967, the two met face-to-face in a Louisville hotel.
Afterward, as Gardner reported last year, the two met with reporters who wondered what they spoke about.
"Nothing, just friends, just like (Nikita) Kruschev and (John F.) Kennedy and everybody," Ali said while making King laugh. “When the people, all of the politicians, all of the white racists come together, although they believe different, they think different, whites can come together and discuss the common cause, but whenever a few of us come together, the world is shook up."
Indeed the two shook up the world. In a 1966 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King. If a similar poll was taken of Ali, it would have been worse.
Too many in America viewed them as Public Enemies No. 1 and 2.
“As Muhammad Ali has just said, we are all victims of the same system of oppression, and even though we may have different religious beliefs, this does not at all bring about a difference in terms of our concerns," King said after the Louisville meeting.
A year later King died from an assassin's bullet. Soon, public opinion of the war shifted. Ali won his court case regarding the draft and regained his career. In the 1970s, Ali drifted away from the Nation of Islam and remade his image, becoming a darling of pop culture.
By 1983, none other than President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law, and Ali was finished with boxing, living on the world's stage as an advocate for the underprivileged and a promoter of peace.
More so, in a 2011 Gallup Poll, King was viewed favorably by 94 percent of Americans, while in 2016, Ali died a hero to the masses.
King and Ali weren't two men ahead of their times. Instead, they were two men who forced time and sentiment to catch up to them.
"Still brothers," Ali said with King standing next to him in Louisville. "Still brothers."
It was a remarkable friendship and a remarkable change of sentiment by everyone living in their time and since.
Rob McCurdy is the sports writer at the Marion Star and can be reached at <email-pii>, 419-610-0998, Twitter @McMotorsport and Instagram @rob_mccurdy_star.
|
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McCurdy: Despite differences, King, Ali 'still brothers' who changed America
If someone were to travel back in time to the 1960s and tap anyone on the shoulder and whisper this news, no one would believe the message.
Within a generation, America will celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday. And, oh yeah, Muhammad Ali — that guy so many of you still derisively call Cassius Clay — will die an old man as one of the most beloved figures in American and world history.
Crazy. Impossible. Absurd.
Be reflective. Be honest. For anyone who lived while these two men both walked the Earth at the same time, it's inconceivable to think that within decades, the memory of King and the life of Ali would be what it is today.
That both came from opposite ends of the struggle and ended in the same place in the world's conscience speaks to the character of each man.
King was the leader of the Civil Rights movement starting in the 1950s and continuing until his assassination in 1968. He preached about inclusion and integration, and he led protests and marches to highlight the injustices Black people endured in this country.
Ali was the outspoken heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He joined the Nation of Islam, changed his name to reflect his change in self and spoke of Black pride and power. He wasn't interested in desegregation, only true freedom.
"All I want is peace — peace for myself and peace for the world. I don't hate any man, black or white. I just want to live with my people. ," Ali is quoted as saying in a 1964 interview that Thomas Hauser collected in his definitive book, "Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times."
He continued: "I don't believe in forcing integration. I don't want to go where I'm not wanted."
That was the opposite of what King and his followers wanted. King's goal was to integrate all facets of life, be it schools, employment, transportation, housing, the government, the ballot box.
And that's where the two icons clashed.
"People are always telling me what a good example I could set for my people if I just wasn't a Muslim," Ali said. "I've heard over and over, how come I couldn't be like (previous great boxers) Joe Louis and Sugar Ray (Robinson). Well, they're
|
gone now, and the Black man's condition is just the same, ain't it? We're all catching hell."
Ali refused to play a part in King's March of Washington, taking the lead of his friend and mentor Malcolm X.
"I had respect for Martin Luther King and all the other civil rights leaders, but I was taking a different road," Ali is quoted in Hauser's book.
King was rankled by Ali's sentiment, as Hayes Gardner of the Louisville Courier Journal wrote a year ago. King saw Ali as a loquacious young man with an important pulpit being the heavyweight champion of the world. Ali was a potential ally in the cause, but instead, King would get no help from the champ.
"When he joined the Black Muslims and started calling himself Cassius X, he became a champion of racial segregation, and that is what we are fighting against,” King said at a conference in Detroit, reported by the Associated Press at the time. “I think perhaps Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skills and do less talking."
Yet through all the differences of opinion, the two were friendly toward one another in private. We know King sent Ali telegrams of congratulations early in his pro boxing career, and in the mid-1960s the two enjoyed phone conversations, which we've learned from FBI notes taken while wiretapping King.
In one conversation, noted in Hauser's book, Ali and King exchanged pleasantries; King congratulated Ali on his recent marriage; Ali invited King to an upcoming fight; Ali called King his brother and said "he's with him 100 percent, but can't take any chances, and that MLK should take care of himself ... and watch out for them whities."
Soon enough Ali and King publicly found a common cause — protesting the escalating war in Viet Nam.
Ali refused induction into the Army via the draft and lost his career over it. King was also outspoken against the war, and in 1967, the two met face-to-face in a Louisville hotel.
Afterward, as Gardner reported last year, the two met with reporters who wondered what they spoke about.
"Nothing, just friends, just like (Nikita) Kruschev and (John F.) Kennedy and everybody," Ali said while making King laugh. “When the people, all of the politicians, all of the white racists come together, although they believe different, they think different, whites can come together and discuss the common cause, but whenever a few of us come together, the world is shook up."
Indeed the two shook up the world. In a 1966 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King. If a similar poll was taken of Ali, it would have been worse.
Too many in America viewed them as Public Enemies No. 1 and 2.
“As Muhammad Ali has just said, we are all victims of the same system of oppression, and even though we may have different religious beliefs, this does not at all bring about a difference in terms of our concerns," King said after the Louisville meeting.
A year later King died from an assassin's bullet. Soon, public opinion of the war shifted. Ali won his court case regarding the draft and regained his career. In the 1970s, Ali drifted away from the Nation of Islam and remade his image, becoming a darling of pop culture.
By 1983, none other than President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law, and Ali was finished with boxing, living on the world's stage as an advocate for the underprivileged and a promoter of peace.
More so, in a 2011 Gallup Poll, King was viewed favorably by 94 percent of Americans, while in 2016, Ali died a hero to the masses.
King and Ali weren't two men ahead of their times. Instead, they were two men who forced time and sentiment to catch up to them.
"Still brothers," Ali said with King standing next to him in Louisville. "Still brothers."
It was a remarkable friendship and a remarkable change of sentiment by everyone living in their time and since.
Rob McCurdy is the sports writer at the Marion Star and can be reached at <email-pii>, 419-610-0998, Twitter @McMotorsport and Instagram @rob_mccurdy_star.
|
As anyone who has either raised or been a teenager in the 21st century can tell you, social media is omnipresent in modern youth culture. Whether it is finding new music on TikTok or finding new friends on Fortnite, teenagers use social media to connect with their peers, express their individuality and participate in a global community. Yet this new technological and social paradigm brings with it grave concerns: social media spaces that youth frequent are rife with bullying, misinformation and bigotry, which can have a detrimental effect on the self-esteem of developing young minds.
Now, the social ills of social media have spurred the United States Surgeon General to advise parents to keep their children off of social media even when they are as old as 13.
"I, personally, based on the data I've seen, believe that 13 is too early."
"I, personally, based on the data I've seen, believe that 13 is too early," US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told "CNN Newsroom" on Sunday. "It's a time where it's really important for us to be thoughtful about what's going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. appeared alongside Murthy during the interview and argued that social media has robbed youth of something intangible and special about interpersonal socialization.
"We have lost something as a society, as so much of our life has turned into screen-to-screen communication, it just doesn't give you the same sense of value and the same sense of satisfaction as talking to somebody or seeing someone," Murphy told CNN. He later noted that both he and Murthy were fathers of young children. "It's not coincidental that Dr. Murthy and I are probably talking more about this issue of loneliness more than others in public life. I look at this through the prism of my 14-year-old and my 11-year-old."
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
A recent study published by neuroscientists from the University of North Carolina in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics found that young people who check their social media accounts more often were also more likely to be sensitive to general social rewards and punishments. Social media even seemed to cause physical changes in their neurochemistry; the adolescents who seemed hooked to social media displayed greater neural sensitivity in parts of the brain like the amygdala. The study's lead author Dr. Eva Telzer later explained to CNN that it is unclear whether (and if so how) this increased neural sensitivity is linked to social media use — or even whether these changes are necessarily a bad thing.
"Heightened sensitivity could lead to later compulsive social media behaviors, or it could reflect an adaptive neural change that helps teens navigate their social worlds," Telzer told CNN. The study also had important limitations, including that it relied on self-reported accounts and did not include TikTok.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 67 percent of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 use TikTok, 62 percent use Instagram and 59 percent use Snapchat, with the last two numbers spiking since 2014-2015. By contrast, only 32 percent of teenagers in that age group use Facebook, only 23 percent use Twitter and only 5 percent use Tumblr, all major declines since 2014 to 2015. The clear winner among teenagers, however, was YouTube, with 95 percent of the survey respondents reporting using the platform on a regular basis.
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As anyone who has either raised or been a teenager in the 21st century can tell you, social media is omnipresent in modern youth culture. Whether it is finding new music on TikTok or finding new friends on Fortnite, teenagers use social media to connect with their peers, express their individuality and participate in a global community. Yet this new technological and social paradigm brings with it grave concerns: social media spaces that youth frequent are rife with bullying, misinformation and bigotry, which can have a detrimental effect on the self-esteem of developing young minds.
Now, the social ills of social media have spurred the United States Surgeon General to advise parents to keep their children off of social media even when they are as old as 13.
"I, personally, based on the data I've seen, believe that 13 is too early."
"I, personally, based on the data I've seen, believe that 13 is too early," US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told "CNN Newsroom" on Sunday. "It's a time where it's really important for us to be thoughtful about what's going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. appeared alongside Murthy during the interview and argued that social media has robbed youth of something intangible and special about interpersonal socialization.
"We have lost something as a society, as so much of our life has turned into screen-to-screen communication, it just doesn't give you the same sense of value and the same sense of satisfaction as talking to somebody or seeing someone," Murphy told CNN. He later noted that both he and Murthy were fathers of young children. "It's not coincidental that Dr. Murthy and I are probably talking more about this issue of loneliness more than others in public life. I look at this through the prism of my 14-year-old and my 11-year-old."
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
A recent study published by neuroscientists from the University of North Carolina in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics found that young people who check their social media accounts more often were also more likely to be sensitive to general social rewards and punishments. Social media even seemed to cause physical changes in their neurochemistry;
|
the adolescents who seemed hooked to social media displayed greater neural sensitivity in parts of the brain like the amygdala. The study's lead author Dr. Eva Telzer later explained to CNN that it is unclear whether (and if so how) this increased neural sensitivity is linked to social media use — or even whether these changes are necessarily a bad thing.
"Heightened sensitivity could lead to later compulsive social media behaviors, or it could reflect an adaptive neural change that helps teens navigate their social worlds," Telzer told CNN. The study also had important limitations, including that it relied on self-reported accounts and did not include TikTok.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 67 percent of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 use TikTok, 62 percent use Instagram and 59 percent use Snapchat, with the last two numbers spiking since 2014-2015. By contrast, only 32 percent of teenagers in that age group use Facebook, only 23 percent use Twitter and only 5 percent use Tumblr, all major declines since 2014 to 2015. The clear winner among teenagers, however, was YouTube, with 95 percent of the survey respondents reporting using the platform on a regular basis.
|
I live in the Golden State, where you can’t walk two feet without running into an amateur “climatologist.” We just came out of one of the wettest winters in decades. It followed a drought that we were told was caused by climate change, and I agree with that statement. Just not the way climate activists think.
The climate changes. Droughts happen, and they happened long before traffic jams on the 405 Freeway.
Before the Industrial Revolution or the proliferation of oil-burning machines, the climate had changed. It changed a lot. The “Lost Colony of Roanoke” disappeared, and its inhabitants died almost certainly because they tried to put stakes down during an 800-year drought. We know this because of tree rings.
In California, notwithstanding the wailing and gnashing of teeth to the contrary, none of California’s historical droughts (before it was California) were the by-product of too many cars. The climate changed. There were lots of articles about California’s “worst drought in 1,200 years.” That sounds terrible and frightening, but most of those reports were written before California had one of its wettest winters in recent history. Lake Shasta is now full and, yes, one year doesn’t end a drought.
If you were wondering, what happened 1,200 years ago? Before that cut-off, there was drought. Before that, in the 16th century, there was a 22-year drought. As long as we have trees old enough to measure tree rings, we can measure drought conditions.
Just a few days ago, my buddy Bob Hoge wrote:
As with so many things the media sells us, a deeper dive tells us a different story. You are, in fact, much less likely to be harmed by inclement weather than your ancestors. What they also neglect to tell you is that the phrase “in recorded history” stands for an infinitesimal amount of time—humans have been recording temperatures and weather phenomena with accuracy for an extremely tiny period in the context of our planet’s history—less than a blink of an eye. “My grandma said it didn’t use to rain so much here” doesn’t mean a cataclysmic shift has occurred in the earth’s weather.
And, Susie Moore added:
[T]he modeling system they use to measure the global average temperature has only been in use since 1979. And while instrument-based records date back to the mid-19th Century, scientists depend on data from tree rings and ice cores to provide “proxy data” for temps prior. That proxy data tells them: “It hasn’t been this warm since…125,000 years ago.”
Is proxy data accurate? Not really. Climatologists use data that shows a 0.2-degree increase in temperature averages. That type of finite data wasn’t available 200 years ago. There is no way to measure what temperature it was on a given day 1,000 years ago or, for that matter, 120,000 years. Scientists can guess, but it is a guess.
That didn’t stop Ilhan Omar from climbing into her DeLorean and traveling back in time, to claim that three days this summer broke a record apparently set 120,000 years ago.
Big, if true. Fred Flintstone was unavailable to confirm.
If there is anything to like about Twitter, it is “community notes”, and the occasional replies to stupid tweets.
— Adam Crigler (@AdamCrigler) July 18, 2023
Omar’s squadmate, and noted mixologist and climatologist AOC warned us that we have 12 years before the earth is done like a Thanksgiving turkey. Sorry – had. That was 4 years ago. We are down to 8 years now. Climate activists are gluing themselves to streets and when they aren’t glued down, they are getting dragged, literally by the hair by people sick of their antics.
I will make a prediction right now: It will get hot this summer, and it will be cooler in the fall. Snow will return in the winter. I didn’t need a DeLorean. You’re welcome.
|
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I live in the Golden State, where you can’t walk two feet without running into an amateur “climatologist.” We just came out of one of the wettest winters in decades. It followed a drought that we were told was caused by climate change, and I agree with that statement. Just not the way climate activists think.
The climate changes. Droughts happen, and they happened long before traffic jams on the 405 Freeway.
Before the Industrial Revolution or the proliferation of oil-burning machines, the climate had changed. It changed a lot. The “Lost Colony of Roanoke” disappeared, and its inhabitants died almost certainly because they tried to put stakes down during an 800-year drought. We know this because of tree rings.
In California, notwithstanding the wailing and gnashing of teeth to the contrary, none of California’s historical droughts (before it was California) were the by-product of too many cars. The climate changed. There were lots of articles about California’s “worst drought in 1,200 years.” That sounds terrible and frightening, but most of those reports were written before California had one of its wettest winters in recent history. Lake Shasta is now full and, yes, one year doesn’t end a drought.
If you were wondering, what happened 1,200 years ago? Before that cut-off, there was drought. Before that, in the 16th century, there was a 22-year drought. As long as we have trees old enough to measure tree rings, we can measure drought conditions.
Just a few days ago, my buddy Bob Hoge wrote:
As with so many things the media sells us, a deeper dive tells us a different story. You are, in fact, much less likely to be harmed by inclement weather than your ancestors. What they also neglect to tell you is that the phrase “in recorded history” stands for an infinitesimal amount of time—humans have been recording temperatures and weather phenomena with accuracy for an extremely tiny period in the context of our planet’s history—less than a blink of an eye. “My grandma said it didn’t use to rain so much here” doesn’t mean a cataclysmic shift has occurred in the earth’s weather.
And, Susie Moore added:
[T]he modeling system they use to measure the global average temperature has only been in use since 1979. And while instrument-based
|
records date back to the mid-19th Century, scientists depend on data from tree rings and ice cores to provide “proxy data” for temps prior. That proxy data tells them: “It hasn’t been this warm since…125,000 years ago.”
Is proxy data accurate? Not really. Climatologists use data that shows a 0.2-degree increase in temperature averages. That type of finite data wasn’t available 200 years ago. There is no way to measure what temperature it was on a given day 1,000 years ago or, for that matter, 120,000 years. Scientists can guess, but it is a guess.
That didn’t stop Ilhan Omar from climbing into her DeLorean and traveling back in time, to claim that three days this summer broke a record apparently set 120,000 years ago.
Big, if true. Fred Flintstone was unavailable to confirm.
If there is anything to like about Twitter, it is “community notes”, and the occasional replies to stupid tweets.
— Adam Crigler (@AdamCrigler) July 18, 2023
Omar’s squadmate, and noted mixologist and climatologist AOC warned us that we have 12 years before the earth is done like a Thanksgiving turkey. Sorry – had. That was 4 years ago. We are down to 8 years now. Climate activists are gluing themselves to streets and when they aren’t glued down, they are getting dragged, literally by the hair by people sick of their antics.
I will make a prediction right now: It will get hot this summer, and it will be cooler in the fall. Snow will return in the winter. I didn’t need a DeLorean. You’re welcome.
|
Sign up for CNN’s Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.
Too much stress isn’t good for you — on top of feeling relentless burnout, it can lead to sleep problems, a poor immune system, higher blood pressure and lower cognitive function. And occasionally, chronic or acute stress can affect your skin, too.
Stress is a natural response to perceived threats and can be healthy to a certain degree, as it creates needed hormones such as DHEA and oxytocin that motivate people to perform better in certain aspects of life, including social relationships. If people experience too much stress for too long, the stress hormone cortisol rises and can trigger the immune system to be more reactive and make skin more sensitive, according to Allina Health.
Stress-induced rashes typically cause a flare-up of hives — persistent, raised itchy bumps — and are common. For those who experience other skin conditions, such as eczema, rosacea and psoriasis, stress can trigger extreme outbreaks.
While you may not realize how stress is affecting your skin until it’s too late, there are preemptive ways to avoid recurring stress rashes, and ways to treat the hives if you already have them.
What causes a stress rash?
“Most of the time, the lay term ‘stress rash’ refers to ‘hives’ or what a medical provider would call ‘urticaria,’” said Dr. Whitney High, a professor and director of dermatopathology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in an email. Cholinergic urticaria is a rash that develops with emotional stress, or after eating hot or spicy food, according to a September 2022 study.
Stress hives can occur in response to elevated body temperatures caused by stress. The skin condition can also develop from an increase in histamine, a chemical your immune system makes in response to certain triggers, resulting in hives or welts, said Dr. Lauren Ploch, a board-certified dermatologist in Augusta, Georgia, and a member of the American Academy of Dermatology Association, via email.
If you break out in hives, a visit to the doctor could be a good idea, as the hives can also be caused by a change in laundry detergent, shampoo or soaps, a change in diet, or other factors. Ruling out these possible factors first will help to determine whether stress is the cause.
“While we recognize, as Dermatologists, that hives can be caused by stress, it is not our ‘first-explanation,’” said High, who is also a board-certified member of the American Academy of Dermatology Association, via email. “If we can’t find any other cause for hives, then it is reasonable to consider stress.”
Occasionally, with prolonged stress, the condition can develop into neurodermatitis, which is a seemingly never-ending cycle of scratching, causing the skin to become itchier with each scratch, High said.
What does a stress rash look like?
Stress rashes look like puffy red bumps that can appear all over the body, but most commonly on the face, neck, chest or arms, according to Scripps Health. The size of the hives can range from tiny dots to large welts and occasionally form in clusters, High said.
The hives come on suddenly and can last as few as a day or up to weeks, but the lesions are always migrating, High said, where a hive will go away and a new one will form, until the condition goes away entirely or is treated.
The hives are relentlessly itchy and can sometimes cause a burning sensation. Stress rashes are occasionally paired with swelling of the eyelids or the lips, Ploch said.
How to get rid of a stress rash
The best treatment for a stress rash is to prevent it altogether, but don’t panic if after a hard day at work your skin begins to itch.
About 20% of people will be affected by hives at one point in their life, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Most of the time, the hives can be treated with oral antihistamines, such as Benadryl and Zyrtec, but could even go away on their own after the factor that caused them is taken away. With stress-induced rashes, stress-reduction techniques such as relaxation, meditation and other similar cognitive therapies may be appropriate, High said.
To relieve swelling and itching at the onset of a rash, taking a cold shower or a cold plunge may help, Ploch said, and she recommended avoiding hot foods, alcohol, and hot tubs and saunas, which could irritate the rash. It is important not to scratch, too, as it can make the itchiness worse and could spread harmful bacteria, according to Scripps Health.
While stress is a natural response, when too much begins to affect your physical health, it may be time for a change in routine. The World Health Organization recommends tactics to mitigate stress, including staying connected with close friends and family and maintaining a daily schedule that allows time for meals, exercise and recreational activities.
“Long-term stress prevention can be achieved with a healthy diet, adequate amount of sleep, and moderate amount of exercise,” Ploch said. “Also, immediate stress reduction techniques such as meditation or breathing techniques may be helpful.”
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Sign up for CNN’s Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.
Too much stress isn’t good for you — on top of feeling relentless burnout, it can lead to sleep problems, a poor immune system, higher blood pressure and lower cognitive function. And occasionally, chronic or acute stress can affect your skin, too.
Stress is a natural response to perceived threats and can be healthy to a certain degree, as it creates needed hormones such as DHEA and oxytocin that motivate people to perform better in certain aspects of life, including social relationships. If people experience too much stress for too long, the stress hormone cortisol rises and can trigger the immune system to be more reactive and make skin more sensitive, according to Allina Health.
Stress-induced rashes typically cause a flare-up of hives — persistent, raised itchy bumps — and are common. For those who experience other skin conditions, such as eczema, rosacea and psoriasis, stress can trigger extreme outbreaks.
While you may not realize how stress is affecting your skin until it’s too late, there are preemptive ways to avoid recurring stress rashes, and ways to treat the hives if you already have them.
What causes a stress rash?
“Most of the time, the lay term ‘stress rash’ refers to ‘hives’ or what a medical provider would call ‘urticaria,’” said Dr. Whitney High, a professor and director of dermatopathology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in an email. Cholinergic urticaria is a rash that develops with emotional stress, or after eating hot or spicy food, according to a September 2022 study.
Stress hives can occur in response to elevated body temperatures caused by stress. The skin condition can also develop from an increase in histamine, a chemical your immune system makes in response to certain triggers, resulting in hives or welts, said Dr. Lauren Ploch, a board-certified dermatologist in Augusta, Georgia, and a member of the American Academy of Dermatology Association, via email.
If you break out in hives, a visit to the doctor could be a good idea, as the hives can also be caused by a change in laundry detergent, shampoo or soaps, a change in diet, or other factors. Ruling out these possible factors first will help to determine whether stress is the cause.
“
|
While we recognize, as Dermatologists, that hives can be caused by stress, it is not our ‘first-explanation,’” said High, who is also a board-certified member of the American Academy of Dermatology Association, via email. “If we can’t find any other cause for hives, then it is reasonable to consider stress.”
Occasionally, with prolonged stress, the condition can develop into neurodermatitis, which is a seemingly never-ending cycle of scratching, causing the skin to become itchier with each scratch, High said.
What does a stress rash look like?
Stress rashes look like puffy red bumps that can appear all over the body, but most commonly on the face, neck, chest or arms, according to Scripps Health. The size of the hives can range from tiny dots to large welts and occasionally form in clusters, High said.
The hives come on suddenly and can last as few as a day or up to weeks, but the lesions are always migrating, High said, where a hive will go away and a new one will form, until the condition goes away entirely or is treated.
The hives are relentlessly itchy and can sometimes cause a burning sensation. Stress rashes are occasionally paired with swelling of the eyelids or the lips, Ploch said.
How to get rid of a stress rash
The best treatment for a stress rash is to prevent it altogether, but don’t panic if after a hard day at work your skin begins to itch.
About 20% of people will be affected by hives at one point in their life, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Most of the time, the hives can be treated with oral antihistamines, such as Benadryl and Zyrtec, but could even go away on their own after the factor that caused them is taken away. With stress-induced rashes, stress-reduction techniques such as relaxation, meditation and other similar cognitive therapies may be appropriate, High said.
To relieve swelling and itching at the onset of a rash, taking a cold shower or a cold plunge may help, Ploch said, and she recommended avoiding hot foods, alcohol, and hot tubs and saunas, which could irritate the rash. It is important not to scratch, too, as it can make the itchiness worse and could spread harmful bacteria, according to Scripps Health.
While stress is a natural response, when too much begins to affect your physical health, it may be time for a change in routine. The World Health Organization recommends tactics to mitigate stress, including staying connected with close friends and family and maintaining a daily schedule that allows time for meals, exercise and recreational activities.
“Long-term stress prevention can be achieved with a healthy diet, adequate amount of sleep, and moderate amount of exercise,” Ploch said. “Also, immediate stress reduction techniques such as meditation or breathing techniques may be helpful.”
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What happens if the US hits the debt ceiling? Here's what to expect if we reach debt limit.
Fears of the federal government hitting its "debt ceiling" have spiked after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to party leaders in Congress last week urging them to raise the limit before the expected deadline Thursday.
Congress can avert economic disaster by increasing or suspending the limit, as it has done numerous times in the past. But House conservatives are threatening to delay the process by demanding deep spending cuts a Democratic Senate and White House have already signaled they won't accept.
Economic experts say failure to raise the ceiling would have national and worldwide economic consequences, and Americans would feel the impact in numerous ways.
Stay in the conversation on politics:Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletter.
What is the debt ceiling and why does it matter?
- Definition: The debt ceiling is the maximum amount the U.S. government can spend on its existing obligations, including Social Security and military salaries.
- What it is not: It is not a vote to spend more money. Without a higher ceiling, the government would have to default on bills already incurred that it has already committed to pay.
- The latest: Congress is expected to hit the ceiling Thursday, Yellen said in her letter on Friday. Despite the deadline, the Treasury Department can take "extraordinary measures" to keep paying its debt for several more months, she said.
- Consequences: If the federal government defaults on payments, ramifications could include a stock market crash, a recession and a rise in unemployment, experts say.
What happens if the limit is not raised?
If Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling, the government would automatically default on its payments. In the more than 100 years since the limit was enacted, that has never happened.
"Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability," Yellen wrote in her letter to leaders of both parties in both chambers.
Even the threat of default could cause an economic downturn, as happened in 2011, when the country's credit rating dropped as a result of the drawn-out debt ceiling debate.
What are the solutions on the table?
Though Thursday is the expected limit deadline, Yellen said, the Treasury will take "extraordinary measures" expected to tide the government over until at least early June.
In the meantime, Congress will continue negotiations. House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are expected to use the debate as leverage to push for spending cuts.
"We've got a Republican House, a Democratic Senate. You've got the president there," McCarthy told Capitol Hill reporters Tuesday. "I think it's arrogance to say: 'Oh, we're not going to negotiate about anything,' especially when it comes to funding. If anyone had a child and their credit card kept hitting the limit, you'd want to change the behavior."
One contingency plan by Republicans, not made public but reported by The Washington Post, would have the government making payments based on a list of priorities. Under this plan, crucial expenses such as debt interest and Medicare would be paid off while leaving out other obligations, including Medicaid and border control.
Democrats have said such a proposal would be a nonstarter, though. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing Monday that the administration would not be open to negotiations and that Congress needs to solve the problem "without conditions."
"This is not a plan. It is a recipe for economic catastrophe," Jean-Pierre said. "This is the duty of Congress. This is something that is their basic duty to deal with the debt ceiling, … It should not be used as a political football."
This is not the first time the GOP has proposed the strategy. But experts then and now have warned against it, saying the approach would not stave off economic downfall.
What have lawmakers had to say?
After the House passed a rules package that makes raising the limit more difficult, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said a priority for Republicans is ending what they see as a cycle of overspending.
"Shouldn't we have an honest conversation about how to start living within our means, how to make sure we're not spending money that we don't have, before that comes up?" Scalise said.
Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer say they "want to move quickly" to avoid a possible recession.
"The debt limit was increased in a bipartisan way three times when Donald Trump was President, twice when Republicans had majorities in the House and Senate. This time should be no different," Jeffries and Schumer wrote in a statement.
- Personal finances:What happens if the government runs out of money? How debt ceiling crisis could impact you
- Opinion:McCarthy is not a leader. Republicans don't trust each other. And it all benefits Democrats.
- 'Fiscally demented':In MLK Day remarks, Biden attacks Republicans' legislative priorities
- How the GOP got here::The rise of ultra conservatives from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump
- Gridlock and polarization:Americans don't expect much from Washington over the next 2 years.
- More:President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Feb. 7
|
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What happens if the US hits the debt ceiling? Here's what to expect if we reach debt limit.
Fears of the federal government hitting its "debt ceiling" have spiked after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to party leaders in Congress last week urging them to raise the limit before the expected deadline Thursday.
Congress can avert economic disaster by increasing or suspending the limit, as it has done numerous times in the past. But House conservatives are threatening to delay the process by demanding deep spending cuts a Democratic Senate and White House have already signaled they won't accept.
Economic experts say failure to raise the ceiling would have national and worldwide economic consequences, and Americans would feel the impact in numerous ways.
Stay in the conversation on politics:Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletter.
What is the debt ceiling and why does it matter?
- Definition: The debt ceiling is the maximum amount the U.S. government can spend on its existing obligations, including Social Security and military salaries.
- What it is not: It is not a vote to spend more money. Without a higher ceiling, the government would have to default on bills already incurred that it has already committed to pay.
- The latest: Congress is expected to hit the ceiling Thursday, Yellen said in her letter on Friday. Despite the deadline, the Treasury Department can take "extraordinary measures" to keep paying its debt for several more months, she said.
- Consequences: If the federal government defaults on payments, ramifications could include a stock market crash, a recession and a rise in unemployment, experts say.
What happens if the limit is not raised?
If Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling, the government would automatically default on its payments. In the more than 100 years since the limit was enacted, that has never happened.
"Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability," Yellen wrote in her letter to leaders of both parties in both chambers.
Even the threat of default could cause an economic downturn, as happened in 2011, when the country's credit rating dropped as a result of the drawn-out debt ceiling debate.
What are the solutions on the table?
Though Thursday is the expected limit deadline, Yellen said, the Treasury will take "extraordinary measures" expected to tide the government over until at least early June.
In the meantime, Congress will continue negotiations. House Republicans, led by Speaker
|
Kevin McCarthy, are expected to use the debate as leverage to push for spending cuts.
"We've got a Republican House, a Democratic Senate. You've got the president there," McCarthy told Capitol Hill reporters Tuesday. "I think it's arrogance to say: 'Oh, we're not going to negotiate about anything,' especially when it comes to funding. If anyone had a child and their credit card kept hitting the limit, you'd want to change the behavior."
One contingency plan by Republicans, not made public but reported by The Washington Post, would have the government making payments based on a list of priorities. Under this plan, crucial expenses such as debt interest and Medicare would be paid off while leaving out other obligations, including Medicaid and border control.
Democrats have said such a proposal would be a nonstarter, though. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing Monday that the administration would not be open to negotiations and that Congress needs to solve the problem "without conditions."
"This is not a plan. It is a recipe for economic catastrophe," Jean-Pierre said. "This is the duty of Congress. This is something that is their basic duty to deal with the debt ceiling, … It should not be used as a political football."
This is not the first time the GOP has proposed the strategy. But experts then and now have warned against it, saying the approach would not stave off economic downfall.
What have lawmakers had to say?
After the House passed a rules package that makes raising the limit more difficult, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said a priority for Republicans is ending what they see as a cycle of overspending.
"Shouldn't we have an honest conversation about how to start living within our means, how to make sure we're not spending money that we don't have, before that comes up?" Scalise said.
Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer say they "want to move quickly" to avoid a possible recession.
"The debt limit was increased in a bipartisan way three times when Donald Trump was President, twice when Republicans had majorities in the House and Senate. This time should be no different," Jeffries and Schumer wrote in a statement.
- Personal finances:What happens if the government runs out of money? How debt ceiling crisis could impact you
- Opinion:McCarthy is not a leader. Republicans don't trust each other. And it all benefits Democrats.
- 'Fiscally demented':In MLK Day remarks, Biden attacks Republicans' legislative priorities
- How the GOP got here::The rise of ultra conservatives from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump
- Gridlock and polarization:Americans don't expect much from Washington over the next 2 years.
- More:President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Feb. 7
|
Finland formally became the 31st member of Nato this week, ditching decades of non-alignment to join the military alliance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The country has spent decades building and maintaining a fighting force to guard its 832 mile frontier with Russia and deter any invasion.
With hundreds of tanks, dozens of aircraft and the ability to call on large numbers of reservists, the Finnish military has long been one of the most powerful in Europe and is now one of the most capable in Nato.
The legacy of the Winter War still casts a shadow over Finland. The conflict, also known as the First Finnish-Soviet War, saw Finland’s armed forces inflict monumental casualties on a vast invading Red Army during the bitter winter months of 1939/40.
The war, which resulted in territorial losses for Finland, taught the Finns the need for an army capable of deterring Russia from ever invading again.
Attack Finland, the logic goes, and its armed forces will, just like they did in the Winter War, savage your army.
This is why Finland has built its armed forces on defence. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the country did not, as so many others did, pivot to establishing a small mobile army suited for expeditionary warfare. It preferred to maintain a large defensively orientated force.
“Finland’s defence policy has been very conservative in the sense that unlike other European states, it has never tried to trim its forces so they can undertake international crisis management operations,” said Tuomas Iso-Markku, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “The main focus has always been on defending Finland. So in that sense, it’s definitely true that Finland is quite different from most European states.”
One difference is that it kept conscription. Under the Finnish constitution, every male citizen aged between 18 and 60 is liable for call-up, and each year some 22,000 men join the army. This means that Finland’s tiny standing army of around 19,000 can quickly grow to 280,000, while thousands more could also be mobilised in a time of national crisis.
Conscription also remains popular in Finland; built upon a broad societal understanding of the need to maintain national defence. A poll from December 2021, for example, revealed that 84 per cent of Finns were willing to defend their country to the best of their abilities.
In line with this defensive posture, Finland has invested heavily in big guns, giving it one of the strongest artillery forces in Europe. It now has some 1,500 weapons, including 700 howitzers and cannons and 100 heavy and light rocket launchers.
It also boasts a tank force of around 650 armoured vehicles, which includes 200 German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks, putting it on a par with any army in Europe, including Britain.
Reacting to the Ukraine war, Finland has boosted its defence budget. This year the country is due to spend 1.9 per cent of its GDP on defence, while two years ago it spent 1.3 per cent. The increased spending has allowed it to purchase F-35 fighter aircraft from the US, to complement the country’s already bristling, and high-tech, air defences.
The Finnish Air Force will help defend Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Encompassing a vulnerable and narrow peninsula of Nato territory bordered to the west, for the most part, by Russia or its subservient ally Belarus, the three Baltic states have long been a source of worry for Nato planners.
But Finnish membership will help ease these concerns. The Alliance’s reach now extends north and east of the Baltic states, changing the security landscape of eastern Europe.
Finnish membership also enhances Nato’s presence in the Baltic Sea, and, crucially, now means the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, which is just 43 miles across, is dominated by Alliance states, with Estonia to the south and Finland to the north.
The post Western Europe’s strongest artillery and a huge reserve army: What Finland brings to Nato appeared first on The Telegraph.
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Finland formally became the 31st member of Nato this week, ditching decades of non-alignment to join the military alliance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The country has spent decades building and maintaining a fighting force to guard its 832 mile frontier with Russia and deter any invasion.
With hundreds of tanks, dozens of aircraft and the ability to call on large numbers of reservists, the Finnish military has long been one of the most powerful in Europe and is now one of the most capable in Nato.
The legacy of the Winter War still casts a shadow over Finland. The conflict, also known as the First Finnish-Soviet War, saw Finland’s armed forces inflict monumental casualties on a vast invading Red Army during the bitter winter months of 1939/40.
The war, which resulted in territorial losses for Finland, taught the Finns the need for an army capable of deterring Russia from ever invading again.
Attack Finland, the logic goes, and its armed forces will, just like they did in the Winter War, savage your army.
This is why Finland has built its armed forces on defence. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the country did not, as so many others did, pivot to establishing a small mobile army suited for expeditionary warfare. It preferred to maintain a large defensively orientated force.
“Finland’s defence policy has been very conservative in the sense that unlike other European states, it has never tried to trim its forces so they can undertake international crisis management operations,” said Tuomas Iso-Markku, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “The main focus has always been on defending Finland. So in that sense, it’s definitely true that Finland is quite different from most European states.”
One difference is that it kept conscription. Under the Finnish constitution, every male citizen aged between 18 and 60 is liable for call-up, and each year some 22,000 men join the army. This means that Finland’s tiny standing army of around 19,000 can quickly grow to 280,000, while thousands more could also be mobilised in a time of national crisis.
Conscription also remains popular in Finland; built upon a broad societal understanding of the need to maintain national defence. A poll from December 2021, for example, revealed that 84 per cent of Finns were willing to defend their
|
country to the best of their abilities.
In line with this defensive posture, Finland has invested heavily in big guns, giving it one of the strongest artillery forces in Europe. It now has some 1,500 weapons, including 700 howitzers and cannons and 100 heavy and light rocket launchers.
It also boasts a tank force of around 650 armoured vehicles, which includes 200 German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks, putting it on a par with any army in Europe, including Britain.
Reacting to the Ukraine war, Finland has boosted its defence budget. This year the country is due to spend 1.9 per cent of its GDP on defence, while two years ago it spent 1.3 per cent. The increased spending has allowed it to purchase F-35 fighter aircraft from the US, to complement the country’s already bristling, and high-tech, air defences.
The Finnish Air Force will help defend Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Encompassing a vulnerable and narrow peninsula of Nato territory bordered to the west, for the most part, by Russia or its subservient ally Belarus, the three Baltic states have long been a source of worry for Nato planners.
But Finnish membership will help ease these concerns. The Alliance’s reach now extends north and east of the Baltic states, changing the security landscape of eastern Europe.
Finnish membership also enhances Nato’s presence in the Baltic Sea, and, crucially, now means the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, which is just 43 miles across, is dominated by Alliance states, with Estonia to the south and Finland to the north.
The post Western Europe’s strongest artillery and a huge reserve army: What Finland brings to Nato appeared first on The Telegraph.
|
'Science of reading' is making a comeback in Ohio
Gov. Mike DeWine has announced that his upcoming two-year budget will include $162 million for public and charter schools which employ "science based" curricula to teach reading, using phonics.
"The jury has returned. The evidence is clear. The verdict is in," he said in his recent State of the State address.
DeWine also noted that just 60% of Ohio's third graders are proficient readers.
There is a mindset in our culture in which we change that which we know works. We flock to the shiny and new, even when we know that the tried-and-true is just that.
As the comedian Tom Lehrer put it :
"Hooray for New Math, New-hoo-hoo Math,
"It won't do you a bit of good to review math
"Because it's so simple, So very simple, That only a child can do it!"
More Charita Goshay:Corruption trial coverage getting little attention
If you're reading this, chances are you're able to do so because of phonics. But the teaching method lost ground with the onset of some education companies pushing "whole-language" curricula, in which words are not diagrammed, but memorized.
The science of reading
DeWine's requirement would mandate that schools only use reading instruction curricula approved by the State Board of Education, which currently doesn't regulate which programs schools and districts use. Some use a combination of phonics and whole-language instruction.
Governor is "hooked on phonics:"Science is 'abundantly clear,' some Ohio schools teach reading wrong
Jessica Godsey, a certified speech and language pathologist and senior editorial director at TeachTown, an Atlanta-based curriculum company, said whole-language reading was introduced in the 1980s.
Godsey, who has a doctorate specializing in language and literacy development and disorders, creates core curricula and learning interventions for students with disabilities based on the science of reading.
"The whole language advocates say that if you expose kids to reading and put them in a literacy-rich environment, kids will learn to read," she said. "And that is partially true. There are a lot of kids that can learn to read through whole language, but not all kids can."
Godsey said children who learn to read through whole-language teaching do well until around the fourth grade.
"I can tell you from my clinical practice, I've had some really, really intelligent kids that were in the whole language program, and then right about the fourth grade, when they get to the higher level texts, when they're coming across unfamiliar words in science and social-studies textbooks, they don't have any decoding skills, and then start doing poorly," she said.
Men step up to help kids:Alliance's 'Men Making A Difference' group a hit with elementary students
'Sold a Story'
American Public Media has published a series and podcast, "Sold a Story," which documents how school systems around the country came under the thrall of whole-language proponents who profited despite dubious results.
"This happened in the late 1990s when the National Reading Panel report came out and talked about the Big Five (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary,and comprehension) in the science of reading," Godsey said. "And so, what a lot of whole language programs did, they didn't actually change their curricula, they just rebranded it as 'balanced literacy.'"
Godsey said that as a result, many educators thought they were doing evidenced-based instruction, but it was just "whole language in disguise."
She also noted that surveys have shown many teachers don't feel fully prepared to teach science-based reading because their own instruction is often limited to one semester — but that's starting to change.
Teacher exodus is concerning:Number of teachers quitting hits new high
DeWine's funding proposal includes money for teacher development.
"I keep hearing people talking about the science of reading and it's really exciting because I think we're going to promote change nationwide and make sure that students are getting the best instruction possible," she said. "We've known for years what works."
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or <email-pii>. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
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|
'Science of reading' is making a comeback in Ohio
Gov. Mike DeWine has announced that his upcoming two-year budget will include $162 million for public and charter schools which employ "science based" curricula to teach reading, using phonics.
"The jury has returned. The evidence is clear. The verdict is in," he said in his recent State of the State address.
DeWine also noted that just 60% of Ohio's third graders are proficient readers.
There is a mindset in our culture in which we change that which we know works. We flock to the shiny and new, even when we know that the tried-and-true is just that.
As the comedian Tom Lehrer put it :
"Hooray for New Math, New-hoo-hoo Math,
"It won't do you a bit of good to review math
"Because it's so simple, So very simple, That only a child can do it!"
More Charita Goshay:Corruption trial coverage getting little attention
If you're reading this, chances are you're able to do so because of phonics. But the teaching method lost ground with the onset of some education companies pushing "whole-language" curricula, in which words are not diagrammed, but memorized.
The science of reading
DeWine's requirement would mandate that schools only use reading instruction curricula approved by the State Board of Education, which currently doesn't regulate which programs schools and districts use. Some use a combination of phonics and whole-language instruction.
Governor is "hooked on phonics:"Science is 'abundantly clear,' some Ohio schools teach reading wrong
Jessica Godsey, a certified speech and language pathologist and senior editorial director at TeachTown, an Atlanta-based curriculum company, said whole-language reading was introduced in the 1980s.
Godsey, who has a doctorate specializing in language and literacy development and disorders, creates core curricula and learning interventions for students with disabilities based on the science of reading.
"The whole language advocates say that if you expose kids to reading and put them in a literacy-rich environment, kids will learn to read," she said. "And that is partially true. There are a lot of kids that can learn to read through whole language, but not all kids can."
Godsey said children who learn to read through whole-language teaching do well until around the fourth grade.
"I can tell you from my clinical practice, I've had some really
|
, really intelligent kids that were in the whole language program, and then right about the fourth grade, when they get to the higher level texts, when they're coming across unfamiliar words in science and social-studies textbooks, they don't have any decoding skills, and then start doing poorly," she said.
Men step up to help kids:Alliance's 'Men Making A Difference' group a hit with elementary students
'Sold a Story'
American Public Media has published a series and podcast, "Sold a Story," which documents how school systems around the country came under the thrall of whole-language proponents who profited despite dubious results.
"This happened in the late 1990s when the National Reading Panel report came out and talked about the Big Five (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary,and comprehension) in the science of reading," Godsey said. "And so, what a lot of whole language programs did, they didn't actually change their curricula, they just rebranded it as 'balanced literacy.'"
Godsey said that as a result, many educators thought they were doing evidenced-based instruction, but it was just "whole language in disguise."
She also noted that surveys have shown many teachers don't feel fully prepared to teach science-based reading because their own instruction is often limited to one semester — but that's starting to change.
Teacher exodus is concerning:Number of teachers quitting hits new high
DeWine's funding proposal includes money for teacher development.
"I keep hearing people talking about the science of reading and it's really exciting because I think we're going to promote change nationwide and make sure that students are getting the best instruction possible," she said. "We've known for years what works."
Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or <email-pii>. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP
|
NEAR NORTH SIDE — A rare collection of images depicting Black life in the early 20th century is now available for public viewing at the Newberry Library.
The collection features 44 glass slides chronicling the first wave of the Great Migration. It was recently acquired by the library, 60 W. Walton St., and it tells a visual story of how Black Americans traveled to northern cities in search of a better life.
The collection, “The Negro in the City,” was produced by the Methodist Episcopal Church, which collaborated with leading Black Chicago churches on the project, library officials said.
These “slice of life” photographs illustrate the day-to-day lives of Black residents, from children enjoying lunchtime in a Chicago nursery to rows of well-dressed men gathering in a Detroit reading room.
One of the more striking images is one from the early days of Chatham’s St. Mark United Methodist Church — one of the oldest Black churches in the city — in which women gather for a dressmaking class.
“We were thrilled to acquire these powerful images and make them available for the first time to researchers and members of the public,” said Will Hansen, curator of Americana at the Newberry. “Not only are the images freely accessible online, users may also view them alongside the rest of the Newberry’s growing digital collections in order to deepen their understanding of this critical period in American history.”
The collection of slides is the “most complete set to survive,” library leaders said. The images are available to view and download for free, along with the library’s other digital collections. The collection is here.
Some historians estimate the first wave of the Great Migration — between 1910 and 1940 — saw more than 1.6 million Black Americans flee the violence of the South for opportunities, settling in northern and Midwestern cities to work in factories or attend schools.
A Methodist Episcopal Church representative used the slides to help give glimpses of life in the North to people interested in moving to Chicago, library officials said.
While many were not immune to the rampant injustices and discrimination in these cities, the slides show the resiliency and determination of a people, said Sherry Williams, the Bronzeville Historical Society’s founder.
Williams said it’s critical for these materials to be publicly available. Williams and her team of volunteers recently collaborated with State Comptroller Susana Mendoza to preserve thousands of funeral records of Black residents dating back to the 1920s. Those documents are available to the public at the Carter G. Woodson Library as part of the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection.
“I’m happy that images and documentation of Black life is emerging via Newberry Library,” Williams said. “Too many institutions holding our stories, images, histories have paywalls, fee schedules and do not present their holdings in Black spaces. The time is now to remove the shackles on information.”
Listen to “It’s All Good: A Block Club Chicago Podcast”:
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NEAR NORTH SIDE — A rare collection of images depicting Black life in the early 20th century is now available for public viewing at the Newberry Library.
The collection features 44 glass slides chronicling the first wave of the Great Migration. It was recently acquired by the library, 60 W. Walton St., and it tells a visual story of how Black Americans traveled to northern cities in search of a better life.
The collection, “The Negro in the City,” was produced by the Methodist Episcopal Church, which collaborated with leading Black Chicago churches on the project, library officials said.
These “slice of life” photographs illustrate the day-to-day lives of Black residents, from children enjoying lunchtime in a Chicago nursery to rows of well-dressed men gathering in a Detroit reading room.
One of the more striking images is one from the early days of Chatham’s St. Mark United Methodist Church — one of the oldest Black churches in the city — in which women gather for a dressmaking class.
“We were thrilled to acquire these powerful images and make them available for the first time to researchers and members of the public,” said Will Hansen, curator of Americana at the Newberry. “Not only are the images freely accessible online, users may also view them alongside the rest of the Newberry’s growing digital collections in order to deepen their understanding of this critical period in American history.”
The collection of slides is the “most complete set to survive,” library leaders said. The images are available to view and download for free, along with the library’s other digital collections. The collection is here.
Some historians estimate the first wave of the Great Migration — between 1910 and 1940 — saw more than 1.6 million Black Americans flee the violence of the South for opportunities, settling in northern and Midwestern cities to work in factories or attend schools.
A Methodist Episcopal Church representative used the slides to help give glimpses of life in the North to people interested in moving to Chicago, library officials said.
While many were not immune to the rampant injustices and discrimination in these cities, the slides show the resiliency and determination of a people, said Sherry Williams, the Bronzeville Historical Society’s founder.
Williams said it’s critical for these materials to be publicly available. Williams and her team of volunteers recently collaborated with State Comptroller Susana Mendoza to preserve thousands of funeral records of Black residents dating back to the 1920s. Those documents are
|
available to the public at the Carter G. Woodson Library as part of the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection.
“I’m happy that images and documentation of Black life is emerging via Newberry Library,” Williams said. “Too many institutions holding our stories, images, histories have paywalls, fee schedules and do not present their holdings in Black spaces. The time is now to remove the shackles on information.”
Listen to “It’s All Good: A Block Club Chicago Podcast”:
|
Jimmy Carter took on the awful Guinea worm when no one else would — and he triumphed
Jimmy Carter took great pride in pointing out that the United States didn't start any new wars during his term as president. But after he left office he launched a war against "neglected" diseases — diseases in far-off lands that most Americans will never suffer from and may not have even heard of. Diseases like lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, schistosomiasis ... and a nasty little bug called Guinea worm disease.
Guinea worms are spread through contaminated drinking water and eating undercooked fish. The female worms, which can be up to 3 feet long once they mature, cause incredibly painful, open blisters usually on the infected person's lower legs and feet – through which the worms emerge. It can take a toll for weeks or months, and sometimes permanently, leaving the individual unable to support a family.
And if someone with Guinea worm has contact with water – perhaps to cool the burning pain caused by the worm's emergence – the worm will release tens of thousands of baby worms, contaminating the whole body of water.
The effort to end this disease did not rely on high-tech methods. Kelly Callahan, a public health worker who spent years fighting Guinea worm disease in southern Sudan with the Carter Center, says: "Guinea worm disease has no cure, no vaccination, basically the entire eradication effort is built on behavior change."
That's meant teaching people in vulnerable areas to filter their water and giving them the low-cost tools to do so.
Other strategies included providing access to safe water supplies; better detection of human and animal cases; cleaning and bandaging of wounds; preventing infected people and animals from wading into water and the use of a larvicide to kill the worms.
Case numbers attest to Carter's success
Because of Carter, the world has come incredibly close to wiping out Guinea worm.
"I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die," Carter said at a press conference in 2015. "I'd like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do. I think right now we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases."
And it did look as if the last Guinea worm was going to die before the 39th U.S. president. Then a few years ago, scientists discovered that the parasite was spreading among stray dogs in Chad – and that baboons in Ethiopia were also carrying the parasite. This long-overlooked reservoir of the worms was a setback for the global eradication program and showed that killing the last guinea worm was going to be harder than previously thought.
What's more, as the number of cases has dwindled, new challenges have emerged. In 2018, Guinea worm disease was found in Angola, a country not known to have cases in the past.
As a result, in 2019 the World Health Organization pushed back its expected eradication date for the disease a full decade from 2020 to 2030.
Researchers are now looking for a treatment for infected dogs, and public health workers have turned to new interventions, like paying people cash to report infected animals.
Nonetheless, Carter's campaign has been remarkably successful.
A problem no one else would tackle
In an interview with NPR in 2015, Carter recalled the origins of his crusade. Carter's former drug czar, Peter Borne, was working on a U.N. initiative called the "Freshwater Decade." Borne came to the Carter Center to talk about overlooked diseases spread from "drinking bad water." One of them was Guinea worm.
"The main reason he [Borne] came to the Carter Center was because he couldn't get anyone else to tackle this problem," Carter recalled. "It's a despicable disease. And it was in such remote villages that no one wanted to take on the task. So we decided to take it on." That was in 1986.
The late Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and a champion of global health causes, spoke to NPR in 2019 about Carter's efforts. Farmer said that the former president deserves much of the credit for pushing Guinea worm to the brink of extinction.
Smallpox, Farmer said, is "the only human disease [that's] ever been eradicated. And if ... Guinea worm is right behind, that's going to be thanks to Carter. I mean, there were millions of cases when he got involved in, you know, after his presidency in the mid-80s. And now we are down to fewer than a hundred last year." In 2022, the Carter Center reports there were only 13 recorded human cases of the disease, a provisional number that will be officially confirmed, likely in March.
Carter was relentless in demanding that people pay attention to diseases that primarily affect poor people in remote parts of the world. And that's a tremendous challenge. It's not easy to keep people committed to action at every level of an eradication drive, Farmer says.
"When you take on a problem like this, like Guinea worm, you have to sweet talk the ministry officials, the political figures, the nurses, the doctors, the community activists, the farmers, the people who are ... most at risk. Carter's had to sweet talk all those people. And that's something that's been very inspiring to many of us."
Christopher Plowe is adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He agrees that Carter's advocacy has helped governments and public health agencies around the world stay focused on eradicating Guinea worm disease. The Carter Center has pitched in, too, investing about $500 million since 1986.
"I think we should be optimistic that it is achievable," says Plowe. "I think we shouldn't be overly optimistic about how quick it's gonna be."
Guinea worm was just one of the targets of Carter's war. Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, has been eliminated from most of the Americas and dramatically reduced in Africa due to the work of Carter and the Carter Center.
Major inroads have also been made against other neglected diseases including lymphatic filariasis, which causes horrific swelling of the legs and genitals.
The power of Carter's roots
Those who know Carter well say it was his upbringing in an impoverished part of the South that left him with a strong sense of self-reliance, self-sacrifice and a duty to help others.
Born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924, he stayed close to his roots, returning home after his Navy career to run the family's peanut farm.
Church was a central part of his life in Plains – he taught Sunday school there into his 90s — and friends say his Christian faith drove him.
"He did what he did out of a love for mankind," says Linda Fuller Degelmann, one of the co-founders of Habitat for Humanity, which counted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter among their many volunteers, hammering nails by day and sleeping in bunk beds by night. The Carters worked on Habitat projects in 14 countries. "He was a true, true humanitarian and a lot the drive comes from his Christian understanding of love," says Degelmann.
This week came the news that Carter has entered hospice care in his final days, but his death will not mean the end of his work. In a statement, the Carter Center has pledged to continue the fight to wipe out Guinea worm.
When that scourge does come to an end, it will become one of Carter's signature achievements – an extraordinary accomplishment that reflects a simple yet profound tenet of his personal philosophy: "To try to help one another instead of being willing to go to war with one another."
He recognized the difficulty of living up to this philosophy: "Getting along with one another and treating each other as equals is one of the hardest things to do on earth." And it's one of the things that Carter did best.
Sam Whitehead is a correspondent for Kaiser Health News who is based in Atlanta.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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Jimmy Carter took on the awful Guinea worm when no one else would — and he triumphed
Jimmy Carter took great pride in pointing out that the United States didn't start any new wars during his term as president. But after he left office he launched a war against "neglected" diseases — diseases in far-off lands that most Americans will never suffer from and may not have even heard of. Diseases like lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, schistosomiasis ... and a nasty little bug called Guinea worm disease.
Guinea worms are spread through contaminated drinking water and eating undercooked fish. The female worms, which can be up to 3 feet long once they mature, cause incredibly painful, open blisters usually on the infected person's lower legs and feet – through which the worms emerge. It can take a toll for weeks or months, and sometimes permanently, leaving the individual unable to support a family.
And if someone with Guinea worm has contact with water – perhaps to cool the burning pain caused by the worm's emergence – the worm will release tens of thousands of baby worms, contaminating the whole body of water.
The effort to end this disease did not rely on high-tech methods. Kelly Callahan, a public health worker who spent years fighting Guinea worm disease in southern Sudan with the Carter Center, says: "Guinea worm disease has no cure, no vaccination, basically the entire eradication effort is built on behavior change."
That's meant teaching people in vulnerable areas to filter their water and giving them the low-cost tools to do so.
Other strategies included providing access to safe water supplies; better detection of human and animal cases; cleaning and bandaging of wounds; preventing infected people and animals from wading into water and the use of a larvicide to kill the worms.
Case numbers attest to Carter's success
Because of Carter, the world has come incredibly close to wiping out Guinea worm.
"I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die," Carter said at a press conference in 2015. "I'd like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do. I think right now we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases."
And it did look as if the last Guinea worm was going to die before the 39th U.S. president. Then a few years ago, scientists discovered that the parasite was spreading among stray dogs in Chad – and that baboons in Ethiopia were also carrying the parasite. This long-over
|
looked reservoir of the worms was a setback for the global eradication program and showed that killing the last guinea worm was going to be harder than previously thought.
What's more, as the number of cases has dwindled, new challenges have emerged. In 2018, Guinea worm disease was found in Angola, a country not known to have cases in the past.
As a result, in 2019 the World Health Organization pushed back its expected eradication date for the disease a full decade from 2020 to 2030.
Researchers are now looking for a treatment for infected dogs, and public health workers have turned to new interventions, like paying people cash to report infected animals.
Nonetheless, Carter's campaign has been remarkably successful.
A problem no one else would tackle
In an interview with NPR in 2015, Carter recalled the origins of his crusade. Carter's former drug czar, Peter Borne, was working on a U.N. initiative called the "Freshwater Decade." Borne came to the Carter Center to talk about overlooked diseases spread from "drinking bad water." One of them was Guinea worm.
"The main reason he [Borne] came to the Carter Center was because he couldn't get anyone else to tackle this problem," Carter recalled. "It's a despicable disease. And it was in such remote villages that no one wanted to take on the task. So we decided to take it on." That was in 1986.
The late Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and a champion of global health causes, spoke to NPR in 2019 about Carter's efforts. Farmer said that the former president deserves much of the credit for pushing Guinea worm to the brink of extinction.
Smallpox, Farmer said, is "the only human disease [that's] ever been eradicated. And if ... Guinea worm is right behind, that's going to be thanks to Carter. I mean, there were millions of cases when he got involved in, you know, after his presidency in the mid-80s. And now we are down to fewer than a hundred last year." In 2022, the Carter Center reports there were only 13 recorded human cases of the disease, a provisional number that will be officially confirmed, likely in March.
Carter was relentless in demanding that people pay attention to diseases that primarily affect poor people in remote parts of the world. And that's a tremendous challenge. It's not easy to keep people committed to action at every level of an eradication drive, Farmer says.
"When you take on a problem like this, like Guinea worm, you have to sweet talk the ministry officials, the political figures, the nurses, the doctors, the community activists, the farmers, the people who are ... most at risk. Carter's had to sweet talk all those people. And that's something that's been very inspiring to many of us."
Christopher Plowe is adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He agrees that Carter's advocacy has helped governments and public health agencies around the world stay focused on eradicating Guinea worm disease. The Carter Center has pitched in, too, investing about $500 million since 1986.
"I think we should be optimistic that it is achievable," says Plowe. "I think we shouldn't be overly optimistic about how quick it's gonna be."
Guinea worm was just one of the targets of Carter's war. Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, has been eliminated from most of the Americas and dramatically reduced in Africa due to the work of Carter and the Carter Center.
Major inroads have also been made against other neglected diseases including lymphatic filariasis, which causes horrific swelling of the legs and genitals.
The power of Carter's roots
Those who know Carter well say it was his upbringing in an impoverished part of the South that left him with a strong sense of self-reliance, self-sacrifice and a duty to help others.
Born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924, he stayed close to his roots, returning home after his Navy career to run the family's peanut farm.
Church was a central part of his life in Plains – he taught Sunday school there into his 90s — and friends say his Christian faith drove him.
"He did what he did out of a love for mankind," says Linda Fuller Degelmann, one of the co-founders of Habitat for Humanity, which counted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter among their many volunteers, hammering nails by day and sleeping in bunk beds by night. The Carters worked on Habitat projects in 14 countries. "He was a true, true humanitarian and a lot the drive comes from his Christian understanding of love," says Degelmann.
This week came the news that Carter has entered hospice care in his final days, but his death will not mean the end of his work. In a statement, the Carter Center has pledged to continue the fight to wipe out Guinea worm.
When that scourge does come to an end, it will become one of Carter's signature achievements – an extraordinary accomplishment that reflects a simple yet profound tenet of his personal philosophy: "To try to help one another instead of being willing to go to war with one another."
He recognized the difficulty of living up to this philosophy: "Getting along with one another and treating each other as equals is one of the hardest things to do on earth." And it's one of the things that Carter did best.
Sam Whitehead is a correspondent for Kaiser Health News who is based in Atlanta.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
Hidden tunnel, possibly connected to the Underground Railroad, found in Pennsylvania
- A tunnel was recently discovered in a Pennsylvania borough that could be part of the Underground Railroad, a historian theorizes.
- Researchers in the area have previously found sites that once served as Underground Railroad destinations.
NEW BRIGHTON, Pa. – A backed-up sewer led to a surprising discovery of historical significance in Pennsylvania.
Turns out, a brick tunnel had been hidden since the 1800s under the Merrick Art Gallery in New Brighton.
"We are not positive, but we do think it may be related to the Underground Railroad," said Michelle Long, director of the Merrick Art Gallery. "We'd have to prove it a bit more, but in my heart and mind there's a connection."
New Brighton historians have, after all, previously documented several locations in the borough that served as Underground Railroad destinations helping slaves find freedom prior to the Civil War.
Underground Railroad: Erie man discovers early Underground Railroad station and once-enslaved couple who ran it
Black History: The pathways of African American history stretch across the US
This Sept. 30, the New Brighton Historical Society's annual guided Underground Railroad tour will visit borough sites like the Irish-Townsend House built in 1855 for abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Lydia Irish.
Another tour stop is the James Edgar house, built in 1849 and used as an inn and livery by Presbyterian Abolitionist James Edgar. Folklore has long held the two-story brick Edgar house was connected by tunnel to the Erie-Pittsburgh Railroad, at a spot that's now the site of the Merrick Art Gallery.
"At this stop, fugitives often dressed as Underground Railroad conductors' servants were secretly led through the tunnel to Edgar's cellar and then transferred to an available 'safe house,'" reads the Edgar House's historical sign commissioned after extensive research by the New Brighton Historical Society.
The tunnel discovered under the Merrick confirms that folklore, Mike Spratt of the New Brighton Historical Society said.
Insurance documents from the mid-19th century prove Edgar owned a stable on the site where the tunnel likely reached.
The tunnel traverses underneath the Merrick, a circa 1850 brick and iron structure that showcases French, German, English and American paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Sewer issue led to discovery
The tunnel's discovery resulted after The Merrick, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, encountered sewer line problems a week ago.
Museum officials hired Debo & Son Excavating to replace the sewer line. With the ground dug up, a Debo employee mentioned working for a different company at that same Merrick site about 40 years ago when the gallery was putting in a kitchen and new bathrooms. He said employees then discovered a tunnel, and reported their finding to a museum representative, but were told to refill the dirt. No formal historic inquiry was conducted, according to Long.
For Long, who became director of the Merrick in January 2021, that tunnel tip was too intriguing to ignore. Especially since it coincided with a recent discovery by her husband Jim Long, the Merrick's volunteer handyman, of old blueprints of the Merrick showing what looked like an underground tunnel on the property.
Long was determined to find answers.
"So, after they were done with the sewer project, we started digging where we felt it might be," Long said.
Volunteers only needed to dig a small hole a few feet below an area between the Merrick's garden and patio before hitting the top of an underground tunnel.
After a few more days of digging, they found the opening to the 5-foot-tall tunnel. Determining it was structurally sound enough, Long's son-in-law explored the tunnel, learning it reaches a length of about 150 feet, traversing below the Merrick, before coming to a bricked-off ending under the sidewalk of present-day Fifth Avenue.
The western opening of the tunnel is now exposed and within inches of a short hedgerow in the Merrick's lush garden grounds.
"There was a church back there at one time, and the foundation of that church would have butted up against the tunnel," Long said. "So, it seems pretty convincing."
Blueprints discoverer Jim Long theorizes the tunnel had been built by the public railroad, perhaps as an area for trains to release steam before pulling to a stop at the New Brighton station, which from roughly 1850 to 1870 stood next to the original Merrick structure that later expanded to take over the entire property to Fifth Avenue.
Spratt, too, wonders what the tunnel's original purpose was, "but it probably did help runaways."
Could that former church have provided an entrance to the tunnel, connecting it to the Edgar House, which historians have established was a safe house on the Underground Railroad?
"I plan to get to the bottom of it," Long said.
She's already planning to improve the landscaping and add a protective iron gate to the tunnel's entrance, so Merrick visitors can get a close-up look and snap photos.
Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at <email-pii>.
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Hidden tunnel, possibly connected to the Underground Railroad, found in Pennsylvania
- A tunnel was recently discovered in a Pennsylvania borough that could be part of the Underground Railroad, a historian theorizes.
- Researchers in the area have previously found sites that once served as Underground Railroad destinations.
NEW BRIGHTON, Pa. – A backed-up sewer led to a surprising discovery of historical significance in Pennsylvania.
Turns out, a brick tunnel had been hidden since the 1800s under the Merrick Art Gallery in New Brighton.
"We are not positive, but we do think it may be related to the Underground Railroad," said Michelle Long, director of the Merrick Art Gallery. "We'd have to prove it a bit more, but in my heart and mind there's a connection."
New Brighton historians have, after all, previously documented several locations in the borough that served as Underground Railroad destinations helping slaves find freedom prior to the Civil War.
Underground Railroad: Erie man discovers early Underground Railroad station and once-enslaved couple who ran it
Black History: The pathways of African American history stretch across the US
This Sept. 30, the New Brighton Historical Society's annual guided Underground Railroad tour will visit borough sites like the Irish-Townsend House built in 1855 for abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Lydia Irish.
Another tour stop is the James Edgar house, built in 1849 and used as an inn and livery by Presbyterian Abolitionist James Edgar. Folklore has long held the two-story brick Edgar house was connected by tunnel to the Erie-Pittsburgh Railroad, at a spot that's now the site of the Merrick Art Gallery.
"At this stop, fugitives often dressed as Underground Railroad conductors' servants were secretly led through the tunnel to Edgar's cellar and then transferred to an available 'safe house,'" reads the Edgar House's historical sign commissioned after extensive research by the New Brighton Historical Society.
The tunnel discovered under the Merrick confirms that folklore, Mike Spratt of the New Brighton Historical Society said.
Insurance documents from the mid-19th century prove Edgar owned a stable on the site where the tunnel likely reached.
The tunnel traverses underneath the Merrick, a circa 1850 brick and iron structure that showcases French, German, English and American paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Sewer issue led to discovery
The tunnel's discovery resulted after The Merrick, listed on the National Register of
|
Historic Places, encountered sewer line problems a week ago.
Museum officials hired Debo & Son Excavating to replace the sewer line. With the ground dug up, a Debo employee mentioned working for a different company at that same Merrick site about 40 years ago when the gallery was putting in a kitchen and new bathrooms. He said employees then discovered a tunnel, and reported their finding to a museum representative, but were told to refill the dirt. No formal historic inquiry was conducted, according to Long.
For Long, who became director of the Merrick in January 2021, that tunnel tip was too intriguing to ignore. Especially since it coincided with a recent discovery by her husband Jim Long, the Merrick's volunteer handyman, of old blueprints of the Merrick showing what looked like an underground tunnel on the property.
Long was determined to find answers.
"So, after they were done with the sewer project, we started digging where we felt it might be," Long said.
Volunteers only needed to dig a small hole a few feet below an area between the Merrick's garden and patio before hitting the top of an underground tunnel.
After a few more days of digging, they found the opening to the 5-foot-tall tunnel. Determining it was structurally sound enough, Long's son-in-law explored the tunnel, learning it reaches a length of about 150 feet, traversing below the Merrick, before coming to a bricked-off ending under the sidewalk of present-day Fifth Avenue.
The western opening of the tunnel is now exposed and within inches of a short hedgerow in the Merrick's lush garden grounds.
"There was a church back there at one time, and the foundation of that church would have butted up against the tunnel," Long said. "So, it seems pretty convincing."
Blueprints discoverer Jim Long theorizes the tunnel had been built by the public railroad, perhaps as an area for trains to release steam before pulling to a stop at the New Brighton station, which from roughly 1850 to 1870 stood next to the original Merrick structure that later expanded to take over the entire property to Fifth Avenue.
Spratt, too, wonders what the tunnel's original purpose was, "but it probably did help runaways."
Could that former church have provided an entrance to the tunnel, connecting it to the Edgar House, which historians have established was a safe house on the Underground Railroad?
"I plan to get to the bottom of it," Long said.
She's already planning to improve the landscaping and add a protective iron gate to the tunnel's entrance, so Merrick visitors can get a close-up look and snap photos.
Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at <email-pii>.
|
The results are in from PortsToronto and the University of Toronto Trash Team about how much plastic pollution was diverted from the Toronto Harbour last year, and the findings were, well, garbage.
Over the course of four months in 2022, a record-setting ten seabins were deployed to collect plastic trash as part of an ongoing partnership between the city and the university.
The program was able to divert more than 100 kilograms — that’s around 92,891 small pieces of plastic — of pollution from Toronto’s harbour.
Although Canada is making progress through the recent single-use plastic ban, says the U of T team, “there is still much to be done” and programs like this one help collect data, increase waste literacy and help inform policies surrounding pollution.
Here’s what researchers found in Toronto’s waterfront
From May through September, student researchers with the U of T trash team were able to sort through debris collected by the seabins.
Tiny debris, like microplastics comprising items smaller than five millimetres, were the most common item collected. Debris also included larger items including hundreds to thousands of pieces of “hard plastic fragments broken off from larger plastic items,” including cigarette butts, food wrapper waste, plastic straws, and cigar tips.
Smaller plastic waste was also found in the form of “nurdles” or pre-industrial plastic pellets, plastic foam and fragments.
The U of T trash team would like to see increased awareness by the general population over the plastic component in cigarette butts, stressing that a common misconception is that they are made entirely of paper or natural fibres when in fact there is plastic found inside them called cellulose acetate. They hope that awareness about this might make smokers less inclined to toss them in the water.
“Fatbergs” top the list of plastic debris
For the first time, reports the findings, “fatbergs” described as rocklike masses comprised of fat, grease, and wastewater materials like wet wipes or diapers, made the top 10 list of items found in the seabins in 2022.
Fatbergs form in the sewer when things people shouldn’t pour down the drain (bacon grease, oils, etc.), mix with things that shouldn’t be flushed like wet wipes or diapers, resulting in a solid greasy mass.
“Remember, only flush the three Ps! (pee, poop and paper)” tweeted the U of T trash team.
PortsToronto seabins collected more than a 100 of these fatbergs, which are typically found in the aftermath of power storm events with heavy rainfall, and serve as a strong reminder to Toronto residents to “consider carefully what is washed down the drain.”
“Findings like these can help to inform policy and drive meaningful change within our community and beyond Toronto’s shores,” reads the report.
Floating trash cans help cleanup Toronto’s waterfront
According to the University of Toronto’s trash team website, there are currently a number of these seabins along Toronto’s waterfront, at the Outer Harbour Marina, and on Toronto Island.
These “floating trash cans” work by pumping water through a mesh bag, creating a vacuum that then sucks up debris that floats by.
Similar traps sit in storm drains along Queens Quay, catching litter before it has a chance to flow into the lake.
The seabin at Marina Quay East collected the most plastic pollution by mass and by count of small pieces per day, according to the findings.
Toronto’s trash facts
An estimated 10,000 metric tonnes of waste enter the Great Lakes every year, and much of it is plastic.
It is common in urban waterways to have floating debris from overflowing garbage cans or storm water runoff.
This kind of debris, especially microplastics, pose dangers to wildlife and can contaminate drinking water and pollute shared water resources.
Since the program launched in the summer of 2019, seabins have helped divert hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic debris from the Toronto waterfront, according to the news release.
“This year, 2022, was a big year. Our trash trapping season included the highest number of trash traps yet,” said Dr. Chelsea Rochman, Head of Operations at the U of T Trash Team in an emailed statement.
Programs like this one, says PortsToronto, play an essential role in educating and changing behaviours to “ultimately preserve our waterways for future generations.”
|
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The results are in from PortsToronto and the University of Toronto Trash Team about how much plastic pollution was diverted from the Toronto Harbour last year, and the findings were, well, garbage.
Over the course of four months in 2022, a record-setting ten seabins were deployed to collect plastic trash as part of an ongoing partnership between the city and the university.
The program was able to divert more than 100 kilograms — that’s around 92,891 small pieces of plastic — of pollution from Toronto’s harbour.
Although Canada is making progress through the recent single-use plastic ban, says the U of T team, “there is still much to be done” and programs like this one help collect data, increase waste literacy and help inform policies surrounding pollution.
Here’s what researchers found in Toronto’s waterfront
From May through September, student researchers with the U of T trash team were able to sort through debris collected by the seabins.
Tiny debris, like microplastics comprising items smaller than five millimetres, were the most common item collected. Debris also included larger items including hundreds to thousands of pieces of “hard plastic fragments broken off from larger plastic items,” including cigarette butts, food wrapper waste, plastic straws, and cigar tips.
Smaller plastic waste was also found in the form of “nurdles” or pre-industrial plastic pellets, plastic foam and fragments.
The U of T trash team would like to see increased awareness by the general population over the plastic component in cigarette butts, stressing that a common misconception is that they are made entirely of paper or natural fibres when in fact there is plastic found inside them called cellulose acetate. They hope that awareness about this might make smokers less inclined to toss them in the water.
“Fatbergs” top the list of plastic debris
For the first time, reports the findings, “fatbergs” described as rocklike masses comprised of fat, grease, and wastewater materials like wet wipes or diapers, made the top 10 list of items found in the seabins in 2022.
Fatbergs form in the sewer when things people shouldn’t pour down the drain (bacon grease, oils, etc.), mix with things that shouldn’t be flushed like wet wipes or diapers, resulting in a solid greasy mass.
“Remember, only flush the three Ps! (pee, poop and paper)” tweeted the U of T
|
trash team.
PortsToronto seabins collected more than a 100 of these fatbergs, which are typically found in the aftermath of power storm events with heavy rainfall, and serve as a strong reminder to Toronto residents to “consider carefully what is washed down the drain.”
“Findings like these can help to inform policy and drive meaningful change within our community and beyond Toronto’s shores,” reads the report.
Floating trash cans help cleanup Toronto’s waterfront
According to the University of Toronto’s trash team website, there are currently a number of these seabins along Toronto’s waterfront, at the Outer Harbour Marina, and on Toronto Island.
These “floating trash cans” work by pumping water through a mesh bag, creating a vacuum that then sucks up debris that floats by.
Similar traps sit in storm drains along Queens Quay, catching litter before it has a chance to flow into the lake.
The seabin at Marina Quay East collected the most plastic pollution by mass and by count of small pieces per day, according to the findings.
Toronto’s trash facts
An estimated 10,000 metric tonnes of waste enter the Great Lakes every year, and much of it is plastic.
It is common in urban waterways to have floating debris from overflowing garbage cans or storm water runoff.
This kind of debris, especially microplastics, pose dangers to wildlife and can contaminate drinking water and pollute shared water resources.
Since the program launched in the summer of 2019, seabins have helped divert hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic debris from the Toronto waterfront, according to the news release.
“This year, 2022, was a big year. Our trash trapping season included the highest number of trash traps yet,” said Dr. Chelsea Rochman, Head of Operations at the U of T Trash Team in an emailed statement.
Programs like this one, says PortsToronto, play an essential role in educating and changing behaviours to “ultimately preserve our waterways for future generations.”
|
Written by Alfonso Bello
Illustrated by Savio Aquino
Every morning I wake up and sit up for a minute to condition my body to sit or stand. I then drink a glass of water and wash up. I leave my bedroom to then clean my cat’s litter, give him food and water. If I’m in a rush, I would probably just grab a piece of bread or fruit to eat then take a quick shower and leave. If I have plenty of time, I’ll check and schedule my emails before 8 AM then cook up breakfast for myself and my family. Maybe I’ll study a little depending on my mood but I will definitely take the time to relax—I might read a book or watch a video or two. This has become my morning routine, a habit of mine.
While it seems almost robotic, my mornings are always structured in this way, the rest of the day is unfortunately unpredictable. This is why it gives me relief to say that I start the day off with some relaxation. I don’t need to think about it, I just do it and it works and it’s the same for most people. This is part of the reason why habits have become so central to us, but it can go both ways. Let me explain.
Like my morning routine, we do habits out of practice; as animals, we get used to it. After all, our habits are an interplay from our behaviors which itself is based on our genes and the environment that we live in. So, how are habits formed?
Habits are formed through repetition of tasks. Like other animals, humans condition themselves to do things out of social or contextual cues. Something as small as a thing out of place for an orderly person, may put them off because they’ve conditioned or have been conditioned to see things in order. We do this and so much more without question because we have done it too many times to count, you no longer have to process it as you would your first or second time, you just do it.
This formation of habits has allowed us something amazing: a conservation of energy or a relaxation of sorts, especially when we’re in intense situations.1 I mean, just imagine having to think about every menial task you do. You’d have to put in effort and focus to fold every crevice of your laundry and clean every speck of food on the dishes—it’s tiring! Though, through habits, you don’t have to think about that.
In this way, habits eliminate common tasks, you won’t even feel like you’re doing them! In turn, they make way to clear up your thoughts to make better decisions. However, there are some caveats to this.
Habits may also prove to be harmful. If you’ve conditioned yourself to do something because you think it’s good and you’ve thought so your entire life but you end up being wrong, what then should you do?
Controlling your core
Before we get into answering that question, it’s important to understand that not all harmful habits can instantly be classified as an addiction. Habits imply regular and conditioned actions or behaviors that get harder to break or more subtle the longer it remains. On the other hand, addiction simply makes that habit the center of your world—that thing, whatever it is, takes control of your life. This is to say that not all habits are addictions but all addictions are habits, intense habits at that.2
In neurobiology, both literally and figuratively will shape how your brain is and how you think and approach life. Studies have found that habits will physically affect you and, more often than not, you won’t even notice!1 Of course, whether the effects are positive or negative are entirely dependent on the habit you develop.
As I have reiterated, habits are good and bad for the right reasons. We have a tendency to try and keep the good ones but at times, you won’t really be able to distinguish it when it starts affecting other people. When it does affect others, we label it as bad and most people would be quick to try and control themselves but constantly relapse and give up but the interplay of science and philosophy helps with this.
Philosophy may compel you
I always carry with me a quote by the famed Aristotle, “You are what you repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit,” and another by the stoic Epictetus, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” You might ask, what do these mean? It means that choice and understanding is central.
If you mean to do things in perpetuity to what is good but there are bad habits in the way, then you must make an effort to fight it. While yes, these habits might be ingrained within your brain, there are ways to restructure it, you just have to believe that you can.
As old as Aristotle is, what he said makes sense today. Studies have shown that habit formation is fluid. It takes time to build them up so it only makes sense that it takes time to change or break them entirely, however long that time may take. People self-report that they have the tendency to change courses once they feel less accomplished by those habits.1 Of course, no one trick is ever effective for every person in habit formation or replacement. However, personally, I do believe there is one way to go about it, at least to start.
In the same vein as what Epictetus mentioned, I believe that the first step in habit formation is having that self-realization that you have complete control over yourself and your actions. As contrary as it might seem, you must actively engage and think about your habits so that, eventually, you’ll arrive at what you want.
What do you accomplish by doing this? Self-consciousness. In the previous study mentioned, they found a trend that once participants were aware of their natural inclinations towards what might be bad and harmful to others and themselves, they found it easier to change albeit with some mental weight.1 After all, nobody said it was going to be easy.
You can do it
Understanding our habits and, in general, our biology helps us understand ourselves more on levels we thought we knew but didn’t. At the same time, we must be conscious about the harmful habits we have come to develop. There is no shame in admitting your guilty everyday doings and the things you’ve grown accustomed to but we should learn a thing or two about balance.
There is this misconception that habits are uncontrollable but this is entirely false, even for addictions. We must de-stigmatize this belief because you are able to control them and you can change them, it will just take a lot of will and literal brain power.
It is entirely agreeable that habits make up part of our lives but not the entirety of it. We must be careful not to tread into such territory because although we might almost be robotic when it comes to the little habits and quirks we have, letting it control your life will make you entirely robotic—an alienation from what we actually want and what we actually are.
Wood W & Runger D. Psychology of Habit. Annual Review of Psychology. 2016; 67:289-314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417
Alvernia University. Habit vs. Addiction: What’s the Difference? [updated 2019, Sept 26; accessed 2023 February 20]. https://online.alvernia.edu/articles/habit-vs-addiction/
|
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Written by Alfonso Bello
Illustrated by Savio Aquino
Every morning I wake up and sit up for a minute to condition my body to sit or stand. I then drink a glass of water and wash up. I leave my bedroom to then clean my cat’s litter, give him food and water. If I’m in a rush, I would probably just grab a piece of bread or fruit to eat then take a quick shower and leave. If I have plenty of time, I’ll check and schedule my emails before 8 AM then cook up breakfast for myself and my family. Maybe I’ll study a little depending on my mood but I will definitely take the time to relax—I might read a book or watch a video or two. This has become my morning routine, a habit of mine.
While it seems almost robotic, my mornings are always structured in this way, the rest of the day is unfortunately unpredictable. This is why it gives me relief to say that I start the day off with some relaxation. I don’t need to think about it, I just do it and it works and it’s the same for most people. This is part of the reason why habits have become so central to us, but it can go both ways. Let me explain.
Like my morning routine, we do habits out of practice; as animals, we get used to it. After all, our habits are an interplay from our behaviors which itself is based on our genes and the environment that we live in. So, how are habits formed?
Habits are formed through repetition of tasks. Like other animals, humans condition themselves to do things out of social or contextual cues. Something as small as a thing out of place for an orderly person, may put them off because they’ve conditioned or have been conditioned to see things in order. We do this and so much more without question because we have done it too many times to count, you no longer have to process it as you would your first or second time, you just do it.
This formation of habits has allowed us something amazing: a conservation of energy or a relaxation of sorts, especially when we’re in intense situations.1 I mean, just imagine having to think about every menial task you do. You’d have to put in effort and focus to fold every crevice of your laundry and clean every speck of food on the dishes—it’s tiring! Though, through habits, you don’t have to think about that.
In this way, habits eliminate common tasks, you won
|
’t even feel like you’re doing them! In turn, they make way to clear up your thoughts to make better decisions. However, there are some caveats to this.
Habits may also prove to be harmful. If you’ve conditioned yourself to do something because you think it’s good and you’ve thought so your entire life but you end up being wrong, what then should you do?
Controlling your core
Before we get into answering that question, it’s important to understand that not all harmful habits can instantly be classified as an addiction. Habits imply regular and conditioned actions or behaviors that get harder to break or more subtle the longer it remains. On the other hand, addiction simply makes that habit the center of your world—that thing, whatever it is, takes control of your life. This is to say that not all habits are addictions but all addictions are habits, intense habits at that.2
In neurobiology, both literally and figuratively will shape how your brain is and how you think and approach life. Studies have found that habits will physically affect you and, more often than not, you won’t even notice!1 Of course, whether the effects are positive or negative are entirely dependent on the habit you develop.
As I have reiterated, habits are good and bad for the right reasons. We have a tendency to try and keep the good ones but at times, you won’t really be able to distinguish it when it starts affecting other people. When it does affect others, we label it as bad and most people would be quick to try and control themselves but constantly relapse and give up but the interplay of science and philosophy helps with this.
Philosophy may compel you
I always carry with me a quote by the famed Aristotle, “You are what you repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit,” and another by the stoic Epictetus, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” You might ask, what do these mean? It means that choice and understanding is central.
If you mean to do things in perpetuity to what is good but there are bad habits in the way, then you must make an effort to fight it. While yes, these habits might be ingrained within your brain, there are ways to restructure it, you just have to believe that you can.
As old as Aristotle is, what he said makes sense today. Studies have shown that habit formation is fluid. It takes time to build them up so it only makes sense that it takes time to change or break them entirely, however long that time may take. People self-report that they have the tendency to change courses once they feel less accomplished by those habits.1 Of course, no one trick is ever effective for every person in habit formation or replacement. However, personally, I do believe there is one way to go about it, at least to start.
In the same vein as what Epictetus mentioned, I believe that the first step in habit formation is having that self-realization that you have complete control over yourself and your actions. As contrary as it might seem, you must actively engage and think about your habits so that, eventually, you’ll arrive at what you want.
What do you accomplish by doing this? Self-consciousness. In the previous study mentioned, they found a trend that once participants were aware of their natural inclinations towards what might be bad and harmful to others and themselves, they found it easier to change albeit with some mental weight.1 After all, nobody said it was going to be easy.
You can do it
Understanding our habits and, in general, our biology helps us understand ourselves more on levels we thought we knew but didn’t. At the same time, we must be conscious about the harmful habits we have come to develop. There is no shame in admitting your guilty everyday doings and the things you’ve grown accustomed to but we should learn a thing or two about balance.
There is this misconception that habits are uncontrollable but this is entirely false, even for addictions. We must de-stigmatize this belief because you are able to control them and you can change them, it will just take a lot of will and literal brain power.
It is entirely agreeable that habits make up part of our lives but not the entirety of it. We must be careful not to tread into such territory because although we might almost be robotic when it comes to the little habits and quirks we have, letting it control your life will make you entirely robotic—an alienation from what we actually want and what we actually are.
Wood W & Runger D. Psychology of Habit. Annual Review of Psychology. 2016; 67:289-314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417
Alvernia University. Habit vs. Addiction: What’s the Difference? [updated 2019, Sept 26; accessed 2023 February 20]. https://online.alvernia.edu/articles/habit-vs-addiction/
|
By Gloria Dickie, Clare Trainor, Daisy Chung and Travis Hartman
LONDON (Reuters) – The wildfire that ripped through Lahaina on Aug 8., reducing what had once been the jewel of the historic Hawaiian kingdom to rubble, was decades in the making, scientists say. Still, it would take a unique combination of the elements to produce America’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century.
In the days before the wildfire started on Aug. 8, temperatures in Lahaina simmered in the low 30s Celsius (high 80s Fahrenheit) — about average for the time of year.
But it was drier than usual. Southeastern Maui has been enduring a moderate-to-severe drought all summer, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The state normally relies on the La Nina climate pattern to deliver quenching rains during winter. But the three-year La Nina that ended in 2022 didn’t deliver as much rain as expected — continuing a 30-year trend which has recorded rainfall declining by about 30% during Hawaii’s wet season.
“Recent La Ninas have been much, much drier than we expected, as we’ve seen multi-year droughts getting more severe,” said climatologist Abby Frazier at Clark University in Massachusetts, who has spent more than a decade working in Hawaii.
Amid this arid backdrop came the wind.
Over Aug. 7 to 9, gale-force wind gusts reached 67 miles per hour (108 kilometres per hour) in Maui County, according to the National Weather Service. The fierce winds uprooted trees and roiled seas.
At first, some meteorologists blamed Dora — a Category 4 hurricane spinning some 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Honolulu — for whipping up the tempestuous winds. However, Honolulu-based meteorologist John Bravender said his analysis suggests that Dora likely played a more minor role in the fire.
“Dora, even though it was a major hurricane, had a very small wind field, and it’s very far away from the state,” said Bravender, who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Central Pacific Hurricane Center. But it did cause warm air around the storm to fall lower in the atmosphere, closer to the ground.
At the same time, a strong high pressure system to the north of Hawaii sent a prevailing east-northeast wind called Moa’e or A’eloa that swept down and across the leeward side of Maui.
The winds from this high pressure system — known as the North Pacific High — likely combined with the warm air layer, called the inversion layer, to push warm, dry air across the volcanic peaks towering over Lahaina, Bravender said.
Such events occur a few times each year, but “this was extreme in the magnitude of it,” he said.
As the winds moved down the slopes to lower elevations, the descending air compressed, causing it to heat up. At the base of the mountains — about one mile (2 km) from town — the winds met with dry grasses and parched earth, rather than the native shrubs and dry forests that once grew in a tangle of tropical trees, ferns, mosses and lichens before being replaced by sugar plantations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The dry winds sapped the drought-stressed grasses of what little moisture they still had.
While climate change, which is driven by fossil fuel use, continues to warm the planet’s atmosphere, wildfires such as those burning in Canada this month have grown worse in northern and mid-latitude forests worldwide.
But warmer temperatures weren’t the driving factor in Maui, which saw only “a small background signal of climate change,” said the climatologist Frazier.
Instead, she said, the invasive grasses were “the largest factor at play with this fire.”
A NEW FUEL
When American missionaries arrived in Lahaina in the early 19th century, they transformed the tropical region by building over wetlands and Hawaiian fish ponds, and turning the port into an international hub for whale oil.
The colonisers replaced local customs with their own, and many native Hawaiians died from diseases introduced by the missionaries to which they had no natural immunity.
During this time, wildfires were less common — and those that occurred were often sparked by lightning or lava and burning ash spewed from volcanic eruptions.
By the mid-1800s, another commodity had taken priority. Sugarcane, brought to the islands by early Polynesian migrants, became a key Lahaina export. The town’s first sugar company, Pioneer Mill, developed the dry forest and native shrubland around Lahaina into plantations. Other companies joined in, and by the 1930s sugar plantations covered more than 250,000 acres (100,000 hectares) of Hawaii.
Cheaper labour markets in India, South America and the Caribbean in the following decades led most Hawaiian sugar companies to end production by the 1990s, including Pioneer Mill in 1999, and the plantation lands were largely abandoned.
But the lush forest and native shrubland did not return.
The once-rich soils had lost much of their nutrient value and eroded away.
“Once you disturb an ecosystem like that and replace it with plantations, it does not return to its former state,” said fire scientist Thomas Smith at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
And so African grasses took over, including buffel grass and guinea grass, which had been introduced to the islands as pasture for livestock. Today, over 90% of Hawaii’s native dry forests have disappeared, and non-native grasses cover roughly a quarter of the state, according to scientists.
Hawaii is particularly vulnerable to plant invasions, as the remoteness of the islands meant that native species evolved without much competition or defenses, said fire ecologist Jennifer Balch at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies grass fires.
The grassland expansion over the last century has coincided with a roughly 400% increase in wildfires, according to the Pacific Fire Exchange group, a fire communication project led in part by the University of Hawaii.
These grasses are “plants that, when you see them dry up, you just think ‘wildfire’,” said botanist Mike Opgenorth, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden and Preserve on Maui.
On the other hand, “a well-established forest system is able to buffer those moments of dry weather and high winds,” he said, with dead tree logs and forest leaves still holding more moisture than finer fuels like grasses.
Strong winds can also move faster over a grassland than they would through a forest, where they face friction against trees.
Investigators have yet to determine what first sparked the Lahaina fire on Aug. 8, but scientists say it is clear how flames managed to rush so quickly across the grasslands, through the plantation-era wooden buildings and up to the harbor in just a few hours.
“It was an incredibly flammable landscape surrounding a very flammable town,” Smith said.
(This story has been refiled to revise ‘last week’ to exact date in paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Clare Trainor; Edited by Julia Wolfe, Katy Daigle, Simon Scarr and Josie Kao)
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By Gloria Dickie, Clare Trainor, Daisy Chung and Travis Hartman
LONDON (Reuters) – The wildfire that ripped through Lahaina on Aug 8., reducing what had once been the jewel of the historic Hawaiian kingdom to rubble, was decades in the making, scientists say. Still, it would take a unique combination of the elements to produce America’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century.
In the days before the wildfire started on Aug. 8, temperatures in Lahaina simmered in the low 30s Celsius (high 80s Fahrenheit) — about average for the time of year.
But it was drier than usual. Southeastern Maui has been enduring a moderate-to-severe drought all summer, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The state normally relies on the La Nina climate pattern to deliver quenching rains during winter. But the three-year La Nina that ended in 2022 didn’t deliver as much rain as expected — continuing a 30-year trend which has recorded rainfall declining by about 30% during Hawaii’s wet season.
“Recent La Ninas have been much, much drier than we expected, as we’ve seen multi-year droughts getting more severe,” said climatologist Abby Frazier at Clark University in Massachusetts, who has spent more than a decade working in Hawaii.
Amid this arid backdrop came the wind.
Over Aug. 7 to 9, gale-force wind gusts reached 67 miles per hour (108 kilometres per hour) in Maui County, according to the National Weather Service. The fierce winds uprooted trees and roiled seas.
At first, some meteorologists blamed Dora — a Category 4 hurricane spinning some 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Honolulu — for whipping up the tempestuous winds. However, Honolulu-based meteorologist John Bravender said his analysis suggests that Dora likely played a more minor role in the fire.
“Dora, even though it was a major hurricane, had a very small wind field, and it’s very far away from the state,” said Bravender, who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Central Pacific Hurricane Center. But it did cause warm air around the storm to fall lower in the atmosphere, closer to the ground.
At the same time, a strong high pressure system to the north of Hawaii sent a prevailing
|
east-northeast wind called Moa’e or A’eloa that swept down and across the leeward side of Maui.
The winds from this high pressure system — known as the North Pacific High — likely combined with the warm air layer, called the inversion layer, to push warm, dry air across the volcanic peaks towering over Lahaina, Bravender said.
Such events occur a few times each year, but “this was extreme in the magnitude of it,” he said.
As the winds moved down the slopes to lower elevations, the descending air compressed, causing it to heat up. At the base of the mountains — about one mile (2 km) from town — the winds met with dry grasses and parched earth, rather than the native shrubs and dry forests that once grew in a tangle of tropical trees, ferns, mosses and lichens before being replaced by sugar plantations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The dry winds sapped the drought-stressed grasses of what little moisture they still had.
While climate change, which is driven by fossil fuel use, continues to warm the planet’s atmosphere, wildfires such as those burning in Canada this month have grown worse in northern and mid-latitude forests worldwide.
But warmer temperatures weren’t the driving factor in Maui, which saw only “a small background signal of climate change,” said the climatologist Frazier.
Instead, she said, the invasive grasses were “the largest factor at play with this fire.”
A NEW FUEL
When American missionaries arrived in Lahaina in the early 19th century, they transformed the tropical region by building over wetlands and Hawaiian fish ponds, and turning the port into an international hub for whale oil.
The colonisers replaced local customs with their own, and many native Hawaiians died from diseases introduced by the missionaries to which they had no natural immunity.
During this time, wildfires were less common — and those that occurred were often sparked by lightning or lava and burning ash spewed from volcanic eruptions.
By the mid-1800s, another commodity had taken priority. Sugarcane, brought to the islands by early Polynesian migrants, became a key Lahaina export. The town’s first sugar company, Pioneer Mill, developed the dry forest and native shrubland around Lahaina into plantations. Other companies joined in, and by the 1930s sugar plantations covered more than 250,000 acres (100,000 hectares) of Hawaii.
Cheaper labour markets in India, South America and the Caribbean in the following decades led most Hawaiian sugar companies to end production by the 1990s, including Pioneer Mill in 1999, and the plantation lands were largely abandoned.
But the lush forest and native shrubland did not return.
The once-rich soils had lost much of their nutrient value and eroded away.
“Once you disturb an ecosystem like that and replace it with plantations, it does not return to its former state,” said fire scientist Thomas Smith at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
And so African grasses took over, including buffel grass and guinea grass, which had been introduced to the islands as pasture for livestock. Today, over 90% of Hawaii’s native dry forests have disappeared, and non-native grasses cover roughly a quarter of the state, according to scientists.
Hawaii is particularly vulnerable to plant invasions, as the remoteness of the islands meant that native species evolved without much competition or defenses, said fire ecologist Jennifer Balch at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies grass fires.
The grassland expansion over the last century has coincided with a roughly 400% increase in wildfires, according to the Pacific Fire Exchange group, a fire communication project led in part by the University of Hawaii.
These grasses are “plants that, when you see them dry up, you just think ‘wildfire’,” said botanist Mike Opgenorth, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden and Preserve on Maui.
On the other hand, “a well-established forest system is able to buffer those moments of dry weather and high winds,” he said, with dead tree logs and forest leaves still holding more moisture than finer fuels like grasses.
Strong winds can also move faster over a grassland than they would through a forest, where they face friction against trees.
Investigators have yet to determine what first sparked the Lahaina fire on Aug. 8, but scientists say it is clear how flames managed to rush so quickly across the grasslands, through the plantation-era wooden buildings and up to the harbor in just a few hours.
“It was an incredibly flammable landscape surrounding a very flammable town,” Smith said.
(This story has been refiled to revise ‘last week’ to exact date in paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Clare Trainor; Edited by Julia Wolfe, Katy Daigle, Simon Scarr and Josie Kao)
|
The report by IQAir, a company that tracks air quality worldwide, found that average annual air pollution in roughly 90% of the countries and territories analyzed exceeded the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, which are designed to help governments craft regulations to protect public health.
IQAir analyzed average air quality from 131 countries and territories, and found that just six countries — Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand — and seven territories in the Pacific and Caribbean, including Guam and Puerto Rico, met the WHO air quality guidelines, which call for an average air pollution level of 5 micrograms per cubic meter or less.
Seven countries – Chad, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Kuwait and India – had poor air quality that far exceeded the WHO guidelines with average air pollution over 50 micrograms per cubic meter.
The study looked specifically at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is the tiniest pollutant but also the most dangerous. When inhaled, the PM2.5 travels deep into lung tissue where it can enter the bloodstream. It comes from sources like the combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires, and has been linked to a number of health problems including asthma, heart disease and other respiratory illnesses.
WHO tightened its annual air pollution guidelines in September 2021, cutting the acceptable amount of fine particulate matter from 10 to 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
Millions of people die each year from air pollution-related health issues. In 2016, around 4.2 million premature deaths were associated with fine particulate matter, according to the UN agency. If the latest guidelines had been applied back then, WHO found there could have been nearly 3.3 million fewer pollution-related deaths.
The report also continues to highlight a worrying inequality: the lack of monitoring stations in developing countries in Africa, South America and the Middle East, which results in a dearth of air quality data in those regions.
Although Africa saw improvement in the number of countries included in this year’s report compared with 2021, the continent still largely remains the most underrepresented. According to IQAir, only 19 out of 54 African countries had sufficient data available from their monitoring stations.
Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir North America, said that each time it adds a new country that once lacked air quality data – as it did with Chad in 2021 – those countries inevitably wind up at the top of the most-polluted list.
“If you look at what’s called satellite or modeled data, Africa is supposed to be probably the most polluted continent on the planet, but we don’t have enough data,” Hammes told CNN. “What that means is there’s a whole lot more data that’s needed in order for us to truly determine what are the most polluted countries and cities in the world.”
But one of the biggest barriers right now, she said, is “the way that governments currently monitor air quality.” Hammes said most governments tend to invest in instruments that fail to accurately measure fine particulate matter in the air.
In the United States, the report found air pollution improved significantly last year compared with 2021 due to a relatively mild wildfire season.
Coffeyville, Kansas, had the worst air quality in the US last year, which IQAir attributed to a nearby oil refinery. Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta and Chicago topped the list of major US cities with the worst air quality, though the researchers also noted that California was home to 10 of the 15 worst major cities for air pollution, including Los Angeles and Sacramento.
Around the world, researchers said, the main sources of air pollution last year were wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and energy production, which wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
“This is literally about how we as a planet are continuing this unhealthy relationship with fossil fuels,” Hammes said. “We are still dependent on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of air pollution that we encounter on this planet.”
China, which had for decades been near the top of the list for the worst air pollution, continued to show improved air quality in 2022. Nearly 64% of the 524 cities analyzed in mainland China saw reductions in annual PM2.5.
Still, IQAir notes that the country’s coal usage continues to be a major climate and environmental concern, and that despite the improvement, none of the Chinese cities actually met the annual WHO guidelines.
Climate change-fueled wildfires, Hammes said, also play a significant role in worsening air quality, especially in the US. The report notes that wildfires in recent years have been rapidly erasing air quality improvements that the US has made over the past decade.
“Wildfires are very much so a global warming issue, and it is creating essentially unsafe conditions,” Hammes said.
Hammes said countries must learn from each other, noting that the countries with best air quality, for example, are the ones taking on specific actions to transition away from polluting industries and into greener forms of energy, such as solar and wind.
She adds it is also important to expand air quality monitoring networks, especially in predominantly disadvantaged regions. For instance, despite Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the IQAir report shows that Ukraine expanded air monitoring networks, collecting data from nearly triple the number of cities in 2022 than in 2021.
“What we’ve learned is that what gets measured gets done,” Hammes said. “We need to collect more data. We need to inform folks of this information, and it does need to be free and available, so that they can make more informed choices.”
|
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The report by IQAir, a company that tracks air quality worldwide, found that average annual air pollution in roughly 90% of the countries and territories analyzed exceeded the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, which are designed to help governments craft regulations to protect public health.
IQAir analyzed average air quality from 131 countries and territories, and found that just six countries — Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand — and seven territories in the Pacific and Caribbean, including Guam and Puerto Rico, met the WHO air quality guidelines, which call for an average air pollution level of 5 micrograms per cubic meter or less.
Seven countries – Chad, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Kuwait and India – had poor air quality that far exceeded the WHO guidelines with average air pollution over 50 micrograms per cubic meter.
The study looked specifically at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is the tiniest pollutant but also the most dangerous. When inhaled, the PM2.5 travels deep into lung tissue where it can enter the bloodstream. It comes from sources like the combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires, and has been linked to a number of health problems including asthma, heart disease and other respiratory illnesses.
WHO tightened its annual air pollution guidelines in September 2021, cutting the acceptable amount of fine particulate matter from 10 to 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
Millions of people die each year from air pollution-related health issues. In 2016, around 4.2 million premature deaths were associated with fine particulate matter, according to the UN agency. If the latest guidelines had been applied back then, WHO found there could have been nearly 3.3 million fewer pollution-related deaths.
The report also continues to highlight a worrying inequality: the lack of monitoring stations in developing countries in Africa, South America and the Middle East, which results in a dearth of air quality data in those regions.
Although Africa saw improvement in the number of countries included in this year’s report compared with 2021, the continent still largely remains the most underrepresented. According to IQAir, only 19 out of 54 African countries had sufficient data available from their monitoring stations.
Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir North America, said that each time it adds a new country that once lacked air quality data – as it did with Chad in 2021 –
|
those countries inevitably wind up at the top of the most-polluted list.
“If you look at what’s called satellite or modeled data, Africa is supposed to be probably the most polluted continent on the planet, but we don’t have enough data,” Hammes told CNN. “What that means is there’s a whole lot more data that’s needed in order for us to truly determine what are the most polluted countries and cities in the world.”
But one of the biggest barriers right now, she said, is “the way that governments currently monitor air quality.” Hammes said most governments tend to invest in instruments that fail to accurately measure fine particulate matter in the air.
In the United States, the report found air pollution improved significantly last year compared with 2021 due to a relatively mild wildfire season.
Coffeyville, Kansas, had the worst air quality in the US last year, which IQAir attributed to a nearby oil refinery. Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta and Chicago topped the list of major US cities with the worst air quality, though the researchers also noted that California was home to 10 of the 15 worst major cities for air pollution, including Los Angeles and Sacramento.
Around the world, researchers said, the main sources of air pollution last year were wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and energy production, which wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
“This is literally about how we as a planet are continuing this unhealthy relationship with fossil fuels,” Hammes said. “We are still dependent on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of air pollution that we encounter on this planet.”
China, which had for decades been near the top of the list for the worst air pollution, continued to show improved air quality in 2022. Nearly 64% of the 524 cities analyzed in mainland China saw reductions in annual PM2.5.
Still, IQAir notes that the country’s coal usage continues to be a major climate and environmental concern, and that despite the improvement, none of the Chinese cities actually met the annual WHO guidelines.
Climate change-fueled wildfires, Hammes said, also play a significant role in worsening air quality, especially in the US. The report notes that wildfires in recent years have been rapidly erasing air quality improvements that the US has made over the past decade.
“Wildfires are very much so a global warming issue, and it is creating essentially unsafe conditions,” Hammes said.
Hammes said countries must learn from each other, noting that the countries with best air quality, for example, are the ones taking on specific actions to transition away from polluting industries and into greener forms of energy, such as solar and wind.
She adds it is also important to expand air quality monitoring networks, especially in predominantly disadvantaged regions. For instance, despite Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the IQAir report shows that Ukraine expanded air monitoring networks, collecting data from nearly triple the number of cities in 2022 than in 2021.
“What we’ve learned is that what gets measured gets done,” Hammes said. “We need to collect more data. We need to inform folks of this information, and it does need to be free and available, so that they can make more informed choices.”
|
State seeks to repair harm caused by racially restrictive real estate covenants
Washington state is setting aside money to help people who were hurt by racially restrictive real estate covenants — documents that were used to enforce segregation in the early- to mid-20th century.
Driving the news: Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure into law Monday that will create a downpayment assistance program for people affected by the racist covenants, which were often used to ban property from being sold or rented to someone who wasn't white. Descendants of those discriminated against would also qualify under the law.
Why it matters: These documents frequently barred Black, Indigenous, Asian and other people of color from entire neighborhoods, excluding them from homeownership opportunities and limiting their ability to build generational wealth.
By the numbers: Statewide, researchers at the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University have identified about 50,000 properties with legal clauses that excluded people who were not white.
- More than 30,000 properties in Seattle and King County had those kinds of restrictions, the researchers say.
- That's contributed to wide disparities in homeownership rates. About 62% of white families in King County owned homes as of 2018, compared to 27% of Black families and 35% of Latino families, according to the research project.
What's happening: Washington's new law will impose a $100 fee on certain recorded documents to raise money for the homeownership assistance program.
- The program will provide assistance with down payments and closing costs to people who lived in Washington state before the Fair Housing Act was enacted on April 11, 1968, and who would have been affected by racially restrictive real estate covenants.
- Descendants of those individuals also would qualify for the assistance, which would likely be in the form of low-interest or no-interest loans.
Plus: Applicants must also be first-time homebuyers with household income at or below the area median income, which in Seattle was about $120,000 for a family of four last year.
- The Legislature approved $150 million for the program for the next two years.
What they're saying: State Rep. Jamila Taylor (D-Federal Way), the sponsor of the new law, said at a bill signing ceremony Monday that while Washington was leading the nation in providing a form of statewide reparations, "400 years of systemic oppression against Black people and other marginalized people in this community cannot be undone in one piece of legislation."
Zoom out: San Francisco's board of supervisors is considering a range of proposals to help compensate Black people for past exclusion and displacement, as well as to right other wrongs, while the state of California is weighing its own reparations proposals.
Flashback: In Washington's Legislature, some lawmakers expressed concern that the state is making a financial commitment with no clear end in sight.
- "Because the bill says 'and their descendants,' it could go on for hundreds of years," said state Sen. Phil Fortunato (R-Auburn) on the state Senate floor last month.
What's next: The state Housing Finance Commission must complete a study to guide the program's implementation by March 1, 2024, with a focus on identifying who should qualify.
- Applicants will be eligible to receive financial assistance starting July 1, 2024.
|
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|
State seeks to repair harm caused by racially restrictive real estate covenants
Washington state is setting aside money to help people who were hurt by racially restrictive real estate covenants — documents that were used to enforce segregation in the early- to mid-20th century.
Driving the news: Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure into law Monday that will create a downpayment assistance program for people affected by the racist covenants, which were often used to ban property from being sold or rented to someone who wasn't white. Descendants of those discriminated against would also qualify under the law.
Why it matters: These documents frequently barred Black, Indigenous, Asian and other people of color from entire neighborhoods, excluding them from homeownership opportunities and limiting their ability to build generational wealth.
By the numbers: Statewide, researchers at the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University have identified about 50,000 properties with legal clauses that excluded people who were not white.
- More than 30,000 properties in Seattle and King County had those kinds of restrictions, the researchers say.
- That's contributed to wide disparities in homeownership rates. About 62% of white families in King County owned homes as of 2018, compared to 27% of Black families and 35% of Latino families, according to the research project.
What's happening: Washington's new law will impose a $100 fee on certain recorded documents to raise money for the homeownership assistance program.
- The program will provide assistance with down payments and closing costs to people who lived in Washington state before the Fair Housing Act was enacted on April 11, 1968, and who would have been affected by racially restrictive real estate covenants.
- Descendants of those individuals also would qualify for the assistance, which would likely be in the form of low-interest or no-interest loans.
Plus: Applicants must also be first-time homebuyers with household income at or below the area median income, which in Seattle was about $120,000 for a family of four last year.
- The Legislature approved $150 million for the program for the next two years.
What they're saying: State Rep. Jamila Taylor (D-Federal Way), the sponsor of the new law, said at a bill signing ceremony Monday that while Washington was leading the nation in providing a form of statewide reparations,
|
"400 years of systemic oppression against Black people and other marginalized people in this community cannot be undone in one piece of legislation."
Zoom out: San Francisco's board of supervisors is considering a range of proposals to help compensate Black people for past exclusion and displacement, as well as to right other wrongs, while the state of California is weighing its own reparations proposals.
Flashback: In Washington's Legislature, some lawmakers expressed concern that the state is making a financial commitment with no clear end in sight.
- "Because the bill says 'and their descendants,' it could go on for hundreds of years," said state Sen. Phil Fortunato (R-Auburn) on the state Senate floor last month.
What's next: The state Housing Finance Commission must complete a study to guide the program's implementation by March 1, 2024, with a focus on identifying who should qualify.
- Applicants will be eligible to receive financial assistance starting July 1, 2024.
|
Wallenpaupack teachers benefit from technology coaching approach
Wallenpaupack high school students are already benefitting, school officials say, from a new approach whereby the teacher is advised on utilizing the latest technology to apply to a lesson.
The school board heard a presentation on the approach, called "technology coaching", January 9, which included showing a modern day-style campaign video for President Andrew Jackson in his 1824 bid for re-election, challenged by candidate John Quincy Adams.
Technology Support Teacher Dan Granville worked with history teacher Rich McGinnis in this pilot example of what technology coaching can achieve.
Technology coaching, Granville explained, is a form of professional development, building a relationship between the coach and the teacher, allowing more hands-on experience on how they will make use of technology in the classroom. In the past they relied on a one-hour session which some teachers stated it wasn't enough time to figure how to apply and implement the techniques.
According to Granville, technology coaching is a collaborative, ongoing partnership that is highly individualized and based solely on the teacher's goals and curriculum. It is non-evaluative in nature.
As an example, he referred to students using an electronic copier used to make a poster rather than paper and pencil.
"The 21st century skills used to make the online poster are skills that will be translated directly into the world outside of education when they graduate," Granville continued. "You can have a poster hanging in the hallway versus a poster on social media."
The teacher, he said, is encouraged to go a bit further than where they may have felt comfortable and achieve a new level of integrating technology, giving a much deeper education for the students.
Bridging traditional and modern
Granville referred to a situation in which McGinnis's history students seemed to lose the real-world connection creating a traditional campaign poster that hangs on a wall. They came up with a plan where the students would analyze a 19th century presidential election and produce a 21st century campaign commercial using propaganda tactics.
Knowing what his students needed, McGinnis developed a template for the students to use with iMovie software for the project. This strategy focused on the content rather than the technology.
Granville sent a survey to the high school faculty to collect data to structure a coaching experience for the teachers that is beneficial and promotes their success, he said. The survey asks what is the teacher's goals and what technology do they have in mind they would like to use.
The goal is to make technology coaching available for faculty in all grade levels. Wallenpaupack Area School District has approximately 325 teachers.
Granville said he has about 12 coaching cycles slated so far this school year, so far.
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|
Wallenpaupack teachers benefit from technology coaching approach
Wallenpaupack high school students are already benefitting, school officials say, from a new approach whereby the teacher is advised on utilizing the latest technology to apply to a lesson.
The school board heard a presentation on the approach, called "technology coaching", January 9, which included showing a modern day-style campaign video for President Andrew Jackson in his 1824 bid for re-election, challenged by candidate John Quincy Adams.
Technology Support Teacher Dan Granville worked with history teacher Rich McGinnis in this pilot example of what technology coaching can achieve.
Technology coaching, Granville explained, is a form of professional development, building a relationship between the coach and the teacher, allowing more hands-on experience on how they will make use of technology in the classroom. In the past they relied on a one-hour session which some teachers stated it wasn't enough time to figure how to apply and implement the techniques.
According to Granville, technology coaching is a collaborative, ongoing partnership that is highly individualized and based solely on the teacher's goals and curriculum. It is non-evaluative in nature.
As an example, he referred to students using an electronic copier used to make a poster rather than paper and pencil.
"The 21st century skills used to make the online poster are skills that will be translated directly into the world outside of education when they graduate," Granville continued. "You can have a poster hanging in the hallway versus a poster on social media."
The teacher, he said, is encouraged to go a bit further than where they may have felt comfortable and achieve a new level of integrating technology, giving a much deeper education for the students.
Bridging traditional and modern
Granville referred to a situation in which McGinnis's history students seemed to lose the real-world connection creating a traditional campaign poster that hangs on a wall. They came up with a plan where the students would analyze a 19th century presidential election and produce a 21st century campaign commercial using propaganda tactics.
Knowing what his students needed, McGinnis developed a template for the students to use with iMovie software for the project. This strategy focused on the content rather than the technology.
Granville sent a survey to the high school faculty to collect data to structure a coaching experience for the teachers that is beneficial and promotes their success, he said. The survey asks what is the teacher's goals and what technology do they have in mind they would like
|
to use.
The goal is to make technology coaching available for faculty in all grade levels. Wallenpaupack Area School District has approximately 325 teachers.
Granville said he has about 12 coaching cycles slated so far this school year, so far.
|
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) recently found that women are binge drinking more than men for the first time in history. Dr. George Koop, Director of the NIAAA, stated in an interview that college-age women are binge drinking more than their male counterparts, a phenomenon never seen before.
Binge drinking is considered consuming four or more drinks in one sitting for women, and five or more drinks for men.
"In 2021, there has been an uptick [in binge drinking], particularly among women," Dr. George Koop said according to the Daily Mail. "Now, it turns out on college campuses women are actually binge drinking more than men, for the first time in history."
In 2019, there was a noticeable dip in the number of college students who reported binge drinking, in 2019, the latest data available, the Daily Mail writes "about 11.8 percent of women were binge drinking monthly and 10.4 percent of men." This is about a 20 percent decrease from 2015 when 40 percent of college students reported binge drinking at least once a month.
The Daily Mail notes that this drop could be due to improved public health messaging surrounding underage and binge drinking; however, there could be other explanations to consider. Though the 2020 data isn’t available yet, many expect the number of binge drinking incidents among young people to decrease significantly, given that bars, schools, and many restaurants closed down for months at a time.
Dr. Koop also raised concerns over this year's spring break — which began yesterday for many schools and noted that new drinking trends could spell carnage. The current drinking fad among college-aged individuals is called the BORG, which stands for Blackout Rage Gallon. Drinkers will take a gallon of water, empty out half, fill the remaining space with liquor, typically vodka, and add in powdered or liquid electrolytes. This new trend has exploded on TikTok and has resulted in an increase in the number of alcohol-related hospitalizations among young people. Videos of BORGs have amassed millions of views, quickly becoming the next deadly trend.
Women are naturally at a higher risk than men for several chronic illnesses linked to frequent alcohol usage. This is typically due to women's lower weight, but another factor is the amount of water a woman’s body contains compared to men. Women have less water in their bodies, which, according to the NIH means that "after a woman and a man of the same weight drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman’s blood alcohol concentration . . . will tend to be higher, putting her at greater risk for harm." The illnesses most often associated with alcohol use are liver damage or failure, heart disease, and brain damage. Numerous negative effects can be felt immediately after over drinking, and women are more likely than men to experience these side effects as well.
So, why? Why are young women now drinking more than men their age?
Dr. Koop’s assessment of the phenomenon didn’t quite illustrate why women feel the need to binge drink, but I can think of a possible explanation.Modern feminism has encouraged women to abandon the "patriarchal" duties of housewife, mother, or homemaker. Instead, messaging to young women encourages them to pursue a career, travel, go out and embrace "hookup culture," because it is "empowering" to have the ability to do everything a man can do.
As an example, this is one of the main explanations offered by (the honest) abortion advocates: women need to have the right and ability to walk away from motherhood following an unplanned pregnancy in the same manner that men can in order to be truly equal.
The messaging surrounding "equality" is what has caused so many young girls to be treated like men from a young age. They are asked where they want to go to college, and how they plan to provide for themselves — but never when they want to start a family.
Women are not men. Ignoring traditional gender roles during the upbringing of children not only holds consequences for the individual but results in societal chaos and downfall. This results in the dismal marriage rates we see today, the declining birth rate, the number of mental illness diagnoses increasing, and a general feeling of unfulfillment and loneliness to abound.
Because college students are told, "This is it, this is the peak, it's all downhill from here. Maybe you'll get a job, maybe get married to a ball and chain, but once you have kids, you're life is over." That is the message causing young people to go on these binge-drinking escapades and act as if the future doesn’t exist.
If we taught young girls that it is good to be different from boys, it is good to want to be in the home and raise a family, if we stepped away from "boss babe" societal standards, maybe we could see the bigger picture. Women are worth more than the current culture will admit, and they have so much more to offer the world than being the life of the party.
This column was originally published at TPUSALIVE.com.
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The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) recently found that women are binge drinking more than men for the first time in history. Dr. George Koop, Director of the NIAAA, stated in an interview that college-age women are binge drinking more than their male counterparts, a phenomenon never seen before.
Binge drinking is considered consuming four or more drinks in one sitting for women, and five or more drinks for men.
"In 2021, there has been an uptick [in binge drinking], particularly among women," Dr. George Koop said according to the Daily Mail. "Now, it turns out on college campuses women are actually binge drinking more than men, for the first time in history."
In 2019, there was a noticeable dip in the number of college students who reported binge drinking, in 2019, the latest data available, the Daily Mail writes "about 11.8 percent of women were binge drinking monthly and 10.4 percent of men." This is about a 20 percent decrease from 2015 when 40 percent of college students reported binge drinking at least once a month.
The Daily Mail notes that this drop could be due to improved public health messaging surrounding underage and binge drinking; however, there could be other explanations to consider. Though the 2020 data isn’t available yet, many expect the number of binge drinking incidents among young people to decrease significantly, given that bars, schools, and many restaurants closed down for months at a time.
Dr. Koop also raised concerns over this year's spring break — which began yesterday for many schools and noted that new drinking trends could spell carnage. The current drinking fad among college-aged individuals is called the BORG, which stands for Blackout Rage Gallon. Drinkers will take a gallon of water, empty out half, fill the remaining space with liquor, typically vodka, and add in powdered or liquid electrolytes. This new trend has exploded on TikTok and has resulted in an increase in the number of alcohol-related hospitalizations among young people. Videos of BORGs have amassed millions of views, quickly becoming the next deadly trend.
Women are naturally at a higher risk than men for several chronic illnesses linked to frequent alcohol usage. This is typically due to women's lower weight, but another factor is the amount of water a woman’s body
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contains compared to men. Women have less water in their bodies, which, according to the NIH means that "after a woman and a man of the same weight drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman’s blood alcohol concentration . . . will tend to be higher, putting her at greater risk for harm." The illnesses most often associated with alcohol use are liver damage or failure, heart disease, and brain damage. Numerous negative effects can be felt immediately after over drinking, and women are more likely than men to experience these side effects as well.
So, why? Why are young women now drinking more than men their age?
Dr. Koop’s assessment of the phenomenon didn’t quite illustrate why women feel the need to binge drink, but I can think of a possible explanation.Modern feminism has encouraged women to abandon the "patriarchal" duties of housewife, mother, or homemaker. Instead, messaging to young women encourages them to pursue a career, travel, go out and embrace "hookup culture," because it is "empowering" to have the ability to do everything a man can do.
As an example, this is one of the main explanations offered by (the honest) abortion advocates: women need to have the right and ability to walk away from motherhood following an unplanned pregnancy in the same manner that men can in order to be truly equal.
The messaging surrounding "equality" is what has caused so many young girls to be treated like men from a young age. They are asked where they want to go to college, and how they plan to provide for themselves — but never when they want to start a family.
Women are not men. Ignoring traditional gender roles during the upbringing of children not only holds consequences for the individual but results in societal chaos and downfall. This results in the dismal marriage rates we see today, the declining birth rate, the number of mental illness diagnoses increasing, and a general feeling of unfulfillment and loneliness to abound.
Because college students are told, "This is it, this is the peak, it's all downhill from here. Maybe you'll get a job, maybe get married to a ball and chain, but once you have kids, you're life is over." That is the message causing young people to go on these binge-drinking escapades and act as if the future doesn’t exist.
If we taught young girls that it is good to be different from boys, it is good to want to be in the home and raise a family, if we stepped away from "boss babe" societal standards, maybe we could see the bigger picture. Women are worth more than the current culture will admit, and they have so much more to offer the world than being the life of the party.
This column was originally published at TPUSALIVE.com.
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On most rainy days, the quintessential chai-pakoda conversation hastily wraps up when a buzz takes over an otherwise tranquil setting — it’s the mosquito music reverberating through the air
Sometimes, these pesky fliers make no noise but sting while lurking in the shadows. And a few bites are enough to send people scurrying into their homes.
The fear is real; in addition to packing a frightening punch, these tiny insects are vectors of several deadly diseases. One of them includes dengue, which has begun making waves across the country of late, registering thousands of infections in Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana.
Although viral infections are pretty commonplace in the rainy season, dengue is no ordinary viral fever. The lack of effective mosquito-mitigation measures makes it one of the most rapidly spreading vector-borne illnesses, and half the world lives at the risk of the disease.
While one vaccine candidate has been licensed by WHO and several others are undergoing clinical trials, its elusive variations (dengue virus’ four serotypes) makes it tough to develop a highly efficacious vaccine.
Moreover, the initial flu-like symptoms — ranging from fever, headache, nausea, muscle and joint pain and even a characteristic dengue rash — can fool you into taking it lightly. Patients must beware of severe manifestations that can result in nose and gum bleeding and extreme fatigue, earning it the moniker of break-bone fever.
Some afflicted more severely by the disease may even witness their platelet counts drop dramatically, eventually resulting in severe internal bleeding, dengue shock syndrome and death.
So, how do I protect myself against dengue?
While treatment is mostly symptomatic, recovery includes keeping yourself hydrated and well-rested.
But there is no remedy better than prevention, and dengue can simply be thwarted by preventing mosquito bites. And with a few simple measures, one can ward off both mosquitoes and the deadly illnesses they may carry.
It is well-known that the dengue virus spreads through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are known for biting during the daytime and thriving in stagnant waters. So, one can start ensuring that their surroundings are clean and dry. Make sure to regularly empty water coolers, flower pots, and empty tires where rainwater can stagnate.
If indoors, use mosquito nets over your doors and windows to prevent the insects from entering your house. While sleeping, utilise natural or artificial repellants if you notice these pesky insects flying about in your homes.
When venturing outdoors, particularly during dawn and dusk, wear long sleeves, pants, and apply mosquito repellents. Also, make sure to not let standing water accumulate and ensure drains are regularly cleaned in your area.
Remember that thwarting dengue is a community effort. Therefore, in instances of waterlogging in your area, notify appropriate authorities and ensure fumigation in case of a rising mosquito menace.
Lastly, stay aware and updated about local community efforts and follow official advisories closely, especially if living in a containment zone during an ongoing outbreak.
Although India sees dengue cases around the year, monsoon season is when cases spike. Now, as monsoon draws to a close, staying vigilant for just a little longer this month can go a long way in warding off dengue infection.
For weather, science, space, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store). It's free!
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On most rainy days, the quintessential chai-pakoda conversation hastily wraps up when a buzz takes over an otherwise tranquil setting — it’s the mosquito music reverberating through the air
Sometimes, these pesky fliers make no noise but sting while lurking in the shadows. And a few bites are enough to send people scurrying into their homes.
The fear is real; in addition to packing a frightening punch, these tiny insects are vectors of several deadly diseases. One of them includes dengue, which has begun making waves across the country of late, registering thousands of infections in Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana.
Although viral infections are pretty commonplace in the rainy season, dengue is no ordinary viral fever. The lack of effective mosquito-mitigation measures makes it one of the most rapidly spreading vector-borne illnesses, and half the world lives at the risk of the disease.
While one vaccine candidate has been licensed by WHO and several others are undergoing clinical trials, its elusive variations (dengue virus’ four serotypes) makes it tough to develop a highly efficacious vaccine.
Moreover, the initial flu-like symptoms — ranging from fever, headache, nausea, muscle and joint pain and even a characteristic dengue rash — can fool you into taking it lightly. Patients must beware of severe manifestations that can result in nose and gum bleeding and extreme fatigue, earning it the moniker of break-bone fever.
Some afflicted more severely by the disease may even witness their platelet counts drop dramatically, eventually resulting in severe internal bleeding, dengue shock syndrome and death.
So, how do I protect myself against dengue?
While treatment is mostly symptomatic, recovery includes keeping yourself hydrated and well-rested.
But there is no remedy better than prevention, and dengue can simply be thwarted by preventing mosquito bites. And with a few simple measures, one can ward off both mosquitoes and the deadly illnesses they may carry.
It is well-known that the dengue virus spreads through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are known for biting during the daytime and thriving in stagnant waters. So, one can start ensuring that their surroundings are clean and dry. Make sure to regularly empty water coolers, flower pots, and empty tires where rainwater can stagnate.
If indoors, use mosquito nets over your doors and windows to prevent the insects from entering your house. While sleeping, utilise natural or artificial repellants if you notice these pesky insects flying about in your homes.
When venturing outdoors,
|
particularly during dawn and dusk, wear long sleeves, pants, and apply mosquito repellents. Also, make sure to not let standing water accumulate and ensure drains are regularly cleaned in your area.
Remember that thwarting dengue is a community effort. Therefore, in instances of waterlogging in your area, notify appropriate authorities and ensure fumigation in case of a rising mosquito menace.
Lastly, stay aware and updated about local community efforts and follow official advisories closely, especially if living in a containment zone during an ongoing outbreak.
Although India sees dengue cases around the year, monsoon season is when cases spike. Now, as monsoon draws to a close, staying vigilant for just a little longer this month can go a long way in warding off dengue infection.
For weather, science, space, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store). It's free!
|
Scotland and Edinburgh in the latter half of the 18th century were uncommonly prolific of genius. This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, and the coming years will see similar milestones for David Hume, James Watt, and many others.
Why, or how, did these scholars give us modern free liberal social and economic communities, constitutions, and nations? I think it was because they created an unsurpassed community of themselves, meeting in "societies" regularly for seminars in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and for dinner every Sunday in Smith's home in Canongate, across High Street from the sidewalk statue of Robert Burns, Scotland's most famed poet.
Scotland was famous for its "clubs and societies," regular seminars that met in pubs for discussion and debate. Unlike the university seminars of today, largely limited to departments and visitors, these were in the community and included the university, independent scholars (Hume's skepticism blocked him from a university appointment, but not invitations to converse), outside visitors (Benjamin Franklin was known to make an appearance), townspeople, merchants, and professionals.
Smith was a member of two of these groups, the Literary Society in Glasgow and the Political Economy Society. He was also a consummate host. "Smith's house was noted for its simple and unpretending hospitality," wrote John Rae in his 1895 Life of Adam Smith. "He liked to have his friends about him without the formality of an invitation."
Smith's Theory of Human Sociability and Self-Command
Smith's natural curiosity as to the sources of order led him to inquire why and how our actions are social, and explored the consequences of those actions. His key methodological principle, separating him from modern thought, was to distinguish the origins of human action from their consequences. He concluded that our maturation as a social being is manifest in three phases.
In the first phase, by observing others—immediate family, then friends and neighbors—we become aware of what another person must feel based on our own feelings experienced in similar situations. We observe another's expression of joy, or of sorrow, in a particular context, and we remember what we felt in a similar circumstance. This ability arises out of, and likely helps to shape, our capacity for sympathy. As Smith puts it, we can never know what another person feels, except through our imagination in changing places with them, and remembering what we felt in their situation.
In the second phase of our social maturation, we realize that sympathy goes both ways: Others are forming sympathetic judgments of what we must feel in situations like they have experienced. When we are observing others, they are observing us. In a situation of joy, we enter into a mutual fellow-feeling that is a source of pleasure. When the situation is one of sorrow, fellow-feeling is a comfort for the person experiencing sorrow. Our feelings associated with sorrow and distress are more pungent and deeply felt than those concerning joy and elation.
Because of this fundamental asymmetry between our feelings of joy and of sorrow, we are more anxious that an associate sympathizes with our sorrow than with our joy. Unless we are vain, we generally can better forgive them for not entering into our joys than for not entering into our sorrows. This fundamental joy-sorrow asymmetry carries over into gains and losses from our actions in society.
These constitute the general principles of Smith's first two phases in the development of our sociability. He strongly objects to any idea that this development is because it is utilitarian, or useful, and efficient. Our sociability may indeed have these consequences, but that does not explain its origin. Out of the relationships created by our capacity for fellow-feelings, we do little services for each other from day to day, but the pattern of relationships we form are not created by those services. The services flow from our relationships and may enhance those relationships, but they do not themselves account for the sense of fellow-feeling arising from our shared experiences. Moreover, Smith argues, our responses are too automatic and immediate to be explained by any utilitarian evaluation, thus providing the first theory of fast- vs. slow-action thinking.
In phase three, knowing what others must feel about our own actions and manner, we take account of their judgments and assessments in the actions we take. We screen and modify our actions, as would a "fair and impartial spectator."
Hence our tendency to follow rules that enable us to get along with others. The collection of all such rules constitute culture, which is disciplined by Smith's critical concept of "self-command." Originally, we begin to follow rules enabling us to get along with others when we first have playmates, usually at about the time we start schooling.
We soon learn that our playmates are not as indulgent as our parents in tolerating our expressions of anger and selfishness. Thereby we enter the great school of self-command, and we continue to be shaped by this school our entire lives.
Human Sociability as a Mirror Phenomenon
Smith demonstrates why we must be social through a "mental experiment" in which he imagines a person growing to adulthood separated from any form of contact or communication with another member of the species. Such a person could not "think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind," any more than they could think of "the beauty or deformity of his own face."
Such things he cannot understand because he has no natural means of observing and learning their meaning. For, as Smith wrote in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, "he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view." But if the person is raised with others, he is part of a group of his peers from the beginning. A mirror is "placed in the countenance and behaviour" of all whom he is associated with, who never fail to "mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments."
It is from the appearance of others, and not from our own, that we draw our personal conceptions of beauty or ugliness. Later we become aware that others go through the same process in examining us. "We are pleased when they approve of our figure, and are disobliged when they seem to be disgusted," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "If…we are satisfied with our own appearance, we can more easily support the most disadvantageous judgments of others. If, on the contrary, we are sensible that we are the natural objects of distaste, every appearance of their disapprobation mortifies us beyond all measure. A man who is tolerably handsome, will allow you to laugh at any little irregularity in his person; but all such jokes are commonly unsupportable to one who is really deformed."
An analogous process shapes our moral judgments concerning the character and conduct of other people. Then we learn that others are making similar moral judgments of us, and we are keen to fully observe their reactions. "We become anxious to know how far we deserve their censure or applause, and whether to them we must necessarily appear those agreeable or disagreeable creatures which they represent us," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us….If in this view it pleases us, we are tolerably satisfied. We can be more indifferent about the applause, and, in some measure, despise the censure of the world; secure that, however misunderstood or misrepresented, we are the natural and proper objects of approbation. On the contrary, if we are doubtful about it, we are often…more anxious to gain their approbation."
The Roots and Importance of Beneficence and Justice
Consequent to this vision of sociability are two fundamental propositions about when we are beneficent or hurtful toward others. The first proposition defines the roots of reciprocity in human communities. The second says that property is rooted in security from intentional injury, a concept of negative justice—as the absence of such intentional injury—essential to stable community and economy.
The first we may call the Beneficence Proposition. "Actions of a beneficent tendency," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments, "which proceed from proper motives [intentional], seem alone to require a reward; because such alone are the approved objects of gratitude, or excite the sympathetic gratitude of the spectator."
People need to know not just what to reward, but what to punish. That leads to Smith's Justice Proposition: "Actions of a hurtful tendency, which proceed from [intentionally] improper motives, seem alone to deserve punishment; because such alone are the approved objects of resentment, or excite the sympathetic resentment of the spectator."
From the Beneficence Proposition is derived the principle of reciprocity: the mutual giving and returning of favors observed everywhere in pleasurable communities of neighbors, friends, workers, and families—and also in communities of adversity, such as prisoner-of-war camps, refugee camps, Japanese-American internment camps, bomb and storm shelters, slave quarters, ad infinitum. "Nature, which formed men for that mutual kindness so necessary for their happiness, renders every man the peculiar object of kindness to the persons to whom he himself has been kind," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "Kindness is the parent of kindness."
From the Justice Proposition we get property in the negative sense of security from injury, a necessary condition for community and for wealth creation. If hurtful conduct deserves punishment, the various ways people can be hurtful to others lead us to various conceptions of property to fence us off from such harm. Security from murder gives us property in our bodies; security from robbery and theft gives us property in the products of our body and mind; security of contract gives us property in each other's promises.
These propositions together powerfully contribute to the spontaneous emergence of order in society. Reciprocity serves positive social betterment while alleviating the pangs of adversity. The punishment of deliberately hurtful acts serves as their deterrent.
Smith, a fine-grained observer, finds in religion ancient inspiration for the rules we follow and the beliefs that support them. Our responses are rooted in feelings: reward in gratitude, punishment in resentment. The latter is so prominent and automatic that we sometimes witlessly strike out at an inanimate object we have carelessly bumped into, as if the object were blameable and deserving of punishment. "Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only. It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments.
Of these two pillars of society, beneficence and justice, Smith finds the latter more vital: "Society…cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another," he wrote in Moral Sentiments. "The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broken asunder, and the different members of which it consisted, are…dissipated and scattered abroad….Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice. Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it."
Positive reciprocity, the exchange of good deeds, never escalates out of control; negative reciprocity easily does. Beneficence is especially important in Smith's thought, and in his larger contributions to economics, because it also underlies gains from trade—the origins of market price discovery, with unintended consequences captured in his theorems on wealth creation.
Specialization, Wealth, and the Value of Extended Markets
Smith's second book, his famous Wealth of Nations, roots wealth creation in "the division of labor"—the specialization across time, space, skill, and technique made possible by market trade. Economic action in a free civil order, he argues, is governed by three fundamental theorems. Together, these theorems illustrate Smith's vision of the pricing system as a decentralized information system for unifying cooperation across widely dispersed peoples.
The first theorem is that wealth is created by the division of labor. "The universal opulence of a well-governed society…is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour," Smith wrote. This opulence "extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people," and it rests on "the assistance and co-operation of many thousands."
The second theorem is that wealth creation is the unintended consequence of the human propensity for exchange. "This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion," Smith wrote. "It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, [evolutionary] consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."
The third theorem is that the division of labor is determined by the extent of the market. "When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for," he explained.
So wealth is created by the division of labor, which is determined by the extent of markets. But positive wealth, or accumulation, can exist only if output value exceeds consumption value, and there are overall surpluses, with one person exchanging his surplus of one product for the surplus product of another.
Suppose you and I each subsist by growing both corn and hogs. If there is a market in corn or one in hogs, but not both, we cannot trade, sharply illustrating how the extent of markets limits specialization. If there is a market for both corn and hogs, and if, by growing more corn and fewer hogs, I can trade my corn for more of your hogs than I gave up, the gain constitutes a surplus above subsistence, which is potential wealth. Trade may benefit even those unable to subsist.
Symmetrically, suppose you can get more corn from me than you gave up in order to raise more hogs to exchange for my corn. Then by specializing more in hogs, you can enjoy a profit, which is potential wealth. Together, we can trade and create new wealth. The 19th century economist David Ricardo called this "comparative advantage" in his explanation of the benefits of free international trade. We do not have to be equal except in having the opportunity to trade and specialize. You are big and consume lots of hogs and corn. I am a little guy and consume little of each. We can still gain from specialization and trade.
The magic is in the fact that the resources of each of us are more productive if we specialize. In the limit we each fully specialize—I grow corn only; you grow hogs only. Practice makes perfect, and we both may gain wealth greater than our previous baselines. We profit. For net profit, each produces greater value than the cost incurred. Every increment to wealth is profit. If no one profits, society descends deeper and deeper into poverty.
What do we do with our profit? We might work less and enjoy more leisure, or we might invest in more land to grow hogs or corn for more others. We might start exporting to China, whose citizens might increase rice output to pay for the corn and hogs bought from us.
Death Among Friends
Smith's Sunday suppers continued until the final evening of his life. On that evening, "he was able to receive them with something of his usual cheerfulness," wrote Smith's biographer Rae.
"He would even have stayed up and sat with them had they allowed him, but they pressed him not to do so, and he retired to bed about half-past nine," Rae continued. "As he left the room he turned and said, 'I love your company, gentlemen, but I believe I must leave you to go to another world.'" Or perhaps he said, as another account claimed: "I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place."
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Scotland and Edinburgh in the latter half of the 18th century were uncommonly prolific of genius. This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, and the coming years will see similar milestones for David Hume, James Watt, and many others.
Why, or how, did these scholars give us modern free liberal social and economic communities, constitutions, and nations? I think it was because they created an unsurpassed community of themselves, meeting in "societies" regularly for seminars in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and for dinner every Sunday in Smith's home in Canongate, across High Street from the sidewalk statue of Robert Burns, Scotland's most famed poet.
Scotland was famous for its "clubs and societies," regular seminars that met in pubs for discussion and debate. Unlike the university seminars of today, largely limited to departments and visitors, these were in the community and included the university, independent scholars (Hume's skepticism blocked him from a university appointment, but not invitations to converse), outside visitors (Benjamin Franklin was known to make an appearance), townspeople, merchants, and professionals.
Smith was a member of two of these groups, the Literary Society in Glasgow and the Political Economy Society. He was also a consummate host. "Smith's house was noted for its simple and unpretending hospitality," wrote John Rae in his 1895 Life of Adam Smith. "He liked to have his friends about him without the formality of an invitation."
Smith's Theory of Human Sociability and Self-Command
Smith's natural curiosity as to the sources of order led him to inquire why and how our actions are social, and explored the consequences of those actions. His key methodological principle, separating him from modern thought, was to distinguish the origins of human action from their consequences. He concluded that our maturation as a social being is manifest in three phases.
In the first phase, by observing others—immediate family, then friends and neighbors—we become aware of what another person must feel based on our own feelings experienced in similar situations. We observe another's expression of joy, or of sorrow, in a particular context, and we remember what we felt in a similar circumstance. This ability arises out of, and likely helps to shape, our capacity for sympathy. As Smith puts it, we can never know what another person feels, except through our imagination in changing places with them, and remembering what we felt in their situation.
In the
|
second phase of our social maturation, we realize that sympathy goes both ways: Others are forming sympathetic judgments of what we must feel in situations like they have experienced. When we are observing others, they are observing us. In a situation of joy, we enter into a mutual fellow-feeling that is a source of pleasure. When the situation is one of sorrow, fellow-feeling is a comfort for the person experiencing sorrow. Our feelings associated with sorrow and distress are more pungent and deeply felt than those concerning joy and elation.
Because of this fundamental asymmetry between our feelings of joy and of sorrow, we are more anxious that an associate sympathizes with our sorrow than with our joy. Unless we are vain, we generally can better forgive them for not entering into our joys than for not entering into our sorrows. This fundamental joy-sorrow asymmetry carries over into gains and losses from our actions in society.
These constitute the general principles of Smith's first two phases in the development of our sociability. He strongly objects to any idea that this development is because it is utilitarian, or useful, and efficient. Our sociability may indeed have these consequences, but that does not explain its origin. Out of the relationships created by our capacity for fellow-feelings, we do little services for each other from day to day, but the pattern of relationships we form are not created by those services. The services flow from our relationships and may enhance those relationships, but they do not themselves account for the sense of fellow-feeling arising from our shared experiences. Moreover, Smith argues, our responses are too automatic and immediate to be explained by any utilitarian evaluation, thus providing the first theory of fast- vs. slow-action thinking.
In phase three, knowing what others must feel about our own actions and manner, we take account of their judgments and assessments in the actions we take. We screen and modify our actions, as would a "fair and impartial spectator."
Hence our tendency to follow rules that enable us to get along with others. The collection of all such rules constitute culture, which is disciplined by Smith's critical concept of "self-command." Originally, we begin to follow rules enabling us to get along with others when we first have playmates, usually at about the time we start schooling.
We soon learn that our playmates are not as indulgent as our parents in tolerating our expressions of anger and selfishness. Thereby we enter the great school of self-command, and we continue to be shaped by this school our entire lives.
Human Sociability as a Mirror Phenomenon
Smith demonstrates why we must be social through a "mental experiment" in which he imagines a person growing to adulthood separated from any form of contact or communication with another member of the species. Such a person could not "think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind," any more than they could think of "the beauty or deformity of his own face."
Such things he cannot understand because he has no natural means of observing and learning their meaning. For, as Smith wrote in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, "he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view." But if the person is raised with others, he is part of a group of his peers from the beginning. A mirror is "placed in the countenance and behaviour" of all whom he is associated with, who never fail to "mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments."
It is from the appearance of others, and not from our own, that we draw our personal conceptions of beauty or ugliness. Later we become aware that others go through the same process in examining us. "We are pleased when they approve of our figure, and are disobliged when they seem to be disgusted," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "If…we are satisfied with our own appearance, we can more easily support the most disadvantageous judgments of others. If, on the contrary, we are sensible that we are the natural objects of distaste, every appearance of their disapprobation mortifies us beyond all measure. A man who is tolerably handsome, will allow you to laugh at any little irregularity in his person; but all such jokes are commonly unsupportable to one who is really deformed."
An analogous process shapes our moral judgments concerning the character and conduct of other people. Then we learn that others are making similar moral judgments of us, and we are keen to fully observe their reactions. "We become anxious to know how far we deserve their censure or applause, and whether to them we must necessarily appear those agreeable or disagreeable creatures which they represent us," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us….If in this view it pleases us, we are tolerably satisfied. We can be more indifferent about the applause, and, in some measure, despise the censure of the world; secure that, however misunderstood or misrepresented, we are the natural and proper objects of approbation. On the contrary, if we are doubtful about it, we are often…more anxious to gain their approbation."
The Roots and Importance of Beneficence and Justice
Consequent to this vision of sociability are two fundamental propositions about when we are beneficent or hurtful toward others. The first proposition defines the roots of reciprocity in human communities. The second says that property is rooted in security from intentional injury, a concept of negative justice—as the absence of such intentional injury—essential to stable community and economy.
The first we may call the Beneficence Proposition. "Actions of a beneficent tendency," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments, "which proceed from proper motives [intentional], seem alone to require a reward; because such alone are the approved objects of gratitude, or excite the sympathetic gratitude of the spectator."
People need to know not just what to reward, but what to punish. That leads to Smith's Justice Proposition: "Actions of a hurtful tendency, which proceed from [intentionally] improper motives, seem alone to deserve punishment; because such alone are the approved objects of resentment, or excite the sympathetic resentment of the spectator."
From the Beneficence Proposition is derived the principle of reciprocity: the mutual giving and returning of favors observed everywhere in pleasurable communities of neighbors, friends, workers, and families—and also in communities of adversity, such as prisoner-of-war camps, refugee camps, Japanese-American internment camps, bomb and storm shelters, slave quarters, ad infinitum. "Nature, which formed men for that mutual kindness so necessary for their happiness, renders every man the peculiar object of kindness to the persons to whom he himself has been kind," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments. "Kindness is the parent of kindness."
From the Justice Proposition we get property in the negative sense of security from injury, a necessary condition for community and for wealth creation. If hurtful conduct deserves punishment, the various ways people can be hurtful to others lead us to various conceptions of property to fence us off from such harm. Security from murder gives us property in our bodies; security from robbery and theft gives us property in the products of our body and mind; security of contract gives us property in each other's promises.
These propositions together powerfully contribute to the spontaneous emergence of order in society. Reciprocity serves positive social betterment while alleviating the pangs of adversity. The punishment of deliberately hurtful acts serves as their deterrent.
Smith, a fine-grained observer, finds in religion ancient inspiration for the rules we follow and the beliefs that support them. Our responses are rooted in feelings: reward in gratitude, punishment in resentment. The latter is so prominent and automatic that we sometimes witlessly strike out at an inanimate object we have carelessly bumped into, as if the object were blameable and deserving of punishment. "Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only. It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence," Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments.
Of these two pillars of society, beneficence and justice, Smith finds the latter more vital: "Society…cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another," he wrote in Moral Sentiments. "The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broken asunder, and the different members of which it consisted, are…dissipated and scattered abroad….Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice. Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it."
Positive reciprocity, the exchange of good deeds, never escalates out of control; negative reciprocity easily does. Beneficence is especially important in Smith's thought, and in his larger contributions to economics, because it also underlies gains from trade—the origins of market price discovery, with unintended consequences captured in his theorems on wealth creation.
Specialization, Wealth, and the Value of Extended Markets
Smith's second book, his famous Wealth of Nations, roots wealth creation in "the division of labor"—the specialization across time, space, skill, and technique made possible by market trade. Economic action in a free civil order, he argues, is governed by three fundamental theorems. Together, these theorems illustrate Smith's vision of the pricing system as a decentralized information system for unifying cooperation across widely dispersed peoples.
The first theorem is that wealth is created by the division of labor. "The universal opulence of a well-governed society…is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour," Smith wrote. This opulence "extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people," and it rests on "the assistance and co-operation of many thousands."
The second theorem is that wealth creation is the unintended consequence of the human propensity for exchange. "This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion," Smith wrote. "It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, [evolutionary] consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."
The third theorem is that the division of labor is determined by the extent of the market. "When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for," he explained.
So wealth is created by the division of labor, which is determined by the extent of markets. But positive wealth, or accumulation, can exist only if output value exceeds consumption value, and there are overall surpluses, with one person exchanging his surplus of one product for the surplus product of another.
Suppose you and I each subsist by growing both corn and hogs. If there is a market in corn or one in hogs, but not both, we cannot trade, sharply illustrating how the extent of markets limits specialization. If there is a market for both corn and hogs, and if, by growing more corn and fewer hogs, I can trade my corn for more of your hogs than I gave up, the gain constitutes a surplus above subsistence, which is potential wealth. Trade may benefit even those unable to subsist.
Symmetrically, suppose you can get more corn from me than you gave up in order to raise more hogs to exchange for my corn. Then by specializing more in hogs, you can enjoy a profit, which is potential wealth. Together, we can trade and create new wealth. The 19th century economist David Ricardo called this "comparative advantage" in his explanation of the benefits of free international trade. We do not have to be equal except in having the opportunity to trade and specialize. You are big and consume lots of hogs and corn. I am a little guy and consume little of each. We can still gain from specialization and trade.
The magic is in the fact that the resources of each of us are more productive if we specialize. In the limit we each fully specialize—I grow corn only; you grow hogs only. Practice makes perfect, and we both may gain wealth greater than our previous baselines. We profit. For net profit, each produces greater value than the cost incurred. Every increment to wealth is profit. If no one profits, society descends deeper and deeper into poverty.
What do we do with our profit? We might work less and enjoy more leisure, or we might invest in more land to grow hogs or corn for more others. We might start exporting to China, whose citizens might increase rice output to pay for the corn and hogs bought from us.
Death Among Friends
Smith's Sunday suppers continued until the final evening of his life. On that evening, "he was able to receive them with something of his usual cheerfulness," wrote Smith's biographer Rae.
"He would even have stayed up and sat with them had they allowed him, but they pressed him not to do so, and he retired to bed about half-past nine," Rae continued. "As he left the room he turned and said, 'I love your company, gentlemen, but I believe I must leave you to go to another world.'" Or perhaps he said, as another account claimed: "I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place."
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A survey of artificial-intelligence researchers found that a majority thought there was a 5% chance the tech could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Nearly 58% of more than 2,700 researchers agreed that AI could trigger catastrophic consequences — though they disagreed widely about the nature of the risks.
The survey also found that researchers thought it is likely that AI will hit major milestones, such as generating music indistinguishable from that created by humans, earlier than first believed.
The threat is likely more philosophical than physical
AI has rapidly become an “alien” intelligence, and fears that the tech could behave in a way that doesn’t align with the values of its creators have proliferated. But the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to actually bring about the catastrophic consequences that many AI-skeptics predict, Nir Eisikovits, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, argued in July. AI systems don’t have the capacity to make complex, multilayered decisions yet, Eisikovits noted, and “it also does not have autonomous access to sufficient parts of our critical infrastructure to start causing that kind of damage.” In his view, the threat is less about the possibility of AI making world-altering decisions, and more about how few decisions humans will need to make in their own lives: An “increasingly uncritical embrace of it … means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills,” he wrote.
Focus on the real-world harms AI causes first
The threat of AI wiping out humanity makes for catchy headlines, but the tech is already causing societal harms, an editorial in Nature argued. Biased decision-making and job elimination are present-day concerns, the journal noted, as is the misuse of facial recognition technology by autocratic governments. “Fearmongering narratives about existential risks are not constructive. Serious discussion about actual risks, and action to contain them, are,” the editorial argued.
It might be time to hit the brakes on developing AI
AI with human-level intelligence is on the horizon, and it’s theoretically possible that future AI systems could develop other AI, meaning that the tech could make its own advancements. The result would be a “superintelligence” that humans can’t control, argued Otto Barten, director of the Existential Risk Observatory, and Joep Meindertsma, the founder of advocacy group PauseAI. At the moment, the competitive nature of AI labs means that tech companies are incentivized to create new products all the time, possibly setting aside ethical considerations and taking risks in order to do it. Humans “have historically not been very good at predicting the future externalities of new technologies,” the authors wrote.
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A survey of artificial-intelligence researchers found that a majority thought there was a 5% chance the tech could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Nearly 58% of more than 2,700 researchers agreed that AI could trigger catastrophic consequences — though they disagreed widely about the nature of the risks.
The survey also found that researchers thought it is likely that AI will hit major milestones, such as generating music indistinguishable from that created by humans, earlier than first believed.
The threat is likely more philosophical than physical
AI has rapidly become an “alien” intelligence, and fears that the tech could behave in a way that doesn’t align with the values of its creators have proliferated. But the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to actually bring about the catastrophic consequences that many AI-skeptics predict, Nir Eisikovits, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, argued in July. AI systems don’t have the capacity to make complex, multilayered decisions yet, Eisikovits noted, and “it also does not have autonomous access to sufficient parts of our critical infrastructure to start causing that kind of damage.” In his view, the threat is less about the possibility of AI making world-altering decisions, and more about how few decisions humans will need to make in their own lives: An “increasingly uncritical embrace of it … means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills,” he wrote.
Focus on the real-world harms AI causes first
The threat of AI wiping out humanity makes for catchy headlines, but the tech is already causing societal harms, an editorial in Nature argued. Biased decision-making and job elimination are present-day concerns, the journal noted, as is the misuse of facial recognition technology by autocratic governments. “Fearmongering narratives about existential risks are not constructive. Serious discussion about actual risks, and action to contain them, are,” the editorial argued.
It might be time to hit the brakes on developing AI
AI with human-level intelligence is on the horizon, and it’s theoretically possible that future AI systems could develop other AI, meaning that the tech could make its own advancements. The result would be a “superintelligence” that humans can’t control, argued Otto Barten, director of the Existential Risk Observatory, and Joep Meindertsma, the founder of advocacy group PauseAI. At the moment, the competitive nature of AI labs means that tech companies are incentivized to create new products all the time,
|
possibly setting aside ethical considerations and taking risks in order to do it. Humans “have historically not been very good at predicting the future externalities of new technologies,” the authors wrote.
|
How the Houma preserve a climate change-threatened tradition
A Houma woman is working to ensure her ancestors' basket-weaving traditions are passed on, one basket at a time.
Why it matters: The cultural traditions of the Houma people, who are native to southeast Louisiana, are under threat by climate change as rising water and worsening weather patterns prompt retreat from the coastal lands they've long called home.
Driving the news: Indigenous Peoples' Day is Monday, Oct. 9.
Flashback: Prior to French and Spanish colonization, the Houma were just one of the tribes living in Louisiana. As the Europeans encroached on their lands, the Houma moved further toward the coastline, deeply influencing their cultural practices.
- "The lifestyle was in the water," says Janie Luster, an artist, weaver and former United Houma Nation Council member. The Houma people were known as hunters and fishers, and their decorative arts included woven baskets.
- But by the 1940s, no Houma member knew how to weave their palmetto baskets anymore, Luster says.
- "We were the only tribe that did this basket in the whole country, so we couldn't go to Chitimacha or Coushatta to ask how to do this basket," Luster tells Axios New Orleans.
That changed in 1992. That's when Richard Conn, a longtime Native Arts curator from the Denver Art Museum, stepped in, Luster tells Axios. Conn reverse-engineered the weaving process by examining Houma baskets within the museum's collection and showed the process to Luster.
- Still, it wasn't easy to grasp.
- "I ended up trying my hand, praying to my grandmothers and ancestors that if they had the gift to please pass it on," Luster says. "I went back to it and sat down and I often say, I had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the palmetto."
- It clicked, and Luster's been weaving ever since.
What's happening: After Hurricane Ida devastated many of the communities where the Houma people live today, Luster, who now has three generations of weavers in her family, felt more acutely the urgency in passing on the basket weaving tradition.
- "Our people are migrating and we want them to take this knowledge with them, and when you do baskets, you do more than weave," she says. "You do culture. You connect people."
More New Orleans stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios New Orleans.
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How the Houma preserve a climate change-threatened tradition
A Houma woman is working to ensure her ancestors' basket-weaving traditions are passed on, one basket at a time.
Why it matters: The cultural traditions of the Houma people, who are native to southeast Louisiana, are under threat by climate change as rising water and worsening weather patterns prompt retreat from the coastal lands they've long called home.
Driving the news: Indigenous Peoples' Day is Monday, Oct. 9.
Flashback: Prior to French and Spanish colonization, the Houma were just one of the tribes living in Louisiana. As the Europeans encroached on their lands, the Houma moved further toward the coastline, deeply influencing their cultural practices.
- "The lifestyle was in the water," says Janie Luster, an artist, weaver and former United Houma Nation Council member. The Houma people were known as hunters and fishers, and their decorative arts included woven baskets.
- But by the 1940s, no Houma member knew how to weave their palmetto baskets anymore, Luster says.
- "We were the only tribe that did this basket in the whole country, so we couldn't go to Chitimacha or Coushatta to ask how to do this basket," Luster tells Axios New Orleans.
That changed in 1992. That's when Richard Conn, a longtime Native Arts curator from the Denver Art Museum, stepped in, Luster tells Axios. Conn reverse-engineered the weaving process by examining Houma baskets within the museum's collection and showed the process to Luster.
- Still, it wasn't easy to grasp.
- "I ended up trying my hand, praying to my grandmothers and ancestors that if they had the gift to please pass it on," Luster says. "I went back to it and sat down and I often say, I had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the palmetto."
- It clicked, and Luster's been weaving ever since.
What's happening: After Hurricane Ida devastated many of the communities where the Houma people live today, Luster, who now has three generations of weavers in her family, felt more acutely the urgency in passing on the basket weaving tradition.
- "Our people are migrating and we want them to take this knowledge with them, and when you do baskets, you do more than weave," she says. "You do culture. You connect people."
|
More New Orleans stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios New Orleans.
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‘Fire weather days’ are increasing in the Inland Empire faster than rest of the country
Warm temperatures, windy conditions and low relative humidity make up the recipe for a “fire weather day,” and in hot and dry inland Southern California, all of these conditions are increasing, resulting in more days each year that are primed for wildfires, according to a new analysis released today by nonprofit Climate Central.
The analysis looked at temperature, humidity and wind conditions using data from 476 weather stations across the 48 contiguous states over the 50-year period spanning 1973 to 2022, and found that wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, especially in parts of Southern California and throughout the broader Southwest.
“What we’re looking at is not necessarily the frequency of fires, but more the weather conditions that promote extreme fire behavior. We’re looking for places that are seeing more hot, dry and windy days ... Across all of the Southwest, and especially in Southern California, we’re seeing the largest increases in these days,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate scientist at Climate Central who led the analysis.
Climate Central, a group of scientists and communicators focused on climate change, looked at weather changes in geographic climate divisions established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Out of 245 climate divisions across the contiguous U.S., inland Southern California is experiencing the biggest increase in “fire weather days.”
In California’s southeast desert basins division, annual fire weather days have increased by 63 days on average since the 1970s, a bigger increase than any other region in the analysis. The southeast desert basins region includes most of San Bernardino County and eastern Riverside County, all of Imperial and Inyo counties, and parts of Los Angeles and Kern counties.
The region now experiences an average of 83 fire weather days each year, roughly two more months of fire weather days each year compared to the 1970s.
Following the southeast desert basins in the top 10 regions for increased fire weather days are three regions of New Mexico, each with an average increase of 59 days. Rounding out the top 10 are parts of Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. Overall, increases in fire weather days were higher in the western interior regions compared to western coastal regions, which typically have higher levels of humidity.
'A perfect storm'
Weather, topography and fuels make up the “fire behavior triangle,” or the three main factors that determine how quickly a wildfire can spread. Trudeau notes that there are locations that might meet the criteria for fire weather, but not be at high risk for a fire because of the actual vegetation conditions and topography.
The Climate Central analysis focused on three meteorological conditions that play a large role in fire weather, and defined a “fire weather day” as one where three conditions are met:
- Temperature of at least 45 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on season
- Sustained wind speeds of 15 miles per hour or greater
- Relative humidity within 5% of specific regional thresholds defined by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. These regional thresholds are based on local fuel type, or vegetation, and local climate.
These thresholds are based on those used by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center for an “elevated fire weather forecast,” which is the agency’s lowest fire risk category and doesn’t rise to the level of a Red Flag Warning.
In the inland deserts region, it might feel rare to have a day below 55 degrees — but those cooler days are becoming more and more infrequent due to climate change, and the number of windy and dry days with low humidity are also on the rise.
“What’s driving these increases across most of the West is the increase in dry days, which is connected to how climate change is increasing our temperatures, increasing evaporation from our landscapes, plants, soil and vegetation, which causes a serious situation on top of other things like a long-term drought,” said Trudeau.
Trudeau called the combination of warm temperatures, wind and low humidity a “perfect storm,” creating conditions where a lightning strike or cigarette flicked out of a car window could grow into a fast-moving wildfire.
“It’s not that this weather is what causes the fire, but if a fire breaks out, the chances of that fire becoming a much bigger fire much faster are increasing due to the presence of these weather conditions,” said Trudeau.
The analysis was limited by the number of weather stations available with hourly data dating back to 1973, and used data from a total of 476 stations across 245 climate divisions. However, some climate divisions only had one weather station that met this criteria, which limited the data because each climate division could span multiple counties and local regions, each with their own weather. The analysis used seven weather stations in California’s southeast desert basins region, but the stations with available data were mostly at airports located in desert areas, without representation from more forested mountain areas.
More risks for homes, public health
More fire weather days each year means more people and property are at risk from wildfires, especially in California, where over 5 million homes are located in the wildland-urban interface, where development occurs in areas with high wildfire risk.
Increasing fire weather days could also mean more power shut-offs by utility companies due to elevated fire risk, as well as fewer days where weather conditions allow for prescribed burns.
And even for Southern California residents who don’t live in the path of wildfires, fire weather still brings elevated public health risks. In Riverside County, for example, many of the days with the worst air quality last year occurred while wildfires burned nearby.
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‘Fire weather days’ are increasing in the Inland Empire faster than rest of the country
Warm temperatures, windy conditions and low relative humidity make up the recipe for a “fire weather day,” and in hot and dry inland Southern California, all of these conditions are increasing, resulting in more days each year that are primed for wildfires, according to a new analysis released today by nonprofit Climate Central.
The analysis looked at temperature, humidity and wind conditions using data from 476 weather stations across the 48 contiguous states over the 50-year period spanning 1973 to 2022, and found that wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, especially in parts of Southern California and throughout the broader Southwest.
“What we’re looking at is not necessarily the frequency of fires, but more the weather conditions that promote extreme fire behavior. We’re looking for places that are seeing more hot, dry and windy days ... Across all of the Southwest, and especially in Southern California, we’re seeing the largest increases in these days,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate scientist at Climate Central who led the analysis.
Climate Central, a group of scientists and communicators focused on climate change, looked at weather changes in geographic climate divisions established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Out of 245 climate divisions across the contiguous U.S., inland Southern California is experiencing the biggest increase in “fire weather days.”
In California’s southeast desert basins division, annual fire weather days have increased by 63 days on average since the 1970s, a bigger increase than any other region in the analysis. The southeast desert basins region includes most of San Bernardino County and eastern Riverside County, all of Imperial and Inyo counties, and parts of Los Angeles and Kern counties.
The region now experiences an average of 83 fire weather days each year, roughly two more months of fire weather days each year compared to the 1970s.
Following the southeast desert basins in the top 10 regions for increased fire weather days are three regions of New Mexico, each with an average increase of 59 days. Rounding out the top 10 are parts of Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. Overall, increases in fire weather days were higher in the western interior regions compared to western coastal regions, which typically have higher levels of humidity.
'A perfect storm'
Weather, topography and fuels make up the “fire behavior triangle,” or the three
|
main factors that determine how quickly a wildfire can spread. Trudeau notes that there are locations that might meet the criteria for fire weather, but not be at high risk for a fire because of the actual vegetation conditions and topography.
The Climate Central analysis focused on three meteorological conditions that play a large role in fire weather, and defined a “fire weather day” as one where three conditions are met:
- Temperature of at least 45 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on season
- Sustained wind speeds of 15 miles per hour or greater
- Relative humidity within 5% of specific regional thresholds defined by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. These regional thresholds are based on local fuel type, or vegetation, and local climate.
These thresholds are based on those used by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center for an “elevated fire weather forecast,” which is the agency’s lowest fire risk category and doesn’t rise to the level of a Red Flag Warning.
In the inland deserts region, it might feel rare to have a day below 55 degrees — but those cooler days are becoming more and more infrequent due to climate change, and the number of windy and dry days with low humidity are also on the rise.
“What’s driving these increases across most of the West is the increase in dry days, which is connected to how climate change is increasing our temperatures, increasing evaporation from our landscapes, plants, soil and vegetation, which causes a serious situation on top of other things like a long-term drought,” said Trudeau.
Trudeau called the combination of warm temperatures, wind and low humidity a “perfect storm,” creating conditions where a lightning strike or cigarette flicked out of a car window could grow into a fast-moving wildfire.
“It’s not that this weather is what causes the fire, but if a fire breaks out, the chances of that fire becoming a much bigger fire much faster are increasing due to the presence of these weather conditions,” said Trudeau.
The analysis was limited by the number of weather stations available with hourly data dating back to 1973, and used data from a total of 476 stations across 245 climate divisions. However, some climate divisions only had one weather station that met this criteria, which limited the data because each climate division could span multiple counties and local regions, each with their own weather. The analysis used seven weather stations in California’s southeast desert basins region, but the stations with available data were mostly at airports located in desert areas, without representation from more forested mountain areas.
More risks for homes, public health
More fire weather days each year means more people and property are at risk from wildfires, especially in California, where over 5 million homes are located in the wildland-urban interface, where development occurs in areas with high wildfire risk.
Increasing fire weather days could also mean more power shut-offs by utility companies due to elevated fire risk, as well as fewer days where weather conditions allow for prescribed burns.
And even for Southern California residents who don’t live in the path of wildfires, fire weather still brings elevated public health risks. In Riverside County, for example, many of the days with the worst air quality last year occurred while wildfires burned nearby.
|
Beinecke event highlights failed effort to make New Haven the site of America’s first HBCU
The Beinecke Library hosted an event to commemorate the unsuccessful attempt to establish the first HBCU in America in New Haven.
Kenisha Mahajan, Contributing Photographer
Yale’s Beinecke Library hosted an event reflecting on the unsuccessful effort to establish the United States’ first Historically Black College/University in New Haven.
The event, which was called “New Haven 1831: What Was and What Could Have Been,” was held on the 192nd anniversary of the very town meeting in 1831 where the proposal for the college was struck down in a 700-4 vote.
“Anniversaries are always great because they allow us to time travel in a sense. It prompts us to say that September tenth was the day that decision was denied, but let’s not make it a bad thing, let’s bring greater awareness to this story,” said Tubyez Cropper, program manager of community engagement at the Beinecke.
The exhibit featured an array of documents and a short film spotlighting the contributions of New Haven residents, abolitionists and free Black people to establish the first postsecondary education institution for people of color in America.
From letters between Timothy Dwight and civil rights activist Bias Stanley to copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s “The Liberator,” the event displayed primary sources that storied the fight to establish this institution — mapping out the networks between individuals from the South to New York and Connecticut that wove a rich tapestry of the movement.
Despite the “revolutionary” nature of the proposal to establish the college and the notable figures who played a role in it, the story of the effort, according to Beinecke staff the News spoke with, has hardly been told. Cropper said that he had not heard the story until Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, who is the director of community engagement at the Beinecke, told Cropper about it.
“The story of 1831 is an essential story of New Haven history, of Yale history, of Connecticut history, of American history, that had been somewhat neglected and forgotten,” Morand told the News.
Black and white abolitionists convened for a meeting in Philadelphia in 1830 where they developed the idea of founding the country’s first HBCU. These activists decided New Haven would be the ideal place for the college to be founded.
A centerpiece of the event was the screening of Cropper’s film “What Could Have Been,” which was produced by the Beinecke Library. On the screen, visitors could see both the well-known and relatively unknown history come together to illuminate the efforts to establish the HBCU.
From sleepless nights of editing a script to working with limited documentation of historical figures, Cropper described the process of creating the film as “exhaustingly rewarding.” The film was designed to capture the efforts to establish the HBCU from the perspective of a New Havener in 1831. Cropper said he utilized the archives that were laid out for display at Sunday’s event as well as other historical documents for the film.
The film has previously been screened in libraries, schools and other public venues, which Cropper said he hopes will help New Haveners recognize this story as a part of their history.
Elisa Cruz ’26, who grew up in East Haven and attended a New Haven public school before coming to Yale, said she felt that despite her history classes’ focus on local history, she had never learned about the attempt to establish an HBCU in New Haven.
“The reason I learned about this was through a TikTok,” Cruz said, “I just thought it was crazy that we hadn’t learned this. Why wasn’t it known?”
Some attendees highlighted efforts Yale has made to confront the history that it has contributed to and been influenced by. These events include last week’s Symposium on the Legacy of Robert Farris Thompson by Yale’s Department of the History of Art and programs like the Pennington Fellowship, which aim to highlight the legacy and contributions of Black leaders to Yale.
At the same time, several attendees also told the News they felt the exhibit provided new information about the University’s role in New Haven history.
“It’s a really eye-opening exhibit because you don’t particularly see the narrative about how Yale individuals interact with New Haven, particularly in the context of African American history,” said Anh Nguyen ’26.
Nguyen said this history is not well-known or discussed often around campus.
Even with Yale’s efforts to move towards a better future, Morand and Cropper emphasized the importance of looking back on the University’s history and understanding how to learn from it.
“We are an educational institution. And the reality is that predecessors of ours, in this institution, and others in the leadership of New Haven acted to thwart education, and we need to reckon with that,” Morand said.
David Daggett, the former mayor of New Haven and founder of the Yale Law School, led the opposition to the proposed HBCU. His opposition would go on to be cited to defend the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, which held that the Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent.
Sheryl Carter Negash ’82 said that Yale’s power in New Haven means the University has a responsibility to the city around it.
“I’m thinking about what’s owed. The New Haven that I came to in 1978 is not the same as the New Haven I know now,” Negash said. “I’m thinking about the continuation of oppression that Yale contributed to and, now, what’s needed.”
In light of recent political attempts in Florida to change history curricula, Vera Wells ’71 said that the documents displayed as part of the exhibit are a testament to the history of Black people’s fighting to access education across the country.
The event at the Beinecke not only allowed visitors to reflect on Yale and New Haven’s history but on their personal connections to this history.
Wells, who was a part of the first class of women admitted to Yale and one of the first Black women to graduate from Yale, said that she had never thought about applying to Yale.
“I just happened to be living in New Haven with my husband, and I applied thinking I wasn’t going to get in,” Wells told the News. “If it hadn’t been for my coming, then what would’ve my life been like?”
Later this week, on Sept. 14, Yale will host a ceremony to posthumously award Reverend James W.C. Pennington and Reverend Alexander Crummell with honorary degrees.
Correction, Sept. 14: A previous version of this article included a misspelling of Cropper’s name. The article has been edited to reflect this.
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Beinecke event highlights failed effort to make New Haven the site of America’s first HBCU
The Beinecke Library hosted an event to commemorate the unsuccessful attempt to establish the first HBCU in America in New Haven.
Kenisha Mahajan, Contributing Photographer
Yale’s Beinecke Library hosted an event reflecting on the unsuccessful effort to establish the United States’ first Historically Black College/University in New Haven.
The event, which was called “New Haven 1831: What Was and What Could Have Been,” was held on the 192nd anniversary of the very town meeting in 1831 where the proposal for the college was struck down in a 700-4 vote.
“Anniversaries are always great because they allow us to time travel in a sense. It prompts us to say that September tenth was the day that decision was denied, but let’s not make it a bad thing, let’s bring greater awareness to this story,” said Tubyez Cropper, program manager of community engagement at the Beinecke.
The exhibit featured an array of documents and a short film spotlighting the contributions of New Haven residents, abolitionists and free Black people to establish the first postsecondary education institution for people of color in America.
From letters between Timothy Dwight and civil rights activist Bias Stanley to copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s “The Liberator,” the event displayed primary sources that storied the fight to establish this institution — mapping out the networks between individuals from the South to New York and Connecticut that wove a rich tapestry of the movement.
Despite the “revolutionary” nature of the proposal to establish the college and the notable figures who played a role in it, the story of the effort, according to Beinecke staff the News spoke with, has hardly been told. Cropper said that he had not heard the story until Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, who is the director of community engagement at the Beinecke, told Cropper about it.
“The story of 1831 is an essential story of New Haven history, of Yale history, of Connecticut history, of American history, that had been somewhat neglected and forgotten,” Morand told the News.
Black and white abolitionists convened for a meeting in Philadelphia in 1830 where they developed the idea of founding the country’s first HBCU. These activists decided New Haven would be the ideal place for the college to be founded.
A centerpiece of
|
the event was the screening of Cropper’s film “What Could Have Been,” which was produced by the Beinecke Library. On the screen, visitors could see both the well-known and relatively unknown history come together to illuminate the efforts to establish the HBCU.
From sleepless nights of editing a script to working with limited documentation of historical figures, Cropper described the process of creating the film as “exhaustingly rewarding.” The film was designed to capture the efforts to establish the HBCU from the perspective of a New Havener in 1831. Cropper said he utilized the archives that were laid out for display at Sunday’s event as well as other historical documents for the film.
The film has previously been screened in libraries, schools and other public venues, which Cropper said he hopes will help New Haveners recognize this story as a part of their history.
Elisa Cruz ’26, who grew up in East Haven and attended a New Haven public school before coming to Yale, said she felt that despite her history classes’ focus on local history, she had never learned about the attempt to establish an HBCU in New Haven.
“The reason I learned about this was through a TikTok,” Cruz said, “I just thought it was crazy that we hadn’t learned this. Why wasn’t it known?”
Some attendees highlighted efforts Yale has made to confront the history that it has contributed to and been influenced by. These events include last week’s Symposium on the Legacy of Robert Farris Thompson by Yale’s Department of the History of Art and programs like the Pennington Fellowship, which aim to highlight the legacy and contributions of Black leaders to Yale.
At the same time, several attendees also told the News they felt the exhibit provided new information about the University’s role in New Haven history.
“It’s a really eye-opening exhibit because you don’t particularly see the narrative about how Yale individuals interact with New Haven, particularly in the context of African American history,” said Anh Nguyen ’26.
Nguyen said this history is not well-known or discussed often around campus.
Even with Yale’s efforts to move towards a better future, Morand and Cropper emphasized the importance of looking back on the University’s history and understanding how to learn from it.
“We are an educational institution. And the reality is that predecessors of ours, in this institution, and others in the leadership of New Haven acted to thwart education, and we need to reckon with that,” Morand said.
David Daggett, the former mayor of New Haven and founder of the Yale Law School, led the opposition to the proposed HBCU. His opposition would go on to be cited to defend the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, which held that the Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent.
Sheryl Carter Negash ’82 said that Yale’s power in New Haven means the University has a responsibility to the city around it.
“I’m thinking about what’s owed. The New Haven that I came to in 1978 is not the same as the New Haven I know now,” Negash said. “I’m thinking about the continuation of oppression that Yale contributed to and, now, what’s needed.”
In light of recent political attempts in Florida to change history curricula, Vera Wells ’71 said that the documents displayed as part of the exhibit are a testament to the history of Black people’s fighting to access education across the country.
The event at the Beinecke not only allowed visitors to reflect on Yale and New Haven’s history but on their personal connections to this history.
Wells, who was a part of the first class of women admitted to Yale and one of the first Black women to graduate from Yale, said that she had never thought about applying to Yale.
“I just happened to be living in New Haven with my husband, and I applied thinking I wasn’t going to get in,” Wells told the News. “If it hadn’t been for my coming, then what would’ve my life been like?”
Later this week, on Sept. 14, Yale will host a ceremony to posthumously award Reverend James W.C. Pennington and Reverend Alexander Crummell with honorary degrees.
Correction, Sept. 14: A previous version of this article included a misspelling of Cropper’s name. The article has been edited to reflect this.
|
In a massive effort to understand the human brain, scientists have revealed hightly detailed atlases of the brain — published through a suite of 21 papers on Thursday.
Ever wondered if your brain is just wired differently from others? You might be right. The new studies tackle how our brains operate at the cellular level.
Experts say the studies will help further our understanding of the brain and mind, and solve mysteries around diseases like , schizophrenia, and .
“This collection of studies is an attempt to understand the human brain, and its development, on a much more detailed level. It focuses on the building blocks of the brain, starting with cells,” said Joseph Ecker, a biologist at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, US, who led one of the 21 studies.
The studies are part of the US-led BRAIN Initiative, which aims to uncover the mysteries of the brain. It’s one of several multi-billion-dollar projects around the world aimed at creating comprehensive brain atlases. These brain projects are neuroscience’s version of the , which successfully mapped the first complete human genome in 2003, or NASA’s , which is changing our understanding of the universe.
Don’t we already have a map of the brain?
Anatomists have spent centuries creating atlases of the brain — mapping its subdivisions, folds (gyri) and grooves (sulci) for centuries.
Newer techniques have shown us beautiful images of the cellular structures of the brain’s inner regions.
But our understanding of the brain was fragmented. The anatomical maps lacked information about how the cells functioned. And this functional information lacked precise spatial details.
More recently, neuroscientists turned their efforts to understanding how these brain cells, and the regions they are in, function — how they contribute to , vision, or , or to disease states like schizophrenia or .
“We didn’t have a comprehensive view of a normal brain with enough detail to help us understand brain diseases. We’re now getting closer to this,” said Patrick Hof, a neuroscientist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, US, who led one of the BRAIN Initiative studies.
Brain cell atlas with unprecedented details
What’s new about this initiative is that it connects the brain anatomy with the function of its cells.
“It’s a first dive into deeply understanding the human brain at the cellular level,” Ecker told DW.
Each study helps to create different cartographies of the brain, with each map providing complementary information about the brain. The maps tackle the brain at different scales — from genes, to cells, to cellular structures, to larger brain regions, and finally the brain as a whole.
These maps integrate our varied knowledge about the brain and will be critical for unraveling its complexity.
Ecker’s study, for example, created a highly detailed map of gene expression in different cells types in the brain, creating “bar codes.” He also tracked how they change during development. It highlighted tremendous diversity in cells of the brain.
Hof’s study, meanwhile, created a Google maps-like tool of Broca’s area; a region of the motor cortex that and language.
Treating brain diseases is the ultimate goal
While the BRAIN initiative is “blue sky science” aimed at open discovery, scientists hope the research will eventually help to understand and .
“Treating diseases is absolutely our end goal. But to understand brain diseases, we first need to know what’s happening in a normal brain. That’s our aim here,” Hof told DW.
What’s important here, Hof said, is that we create atlases of the brain through its development — from fetal stages to old age. Only then can we fully understand what went wrong in the brain.
“It means we can understand what happens in developmental disorders like autism spectrum disorders, psychiatric diseases like depression and schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” he told DW.
Ecker is also hopeful the studies will help create new applications to treat these diseases.
“It means we can create new tools to target the cell types that are affected in a certain disease. For example, it can help us to create better gene therapies that treat Alzheimer’s disease. The treatments would be very specific,” said Ecker.
Scientists working together
While the studies are helping to integrate our fragmented knowledge of the brain, the BRAIN initiative itself has helped to integrate the fragmented neuroscientists community.
“It was both a scientific and cultural shift for so many neuroscientists to work together on a project the same scale as the human genome project. It’s working pretty well and there really aren’t any arguments. That’s a story in itself,” Ecker said.
Collaboration between the other brain projects in the EU and Japan has also been successful, where open-access data and tools are helping scientists move towards the common goal of treating brain diseases.
“We are taking away boundaries between different disciplines in neuroscience. It’s a tremendously important aspect that’s opening doors to new discoveries,” said Jan Bjaalie, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the neuroinformatics leader of the EU-funded Human Brain Project, the European counterpart to the BRAIN initiative.
Bjaalie, who was not part of the 21 studies from the BRAIN Iniative, said they were an “outstanding contribution” to brain mapping efforts.
The new studies are currently a first draft of the human brain. The BRAIN Initiative aims to present its first complete atlas of the mouse brain in early 2024, with the human brain to follow in later years.
“The reason for these brain projects is the same reason for our interest in the universe: it is curiosity driven, but also driven by the need to understand brain diseases,” said Bjaalie.
Edited by: Sushmitha Ramakrishnan
The post New brain atlases will unlock mysteries of the human mind appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
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In a massive effort to understand the human brain, scientists have revealed hightly detailed atlases of the brain — published through a suite of 21 papers on Thursday.
Ever wondered if your brain is just wired differently from others? You might be right. The new studies tackle how our brains operate at the cellular level.
Experts say the studies will help further our understanding of the brain and mind, and solve mysteries around diseases like , schizophrenia, and .
“This collection of studies is an attempt to understand the human brain, and its development, on a much more detailed level. It focuses on the building blocks of the brain, starting with cells,” said Joseph Ecker, a biologist at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, US, who led one of the 21 studies.
The studies are part of the US-led BRAIN Initiative, which aims to uncover the mysteries of the brain. It’s one of several multi-billion-dollar projects around the world aimed at creating comprehensive brain atlases. These brain projects are neuroscience’s version of the , which successfully mapped the first complete human genome in 2003, or NASA’s , which is changing our understanding of the universe.
Don’t we already have a map of the brain?
Anatomists have spent centuries creating atlases of the brain — mapping its subdivisions, folds (gyri) and grooves (sulci) for centuries.
Newer techniques have shown us beautiful images of the cellular structures of the brain’s inner regions.
But our understanding of the brain was fragmented. The anatomical maps lacked information about how the cells functioned. And this functional information lacked precise spatial details.
More recently, neuroscientists turned their efforts to understanding how these brain cells, and the regions they are in, function — how they contribute to , vision, or , or to disease states like schizophrenia or .
“We didn’t have a comprehensive view of a normal brain with enough detail to help us understand brain diseases. We’re now getting closer to this,” said Patrick Hof, a neuroscientist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, US, who led one of the BRAIN Initiative studies.
Brain cell atlas with unprecedented details
What’s new about this initiative is that it connects the brain anatomy with the function of its cells.
“It’s a first dive into deeply understanding the human brain at the cellular level,” Ecker told DW.
Each study helps to create different cartographies of the brain, with each map providing complementary information about the
|
brain. The maps tackle the brain at different scales — from genes, to cells, to cellular structures, to larger brain regions, and finally the brain as a whole.
These maps integrate our varied knowledge about the brain and will be critical for unraveling its complexity.
Ecker’s study, for example, created a highly detailed map of gene expression in different cells types in the brain, creating “bar codes.” He also tracked how they change during development. It highlighted tremendous diversity in cells of the brain.
Hof’s study, meanwhile, created a Google maps-like tool of Broca’s area; a region of the motor cortex that and language.
Treating brain diseases is the ultimate goal
While the BRAIN initiative is “blue sky science” aimed at open discovery, scientists hope the research will eventually help to understand and .
“Treating diseases is absolutely our end goal. But to understand brain diseases, we first need to know what’s happening in a normal brain. That’s our aim here,” Hof told DW.
What’s important here, Hof said, is that we create atlases of the brain through its development — from fetal stages to old age. Only then can we fully understand what went wrong in the brain.
“It means we can understand what happens in developmental disorders like autism spectrum disorders, psychiatric diseases like depression and schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” he told DW.
Ecker is also hopeful the studies will help create new applications to treat these diseases.
“It means we can create new tools to target the cell types that are affected in a certain disease. For example, it can help us to create better gene therapies that treat Alzheimer’s disease. The treatments would be very specific,” said Ecker.
Scientists working together
While the studies are helping to integrate our fragmented knowledge of the brain, the BRAIN initiative itself has helped to integrate the fragmented neuroscientists community.
“It was both a scientific and cultural shift for so many neuroscientists to work together on a project the same scale as the human genome project. It’s working pretty well and there really aren’t any arguments. That’s a story in itself,” Ecker said.
Collaboration between the other brain projects in the EU and Japan has also been successful, where open-access data and tools are helping scientists move towards the common goal of treating brain diseases.
“We are taking away boundaries between different disciplines in neuroscience. It’s a tremendously important aspect that’s opening doors to new discoveries,” said Jan Bjaalie, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the neuroinformatics leader of the EU-funded Human Brain Project, the European counterpart to the BRAIN initiative.
Bjaalie, who was not part of the 21 studies from the BRAIN Iniative, said they were an “outstanding contribution” to brain mapping efforts.
The new studies are currently a first draft of the human brain. The BRAIN Initiative aims to present its first complete atlas of the mouse brain in early 2024, with the human brain to follow in later years.
“The reason for these brain projects is the same reason for our interest in the universe: it is curiosity driven, but also driven by the need to understand brain diseases,” said Bjaalie.
Edited by: Sushmitha Ramakrishnan
The post New brain atlases will unlock mysteries of the human mind appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
|
How tourist attractions are keeping animals cool during the Queensland heatwaveBy Gemma Sapwell and Nicholas McElroy
Gus, the Tasmanian devil, is a long way from his native range at his Queensland home.
- Attractions across Queensland say they are working hard to keep the animals cool
- They use a variety of methods, including sprinklers, air-conditioned dens and plenty of ice to keep animals cool
- Tasmanian devils get to tuck into "bloodsicles"
That's why his keepers at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary have gone to extra lengths to keep him cool as the state's south east swelters through a heatwave.
Tucking into the occasional "bloodsicle" helps the devil keep cool, according to Anthony Molyneux, life sciences manager at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary.
"Because they're carnivores, they eat meat, so you mix a bit of blood with water, freeze it, and then you have a bloodsicle," he said.
Tourist attractions across Queensland's east coast are working to ensure the animals in their cares are kept cool in the stifling conditions.
Mr Molyneux said animals were at a higher risk of overheating.
"Much like humans, it's the young and the elderly animals that are a bit more at risk because their bodies can't cope as well," he said.
On top of homemade ice blocks, the sanctuary uses sprinkler systems in all its aviaries to keep birds cool and air-conditioned dens so the wombats can chill out.
"We have two enclosures, one is natural where [wombats] can burrow underground and regulate their temperatures, and the other one is a little den, which we air condition," he said.
He said it was the least the sanctuary could do.
"They're our Aussie icons, so we need to look after them the best we can."
The heatwave is expected to ease over the weekend, but yesterday the apparent temperature was 39 degrees Celsius in Archerfield, 38.6C in Greenbank, 37.7C in Beerburrum and 37C in Brisbane.
Polar bears fussy with water temperature
At Sea World Marine Park on the Gold Coast, the three polar bears — Hudson, Nelson and Mishka — can also choose to take shelter in climate-controlled dens, said Mitchell Leroy, the curator of mammals at the theme park.
The trio also have access to about four tonnes of flaked ice and a chilled saltwater pool.
But the park has learned not to play around with changing the water temperature too much.
"Interestingly, we have found if we make the pool too cool, they won't get in it," he said.
"We find if it sits around 19 to 21 degrees, that's when they'll engage with the water the most."
An icicle banquet on the Sunshine Coast
Meanwhile, on the Sunshine Coast, zookeepers at Wildlife HQ on the Sunshine Coast use hibiscus flower ice blocks for the lemurs, while the spider monkeys and sun bear love blended fruit flavours.
Collections manager Nikki Mikula said staff at the park put in a lot of preparation work in the lead-up to summer to ensure animal enclosures are comfortable.
"We walk around each enclosure to work out how we can make it cooler and put up extra shade where we can," she said.
She said along with additional shading of the park and icicles, they used sprinklers, frozen towels and cooling mats for animals.
Ms Mikula said animals like emus were more than happy to take advantage of sprinklers at the park, but meerkats were not as keen on the water.
She said their meals were served in water on hot days, so they got a chance to cool down as they ate.
"The meerkats get trays of water with mealworms in the middle," she said.
She said some animals needed coaxing to interact with icicles on hot days.
For example, she said some monkeys would not take an icicle with vegetables frozen inside.
"They're not so keen, so we add some fruit inside to get them interested."
A zoo spokesperson added that people could use the same methods to look after their pets at home.
"Creating ice blocks can be done for your pets at home by freezing some of their regular food with water to keep them hydrated as we enter the summer months," the spokesperson said.
"It is always important to make sure our animals have access to shady areas, either through natural shade or artificial shade structures."
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How tourist attractions are keeping animals cool during the Queensland heatwaveBy Gemma Sapwell and Nicholas McElroy
Gus, the Tasmanian devil, is a long way from his native range at his Queensland home.
- Attractions across Queensland say they are working hard to keep the animals cool
- They use a variety of methods, including sprinklers, air-conditioned dens and plenty of ice to keep animals cool
- Tasmanian devils get to tuck into "bloodsicles"
That's why his keepers at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary have gone to extra lengths to keep him cool as the state's south east swelters through a heatwave.
Tucking into the occasional "bloodsicle" helps the devil keep cool, according to Anthony Molyneux, life sciences manager at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary.
"Because they're carnivores, they eat meat, so you mix a bit of blood with water, freeze it, and then you have a bloodsicle," he said.
Tourist attractions across Queensland's east coast are working to ensure the animals in their cares are kept cool in the stifling conditions.
Mr Molyneux said animals were at a higher risk of overheating.
"Much like humans, it's the young and the elderly animals that are a bit more at risk because their bodies can't cope as well," he said.
On top of homemade ice blocks, the sanctuary uses sprinkler systems in all its aviaries to keep birds cool and air-conditioned dens so the wombats can chill out.
"We have two enclosures, one is natural where [wombats] can burrow underground and regulate their temperatures, and the other one is a little den, which we air condition," he said.
He said it was the least the sanctuary could do.
"They're our Aussie icons, so we need to look after them the best we can."
The heatwave is expected to ease over the weekend, but yesterday the apparent temperature was 39 degrees Celsius in Archerfield, 38.6C in Greenbank, 37.7C in Beerburrum and 37C in Brisbane.
Polar bears fussy with water temperature
At Sea World Marine Park on the Gold Coast, the three polar bears — Hudson, Nelson and Mishka — can also choose to take shelter in climate-controlled dens, said Mitchell Leroy, the curator of mammals at the theme park.
The trio also have access to about
|
four tonnes of flaked ice and a chilled saltwater pool.
But the park has learned not to play around with changing the water temperature too much.
"Interestingly, we have found if we make the pool too cool, they won't get in it," he said.
"We find if it sits around 19 to 21 degrees, that's when they'll engage with the water the most."
An icicle banquet on the Sunshine Coast
Meanwhile, on the Sunshine Coast, zookeepers at Wildlife HQ on the Sunshine Coast use hibiscus flower ice blocks for the lemurs, while the spider monkeys and sun bear love blended fruit flavours.
Collections manager Nikki Mikula said staff at the park put in a lot of preparation work in the lead-up to summer to ensure animal enclosures are comfortable.
"We walk around each enclosure to work out how we can make it cooler and put up extra shade where we can," she said.
She said along with additional shading of the park and icicles, they used sprinklers, frozen towels and cooling mats for animals.
Ms Mikula said animals like emus were more than happy to take advantage of sprinklers at the park, but meerkats were not as keen on the water.
She said their meals were served in water on hot days, so they got a chance to cool down as they ate.
"The meerkats get trays of water with mealworms in the middle," she said.
She said some animals needed coaxing to interact with icicles on hot days.
For example, she said some monkeys would not take an icicle with vegetables frozen inside.
"They're not so keen, so we add some fruit inside to get them interested."
A zoo spokesperson added that people could use the same methods to look after their pets at home.
"Creating ice blocks can be done for your pets at home by freezing some of their regular food with water to keep them hydrated as we enter the summer months," the spokesperson said.
"It is always important to make sure our animals have access to shady areas, either through natural shade or artificial shade structures."
|
If every Australian household that uses gas went all-electric today, we would "save" more than 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years.
Most people would spend less money on energy too. Electric appliances use less energy than gas appliances to do the same job, making them cheaper to run.
Our new report shows how much most households can save by switching from gas to electricity for heating, hot water and cooking. The extra cash couldn't come at a better time: about a quarter of Australian households say they found it difficult to pay their energy bills this year.
But many households face hurdles that stop them, or make it hard for them, to go all-electric. Governments could make it easier for people and bring emissions-reduction targets closer to reality.
Households in Melbourne tend to use more gas than those in other mainland capitals, mainly because the winter is so cold. Our report found Melburnians who replace broken gas appliances with electric ones, or move into an all-electric home, could save up to $13,900 over 10 years. Households with rooftop solar will save even more.
It's a similar story in most parts of Australia except the west, where gas is relatively cheap. This mainly reflects differences in the historical development of the gas markets between the west and east coasts.
Households face a series of hurdles
Renters make up nearly a third of all households, and they have little or no control over the appliances that are installed. As most electric appliances cost more to buy than gas ones — and the subsequent bill savings flow to tenants — landlords have little incentive to upgrade their properties from gas to all-electric.
Apartment living can increase the level of complexity. Multi-unit dwellings often bundle gas bills into body-corporate fees, limiting the occupants' incentive to go all-electric. There can also be space constraints in these buildings. Centralised electric heat pumps, for example, take up more space than centralised gas water heaters.
Then there are households that simply can't afford the upgrade. Induction stoves and heat pumps are more expensive than their gas equivalents, by up to a combined $2,000. This initial outlay will soon be recovered by cheaper energy bills, but that doesn't help households that don't have the cash up front.
The 12 per cent of households that skipped meals to pay their energy bills in the past year are the most likely to remain locked into high gas bills.
Some people also simply prefer cooking with gas. Some think induction cooktops will be no better than the poor-performing electric cooktops they may have used in the distant past. Others haven't ever heard of a heat pump for hot water.
Here's how governments can help
Governments, both state and federal, should lower the hurdles on the path to all-electric homes — to reduce people's cost of living and to cut carbon emissions.
As a first step, state governments should ban new gas connections to homes. In 2021, more than 70,000 households joined the gas network. Trying to shift households off gas while allowing new connections is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.
Then, governments should provide landlords with tax write-offs on new induction stoves and heat pumps for hot water, for a limited time. After that, they should require every rental property to be all-electric. Governments should pay to upgrade public housing to all-electric, where they are the landlords. And they should pay not-for-profits managing community housing to do the same.
The federal government should help all households to spread the cost of electric appliances over time. It should subsidise banks to offer low-interest loans for home electrification, via the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
And governments should set out to change people's preferences, from gas to electric. They should embark on a multi-decade communication campaign, not unlike the campaign to upgrade from analogue to digital television in the early 2000s.
A key challenge will be shifting people's ideas about the best way to cook. There are precedents. In Gininderry, a new all-electric suburb of Canberra, one developer recruited chefs to run demonstrations on induction cooktops at the display village. The proportion of potential homebuyers willing to consider buying an all-electric home rose from 67 per cent to 88 per cent.
'Green gas' is no panacea: electricity is cheaper
The gas industry has another solution in mind: instead of switching from gas to electricity, it suggests using "green gas" — biomethane or "green" hydrogen.
Biomethane is chemically identical to natural gas, but is derived from biological materials such as food waste, sewage or agricultural waste. Green hydrogen is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
But both options are too expensive and too far away. Under the most generous of assumptions, green hydrogen will only become cost-competitive with electricity after 2045. And there is not enough biomethane commercially available to replace gas in households.
Meanwhile, more than three million Australian homes already run on electricity alone.
Getting the five million homes that use gas to the same point won't be easy. But with good policy, it is doable. For households, and the climate, there is much to be gained.
Esther Suckling is a research associate at the Grattan Institute. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.
|
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If every Australian household that uses gas went all-electric today, we would "save" more than 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years.
Most people would spend less money on energy too. Electric appliances use less energy than gas appliances to do the same job, making them cheaper to run.
Our new report shows how much most households can save by switching from gas to electricity for heating, hot water and cooking. The extra cash couldn't come at a better time: about a quarter of Australian households say they found it difficult to pay their energy bills this year.
But many households face hurdles that stop them, or make it hard for them, to go all-electric. Governments could make it easier for people and bring emissions-reduction targets closer to reality.
Households in Melbourne tend to use more gas than those in other mainland capitals, mainly because the winter is so cold. Our report found Melburnians who replace broken gas appliances with electric ones, or move into an all-electric home, could save up to $13,900 over 10 years. Households with rooftop solar will save even more.
It's a similar story in most parts of Australia except the west, where gas is relatively cheap. This mainly reflects differences in the historical development of the gas markets between the west and east coasts.
Households face a series of hurdles
Renters make up nearly a third of all households, and they have little or no control over the appliances that are installed. As most electric appliances cost more to buy than gas ones — and the subsequent bill savings flow to tenants — landlords have little incentive to upgrade their properties from gas to all-electric.
Apartment living can increase the level of complexity. Multi-unit dwellings often bundle gas bills into body-corporate fees, limiting the occupants' incentive to go all-electric. There can also be space constraints in these buildings. Centralised electric heat pumps, for example, take up more space than centralised gas water heaters.
Then there are households that simply can't afford the upgrade. Induction stoves and heat pumps are more expensive than their gas equivalents, by up to a combined $2,000. This initial outlay will soon be recovered by cheaper energy bills, but that doesn't help households that don't have the cash up front.
The 12 per cent of households that skipped meals to pay their energy bills in the past year are the most
|
likely to remain locked into high gas bills.
Some people also simply prefer cooking with gas. Some think induction cooktops will be no better than the poor-performing electric cooktops they may have used in the distant past. Others haven't ever heard of a heat pump for hot water.
Here's how governments can help
Governments, both state and federal, should lower the hurdles on the path to all-electric homes — to reduce people's cost of living and to cut carbon emissions.
As a first step, state governments should ban new gas connections to homes. In 2021, more than 70,000 households joined the gas network. Trying to shift households off gas while allowing new connections is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.
Then, governments should provide landlords with tax write-offs on new induction stoves and heat pumps for hot water, for a limited time. After that, they should require every rental property to be all-electric. Governments should pay to upgrade public housing to all-electric, where they are the landlords. And they should pay not-for-profits managing community housing to do the same.
The federal government should help all households to spread the cost of electric appliances over time. It should subsidise banks to offer low-interest loans for home electrification, via the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
And governments should set out to change people's preferences, from gas to electric. They should embark on a multi-decade communication campaign, not unlike the campaign to upgrade from analogue to digital television in the early 2000s.
A key challenge will be shifting people's ideas about the best way to cook. There are precedents. In Gininderry, a new all-electric suburb of Canberra, one developer recruited chefs to run demonstrations on induction cooktops at the display village. The proportion of potential homebuyers willing to consider buying an all-electric home rose from 67 per cent to 88 per cent.
'Green gas' is no panacea: electricity is cheaper
The gas industry has another solution in mind: instead of switching from gas to electricity, it suggests using "green gas" — biomethane or "green" hydrogen.
Biomethane is chemically identical to natural gas, but is derived from biological materials such as food waste, sewage or agricultural waste. Green hydrogen is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
But both options are too expensive and too far away. Under the most generous of assumptions, green hydrogen will only become cost-competitive with electricity after 2045. And there is not enough biomethane commercially available to replace gas in households.
Meanwhile, more than three million Australian homes already run on electricity alone.
Getting the five million homes that use gas to the same point won't be easy. But with good policy, it is doable. For households, and the climate, there is much to be gained.
Esther Suckling is a research associate at the Grattan Institute. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.
|
At its very beginning, this country was a radical, establishment-shattering invention in a staid world of established order.
One of the most important and historically unique aspects the Founding Fathers built into the newly-constituted United States was the opportunity — not the guarantee but the opportunity — for anyone to achieve whatever they could.
That is all under attack now by an insidious effort to smother American exceptionalism.
Until that time, people around the world lived or endured their entire lives precisely where they were born – in geography, yes, but also in social position. Farmers’ sons became farmers, their daughters became farmers’ wives. Elites and royals were born into wealth and social positions. And they remained elites and royals no matter how ignorant, corrupt, or feckless they were.
In short, the horizons of life were set at birth by heritage and class and those channels were immutable.
It is rather astonishing that America’s revolutionaries were not impoverished street wretches looking for some bread, like so many of France’s insurgents 20 years later. They were well-to-do, rather educated gentry comfortably wearing powdered wigs who set out to create a nation where virtually anyone could rise to their level.
Who does that? Talk about revolutionary!
Those uppity colonials who risked their own lives against the world’s most formidable military could have no idea how successful, despite stormy eras and turmoil, that liberating concept would prove to be for more than two centuries in North America. And how contagious it would prove to be to this day around the once-distant world.
They unleashed not just political and social liberties. They ignited a culture of innovators and innovations that sparked individual imaginations and ingenuities that changed life for most everyone.
Names many may not know or recall:
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin stove, lightning rod, even the flexible urinary catheter), Robert Fulton (steamboat), Eli Whitney (cotton gin), Cyrus McCormick (mechanical reaper), Samuel Morse (early telegraph, Morse Code), Charles Goodyear (vulcanized rubber),
Alvah Sears (mail order), Thomas Edison (electric generator), Henry Ford (assembly line), Horatio Alger Jr. (author of young adult novels heralding impoverished youths rising to success through hard work), the Wright Brothers (human flight), and many others.
These people, their competitors, and their descendants were not equal to their countrymen. They were superior in unique ways and were widely hailed, celebrated, and usually rewarded for their individual achievements.
Now, comes this disturbing report from my RedState colleague Nick Arama about an effort cloaked in professed good woke intentions but absolutely antithetical to an essential element of what is American.
Two twisted high school administrators appointed themselves guardians of the feelings of underachievers. For years, they’ve been hiding the names of anyone in their once-renowned school who was honored as a National Merit Scholar. Their professed thinking: They didn’t want the overwhelming number of non-recipients to feel bad, because “Equity.”
Ironically, the offending high school is in Virginia, home state to a large number of those same Founding Fathers, and at a school named for one of them, who went on to become the third president whose personal book collection became the founding core of the Library of Congress.
This is an extreme and perverse extension of progressives’ ‘everyone gets a trophy’ so no one is a loser. That demeans achievement. And, of course, that also means no one is a winner, gets rewarded for excellence, or is encouraged to excel.
There’s even a campaign to show that individualism is actually white supremacy. And Woke sponsors also seek to signal virtue by canceling contradictory speech, as they did here to my colleague, Kira Davis.
Turns out, these arrogant administrators on their own initiative have been secretly applying a perverse twist to this American tradition in recent years. They hide the names of any student there who was recognized as a high-achieving National Merit Scholar – even from the recipients themselves.
In contrast is my small Tennessee town. Every June, instead of shielding a few dropouts, the town posts an oversized portrait of each high school graduate on light posts around the square to celebrate and encourage such achievements.
Reality check for progressives: Not everyone gets a trophy in life. There are losers and winners and competition and values, like work ethic, to be learned. And the sooner parents and educators teach that – or perhaps learn it themselves – the better off we’ll all be.
The offending school administrators in this race to the bottom are Ann Bonitatibus, the principal, and Brandon Kosatka, director of student services, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County.
They did this under a so-called Equitable Grading Policy that involves, among other things, no student ever receiving a zero for anything and everyone getting a score of at least 50 just for showing up. That policy probably could have doubled my Algebra score.
I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn Express recently, but this arbitrary withholding of National Merit certificates on phony woke thinking strikes me as fertile grounds for one helluva lawsuit if the Biden Department of Justice was interested in anything other than going after Donald Trump.
Let’s see, an estimated 1,200 Jefferson students were affected over the years. A National Merit certificate would have given each of them a huge boost in college applications as well as opportunities to apply for thousands of dollars in scholarships, but now all gone.
Oh, and the withholding policy affected a disproportionate number of youngsters with Asian backgrounds. See, they were doing too well in school and others weren’t, so the scale needed adjusting down for equity purposes.
Perhaps the National Merit Scholarship folks simply need to adjust their notification policy as well to include the student and parents and not just the student’s school principal.
One parent said she talked with Kosatka after the achievement censorship was exposed. She reported that he said, “’We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,’ claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to ‘hurt’ the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.”
Another Townhall colleague, Jazz Shaw at sister site Hot Air, accurately calls this “barely disguised racism” and adds:
Efforts have been underway to eliminate merit-based achievements. In the opinion of the progressives pushing such “reforms,” too many of the “wrong” types of students were getting the awards, most commonly students from Asian families.
To correct what they see as an “unfair” system, they keep lowering the standards until everyone is equal, meaning equally underachieving and denying everyone to chance to excel. Which, when you think about it, is the genuine “unfair” system in a real America that was founded to do exactly the opposite.
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At its very beginning, this country was a radical, establishment-shattering invention in a staid world of established order.
One of the most important and historically unique aspects the Founding Fathers built into the newly-constituted United States was the opportunity — not the guarantee but the opportunity — for anyone to achieve whatever they could.
That is all under attack now by an insidious effort to smother American exceptionalism.
Until that time, people around the world lived or endured their entire lives precisely where they were born – in geography, yes, but also in social position. Farmers’ sons became farmers, their daughters became farmers’ wives. Elites and royals were born into wealth and social positions. And they remained elites and royals no matter how ignorant, corrupt, or feckless they were.
In short, the horizons of life were set at birth by heritage and class and those channels were immutable.
It is rather astonishing that America’s revolutionaries were not impoverished street wretches looking for some bread, like so many of France’s insurgents 20 years later. They were well-to-do, rather educated gentry comfortably wearing powdered wigs who set out to create a nation where virtually anyone could rise to their level.
Who does that? Talk about revolutionary!
Those uppity colonials who risked their own lives against the world’s most formidable military could have no idea how successful, despite stormy eras and turmoil, that liberating concept would prove to be for more than two centuries in North America. And how contagious it would prove to be to this day around the once-distant world.
They unleashed not just political and social liberties. They ignited a culture of innovators and innovations that sparked individual imaginations and ingenuities that changed life for most everyone.
Names many may not know or recall:
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin stove, lightning rod, even the flexible urinary catheter), Robert Fulton (steamboat), Eli Whitney (cotton gin), Cyrus McCormick (mechanical reaper), Samuel Morse (early telegraph, Morse Code), Charles Goodyear (vulcanized rubber),
Alvah Sears (mail order), Thomas Edison (electric generator), Henry Ford (assembly line), Horatio Alger Jr. (author of young adult novels heralding impoverished youths rising to success through hard work), the Wright Brothers (human flight), and many others.
These people, their competitors, and their descendants were not equal to their countrymen. They were superior in
|
unique ways and were widely hailed, celebrated, and usually rewarded for their individual achievements.
Now, comes this disturbing report from my RedState colleague Nick Arama about an effort cloaked in professed good woke intentions but absolutely antithetical to an essential element of what is American.
Two twisted high school administrators appointed themselves guardians of the feelings of underachievers. For years, they’ve been hiding the names of anyone in their once-renowned school who was honored as a National Merit Scholar. Their professed thinking: They didn’t want the overwhelming number of non-recipients to feel bad, because “Equity.”
Ironically, the offending high school is in Virginia, home state to a large number of those same Founding Fathers, and at a school named for one of them, who went on to become the third president whose personal book collection became the founding core of the Library of Congress.
This is an extreme and perverse extension of progressives’ ‘everyone gets a trophy’ so no one is a loser. That demeans achievement. And, of course, that also means no one is a winner, gets rewarded for excellence, or is encouraged to excel.
There’s even a campaign to show that individualism is actually white supremacy. And Woke sponsors also seek to signal virtue by canceling contradictory speech, as they did here to my colleague, Kira Davis.
Turns out, these arrogant administrators on their own initiative have been secretly applying a perverse twist to this American tradition in recent years. They hide the names of any student there who was recognized as a high-achieving National Merit Scholar – even from the recipients themselves.
In contrast is my small Tennessee town. Every June, instead of shielding a few dropouts, the town posts an oversized portrait of each high school graduate on light posts around the square to celebrate and encourage such achievements.
Reality check for progressives: Not everyone gets a trophy in life. There are losers and winners and competition and values, like work ethic, to be learned. And the sooner parents and educators teach that – or perhaps learn it themselves – the better off we’ll all be.
The offending school administrators in this race to the bottom are Ann Bonitatibus, the principal, and Brandon Kosatka, director of student services, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County.
They did this under a so-called Equitable Grading Policy that involves, among other things, no student ever receiving a zero for anything and everyone getting a score of at least 50 just for showing up. That policy probably could have doubled my Algebra score.
I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn Express recently, but this arbitrary withholding of National Merit certificates on phony woke thinking strikes me as fertile grounds for one helluva lawsuit if the Biden Department of Justice was interested in anything other than going after Donald Trump.
Let’s see, an estimated 1,200 Jefferson students were affected over the years. A National Merit certificate would have given each of them a huge boost in college applications as well as opportunities to apply for thousands of dollars in scholarships, but now all gone.
Oh, and the withholding policy affected a disproportionate number of youngsters with Asian backgrounds. See, they were doing too well in school and others weren’t, so the scale needed adjusting down for equity purposes.
Perhaps the National Merit Scholarship folks simply need to adjust their notification policy as well to include the student and parents and not just the student’s school principal.
One parent said she talked with Kosatka after the achievement censorship was exposed. She reported that he said, “’We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,’ claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to ‘hurt’ the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.”
Another Townhall colleague, Jazz Shaw at sister site Hot Air, accurately calls this “barely disguised racism” and adds:
Efforts have been underway to eliminate merit-based achievements. In the opinion of the progressives pushing such “reforms,” too many of the “wrong” types of students were getting the awards, most commonly students from Asian families.
To correct what they see as an “unfair” system, they keep lowering the standards until everyone is equal, meaning equally underachieving and denying everyone to chance to excel. Which, when you think about it, is the genuine “unfair” system in a real America that was founded to do exactly the opposite.
|
Hazardous waste landfills safe, but concerns linger over toxic soil coming to Indiana
Hundreds of tons of contaminated soil and millions of gallons of water have been collected from East Palestine, Ohio, after a train derailment last month released toxic chemicals into the surrounding air, water and ground.
The waste from the site has to go somewhere, but the question becomes: Where to put it?
A landfill about 40 miles west of Indianapolis is among seven facilities in four different states that have been designated to take some of the material. It has already received three shipments of contaminated soil from the wreck site, a development that has raised serious concerns among officials including Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and residents who live near the landfill.
Some of the chemicals that spilled in the train crash, along with possible byproducts from the fire, are known to cause cancer. Others can cause headaches, difficulty breathing or skin and eye irritation.
Railroad safety:Indiana communities at risk for train disasters like the one that devastated Ohio town
The potential for harm has many Hoosiers questioning if Indiana is the right place for the Ohio waste. They fear it could put them at risk.
“The materials should go to the nearest facilities, not moved from the far eastern side of Ohio to the far western side of Indiana,” Holcomb said last week. “I want to know exactly what precautions will be taken in the transport and disposition of the materials.”
But scientists and hazardous waste experts say they aren’t overly concerned.
Landfills like the one in Putnam County are designed and built to handle toxic waste, they said. They also have processes in place to protect the surrounding environment.
“When hazardous waste landfills are properly run and maintained, then it is not a problem for the surrounding environment or the people living there,” said Marta Venier, an environmental chemist at Indiana University.
However, the Indiana landfill has had some alleged issues in recent years, according to a compliance database from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That raises questions for some about the facility, operated by Heritage Environmental Services, and whether it is equipped to properly handle the waste.
The company is working to calm those concerns and says the alleged violations cited by the EPA relate to a minor disagreement over labeling.
“We have operated in the community since 1980 and continuously strive to be a good neighbor and corporate citizen,” Heritage vice president Ali Alavi told IndyStar in an emailed response. “We are happy to engage with the community and believe it is important to maintain an open dialogue.”
Landfills designed to handle toxic waste
The Indiana landfill sits in a rural area between the towns of Roachdale and Russellville. It is certified to handle hazardous waste. On its website, Heritage said that it has roughly 14 million cubic yards of permitted landfill capacity and that the landfill is geologically isolated.
Landfills like this one are specifically engineered sites where non-liquid hazardous waste is disposed of and covered. The sites have to be designed in a particular way to “minimize the chance of release of hazardous waste into the environment,” according to the EPA.
While most regular landfills for sanitary waste — think every day household trash — have one liner, hazardous waste landfills have at least two, said Chris Kohler, a professor at IU who also has a long career working with hazardous waste and contaminated sites.
The liners are made with impermeable materials. In addition to the liners, there are layers of clay, soil and other materials. In between the liners, there are sensors to detect leaks from a tear or other damage. The landfills also have leachate collection systems to capture anything that comes out of the landfill and remove it to be treated, Kohler explained.
Spaced along the perimeter of the Roachdale landfill is a network of 15 wells used to monitor the groundwater around the site, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Heritage tests the groundwater semi-annually, the agency said, and the company has not detected any pollutants above acceptable levels.
Heritage “is in compliance with its permit,” IDEM told IndyStar.
Kohler said hazardous waste is typically treated — often before it even comes to the landfill — or is encapsulated in a way to reduce the level of potentially harmful chemicals before it is put in the ground. He said precautions are taken throughout the process to reduce the risk and ensure the material is contained safely.
“Landfills are not just a hole in the ground,” Kohler said. “They’ve been engineered to contain the waste.”
Past violations raise concerns
For many, their concerns stem from uncertainty: What is in the waste and will the facility will meet its duty to handle it properly?
At a community meeting on March 1, residents asked about past issues at the site. It had 12 quarters of noncompliance with federal regulations dating back to the spring of 2020, according to the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database.
A document from IDEM to the company also cites issues discovered during a 2019 inspection. They include a failure to meet sampling requirements, a bag with hazardous debris that ignited, and liquid found in a trailer.
But a response from the company to the state agency argues the waste had already been treated and encapsulated, so they didn’t need to sample it. They also said they’ve addressed the ignition issue and the liquid was in the transport truck and did not leak from the bag of hazardous waste.
Alavi said the alleged EPA noncompliance involved a “disagreement over the level of detail required on a label” and the issue was addressed. The company also stressed that while negotiations on resolving the paperwork are ongoing, it does not mean violations at the site have continued.
“The official closing of a file often is over a year after the alleged violation has been addressed and a resolution agreed upon,” Alavi told IndyStar. “Thus the misleading appearance of a violation extending for multiple quarters when it actually promptly was resolved."
He added the EPA database does not distinguish between what is considered a minor issue, like paperwork, compared to something more serious like a spill.
Hazardous materials:'We don't trust you' — Indiana landfill neighbors don't want toxic waste from Ohio train
While IDEM would not comment on the ongoing compliance case, as it is still open, the agency did tell IndyStar that “this issue does not pertain to the landfill’s ability to accept or appropriately manage hazardous waste.”
The EPA also said that it determines if a disposal facility is in compliance with hazardous waste laws and is acceptable to receive the waste before approving debris to be moved there. EPA told IndyStar that the landfill near Roachdale "is acceptable” for receiving the wastes from the train wreck.
Future shipments of contaminated soil
Several shipments of waste have already been received at the site. Alavi said it is unclear how much waste in total is expected to come to the Indiana landfill.
The material is being shipped by truck and is safely closed and sealed on all sides, Alavi said.
Gabe Filippelli, executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, said he recognizes the material is potentially dangerous to the environment and public health, “thus the need to get it disposed of.” His main concern, he said, is that the trucks transporting the material could have an accident themselves and cause the potential for an additional spill somewhere in the delivery chain.
The shipments of waste from the Ohio site have been paused temporarily. The EPA said it is testing the soil for dioxins, a “highly toxic” chemical compound that can cause cancer and takes a long time to break down in the environment.
Holcomb has also ordered testing for dioxins in the contaminated soil that has already been delivered to the landfill. The Heritage site is not permitted to receive certain hazardous waste streams that contain dioxins, Alavi said, but it can accept dioxins that are naturally occurring or in wastes at trace amounts below specific levels.
The results, which were announced Wednesday, showed that the contaminated soil does not contain any harmful levels of dioxins, according to a release from the Governor. That means the landfill is lawfully permitted to dispose of that material at its site. Still, Holcomb added that the state will continue to test any further shipments brought to Indiana.
Kohler said these facilities are receiving various types of hazardous waste on a regular basis, some potentially more harmful than the material from Ohio. Filippelli said that is the “conundrum” with the country’s use of hazardous materials for industrial purposes: “What do you do with it afterwards or in this type of situation?”
Some materials can be incinerated, which is the case for some of the waste from the train derailment. For others, the only solution is disposal at a hazardous waste facility. Filippelli stressed that continued and long-term monitoring is important to ensure all the safety systems are working properly to prevent an unexpected release into the environment.
Venier, the chemist, said she is not concerned with the waste coming to Indiana, adding the risk of exposure like what was experienced in East Palestine after the crash is very different from that posed by the waste.
“There is a lack of trust between people and institutions, which is unfortunate. But these facilities are monitored much more than other places where this waste could have gone,” she said. “So this is the best way to do this.”
Call IndyStar reporter Sarah Bowman at 317-444-6129 or email at <email-pii>. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook: @IndyStarSarah. Connect with IndyStar’s environmental reporters: Join The Scrub on Facebook.
IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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Hazardous waste landfills safe, but concerns linger over toxic soil coming to Indiana
Hundreds of tons of contaminated soil and millions of gallons of water have been collected from East Palestine, Ohio, after a train derailment last month released toxic chemicals into the surrounding air, water and ground.
The waste from the site has to go somewhere, but the question becomes: Where to put it?
A landfill about 40 miles west of Indianapolis is among seven facilities in four different states that have been designated to take some of the material. It has already received three shipments of contaminated soil from the wreck site, a development that has raised serious concerns among officials including Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and residents who live near the landfill.
Some of the chemicals that spilled in the train crash, along with possible byproducts from the fire, are known to cause cancer. Others can cause headaches, difficulty breathing or skin and eye irritation.
Railroad safety:Indiana communities at risk for train disasters like the one that devastated Ohio town
The potential for harm has many Hoosiers questioning if Indiana is the right place for the Ohio waste. They fear it could put them at risk.
“The materials should go to the nearest facilities, not moved from the far eastern side of Ohio to the far western side of Indiana,” Holcomb said last week. “I want to know exactly what precautions will be taken in the transport and disposition of the materials.”
But scientists and hazardous waste experts say they aren’t overly concerned.
Landfills like the one in Putnam County are designed and built to handle toxic waste, they said. They also have processes in place to protect the surrounding environment.
“When hazardous waste landfills are properly run and maintained, then it is not a problem for the surrounding environment or the people living there,” said Marta Venier, an environmental chemist at Indiana University.
However, the Indiana landfill has had some alleged issues in recent years, according to a compliance database from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That raises questions for some about the facility, operated by Heritage Environmental Services, and whether it is equipped to properly handle the waste.
The company is working to calm those concerns and says the alleged violations cited by the EPA relate to a minor disagreement over labeling.
“We have operated in the community since 1980 and continuously strive to be a good neighbor and corporate citizen,” Heritage vice president Ali Alavi told IndyStar in an emailed response. “We are happy to engage with the community and
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believe it is important to maintain an open dialogue.”
Landfills designed to handle toxic waste
The Indiana landfill sits in a rural area between the towns of Roachdale and Russellville. It is certified to handle hazardous waste. On its website, Heritage said that it has roughly 14 million cubic yards of permitted landfill capacity and that the landfill is geologically isolated.
Landfills like this one are specifically engineered sites where non-liquid hazardous waste is disposed of and covered. The sites have to be designed in a particular way to “minimize the chance of release of hazardous waste into the environment,” according to the EPA.
While most regular landfills for sanitary waste — think every day household trash — have one liner, hazardous waste landfills have at least two, said Chris Kohler, a professor at IU who also has a long career working with hazardous waste and contaminated sites.
The liners are made with impermeable materials. In addition to the liners, there are layers of clay, soil and other materials. In between the liners, there are sensors to detect leaks from a tear or other damage. The landfills also have leachate collection systems to capture anything that comes out of the landfill and remove it to be treated, Kohler explained.
Spaced along the perimeter of the Roachdale landfill is a network of 15 wells used to monitor the groundwater around the site, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Heritage tests the groundwater semi-annually, the agency said, and the company has not detected any pollutants above acceptable levels.
Heritage “is in compliance with its permit,” IDEM told IndyStar.
Kohler said hazardous waste is typically treated — often before it even comes to the landfill — or is encapsulated in a way to reduce the level of potentially harmful chemicals before it is put in the ground. He said precautions are taken throughout the process to reduce the risk and ensure the material is contained safely.
“Landfills are not just a hole in the ground,” Kohler said. “They’ve been engineered to contain the waste.”
Past violations raise concerns
For many, their concerns stem from uncertainty: What is in the waste and will the facility will meet its duty to handle it properly?
At a community meeting on March 1, residents asked about past issues at the site. It had 12 quarters of noncompliance with federal regulations dating back to the spring of 2020, according to the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database.
A document from IDEM to the company also cites issues discovered during a 2019 inspection. They include a failure to meet sampling requirements, a bag with hazardous debris that ignited, and liquid found in a trailer.
But a response from the company to the state agency argues the waste had already been treated and encapsulated, so they didn’t need to sample it. They also said they’ve addressed the ignition issue and the liquid was in the transport truck and did not leak from the bag of hazardous waste.
Alavi said the alleged EPA noncompliance involved a “disagreement over the level of detail required on a label” and the issue was addressed. The company also stressed that while negotiations on resolving the paperwork are ongoing, it does not mean violations at the site have continued.
“The official closing of a file often is over a year after the alleged violation has been addressed and a resolution agreed upon,” Alavi told IndyStar. “Thus the misleading appearance of a violation extending for multiple quarters when it actually promptly was resolved."
He added the EPA database does not distinguish between what is considered a minor issue, like paperwork, compared to something more serious like a spill.
Hazardous materials:'We don't trust you' — Indiana landfill neighbors don't want toxic waste from Ohio train
While IDEM would not comment on the ongoing compliance case, as it is still open, the agency did tell IndyStar that “this issue does not pertain to the landfill’s ability to accept or appropriately manage hazardous waste.”
The EPA also said that it determines if a disposal facility is in compliance with hazardous waste laws and is acceptable to receive the waste before approving debris to be moved there. EPA told IndyStar that the landfill near Roachdale "is acceptable” for receiving the wastes from the train wreck.
Future shipments of contaminated soil
Several shipments of waste have already been received at the site. Alavi said it is unclear how much waste in total is expected to come to the Indiana landfill.
The material is being shipped by truck and is safely closed and sealed on all sides, Alavi said.
Gabe Filippelli, executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, said he recognizes the material is potentially dangerous to the environment and public health, “thus the need to get it disposed of.” His main concern, he said, is that the trucks transporting the material could have an accident themselves and cause the potential for an additional spill somewhere in the delivery chain.
The shipments of waste from the Ohio site have been paused temporarily. The EPA said it is testing the soil for dioxins, a “highly toxic” chemical compound that can cause cancer and takes a long time to break down in the environment.
Holcomb has also ordered testing for dioxins in the contaminated soil that has already been delivered to the landfill. The Heritage site is not permitted to receive certain hazardous waste streams that contain dioxins, Alavi said, but it can accept dioxins that are naturally occurring or in wastes at trace amounts below specific levels.
The results, which were announced Wednesday, showed that the contaminated soil does not contain any harmful levels of dioxins, according to a release from the Governor. That means the landfill is lawfully permitted to dispose of that material at its site. Still, Holcomb added that the state will continue to test any further shipments brought to Indiana.
Kohler said these facilities are receiving various types of hazardous waste on a regular basis, some potentially more harmful than the material from Ohio. Filippelli said that is the “conundrum” with the country’s use of hazardous materials for industrial purposes: “What do you do with it afterwards or in this type of situation?”
Some materials can be incinerated, which is the case for some of the waste from the train derailment. For others, the only solution is disposal at a hazardous waste facility. Filippelli stressed that continued and long-term monitoring is important to ensure all the safety systems are working properly to prevent an unexpected release into the environment.
Venier, the chemist, said she is not concerned with the waste coming to Indiana, adding the risk of exposure like what was experienced in East Palestine after the crash is very different from that posed by the waste.
“There is a lack of trust between people and institutions, which is unfortunate. But these facilities are monitored much more than other places where this waste could have gone,” she said. “So this is the best way to do this.”
Call IndyStar reporter Sarah Bowman at 317-444-6129 or email at <email-pii>. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook: @IndyStarSarah. Connect with IndyStar’s environmental reporters: Join The Scrub on Facebook.
IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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If you’ve been feeling more tired lately and catch yourself sneezing more often, don’t fret — you’re not the only one suffering from spring allergies.
About 50 million Americans are triggered by high counts of tree and grass pollen in the spring. This year’s season arrived slightly earlier than usual, said Dr. Preeti Sharma, a pediatrician who specializes in respiratory disease at Children’s Health.
“As we head into warmer weather and grass starts to grow again … they produce pollen with that, and the pollen is carried in the wind,” she said.
While seasonal allergies might make some dread springtime, there is information available to help peole better navigate the eye-watering ailment.
Here’s everything you need to know about the 2023 spring allergy season, including if it’s worse this year, how to tell if you’re experiencing allergies and ways to cope.
Is it worse this year?
Allergies are not necessarily more intense this year, but they have come early, said Sharma, who’s also an assistant professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Due to warmer weather, cities across the Southern and Eastern U.S. are also reporting higher pollen counts than usual for early March, causing some to experience an earlier bout of spring allergies. It’s also possible allergy season may last longer, according to a study published in the Nature Communications journal.
In North Texas, Dallas ranks as one of the worst cities for seasonal allergies, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Tree pollen count in Dallas was “very high” Thursday, The Weather Channel reported, and it’s expected to remain so through the weekend.
In short, now is probably a good time to start taking antihistamines, which are commonly used as allergy medicine.
Is it a cold or just allergies?
Allergy symptoms can often resemble those of a cold — especially in kids — Sharma said. Both can result in coughing, a runny nose and congestion.
But the telltale sign of a cold, rather than allergies, is a fever.
“A fever is a strong indicator that the viral illness is not allergies, because we generally don’t see fevers in allergies,” Sharma said.
Additionally, colds are more likely to make people feel unwell and cause them to experience body aches and sore throats.
Allergies are also uncommon in infants younger than 1, Sharma said. In other words, if it’s baby’s first spring, it’s more likely they’re experiencing a cold, not allergies.
Need more of an explanation? Common colds are caused by viruses, while allergies are a body’s response to allergens in the environment, according to the Mayo Clinic. Colds often last five to seven days, while allergies may linger longer than two weeks.
How to cope
There is no cure for allergies. Over-the-counter antihistamines, such as Zyrtec, Allegra and Claritin, are probably your best bet for relief. But if they aren’t available at a pharmacy, the next option is to use a nasal spray, Sharma said.
Nasal steroid sprays are also available over the counter and can provide relief for nasal symptoms. For those suffering from severe eye symptoms, such as redness and itchiness, over-the-counter eye drops are also available.
Moreover, allergen counts tend to peak in the early morning hours, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and early evening, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. — which tend to coincide with our free time to be outside. If you’re a chronic allergy sufferer, Sharma said it might be best to avoid going outside during these hours.
Other preventative measures include closing windows inside your home and car, washing your clothes after being outside and using an air purifier. If you experience intense allergy flare-ups, Sharma recommends wearing a mask while outside.
“If you know you’re going to be outside and doing something that often kicks up your allergy, wearing a mask is going to prevent your nasal exposure to those spores,” she said.
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If you’ve been feeling more tired lately and catch yourself sneezing more often, don’t fret — you’re not the only one suffering from spring allergies.
About 50 million Americans are triggered by high counts of tree and grass pollen in the spring. This year’s season arrived slightly earlier than usual, said Dr. Preeti Sharma, a pediatrician who specializes in respiratory disease at Children’s Health.
“As we head into warmer weather and grass starts to grow again … they produce pollen with that, and the pollen is carried in the wind,” she said.
While seasonal allergies might make some dread springtime, there is information available to help peole better navigate the eye-watering ailment.
Here’s everything you need to know about the 2023 spring allergy season, including if it’s worse this year, how to tell if you’re experiencing allergies and ways to cope.
Is it worse this year?
Allergies are not necessarily more intense this year, but they have come early, said Sharma, who’s also an assistant professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Due to warmer weather, cities across the Southern and Eastern U.S. are also reporting higher pollen counts than usual for early March, causing some to experience an earlier bout of spring allergies. It’s also possible allergy season may last longer, according to a study published in the Nature Communications journal.
In North Texas, Dallas ranks as one of the worst cities for seasonal allergies, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Tree pollen count in Dallas was “very high” Thursday, The Weather Channel reported, and it’s expected to remain so through the weekend.
In short, now is probably a good time to start taking antihistamines, which are commonly used as allergy medicine.
Is it a cold or just allergies?
Allergy symptoms can often resemble those of a cold — especially in kids — Sharma said. Both can result in coughing, a runny nose and congestion.
But the telltale sign of a cold, rather than allergies, is a fever.
“A fever is a strong indicator that the viral illness is not allergies, because we generally don’t see fevers in allergies,” Sharma said.
Additionally, colds are more likely to make people feel unwell and cause them to experience body aches and sore throats.
Allergies are also uncommon in infants younger than 1, Sharma said. In other words, if it’s baby’s first spring, it’s more
|
likely they’re experiencing a cold, not allergies.
Need more of an explanation? Common colds are caused by viruses, while allergies are a body’s response to allergens in the environment, according to the Mayo Clinic. Colds often last five to seven days, while allergies may linger longer than two weeks.
How to cope
There is no cure for allergies. Over-the-counter antihistamines, such as Zyrtec, Allegra and Claritin, are probably your best bet for relief. But if they aren’t available at a pharmacy, the next option is to use a nasal spray, Sharma said.
Nasal steroid sprays are also available over the counter and can provide relief for nasal symptoms. For those suffering from severe eye symptoms, such as redness and itchiness, over-the-counter eye drops are also available.
Moreover, allergen counts tend to peak in the early morning hours, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and early evening, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. — which tend to coincide with our free time to be outside. If you’re a chronic allergy sufferer, Sharma said it might be best to avoid going outside during these hours.
Other preventative measures include closing windows inside your home and car, washing your clothes after being outside and using an air purifier. If you experience intense allergy flare-ups, Sharma recommends wearing a mask while outside.
“If you know you’re going to be outside and doing something that often kicks up your allergy, wearing a mask is going to prevent your nasal exposure to those spores,” she said.
|
A nearly 130-year-old shipwreck was discovered deep in Lake Huron, identified as the Ironton schooner that sank after a collision with a wooden freighter, killing five crew members.
The ship was found in Lake Huron’s deadly “Shipwreck Alley” in 2019 but the findings were not revealed to the public until Wednesday to give researchers time to study the wreck, one of an estimated 6,000 ships that have sank in the Great Lakes.
The Ironton was “magnificently preserved,” researchers noted, with a lifeboat still attached to the ship’s stern, confirming the story of the 1894 disaster’s two survivors who said the rope on the boat had not been untied.
The Great Lakes have a long history of swallowing ships whole. The climate makes them prone to storms, and the resulting surging waves can be strong enough to sink vessels. Long a cargo passage, barges and shipping vessels have crossed the lakes since at least the seventeenth century.
These ships are generally well-preserved, due to the cold conditions deep within the lakes. Because the lakes are bodies of freshwater, salinity does not eat away at the ships’ structure, meaning they decay more slowly than those that sink in the ocean.
The Edmund Fitzgerald
A fairly recent wreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in 1975, the largest ship to ever sink in the Great Lakes. The entire 29-person crew was killed after a November storm caused gale-force winds, damaging integral parts of the freighter. The disaster inspired a Canadian folk song, released the following year: Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Lady Elgin
The Lady Elgin sank in Lake Michigan in September 1860, killing an estimated 300 passengers, mostly members of an Irish militia. The wreck was caused by a collision between the Elgin and a Canadian schooner. The schooner’s captain didn’t realize how much damage was done to the Elgin, and left the area shortly after the crash. The Lady Elgin broke apart, sinking in about 20 minutes.
“We have not only located a pristine shipwreck lost for over a century, we are also learning more about one of our nation’s most important natural resources — the Great Lakes,” said Jeff Gray, superintendent of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. “This research will help protect Lake Huron and its rich history.”
- In the Ontario-based publication The Hamilton Spectator, contributing writer Craig Wallace details how his great-uncle was lost in a 1940 wreck on the Great Lakes. Like others, the Anna C. Minch was trapped in a storm, and all of the crew were killed.
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A nearly 130-year-old shipwreck was discovered deep in Lake Huron, identified as the Ironton schooner that sank after a collision with a wooden freighter, killing five crew members.
The ship was found in Lake Huron’s deadly “Shipwreck Alley” in 2019 but the findings were not revealed to the public until Wednesday to give researchers time to study the wreck, one of an estimated 6,000 ships that have sank in the Great Lakes.
The Ironton was “magnificently preserved,” researchers noted, with a lifeboat still attached to the ship’s stern, confirming the story of the 1894 disaster’s two survivors who said the rope on the boat had not been untied.
The Great Lakes have a long history of swallowing ships whole. The climate makes them prone to storms, and the resulting surging waves can be strong enough to sink vessels. Long a cargo passage, barges and shipping vessels have crossed the lakes since at least the seventeenth century.
These ships are generally well-preserved, due to the cold conditions deep within the lakes. Because the lakes are bodies of freshwater, salinity does not eat away at the ships’ structure, meaning they decay more slowly than those that sink in the ocean.
The Edmund Fitzgerald
A fairly recent wreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in 1975, the largest ship to ever sink in the Great Lakes. The entire 29-person crew was killed after a November storm caused gale-force winds, damaging integral parts of the freighter. The disaster inspired a Canadian folk song, released the following year: Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Lady Elgin
The Lady Elgin sank in Lake Michigan in September 1860, killing an estimated 300 passengers, mostly members of an Irish militia. The wreck was caused by a collision between the Elgin and a Canadian schooner. The schooner’s captain didn’t realize how much damage was done to the Elgin, and left the area shortly after the crash. The Lady Elgin broke apart, sinking in about 20 minutes.
“We have not only located a pristine shipwreck lost for over a century, we are also learning more about one of our nation’s most important natural resources — the Great Lakes,” said Jeff Gray, superintendent of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. “This research will help protect Lake Huron and its rich history.”
- In the Ontario
|
-based publication The Hamilton Spectator, contributing writer Craig Wallace details how his great-uncle was lost in a 1940 wreck on the Great Lakes. Like others, the Anna C. Minch was trapped in a storm, and all of the crew were killed.
|
UF's International Shark Attack File: Unprovoked bites down in 2022
The number of unprovoked shark attacks worldwide decreased last year, tying with 2020 for the fewest number of reported incidents in the last 10 years.
According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, there were a total of 57 unprovoked bites in 2022, most of which occurred in the United States and Australia. Of these, five attacks were fatal, down from nine deaths in 2021, and 10 the year prior.
Since 2013, there has been an average of 74 unprovoked bites per year.
The one notable exception was in 2020, as COVID-19-related travel restrictions and beach closures likely resulted in fewer encounters between humans and sharks. The overall reduction in the number of bites last year may reflect the documented global decline of shark populations.
“Generally speaking, the number of sharks in the world’s oceans has decreased, which may have contributed to recent lulls,” said Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Florida Program for Shark Research. “It’s likely that fatalities are down because some areas have recently implemented rigorous beach safety protocols, especially in Australia.”
Science:University of Florida study shows human pee could play key role in seagrass restoration
More:Animal rights group files complaint against UF research ending in dog deaths
The International Shark Attack File places a strong emphasis on unprovoked bites in its annual report and does not highlight attacks that may have been prompted by mitigating circumstances, such as fishing lines cast in the direct vicinity of the incident or the presence of chum in the water. There were 32 additional bites in 2022 that fit the ISAF’s criteria for having been intentionally or unintentionally provoked.
“Unprovoked bites give us significantly more insight into the biology and behavior of sharks,” Naylor said. “Changing the environment such that sharks are drawn to the area in search of their natural food source might prompt them to bite humans when they otherwise wouldn’t.”
As in previous years, the U.S. had the highest number of bites, and Florida again had more reported bites than anywhere else on Earth. None of Florida’s 16 unprovoked bites were fatal, but two — likely from bull sharks — required medical treatment resulting in amputations. A woman snorkeling in the Dry Tortugas early in the year was notably bitten by a lemon shark, which rarely attacks humans. T
he incident marked only the 11th known unprovoked attack from this species.
The U.S. had only a single unprovoked fatality, which occurred late in the year when a snorkeler went missing along Keawakapu Beach in Maui, Hawaii.
Australia had nine confirmed unprovoked bites, and single bites occurred in New Zealand, Thailand and Brazil. Two fatal attacks occurred on the same day in Egypt’s Red Sea, where shark encounters are considered rare. South Africa, which averages a few bites a year, had two unprovoked attacks in 2022, both of which were fatal and likely caused by white sharks.
The chances of being bitten by a shark remain incredibly low. According to the World Health Organization, drowning is the third leading cause of accidental death worldwide, and coastal features like rip tides and strong currents pose a greater risk to beachgoers than sharks.
The International Shark Attack File provides a curated list of recommendations for further reducing your risk of a shark bite, such as removing reflective jewelry before entering the water and avoiding areas where people are fishing. For more resources, including the full 2022 report, you can visit the International Shark Attack File’s website at floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/.
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UF's International Shark Attack File: Unprovoked bites down in 2022
The number of unprovoked shark attacks worldwide decreased last year, tying with 2020 for the fewest number of reported incidents in the last 10 years.
According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, there were a total of 57 unprovoked bites in 2022, most of which occurred in the United States and Australia. Of these, five attacks were fatal, down from nine deaths in 2021, and 10 the year prior.
Since 2013, there has been an average of 74 unprovoked bites per year.
The one notable exception was in 2020, as COVID-19-related travel restrictions and beach closures likely resulted in fewer encounters between humans and sharks. The overall reduction in the number of bites last year may reflect the documented global decline of shark populations.
“Generally speaking, the number of sharks in the world’s oceans has decreased, which may have contributed to recent lulls,” said Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Florida Program for Shark Research. “It’s likely that fatalities are down because some areas have recently implemented rigorous beach safety protocols, especially in Australia.”
Science:University of Florida study shows human pee could play key role in seagrass restoration
More:Animal rights group files complaint against UF research ending in dog deaths
The International Shark Attack File places a strong emphasis on unprovoked bites in its annual report and does not highlight attacks that may have been prompted by mitigating circumstances, such as fishing lines cast in the direct vicinity of the incident or the presence of chum in the water. There were 32 additional bites in 2022 that fit the ISAF’s criteria for having been intentionally or unintentionally provoked.
“Unprovoked bites give us significantly more insight into the biology and behavior of sharks,” Naylor said. “Changing the environment such that sharks are drawn to the area in search of their natural food source might prompt them to bite humans when they otherwise wouldn’t.”
As in previous years, the U.S. had the highest number of bites, and Florida again had more reported bites than anywhere else on Earth. None of Florida’s 16 unprovoked bites were fatal, but two — likely from bull sharks — required medical treatment resulting in amputations.
|
A woman snorkeling in the Dry Tortugas early in the year was notably bitten by a lemon shark, which rarely attacks humans. T
he incident marked only the 11th known unprovoked attack from this species.
The U.S. had only a single unprovoked fatality, which occurred late in the year when a snorkeler went missing along Keawakapu Beach in Maui, Hawaii.
Australia had nine confirmed unprovoked bites, and single bites occurred in New Zealand, Thailand and Brazil. Two fatal attacks occurred on the same day in Egypt’s Red Sea, where shark encounters are considered rare. South Africa, which averages a few bites a year, had two unprovoked attacks in 2022, both of which were fatal and likely caused by white sharks.
The chances of being bitten by a shark remain incredibly low. According to the World Health Organization, drowning is the third leading cause of accidental death worldwide, and coastal features like rip tides and strong currents pose a greater risk to beachgoers than sharks.
The International Shark Attack File provides a curated list of recommendations for further reducing your risk of a shark bite, such as removing reflective jewelry before entering the water and avoiding areas where people are fishing. For more resources, including the full 2022 report, you can visit the International Shark Attack File’s website at floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/.
|
Ann Uccello, former mayor of Hartford who was the first woman to be elected mayor of any municipality in Connecticut and the first woman to be elected mayor of a U.S. capital city, has died.
She was 100 years old.
“Ann Uccello was a trailblazer who was born and raised in Hartford and dedicated her career in public service to the city she loved,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement. “She fought to expand housing, ensure that children have access to essential services, and encouraged job growth and opportunities in Hartford.”
A Republican, Uccello was elected in 1967 as the first female mayor of the city of Hartford. She was also the first female mayor of any U.S. capital, according to Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz.
“Ann Uccello made history as the first woman to serve as mayor of a capitol city, shattering glass ceilings and commanding attention not just here, but across the globe,” Bysiewicz said in a statement. “A beloved mayor and trailblazer, she will be remembered for her energy, grace, and above all, her passion.”
Support from women
Women were key to her victory in the late 1960s, Uccello recalled in an interview for a tribute video from the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.
“The thing that impressed me the most about my election as mayor was the tremendous support that I had from women right across the board,” she said.
She’s noted for the role she played in Hartford after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
On the night of the assassination, Uccello recalled getting a phone call from police officials that people were throwing bottles in Hartford’s North End. She drove to police headquarters and insisted to police and city leaders that she was going to go out to the neighborhood.
“And they said, ‘Oh, no, you’re not,’” Uccello recalled in the Hall of Fame video.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, I’m not going out there?’”
She told them: “If I were a male mayor, you would never tell him that he could not go out there. I’m going out.”
Uccello made her way to the neighborhood, visiting a large crowd of people upset about what happened to King.
“They were saying: ‘They killed our leader; they killed our leader,’” she recalled. “’Why did they do that?’”
Uccello told them: “It was some deranged person just as some deranged person killed John Kennedy. This does happen and it’s unfortunate.”
Served with ’empathy, understanding, care’
Bysiewicz reflected on that night.
“When the threat of riots overcame Hartford, Ann took to the neighborhoods to speak and mourn with residents, encouraging peace,” Bysiewicz said. “She served with a level of empathy, understanding, and care that is so needed in politics.”
Uccello, who was elected mayor in 1967 and 1969, “ran as a Republican in a mainly Democratic city, and is Hartford’s last Republican mayor to date,” according to NBC Connecticut.
In her interview for the tribute video, Uccello reflected on the 1967 election.
“I spent the whole Election Day going from voting place to voting place meeting the voters, passing out my little cards,” she recalled.
Uccello sat in her living room to listen to the election results. Once she had won, “there was pandemonium over the place,” she said.
“And I said ‘I just don’t believe it,’” she recalled.
A TV station wanted to interview her, so a police cruiser escorted her to the studios. As she approached the station, police officers saluted her.
Hartford, then D.C.
Following her time in Hartford, Uccello moved to Washington, D.C., for stints in federal service beginning with the administration of former President Richard Nixon.
She eventually returned to Connecticut. In 2008, Hartford’s Ann Street was renamed Ann Uccello Street. Bysiewicz recalled celebrating with Uccello at her 100th birthday party last May.
“Ann Uccello was a pioneer. I admired her ground-breaking work as mayor of Hartford, and one of the highest-ranking women in the Nixon administration, she leaves a legacy that has and will continue to inspire generations of women to pursue careers in politics and public service,” Bysiewicz said.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said Uccello did more than break glass ceilings.
“She led Hartford through an enormously challenging [and] consequential time with courage, clarity, and compassion,” Bronin said on Facebook. “She was a lifelong champion for Hartford.
“Grateful for her life of service.”
Learn more: Tributes to Ann Uccello
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said Uccello dedicated her life to public service.
“As the first woman to be elected mayor of a U.S. capital city and the first female mayor in Connecticut, she was a trailblazer who charted a new path for women in politics,” Murphy said in a statement. “Her legacy and lasting impact on the city of Hartford will far outlive her, and my thoughts are with her family and loved ones.”
Uccello graduated from the University of Saint Joseph in 1944. She received a doctoral honorary degree in 1971 and received the Distinguished Alumna Award in 1978.
“She was a strong, accomplished, and fearless woman who gave her talents to the community, university and city that she loved,” president Rhona Free said in a statement. “She inspired women to believe in and pursue their potential, and she inspired all those with whom she worked to believe that harnessing the talents of all citizens would advance the common good.”
Connecticut Public’s Eric Aasen contributed to this report. This story was originally published March 14, 2023, by Connecticut Public.
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Ann Uccello, former mayor of Hartford who was the first woman to be elected mayor of any municipality in Connecticut and the first woman to be elected mayor of a U.S. capital city, has died.
She was 100 years old.
“Ann Uccello was a trailblazer who was born and raised in Hartford and dedicated her career in public service to the city she loved,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement. “She fought to expand housing, ensure that children have access to essential services, and encouraged job growth and opportunities in Hartford.”
A Republican, Uccello was elected in 1967 as the first female mayor of the city of Hartford. She was also the first female mayor of any U.S. capital, according to Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz.
“Ann Uccello made history as the first woman to serve as mayor of a capitol city, shattering glass ceilings and commanding attention not just here, but across the globe,” Bysiewicz said in a statement. “A beloved mayor and trailblazer, she will be remembered for her energy, grace, and above all, her passion.”
Support from women
Women were key to her victory in the late 1960s, Uccello recalled in an interview for a tribute video from the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.
“The thing that impressed me the most about my election as mayor was the tremendous support that I had from women right across the board,” she said.
She’s noted for the role she played in Hartford after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
On the night of the assassination, Uccello recalled getting a phone call from police officials that people were throwing bottles in Hartford’s North End. She drove to police headquarters and insisted to police and city leaders that she was going to go out to the neighborhood.
“And they said, ‘Oh, no, you’re not,’” Uccello recalled in the Hall of Fame video.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, I’m not going out there?’”
She told them: “If I were a male mayor, you would never tell him that he could not go out there. I’m going out.”
Uccello made her way to the neighborhood, visiting a large crowd of people upset about what happened to King.
“They were saying: ‘They killed our leader; they killed our leader,’” she recalled. “’Why did they do that
|
?’”
Uccello told them: “It was some deranged person just as some deranged person killed John Kennedy. This does happen and it’s unfortunate.”
Served with ’empathy, understanding, care’
Bysiewicz reflected on that night.
“When the threat of riots overcame Hartford, Ann took to the neighborhoods to speak and mourn with residents, encouraging peace,” Bysiewicz said. “She served with a level of empathy, understanding, and care that is so needed in politics.”
Uccello, who was elected mayor in 1967 and 1969, “ran as a Republican in a mainly Democratic city, and is Hartford’s last Republican mayor to date,” according to NBC Connecticut.
In her interview for the tribute video, Uccello reflected on the 1967 election.
“I spent the whole Election Day going from voting place to voting place meeting the voters, passing out my little cards,” she recalled.
Uccello sat in her living room to listen to the election results. Once she had won, “there was pandemonium over the place,” she said.
“And I said ‘I just don’t believe it,’” she recalled.
A TV station wanted to interview her, so a police cruiser escorted her to the studios. As she approached the station, police officers saluted her.
Hartford, then D.C.
Following her time in Hartford, Uccello moved to Washington, D.C., for stints in federal service beginning with the administration of former President Richard Nixon.
She eventually returned to Connecticut. In 2008, Hartford’s Ann Street was renamed Ann Uccello Street. Bysiewicz recalled celebrating with Uccello at her 100th birthday party last May.
“Ann Uccello was a pioneer. I admired her ground-breaking work as mayor of Hartford, and one of the highest-ranking women in the Nixon administration, she leaves a legacy that has and will continue to inspire generations of women to pursue careers in politics and public service,” Bysiewicz said.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said Uccello did more than break glass ceilings.
“She led Hartford through an enormously challenging [and] consequential time with courage, clarity, and compassion,” Bronin said on Facebook. “She was a lifelong champion for Hartford.
“Grateful for her life of service.”
Learn more: Tributes to Ann Uccello
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said Uccello dedicated her life to public service.
“As the first woman to be elected mayor of a U.S. capital city and the first female mayor in Connecticut, she was a trailblazer who charted a new path for women in politics,” Murphy said in a statement. “Her legacy and lasting impact on the city of Hartford will far outlive her, and my thoughts are with her family and loved ones.”
Uccello graduated from the University of Saint Joseph in 1944. She received a doctoral honorary degree in 1971 and received the Distinguished Alumna Award in 1978.
“She was a strong, accomplished, and fearless woman who gave her talents to the community, university and city that she loved,” president Rhona Free said in a statement. “She inspired women to believe in and pursue their potential, and she inspired all those with whom she worked to believe that harnessing the talents of all citizens would advance the common good.”
Connecticut Public’s Eric Aasen contributed to this report. This story was originally published March 14, 2023, by Connecticut Public.
|
The word "heirloom" likely conjures an image of the past, and when it comes to growing food, the implication is mostly accurate. But while some try to define heirloom cultivars by age — at least 50 years old, for example, or predating World War II — there's another facet of the word "heirloom" that's much more important.
"Heirloom seeds carry with them cultural distinctions," says Brian Ward, assistant professor and seed researcher at Clemson University's Coastal Research and Education Center. "Cultures have passed down the seed from generation to the next generation without any breeding going on," with the lineage stewarded by a family or community. These seeds will always grow "true to type," maintaining the same characteristics over time — "So your grandma's tomato is the same tomato her grandma had."
For Melissa Nelson, a professor of Indigenous sustainability at Arizona State University, "Heirloom seeds are deeply tied to cultural heritage." Long before the supermarket existed, these cultivars were key to how we ate: "They produce seeds naturally that you can save and grow again for the next generation and also share with friends and family…You knew that your ancestors relied on them, so you want[ed] to keep them going."
Safeguarding heirlooms may be more important now than ever, as the full scope of our current biodiversity emergency continues to come into focus. Studies have shown the crisis has been primarily driven by our food system, which puts species at risk through habitat destruction, inputs like fertilizers and pesticides and reliance on monoculture (growing one species at a time), in addition to carbon emissions that hasten climate change. But biodiversity is crucial for limiting climate change's impact. With 34 percent of the country's plants at risk of extinction, the time to protect them is now.
Heirlooms vs. Hybrids vs. GMOs
So what are the alternatives to heirlooms? Another common category is hybrid seeds, which are simply seeds from plants that have been cross-pollinated with a goal in mind. "Hybrids are carefully bred to produce specific characteristics," explains Ashleigh Smith, managing editor at the seed company True Leaf Market, "including color, size, taste, disease resistance and more." This can be useful in an agricultural context, especially in the face of increasing food insecurity and climate change. Hybrid seeds can be bred to create better yields, improved nutritional value or resilience to extreme temperatures or weather.
Hybrids aren't a new concept, either. "People have been introducing different varieties within the same species for as long as we've been farming," says Owen Taylor, cofounder of Truelove Seeds. But hybrid seeds became widely available commercially in the 1930s with the introduction of hybrid corn seed. "This translated to the food industry," Taylor explains, "to breeding a new kind of vegetable that could be the same on any supermarket shelf in any part of the world."
When specific traits are desired, such as taste or disease resistance, professional plant breeders carefully prepare two stable seed lines and cross-pollinate them to produce a predictable, reliable plant. But the genes that plant passes on to its own offspring are a variable mix of those of its parents; remixing those genes again doesn't produce the same results when they recombine in the next generation of seeds. This means you can't just save the seeds and get the same results next year — there's no guarantee of the outcome and some of the second-generation seeds may even be infertile. For farmers who grow hybrid crops, that means buying new seeds every year. For home gardeners, Taylor says that makes hybrid seed-saving "extremely undesirable, because people want a certain color or performance."
The type of breeding required to create hybrid seeds is distinctly different from the creation of seeds for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), sometimes referred to as genetically engineered (GE) seeds. A genetically engineered seed is created in the lab, Ward explains, "by inserting, deleting, mutating or removing a gene or amplifying a gene."
GE seeds aren't available for home gardeners, but are common in conventional agriculture, making up the majority of the U.S. corn and soybean crop. This widespread adoption has sped up consolidation of the seed industry and left farmers with even less control over their crops. "GMO seeds, like hybrid seeds, can't be saved," Nelson explains. "They're often literally owned as property," creating profit for large corporations. And while there aren't well documented health impacts associated with GMO crops themselves, engineered traits like herbicide resistance have enabled the proliferation of chemical-intensive monocultures that seriously harm biodiversity both on and off the farm.
Indigenous communities have also expressed concern that genetically manipulating a seed is going too far. "From an Indigenous ethical standpoint," Nelson continues, "this is playing God with our plant relatives."
Why Grow Heirlooms?
When you bite into something like an heirloom tomato, it's clear that generations of farmers and gardeners saved those seeds for a reason: Many heirlooms are known for their intense or unique flavor. "Growers who produce our seeds are stewarding those old varieties that taste like home," says Taylor, who adds that immigrants and refugees in a new place often find the flavors of their culture in heirloom seeds.
But the longevity of these plants also says something in itself: "They have withstood storms and floods and they're hardy, so they should be preserved for their genetic biodiversity and for agricultural diversity," Nelson explains. Every time someone grows an heirloom seed, they are preserving that diversity and ensuring these seeds continue on for future generations; groups like Seed Savers Exchange connect people growing the same varieties so they can work together to ensure the plants aren't lost forever.
Heirloom seeds are also key to food sovereignty — which allows people to choose what food they consume and control how and where it is grown. "For generations, heirlooms have saved communities from food scarcity," says Smith. The last stage of a plant's life cycle, after it flowers, is to produce seeds, which anyone can save and grow as long as they have soil, water and sufficient sunlight.
But seeds don't just provide nutritious food; they can also provide insight into our past. "We see our seeds as relatives, as ancestors that have deep stories embedded in them," Nelson explains, noting that seeds are sacred in many cultures. "They need to be restored and returned to their communities of origin and then shared."
Taylor, for his part, prefers to call heirlooms "traditional seeds." With vegetables and fruits now available year-round, often produced elsewhere and then shipped across the world, "they tell a story about ten thousand years of human relationships with food and plants," he says, and "bring it back to a time when food was bred locally, super locally." Heirlooms are more commonly grown by small farmers and home gardeners: "I would say the majority [who order] from us are small scale farms," Taylor explains, "in particular CSA farms and urban farm community gardens, and some production farms, as well as distinct cultural communities."
How to Grow Your Own
Want to grow heirloom seeds? Make sure to pay attention to where certain heirlooms grow best, since it can vary by region. Small or specialty seed companies, especially ones like Truelove Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange that are devoted to maintaining plant diversity, will offer seeds online, via seed catalogs or at local nurseries. Though not all open-pollinated seeds are heirlooms, heirloom seeds are always open-pollinated — meaning the plant is pollinated naturally, by air, insects, birds or other animals — and will often be labeled as such.
Another way to source seeds is by visiting farmers' markets and talking to the very people who grow your food. "When I really like a potato or a broccoli or a bean, I ask the farmers," says Nelson, who prefers to source seeds directly from them when she can. Nelson also recommends checking out the Alliance of Native Seed Keepers and the seed exchanges organized by the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. The crops known as the "Three Sisters" — corn, beans and squash — are important for many Indigenous communities, who often steward heirloom varieties. "One we grow is Seneca white corn, also known as Iroquois white corn or Tuscarora white corn," Nelson explains, along with Buffalo Creek squash, from the reservation of the same name. Heirloom bavi (tepary beans) have been grown for a millennium by the Indigenous communities of the Sonoran Desert, and the Tohono and Akimel O'odham continue to cultivate them today.
There are many other culturally significant — and delicious — heirloom fruits and vegetables you can find at the farmers' market or grow at home, and many people and organizations looking after them. Some heirlooms are relatively famous, especially tomatoes (like Brandywines or Cherokee purples) but also favorites like lacinato kale, Jimmy Nardello peppers or delicata squash. Others you may not even realize are heirlooms. Take lemon cucumbers — yellow, spherical and around the size of a big lemon — which might seem nontraditional but have actually been grown in the U.S. since the 19th century. Many heirlooms have deep roots in certain regions of the country: The southeast has a number of cultivars of collard greens, for example, which are the focus of the Heirloom Collard Project, spearheaded by Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in collaboration with other farmers and researchers. Their goal is to preserve and promote these heirloom cultivars, from cabbage collards to Brickhouse old collards to old timey blues, so future generations can enjoy them.
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The word "heirloom" likely conjures an image of the past, and when it comes to growing food, the implication is mostly accurate. But while some try to define heirloom cultivars by age — at least 50 years old, for example, or predating World War II — there's another facet of the word "heirloom" that's much more important.
"Heirloom seeds carry with them cultural distinctions," says Brian Ward, assistant professor and seed researcher at Clemson University's Coastal Research and Education Center. "Cultures have passed down the seed from generation to the next generation without any breeding going on," with the lineage stewarded by a family or community. These seeds will always grow "true to type," maintaining the same characteristics over time — "So your grandma's tomato is the same tomato her grandma had."
For Melissa Nelson, a professor of Indigenous sustainability at Arizona State University, "Heirloom seeds are deeply tied to cultural heritage." Long before the supermarket existed, these cultivars were key to how we ate: "They produce seeds naturally that you can save and grow again for the next generation and also share with friends and family…You knew that your ancestors relied on them, so you want[ed] to keep them going."
Safeguarding heirlooms may be more important now than ever, as the full scope of our current biodiversity emergency continues to come into focus. Studies have shown the crisis has been primarily driven by our food system, which puts species at risk through habitat destruction, inputs like fertilizers and pesticides and reliance on monoculture (growing one species at a time), in addition to carbon emissions that hasten climate change. But biodiversity is crucial for limiting climate change's impact. With 34 percent of the country's plants at risk of extinction, the time to protect them is now.
Heirlooms vs. Hybrids vs. GMOs
So what are the alternatives to heirlooms? Another common category is hybrid seeds, which are simply seeds from plants that have been cross-pollinated with a goal in mind. "Hybrids are carefully bred to produce specific characteristics," explains Ashleigh Smith, managing editor at the seed company True Leaf Market, "including color, size, taste, disease resistance and more." This can be useful in an agricultural context, especially in the face of increasing food insecurity and climate change. Hybrid seeds can be bred to create better yields, improved nutritional value or resilience to extreme temperatures or weather.
|
Hybrids aren't a new concept, either. "People have been introducing different varieties within the same species for as long as we've been farming," says Owen Taylor, cofounder of Truelove Seeds. But hybrid seeds became widely available commercially in the 1930s with the introduction of hybrid corn seed. "This translated to the food industry," Taylor explains, "to breeding a new kind of vegetable that could be the same on any supermarket shelf in any part of the world."
When specific traits are desired, such as taste or disease resistance, professional plant breeders carefully prepare two stable seed lines and cross-pollinate them to produce a predictable, reliable plant. But the genes that plant passes on to its own offspring are a variable mix of those of its parents; remixing those genes again doesn't produce the same results when they recombine in the next generation of seeds. This means you can't just save the seeds and get the same results next year — there's no guarantee of the outcome and some of the second-generation seeds may even be infertile. For farmers who grow hybrid crops, that means buying new seeds every year. For home gardeners, Taylor says that makes hybrid seed-saving "extremely undesirable, because people want a certain color or performance."
The type of breeding required to create hybrid seeds is distinctly different from the creation of seeds for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), sometimes referred to as genetically engineered (GE) seeds. A genetically engineered seed is created in the lab, Ward explains, "by inserting, deleting, mutating or removing a gene or amplifying a gene."
GE seeds aren't available for home gardeners, but are common in conventional agriculture, making up the majority of the U.S. corn and soybean crop. This widespread adoption has sped up consolidation of the seed industry and left farmers with even less control over their crops. "GMO seeds, like hybrid seeds, can't be saved," Nelson explains. "They're often literally owned as property," creating profit for large corporations. And while there aren't well documented health impacts associated with GMO crops themselves, engineered traits like herbicide resistance have enabled the proliferation of chemical-intensive monocultures that seriously harm biodiversity both on and off the farm.
Indigenous communities have also expressed concern that genetically manipulating a seed is going too far. "From an Indigenous ethical standpoint," Nelson continues, "this is playing God with our plant relatives."
Why Grow Heirlooms?
When you bite into something like an heirloom tomato, it's clear that generations of farmers and gardeners saved those seeds for a reason: Many heirlooms are known for their intense or unique flavor. "Growers who produce our seeds are stewarding those old varieties that taste like home," says Taylor, who adds that immigrants and refugees in a new place often find the flavors of their culture in heirloom seeds.
But the longevity of these plants also says something in itself: "They have withstood storms and floods and they're hardy, so they should be preserved for their genetic biodiversity and for agricultural diversity," Nelson explains. Every time someone grows an heirloom seed, they are preserving that diversity and ensuring these seeds continue on for future generations; groups like Seed Savers Exchange connect people growing the same varieties so they can work together to ensure the plants aren't lost forever.
Heirloom seeds are also key to food sovereignty — which allows people to choose what food they consume and control how and where it is grown. "For generations, heirlooms have saved communities from food scarcity," says Smith. The last stage of a plant's life cycle, after it flowers, is to produce seeds, which anyone can save and grow as long as they have soil, water and sufficient sunlight.
But seeds don't just provide nutritious food; they can also provide insight into our past. "We see our seeds as relatives, as ancestors that have deep stories embedded in them," Nelson explains, noting that seeds are sacred in many cultures. "They need to be restored and returned to their communities of origin and then shared."
Taylor, for his part, prefers to call heirlooms "traditional seeds." With vegetables and fruits now available year-round, often produced elsewhere and then shipped across the world, "they tell a story about ten thousand years of human relationships with food and plants," he says, and "bring it back to a time when food was bred locally, super locally." Heirlooms are more commonly grown by small farmers and home gardeners: "I would say the majority [who order] from us are small scale farms," Taylor explains, "in particular CSA farms and urban farm community gardens, and some production farms, as well as distinct cultural communities."
How to Grow Your Own
Want to grow heirloom seeds? Make sure to pay attention to where certain heirlooms grow best, since it can vary by region. Small or specialty seed companies, especially ones like Truelove Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange that are devoted to maintaining plant diversity, will offer seeds online, via seed catalogs or at local nurseries. Though not all open-pollinated seeds are heirlooms, heirloom seeds are always open-pollinated — meaning the plant is pollinated naturally, by air, insects, birds or other animals — and will often be labeled as such.
Another way to source seeds is by visiting farmers' markets and talking to the very people who grow your food. "When I really like a potato or a broccoli or a bean, I ask the farmers," says Nelson, who prefers to source seeds directly from them when she can. Nelson also recommends checking out the Alliance of Native Seed Keepers and the seed exchanges organized by the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. The crops known as the "Three Sisters" — corn, beans and squash — are important for many Indigenous communities, who often steward heirloom varieties. "One we grow is Seneca white corn, also known as Iroquois white corn or Tuscarora white corn," Nelson explains, along with Buffalo Creek squash, from the reservation of the same name. Heirloom bavi (tepary beans) have been grown for a millennium by the Indigenous communities of the Sonoran Desert, and the Tohono and Akimel O'odham continue to cultivate them today.
There are many other culturally significant — and delicious — heirloom fruits and vegetables you can find at the farmers' market or grow at home, and many people and organizations looking after them. Some heirlooms are relatively famous, especially tomatoes (like Brandywines or Cherokee purples) but also favorites like lacinato kale, Jimmy Nardello peppers or delicata squash. Others you may not even realize are heirlooms. Take lemon cucumbers — yellow, spherical and around the size of a big lemon — which might seem nontraditional but have actually been grown in the U.S. since the 19th century. Many heirlooms have deep roots in certain regions of the country: The southeast has a number of cultivars of collard greens, for example, which are the focus of the Heirloom Collard Project, spearheaded by Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in collaboration with other farmers and researchers. Their goal is to preserve and promote these heirloom cultivars, from cabbage collards to Brickhouse old collards to old timey blues, so future generations can enjoy them.
|
This article is part of a series on recent advances in the science and medicine of longevity.
What if you could turn back the clock on biological age? What if, instead of growing older by the day, you grew younger by the day? New research by scientists at Harvard Medical School suggests this may be less science fiction than it seems. Published in Nature Aging, Bohan Zhang and colleagues discovered that old mice that have been connected to young mice for an extended period begin to “reverse age” and live up to 9% longer than their peers. Although still in its early stages, their work holds exciting implications for the future of aging and longevity.
Two Peas in a Pod: Parabiosis
To connect the old mice to the young mice, the researchers used a laboratory technique called parabiosis. Think of this as a very involved kind of blood transfusion. Whereas during a normal transfusion, blood is taken from one mouse and separately infused into another, during parabiosis the two animals are surgically joined; an ongoing, real-time transfusion. So instead of simply exchanging blood, animals connected via parabiosis develop a single, shared physiological system. In a sense, they merge together, exchanging everything from blood to hormones.
Zhang et al. connected young mice to young mice, old mice to old mice, and young mice to old mice. The first two acted as control groups, providing the scientists with a reference point against which to compare the results of the young-to-old parabiosis. Throughout parabiosis, the mice had their liver and their blood analyzed for various age-related biomarkers.
The mice were left joined together for three whole months, after which they were surgically separated —“detached.” They were then given one month to recover before having their physiological data recorded. A few of the mice were allowed to live freely until their natural death to help the researchers understand the effects of parabiosis on longevity.
Biological Age vs Chronological Age
We all age. Every rotation around the sun adds one additional year to our lives, there’s no way around that. But, it's becoming increasingly clear that we don’t all age at the same speed: although two people may share the same “chronological” age, they can be very different “biological” ages. The former simply refers to the number of birthdays they’ve celebrated, but the latter refers to markers of aging at the level of blood, organs, and genetics. Your biological age is your “true”, physical age. Your risk of developing age-related diseases, like heart disease or cancer, is based on your biological age — in some cases this may be lower than chronological age, in others, it may be higher.
How do you measure biological age? There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most accurate is through the use of “epigenetic clocks”. Discovered in 2011 by Steve Horvath, such epigenetic clocks are based on a process known as DNA methylation. Even though our genetic code itself —our DNA— does not change over the course of our lifetime, the way in which it is expressed does. This is called epigenetics. DNA methylation is a key mechanism of epigenetics; molecules called methyl groups are added along the length of DNA, turning certain genes “off” or “on”. Horvath’s prescient contribution was the recognition that the way DNA is methylated follows a pattern, one that can be traced over time and correlates with age. Knowing the pattern allows us to read DNA methylation like a clock.
Long, Youthful Lives
Bohan Zhang and his fellow researchers made use of epigenetic clocks to study the effects of parabiosis on the mice. They noticed that the old mice that had been joined to young mice displayed signs not only of slowed aging, but even reverse aging: their DNA methylation signatures were consistently “younger” than their chronological age. Indeed, the methylation clocks suggested a decrease in biological age by up to 30%. This was not true of the old mice that had been surgically joined to other old mice. Nor was it true of old mice that had been non-surgically joined to younger mice, ruling out the possibility that the reversal of epigenetic age was due to increased movement or exercise from being connected to a young mouse.
Crucially, the changes to biological age persisted even after detachment from the younger mice. And they weren’t restricted to the blood alone, but to muscle tissue, the liver, and the nervous system too. Reversal of biological age also correlated to longer life spans, with the older mice that had been joined to younger mice living six to nine percent longer than those that had been joined to other older mice. Similarly, changes to gene expression mirrored those observed in longevity interventions and opposed changes usually seen during aging.
In this exciting study, Zhang et al. have shown that old mice can have their lifespan extended and have their aging slowed by being joined to younger mice. The benefits of this procedure persist even after detachment. Indeed, along with increased lifespan, the old mice also displayed signs of improved organ health. Although chronological age is fixed, biological age is starting to look a lot more reversible.
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This article is part of a series on recent advances in the science and medicine of longevity.
What if you could turn back the clock on biological age? What if, instead of growing older by the day, you grew younger by the day? New research by scientists at Harvard Medical School suggests this may be less science fiction than it seems. Published in Nature Aging, Bohan Zhang and colleagues discovered that old mice that have been connected to young mice for an extended period begin to “reverse age” and live up to 9% longer than their peers. Although still in its early stages, their work holds exciting implications for the future of aging and longevity.
Two Peas in a Pod: Parabiosis
To connect the old mice to the young mice, the researchers used a laboratory technique called parabiosis. Think of this as a very involved kind of blood transfusion. Whereas during a normal transfusion, blood is taken from one mouse and separately infused into another, during parabiosis the two animals are surgically joined; an ongoing, real-time transfusion. So instead of simply exchanging blood, animals connected via parabiosis develop a single, shared physiological system. In a sense, they merge together, exchanging everything from blood to hormones.
Zhang et al. connected young mice to young mice, old mice to old mice, and young mice to old mice. The first two acted as control groups, providing the scientists with a reference point against which to compare the results of the young-to-old parabiosis. Throughout parabiosis, the mice had their liver and their blood analyzed for various age-related biomarkers.
The mice were left joined together for three whole months, after which they were surgically separated —“detached.” They were then given one month to recover before having their physiological data recorded. A few of the mice were allowed to live freely until their natural death to help the researchers understand the effects of parabiosis on longevity.
Biological Age vs Chronological Age
We all age. Every rotation around the sun adds one additional year to our lives, there’s no way around that. But, it's becoming increasingly clear that we don’t all age at the same speed: although two people may share the same “chronological” age, they can be very different “biological” ages. The former simply refers to the number of birthdays they’ve celebrated, but the latter refers to markers of aging at the level of blood, organs, and genetics. Your biological age is your “true”, physical age. Your risk of developing age-related diseases, like heart disease or
|
cancer, is based on your biological age — in some cases this may be lower than chronological age, in others, it may be higher.
How do you measure biological age? There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most accurate is through the use of “epigenetic clocks”. Discovered in 2011 by Steve Horvath, such epigenetic clocks are based on a process known as DNA methylation. Even though our genetic code itself —our DNA— does not change over the course of our lifetime, the way in which it is expressed does. This is called epigenetics. DNA methylation is a key mechanism of epigenetics; molecules called methyl groups are added along the length of DNA, turning certain genes “off” or “on”. Horvath’s prescient contribution was the recognition that the way DNA is methylated follows a pattern, one that can be traced over time and correlates with age. Knowing the pattern allows us to read DNA methylation like a clock.
Long, Youthful Lives
Bohan Zhang and his fellow researchers made use of epigenetic clocks to study the effects of parabiosis on the mice. They noticed that the old mice that had been joined to young mice displayed signs not only of slowed aging, but even reverse aging: their DNA methylation signatures were consistently “younger” than their chronological age. Indeed, the methylation clocks suggested a decrease in biological age by up to 30%. This was not true of the old mice that had been surgically joined to other old mice. Nor was it true of old mice that had been non-surgically joined to younger mice, ruling out the possibility that the reversal of epigenetic age was due to increased movement or exercise from being connected to a young mouse.
Crucially, the changes to biological age persisted even after detachment from the younger mice. And they weren’t restricted to the blood alone, but to muscle tissue, the liver, and the nervous system too. Reversal of biological age also correlated to longer life spans, with the older mice that had been joined to younger mice living six to nine percent longer than those that had been joined to other older mice. Similarly, changes to gene expression mirrored those observed in longevity interventions and opposed changes usually seen during aging.
In this exciting study, Zhang et al. have shown that old mice can have their lifespan extended and have their aging slowed by being joined to younger mice. The benefits of this procedure persist even after detachment. Indeed, along with increased lifespan, the old mice also displayed signs of improved organ health. Although chronological age is fixed, biological age is starting to look a lot more reversible.
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Relevance of Deep Learning in Education;
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. Although it is essentially a neural network with three or more layers. These neural networks attempt to simulate the behavior of the human brain—albeit far from matching its ability—allowing it to “learn” from large amounts of data.
While a neural network with a single layer can still make approximate predictions. Also additional hidden layers can help to optimize and refine for accuracy.
Deep learning drives many artificial intelligence (AI) applications and services that improve automation. Also performing analytical and physical tasks without human intervention.
Deep learning technology lies behind everyday products and services (such as digital assistants, voice-enabled TV remotes, and credit card fraud detection) as well as emerging technologies (such as self-driving cars).
If deep learning is a subset of machine learning, how do they differ? Deep learning distinguishes itself from classical machine learning by the type of data that it works with and the methods in which it learns.
Machine learning algorithms leverage data to make predictions. This means that specific features are from the input data for the model and organized into tables. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t use unstructured data; it just means that if it does. However it generally goes through some pre-processing to organize it into a structured format.
Deep learning eliminates some of data pre-processing that is typically involved with machine learning.
Although These algorithms can ingest and process unstructured data, like text and images.
Furthermore, it automates feature extraction, removing some of the dependency on human experts. For example, let’s say that we had a set of photos of different pets, and we wanted to categorize by “cat”, “dog”, “hamster”, et cetera.
Deep learning algorithms can determine which features (e.g. ears) are most important to distinguish each animal from another.
In machine learning, this hierarchy of features is established manually by a human expert.
Then, through the processes of gradient descent and back propagations. Here the deep learning algorithm adjusts and fits itself for accuracy, allowing it to make predictions about a new photo of an animal with precision.
Machine learning and deep learning models are capable of different types of learning as well. They are usually categorized as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.
Moreover Supervised learning utilizes labeled datasets to categorize or make predictions; this requires some kind of human intervention to label input data correctly.
In contrast, unsupervised learning doesn’t require labeled datasets, and instead, it detects patterns in the data, clustering them by any distinguishing characteristics. Reinforcement learning is a process in which a model learns to become more accurate for performing an action in an environment based on feedback in order to maximize the reward.
In this article you will learn some of the relevance of deep learning in education;
1. It is accurate and precise:
Deep learning as a subset of machine language is very accurate and precise. In addition if you want to make the best of your learning experience with little or no mistakes and errors then deep learning is a great approach.
Also, It can help to complete any task within the shortest possible time.
2. It is cost effective:
One of the main benefits and relevance of any technology driven tool is that it helps to cut cost.
Any user either a teacher or student that employs the use of deep learning will be able to get their work done with little or no cost. Most users are also able to tailor down their work to only what is important to them. This helps to focus only on the necessary tasks.
3. It is versatile:
Deep learning will continue to evolve and become more beneficial to people. It can be used for multiple purposes which makes it to be very versatile. Although it entails the use of numerous tools and resources, The deep learning algorithms can also be used to correct errors in any data that a user needs to use to carry out a task.
Are you a school owner and you need a web solution to transform your school work. Click here to sign up for free.
Author: Semira Ayeni.
|
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Relevance of Deep Learning in Education;
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. Although it is essentially a neural network with three or more layers. These neural networks attempt to simulate the behavior of the human brain—albeit far from matching its ability—allowing it to “learn” from large amounts of data.
While a neural network with a single layer can still make approximate predictions. Also additional hidden layers can help to optimize and refine for accuracy.
Deep learning drives many artificial intelligence (AI) applications and services that improve automation. Also performing analytical and physical tasks without human intervention.
Deep learning technology lies behind everyday products and services (such as digital assistants, voice-enabled TV remotes, and credit card fraud detection) as well as emerging technologies (such as self-driving cars).
If deep learning is a subset of machine learning, how do they differ? Deep learning distinguishes itself from classical machine learning by the type of data that it works with and the methods in which it learns.
Machine learning algorithms leverage data to make predictions. This means that specific features are from the input data for the model and organized into tables. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t use unstructured data; it just means that if it does. However it generally goes through some pre-processing to organize it into a structured format.
Deep learning eliminates some of data pre-processing that is typically involved with machine learning.
Although These algorithms can ingest and process unstructured data, like text and images.
Furthermore, it automates feature extraction, removing some of the dependency on human experts. For example, let’s say that we had a set of photos of different pets, and we wanted to categorize by “cat”, “dog”, “hamster”, et cetera.
Deep learning algorithms can determine which features (e.g. ears) are most important to distinguish each animal from another.
In machine learning, this hierarchy of features is established manually by a human expert.
Then, through the processes of gradient descent and back propagations. Here the deep learning algorithm adjusts and fits itself for accuracy, allowing it to make predictions about a new photo of an animal with precision.
Machine learning and deep learning models are capable of different types of learning as well. They are usually categorized as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.
Moreover Supervised learning utilizes labeled datasets to categorize or make predictions; this requires some kind of human intervention to label input data correctly.
In contrast, unsupervised learning doesn’t require labeled datasets, and instead, it detects patterns in the data
|
, clustering them by any distinguishing characteristics. Reinforcement learning is a process in which a model learns to become more accurate for performing an action in an environment based on feedback in order to maximize the reward.
In this article you will learn some of the relevance of deep learning in education;
1. It is accurate and precise:
Deep learning as a subset of machine language is very accurate and precise. In addition if you want to make the best of your learning experience with little or no mistakes and errors then deep learning is a great approach.
Also, It can help to complete any task within the shortest possible time.
2. It is cost effective:
One of the main benefits and relevance of any technology driven tool is that it helps to cut cost.
Any user either a teacher or student that employs the use of deep learning will be able to get their work done with little or no cost. Most users are also able to tailor down their work to only what is important to them. This helps to focus only on the necessary tasks.
3. It is versatile:
Deep learning will continue to evolve and become more beneficial to people. It can be used for multiple purposes which makes it to be very versatile. Although it entails the use of numerous tools and resources, The deep learning algorithms can also be used to correct errors in any data that a user needs to use to carry out a task.
Are you a school owner and you need a web solution to transform your school work. Click here to sign up for free.
Author: Semira Ayeni.
|
US students give their schools an overall B- grade on average, according to a new report released Wednesday that asked fifth through twelfth graders to assess their school’s quality in multiple categories, including teaching, effectiveness in preparing them for the future and mental health support.
Two-thirds of students graded their school overall an A or a B, according to the report released by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation. Nearly a quarter, 24%, gave their school a C and one-tenth gave either a D or F.
The average grades for each individual metric ranged from C+ to B.
“Whether because of the challenges schools faced during three years of dire disruption to learning during the pandemic or longer-term issues, there is clearly room for improvement,” the researchers wrote in the report.
The report is based on 2,062 responses from adolescents in fifth through twelfth grade at public, charter and private schools in the US. The students were surveyed between late April and early May.
Schools received the worst grades on metrics about student engagement and preparedness, according to the report. Students gave an average grade of a C+ for how well their schools teach about potential careers, foster excitement about learning, and teach in ways that adapt to unique learning needs. Students gave a B- for the quality of teaching, with only 23% giving an A.
Schools also earned an average grade of C+ for how well they support mental health, with less than a quarter, 22%, of students giving an A for the metric.
Schools received the best grades for safety and respect, receiving an average grade of a B for each category. According to the report, 48% of students gave their school an A for respecting who they are and 43% gave an A for keeping them physically safe.
However, the responses for these two metrics varied based on race, the report said. Only one-third of Black students gave their school an A for making them feel respected. That’s compared to half of White students and 53% of Hispanic students.
Meanwhile, 37% of Black students gave their school an A for safety, while 41% of Hispanic and 46% of White students did.
“These are the largest negative disparities observed among Black students across all metrics assessed,” the researchers wrote.
Student responses vary based on academic performance, grade level
Students’ ratings of their schools “closely align” with their academic performance, as higher-performing students are “much more likely” to give their schools higher grades than lower-performing students, the report said.
Six in 10 students who earned excellent or good grades gave their school an A or B for teaching them based on their unique learning needs, compared to only three in 10 of those who received fair or poor grades.
Among students at public schools, middle schoolers gave more positive grades across all metrics than high schoolers, according to the report. Nearly a quarter, 23%, of public middle school students gave their school an overall A grade, while only 17% of public high school students did.
“At a crucial moment in defining future pathways, high school students are less excited about learning and feel less prepared for the future than middle school students,” the researchers wrote.
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US students give their schools an overall B- grade on average, according to a new report released Wednesday that asked fifth through twelfth graders to assess their school’s quality in multiple categories, including teaching, effectiveness in preparing them for the future and mental health support.
Two-thirds of students graded their school overall an A or a B, according to the report released by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation. Nearly a quarter, 24%, gave their school a C and one-tenth gave either a D or F.
The average grades for each individual metric ranged from C+ to B.
“Whether because of the challenges schools faced during three years of dire disruption to learning during the pandemic or longer-term issues, there is clearly room for improvement,” the researchers wrote in the report.
The report is based on 2,062 responses from adolescents in fifth through twelfth grade at public, charter and private schools in the US. The students were surveyed between late April and early May.
Schools received the worst grades on metrics about student engagement and preparedness, according to the report. Students gave an average grade of a C+ for how well their schools teach about potential careers, foster excitement about learning, and teach in ways that adapt to unique learning needs. Students gave a B- for the quality of teaching, with only 23% giving an A.
Schools also earned an average grade of C+ for how well they support mental health, with less than a quarter, 22%, of students giving an A for the metric.
Schools received the best grades for safety and respect, receiving an average grade of a B for each category. According to the report, 48% of students gave their school an A for respecting who they are and 43% gave an A for keeping them physically safe.
However, the responses for these two metrics varied based on race, the report said. Only one-third of Black students gave their school an A for making them feel respected. That’s compared to half of White students and 53% of Hispanic students.
Meanwhile, 37% of Black students gave their school an A for safety, while 41% of Hispanic and 46% of White students did.
“These are the largest negative disparities observed among Black students across all metrics assessed,” the researchers wrote.
Student responses vary based on academic performance, grade level
Students’ ratings of their schools “closely align” with their academic performance, as higher-performing students are “much more likely” to
|
give their schools higher grades than lower-performing students, the report said.
Six in 10 students who earned excellent or good grades gave their school an A or B for teaching them based on their unique learning needs, compared to only three in 10 of those who received fair or poor grades.
Among students at public schools, middle schoolers gave more positive grades across all metrics than high schoolers, according to the report. Nearly a quarter, 23%, of public middle school students gave their school an overall A grade, while only 17% of public high school students did.
“At a crucial moment in defining future pathways, high school students are less excited about learning and feel less prepared for the future than middle school students,” the researchers wrote.
|
Far fewer monarch butterflies are migrating through Texas this spring
It’s the time of year when monarch butterflies pass through Texas on their annual migration. But you might not see as many as last spring. One reason? The number of monarchs that spent the winter in Mexico dropped significantly.
Migrating Eastern monarchs spend the winter months in forest colonies in the Mexican states of Michoacán and Mexico. Their population is tracked by the World Wildlife Fund, which measures it by surveying how much land is covered by thick masses of roosting insects. This winter’s survey found the butterflies concentrated on only about 5.5 acres of forest, a 22% decline from last winter.
“This is part of a mostly downward trend over the past 25 years, when monarchs once covered more than 45 acres of forest,” the WWFsaid in a press release.
That trend has many experts saying the Eastern monarch migration could eventually cease altogether.
The reasons for its general decline are many. They include habitat loss in the U.S. from farming and development, insecticide use, destruction of the monarchs’ winter grounds in Mexico, extreme weather and climate change.
But those challenges are no reason to give up hope that the population can’t rebound, says Monika Maeckle, who runs the website Texas Butterfly Ranch where she wrote about the spring migration.
Insect populations are “famously volatile,” she says, pointing out that the Eastern monarch population was up by 35% last year.
“The monarch butterfly population has been called bouncy,” she says. "[It goes] up and down, up and down. It just so often depends on conditions — climate, timing of the seasons, all that stuff.”
One reason for the butterflies' lower numbers could be the devastating drought that began last year in Texas, depriving them of nectar and milkweed on which to lay their eggs and leading to fewer arriving in Mexico last fall.
That drought continues in much of the state, including San Antonio, where Maeckle tracks monarchs.
“I have not seen a lot of butterflies,” she says. “It's been very dry, and it just really depends so much on where you are.”
Conservation, local and national
One way to encourage the monarch migration is to plant the milkweed and flowers they rely on to eat and lay their eggs. Experts urge the use of native milkweed, though it can be more expensive and is difficult to grow.
Maeckle says local efforts to create monarch habitats in California could be one reason the population there rebounded after nearly disappearing. The Western population of butterflies was estimated to be 330,000 strong this winter. Fewer than 2,000 were counted there in 2020.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also determining whether to list the species as threatened or endangered. In 2020, the agency determined listing the monarch was warranted, but did not proceed with a determination on how to regulate the species. It says the butterfly's potential listing will be up for review again in 2024.
Listing monarchs as threatened or endangered would bring new regulatory protections to the species and its habitat. Depending on how the protections are written, however, listing could also complicate local monarch protection and propagation efforts. For example, a listing could potentially make it against the law for hobbyists to share monarch eggs or raise the species in their homes.
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|
Far fewer monarch butterflies are migrating through Texas this spring
It’s the time of year when monarch butterflies pass through Texas on their annual migration. But you might not see as many as last spring. One reason? The number of monarchs that spent the winter in Mexico dropped significantly.
Migrating Eastern monarchs spend the winter months in forest colonies in the Mexican states of Michoacán and Mexico. Their population is tracked by the World Wildlife Fund, which measures it by surveying how much land is covered by thick masses of roosting insects. This winter’s survey found the butterflies concentrated on only about 5.5 acres of forest, a 22% decline from last winter.
“This is part of a mostly downward trend over the past 25 years, when monarchs once covered more than 45 acres of forest,” the WWFsaid in a press release.
That trend has many experts saying the Eastern monarch migration could eventually cease altogether.
The reasons for its general decline are many. They include habitat loss in the U.S. from farming and development, insecticide use, destruction of the monarchs’ winter grounds in Mexico, extreme weather and climate change.
But those challenges are no reason to give up hope that the population can’t rebound, says Monika Maeckle, who runs the website Texas Butterfly Ranch where she wrote about the spring migration.
Insect populations are “famously volatile,” she says, pointing out that the Eastern monarch population was up by 35% last year.
“The monarch butterfly population has been called bouncy,” she says. "[It goes] up and down, up and down. It just so often depends on conditions — climate, timing of the seasons, all that stuff.”
One reason for the butterflies' lower numbers could be the devastating drought that began last year in Texas, depriving them of nectar and milkweed on which to lay their eggs and leading to fewer arriving in Mexico last fall.
That drought continues in much of the state, including San Antonio, where Maeckle tracks monarchs.
“I have not seen a lot of butterflies,” she says. “It's been very dry, and it just really depends so much on where you are.”
Conservation, local and national
One way to encourage the monarch migration is to plant the milkweed and flowers they rely on to eat and lay their eggs. Experts urge the use of native milkweed, though it can be more expensive and is difficult to grow.
Maeck
|
le says local efforts to create monarch habitats in California could be one reason the population there rebounded after nearly disappearing. The Western population of butterflies was estimated to be 330,000 strong this winter. Fewer than 2,000 were counted there in 2020.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also determining whether to list the species as threatened or endangered. In 2020, the agency determined listing the monarch was warranted, but did not proceed with a determination on how to regulate the species. It says the butterfly's potential listing will be up for review again in 2024.
Listing monarchs as threatened or endangered would bring new regulatory protections to the species and its habitat. Depending on how the protections are written, however, listing could also complicate local monarch protection and propagation efforts. For example, a listing could potentially make it against the law for hobbyists to share monarch eggs or raise the species in their homes.
|
Here is the third text I have written for the CEEBC
THE LEGACY OF COMMUNISM
Marxism, the ideological basis of communism, attempts to turn the Christian gospel on its head. It presents a specific version of anthropology (the study of human experience), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) and eschatology (the study of the end things) and claims to provide salvation for a world in crisis. This utopian vision turned into a dystopian reality and made over one hundred million victims.
When communism collapsed as a political system, the liberated people expected things to change overnight, just like the Israelites did after they left Egypt (Exodus 16:1-3). But they soon realised that even if they had been taken out of communism, communism had not been taken out of them. The Berlin Wall fell in the summer of 1989, but a wall remained in people’s minds and hearts. The ongoing legacy of communism is displayed in specific ways in Central and Eastern European societies and churches. Here are some of its basic traits.
Under communism, authoritarianism was the dominant leadership style and it penetrated the churches too. It created a paradoxical combination of distrust and dependence on authority. To the surprise of many, this model continued unabated in the churches in the region even after the fall of the old system. Its proponents were often those who had been active in leading resistance against communism in earlier times.
Communist regimes used secret police units to keep the churches under control, with the help of collaborators recruited among church members and leaders and through the use of threats or enticements. This created an atmosphere of suspicion, as it was impossible to discern who the agents of the regime were. The churches in our region have been largely unable to deal with the presence of former collaborators in their midst and have not known how to implement confession, forgiveness and restoration. Some have tried to play the phenomenon down, while others have engaged in harsh exposure campaigns. Neither approach has solved the problem. As a result, our churches still have to deal with a lack of trust between their members.
People who had to live under communist politics and economics functioned on a daily basis according to the ethics of survival. They played by the rules in order to survive as best they could. The same was true of church leaders, who tried to keep their congregations going even if it meant accepting compromises. However, when freedom came and such dubious ethical games were no longer necessary, it seemed that old habits died hard. The ethics of freedom meant making conscious choices rather than reverting to the path of least resistance. External conditions changed but automatic mechanisms were harder to eliminate.
When many Christians had their backs pushed to the wall by a regime which vowed to eradicate religion for good, the “Christ against culture” approach (to use Richard Niebuhr’s terminology) was widely adopted. When democratic pluralism arrived, Christians found themselves unprepared and incapable of mature responses. After decades of oppression, they were finally given the opportunity to engage prophetically and transform their cultures through the power of the gospel. In this watershed moment, many churches either prolonged their isolationist stance or opted for a sort of nostalgia, looking back to times long gone, when the church used to impose its principles on the world without opposition. The rules of the game proved to be quite different in post-communist societies and Christians needed to learn how to function in a Christ-like way in a new world full of competing voices and ideologies.
Christians who have grown up under freedom have a desperate need for models to follow. Yet most of the previous generation’s leaders, who survived communism but became entrenched in their actions or mindsets, have been unable to teach the younger generation how to live as free human beings. This is where the experience and input of Christians in the West has been a lifeline for the churches in our region. In the early 1990s we needed a great deal of help and support to compensate for the decades lost under communism – years when we were unable to train pastors or theologians, write or publish Christian literature, distribute Bibles, evangelise our own people, develop Christian education for children and adults, or practise care and hospitality for the poorest, the marginalised and the excluded in our societies.
The lives of Christians under communism were rather similar to lives of the Israelites living as slaves in Egypt. Their liberation under Moses did not automatically make them act like free, responsible people. The same is true of the church living in the post-communist era in our region. We too may need forty years in the desert of transition before we are able to live as people of freedom. It is for freedom that God has set us free (Gal 5:1) but we need to beware of the risk of falling back into old habits.
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Here is the third text I have written for the CEEBC
THE LEGACY OF COMMUNISM
Marxism, the ideological basis of communism, attempts to turn the Christian gospel on its head. It presents a specific version of anthropology (the study of human experience), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) and eschatology (the study of the end things) and claims to provide salvation for a world in crisis. This utopian vision turned into a dystopian reality and made over one hundred million victims.
When communism collapsed as a political system, the liberated people expected things to change overnight, just like the Israelites did after they left Egypt (Exodus 16:1-3). But they soon realised that even if they had been taken out of communism, communism had not been taken out of them. The Berlin Wall fell in the summer of 1989, but a wall remained in people’s minds and hearts. The ongoing legacy of communism is displayed in specific ways in Central and Eastern European societies and churches. Here are some of its basic traits.
Under communism, authoritarianism was the dominant leadership style and it penetrated the churches too. It created a paradoxical combination of distrust and dependence on authority. To the surprise of many, this model continued unabated in the churches in the region even after the fall of the old system. Its proponents were often those who had been active in leading resistance against communism in earlier times.
Communist regimes used secret police units to keep the churches under control, with the help of collaborators recruited among church members and leaders and through the use of threats or enticements. This created an atmosphere of suspicion, as it was impossible to discern who the agents of the regime were. The churches in our region have been largely unable to deal with the presence of former collaborators in their midst and have not known how to implement confession, forgiveness and restoration. Some have tried to play the phenomenon down, while others have engaged in harsh exposure campaigns. Neither approach has solved the problem. As a result, our churches still have to deal with a lack of trust between their members.
People who had to live under communist politics and economics functioned on a daily basis according to the ethics of survival. They played by the rules in order to survive as best they could. The same was true of church leaders, who tried to keep their congregations going even if it meant accepting compromises. However, when freedom came and such dubious ethical
|
games were no longer necessary, it seemed that old habits died hard. The ethics of freedom meant making conscious choices rather than reverting to the path of least resistance. External conditions changed but automatic mechanisms were harder to eliminate.
When many Christians had their backs pushed to the wall by a regime which vowed to eradicate religion for good, the “Christ against culture” approach (to use Richard Niebuhr’s terminology) was widely adopted. When democratic pluralism arrived, Christians found themselves unprepared and incapable of mature responses. After decades of oppression, they were finally given the opportunity to engage prophetically and transform their cultures through the power of the gospel. In this watershed moment, many churches either prolonged their isolationist stance or opted for a sort of nostalgia, looking back to times long gone, when the church used to impose its principles on the world without opposition. The rules of the game proved to be quite different in post-communist societies and Christians needed to learn how to function in a Christ-like way in a new world full of competing voices and ideologies.
Christians who have grown up under freedom have a desperate need for models to follow. Yet most of the previous generation’s leaders, who survived communism but became entrenched in their actions or mindsets, have been unable to teach the younger generation how to live as free human beings. This is where the experience and input of Christians in the West has been a lifeline for the churches in our region. In the early 1990s we needed a great deal of help and support to compensate for the decades lost under communism – years when we were unable to train pastors or theologians, write or publish Christian literature, distribute Bibles, evangelise our own people, develop Christian education for children and adults, or practise care and hospitality for the poorest, the marginalised and the excluded in our societies.
The lives of Christians under communism were rather similar to lives of the Israelites living as slaves in Egypt. Their liberation under Moses did not automatically make them act like free, responsible people. The same is true of the church living in the post-communist era in our region. We too may need forty years in the desert of transition before we are able to live as people of freedom. It is for freedom that God has set us free (Gal 5:1) but we need to beware of the risk of falling back into old habits.
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Bacteria are in virtually all parts of your body — your face, genitals, underarms, bowel, lungs . . . they make up the biomes of each organ system, your skin among them.
My fascination with bacteria began as a high school student, when I spent weekends growing them at a local hospital and volunteering in the bacteriology laboratory. Viruses were dead, and most hospitals cannot grow them.
Bacteria seemed to have lives of their own. They had character, color in some cases, odors, and growth characteristics which assisted in their recognition and identification. They could degrade plastics, oil, and flesh. They had survived in the coldest and hottest places on earth. They colonized human organs and delivered us energy, heat, foods, drinks, and much more.
Billions of years ago, bacteria became part of each of our cells in the form of an organelle (little organ) called a mitochondrion. Life is impossible without these mitochondria, and I along with others believe that they are at the source of some of our diseases. They also inform our immune systems. Each mitochondrion is inherited solely from our mothers’ eggs and are a vestigial bacterium replete with its own DNA. (Vestigial in the sense that they are vestiges of a prehistoric infection.)
Our bodies have billions of these mitochondria powerhouses. They generate energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a chemical current of sorts, which is essential for every energy consuming activity that we have. The attributes these bacteria give us while growing in our biomes, skin, lung, bowel, and kidney provide our biological soul with continuing education of a sort and are probably the greatest single source of clues to the causes of our most devastating diseases.
But beyond the mitochondria and friendly invaders lurk some nasty ones.
Consider Lyme disease, a common tickborne illness caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. Lyme results in flu-like symptoms, rash, fatigue, and joint pain and weakness and — as with all bacteria — the chance for cross-reaction with other diseases. Lyme relies on the immune system for clearance of its spirochete, the Borrelia. Spirochetes are a class of bacteria that include the bad (Lyme, syphilis) and harmless (those found every day in our mouths).
After all, all criminals have families; some who are criminals themselves, some completely innocent. In the case of Lyme, the body is invaded by the spirochete, which is eliminated by the immune system but not before the immune system, seeing spirochetes in certain organs like the joints, keeps ravaging the body as though the bug was in the blood.
Depending on the stage of the disease, Lyme can be eliminated from the body with adequate treatment over a few weeks, but the immune system can continue to provide symptoms, which are exceedingly difficult to treat.
This difficulty has been compounded by a bit of controversy: With initial descriptions of Lyme disease, countless doctors and pharmacies spent months treating patients for the bacterium rather than realize that they were looking at what the immune system was doing to their patients. But they did it late, and the ongoing use of antibiotics for up to six months in some patients made no sense. The Lyme was gone.
Huge, unnecessary antibiotic bills from medical practices with a total lack of understanding about Lyme disease is another reason why understanding the nature immunity is so important.
© 2023 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.
|
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Bacteria are in virtually all parts of your body — your face, genitals, underarms, bowel, lungs . . . they make up the biomes of each organ system, your skin among them.
My fascination with bacteria began as a high school student, when I spent weekends growing them at a local hospital and volunteering in the bacteriology laboratory. Viruses were dead, and most hospitals cannot grow them.
Bacteria seemed to have lives of their own. They had character, color in some cases, odors, and growth characteristics which assisted in their recognition and identification. They could degrade plastics, oil, and flesh. They had survived in the coldest and hottest places on earth. They colonized human organs and delivered us energy, heat, foods, drinks, and much more.
Billions of years ago, bacteria became part of each of our cells in the form of an organelle (little organ) called a mitochondrion. Life is impossible without these mitochondria, and I along with others believe that they are at the source of some of our diseases. They also inform our immune systems. Each mitochondrion is inherited solely from our mothers’ eggs and are a vestigial bacterium replete with its own DNA. (Vestigial in the sense that they are vestiges of a prehistoric infection.)
Our bodies have billions of these mitochondria powerhouses. They generate energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a chemical current of sorts, which is essential for every energy consuming activity that we have. The attributes these bacteria give us while growing in our biomes, skin, lung, bowel, and kidney provide our biological soul with continuing education of a sort and are probably the greatest single source of clues to the causes of our most devastating diseases.
But beyond the mitochondria and friendly invaders lurk some nasty ones.
Consider Lyme disease, a common tickborne illness caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. Lyme results in flu-like symptoms, rash, fatigue, and joint pain and weakness and — as with all bacteria — the chance for cross-reaction with other diseases. Lyme relies on the immune system for clearance of its spirochete, the Borrelia. Spirochetes are a class of bacteria that include the bad (Lyme, syphilis) and harmless (those found every day in our mouths).
After all, all criminals have families; some who are criminals themselves, some completely innocent. In the case of Lyme, the body is invaded
|
by the spirochete, which is eliminated by the immune system but not before the immune system, seeing spirochetes in certain organs like the joints, keeps ravaging the body as though the bug was in the blood.
Depending on the stage of the disease, Lyme can be eliminated from the body with adequate treatment over a few weeks, but the immune system can continue to provide symptoms, which are exceedingly difficult to treat.
This difficulty has been compounded by a bit of controversy: With initial descriptions of Lyme disease, countless doctors and pharmacies spent months treating patients for the bacterium rather than realize that they were looking at what the immune system was doing to their patients. But they did it late, and the ongoing use of antibiotics for up to six months in some patients made no sense. The Lyme was gone.
Huge, unnecessary antibiotic bills from medical practices with a total lack of understanding about Lyme disease is another reason why understanding the nature immunity is so important.
© 2023 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.
|
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
The new year kicks off with the Quadrantids, one of 12 annual meteor showers.
The celestial event is typically among the strongest meteor showers and is expected to peak overnight January 3 and 4, according to the American Meteor Society. Sky-gazers in the Northern Hemisphere can best view the shower between the late-night hours of Tuesday and dawn on Wednesday.
However, the shower is notoriously hard to observe due to its brief peak of six hours and January’s often inclement weather in the Northern Hemisphere. A bright, nearly full moon will make the Quadrantids even less visible this year.
Moonset will occur just before dawn, providing a very small window to spot the shower against dark skies.
Predictions for the shower’s peak range from 10:40 p.m. to 1:40 a.m. ET (3:40 a.m. to 6:40 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time). The later time favors those in the eastern part of North America and the earlier time is more favorable for observers across Europe. The Quadrantids won’t be visible in the Southern Hemisphere because the shower’s radiant point doesn’t rise that high in its sky before dawn.
Check Time and Date’s site to see what your chances are like to view the event, or step outside to take a look for yourself. The Virtual Telescope Project will also have a live stream of the shower over Rome.
What you’ll see
Between 50 and 100 meteors are typically visible per hour, especially in rural areas, although the peak can include up to 120 visible meteors in an hour.
Watch the northeastern sky, and look about halfway up. You may even glimpse some fireballs during the meteor shower. View the skies for at least an hour, the American Meteor Society advises.
If you live in an urban area, you may want to drive to a place that isn’t full of bright city lights. If you’re able to find an area unaffected by light pollution, meteors could be visible every couple of minutes from late evening until dawn.
Find an open area with a wide view of the sky. Make sure you have a chair or blanket so you can look straight up. And give your eyes about 20 to 30 minutes to adjust to the darkness — without looking at your phone — so the meteors will be easier to spot.
If the meteor shower’s name sounds odd, it’s probably because it doesn’t sound like it’s related to a constellation, like other meteor showers. That’s because the Quadrantids’ namesake constellation no longer exists — at least, not as a recognized constellation.
The constellation Quadrans Muralis, first observed and noted in 1795 between Boötes and Draco, is no longer included in the International Astronomical Union’s list of modern constellations because it’s considered obsolete and isn’t used as a landmark for celestial navigation anymore, according to EarthSky.
Like the Geminid meteor shower, the Quadrantid comes from a mysterious asteroid or “rock comet,” rather than an icy comet, which is unusual. This particular asteroid is 2003 EH1, which takes 5.52 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The shower’s peak is short because only a small stream of particles interacts with our atmosphere, and the stream occurs at a perpendicular angle. Each year, Earth passes through this debris trail for a short time.
Catch a comet, too
In addition to the meteor shower, a recently discovered comet will soon make its appearance in January’s night sky.
Discovered in March 2022, the comet will make its closest approach to the sun on January 12, according to NASA. The comet, spotted by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, is named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) and will make its closest pass of Earth on February 2.
The comet should be visible through binoculars in the morning sky for sky-watchers in the Northern Hemisphere during most of January and those in the Southern Hemisphere in early February, according to NASA.
Here are the rest of 2023’s top sky events, so you can have your binoculars and telescope ready.
Mark your calendar with the peak dates of other showers to watch in 2023:
- Lyrids: April 22-23
- Eta Aquariids: May 5-6
- Southern delta Aquariids: July 30-31
- Alpha Capricornids: July 30-31
- Perseids: August 12-13
- Orionids: October 20-21
- Southern Taurids: November 4-5
- Northern Taurids: November 11-12
- Leonids: November 17-18
- Geminids: December 13-14
- Ursids: December 21-22
Full moons and supermoons
Most years, there are 12 full moons — one for each month. But in 2023, there will be 13 full moons, with two occurring in August.
The second full moon in one month is known as a blue moon, like the phrase “once in a blue moon,” according to NASA. Typically, full moons occur every 29 days, while most months in our calendar last 30 or 31 days, so the months and moon phases don’t always align. This results in a blue moon about every 2.5 years.
The two full moons in August can also be considered supermoons, according to EarthSky. Definitions of a supermoon vary, but the term generally denotes a full moon that is brighter and closer to Earth than normal and thus appears larger in the night sky.
Some astronomers say the phenomenon occurs when the moon is within 90% of perigee — its closest approach to Earth in orbit. By that definition, the full moon for July will also be considered a supermoon event, according to EarthSky.
Here is the list of full moons for 2023, according to the Farmer’s Almanac:
- January 6: Wolf moon
- February 5: Snow moon
- March 7: Worm moon
- April 6: Pink moon
- May 5: Flower moon
- June 3: Strawberry moon
- July 3: Buck moon
- August 1: Sturgeon moon
- August 30: Blue moon
- September 29: Harvest moon
- October 28: Hunter’s moon
- November 27: Beaver moon
- December 26: Cold moon
While these are the popularized names associated with the monthly full moon, each one carries its own significance across Native American tribes (with many also referred to by differing names).
Solar and lunar eclipses
There will be two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses in 2023.
A total solar eclipse will occur on April 20, visible to those in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Antarctica. This kind of event occurs when the moon moves between the sun and Earth, blocking out the sun.
And for some sky-watchers in Indonesia, parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea, it will actually be a hybrid solar eclipse. The curvature of Earth’s surface can cause some eclipses to shift between total and annular as the moon’s shadow moves across the globe, according to NASA.
Like a total solar eclipse, the moon passes between the sun and the Earth during an annular eclipse — but it occurs when the moon is at or near its farthest point from Earth, according to NASA. This causes the moon to appear smaller than the sun, so it doesn’t completely block out our star and creates a glowing ring around the moon.
A Western Hemisphere-sweeping annular solar eclipse will occur on October 14 and be visible across the Americas.
Be sure to wear proper eclipse glasses to safely view solar eclipses, as the sun’s light can be damaging to the eye.
Meanwhile, a lunar eclipse can occur only during a full moon when the sun, Earth and moon align and the moon passes into Earth’s shadow. When this occurs, Earth casts two shadows on the moon during the eclipse. The partial outer shadow is called the penumbra; the full, dark shadow is the umbra.
When the full moon moves into Earth’s shadow, it darkens, but it won’t disappear. Instead, sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere lights the moon in a dramatic fashion, turning it red — which is why the event is often referred to as a “blood moon.”
Depending on the weather conditions in your area, it may be a rusty or brick-colored red. This happens because blue light undergoes stronger atmospheric scattering, so red light will be the most dominant color highlighted as sunlight passes through the atmosphere and casts it on the moon.
A penumbral lunar eclipse will occur on May 5 for those in Africa, Asia and Australia. This less dramatic version of a lunar eclipse happens when the moon moves through the penumbra, or the faint, outer part of Earth’s shadow.
A partial lunar eclipse of the hunter’s moon on October 28 will be visible to those in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, parts of North America and much of South America. Partial eclipses occur when the sun, Earth and moon don’t completely align, so only part of the moon passes into shadow.
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Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
The new year kicks off with the Quadrantids, one of 12 annual meteor showers.
The celestial event is typically among the strongest meteor showers and is expected to peak overnight January 3 and 4, according to the American Meteor Society. Sky-gazers in the Northern Hemisphere can best view the shower between the late-night hours of Tuesday and dawn on Wednesday.
However, the shower is notoriously hard to observe due to its brief peak of six hours and January’s often inclement weather in the Northern Hemisphere. A bright, nearly full moon will make the Quadrantids even less visible this year.
Moonset will occur just before dawn, providing a very small window to spot the shower against dark skies.
Predictions for the shower’s peak range from 10:40 p.m. to 1:40 a.m. ET (3:40 a.m. to 6:40 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time). The later time favors those in the eastern part of North America and the earlier time is more favorable for observers across Europe. The Quadrantids won’t be visible in the Southern Hemisphere because the shower’s radiant point doesn’t rise that high in its sky before dawn.
Check Time and Date’s site to see what your chances are like to view the event, or step outside to take a look for yourself. The Virtual Telescope Project will also have a live stream of the shower over Rome.
What you’ll see
Between 50 and 100 meteors are typically visible per hour, especially in rural areas, although the peak can include up to 120 visible meteors in an hour.
Watch the northeastern sky, and look about halfway up. You may even glimpse some fireballs during the meteor shower. View the skies for at least an hour, the American Meteor Society advises.
If you live in an urban area, you may want to drive to a place that isn’t full of bright city lights. If you’re able to find an area unaffected by light pollution, meteors could be visible every couple of minutes from late evening until dawn.
Find an open area with a wide view of the sky. Make sure you have a chair or blanket so you can look straight up. And give your eyes about 20 to 30 minutes to adjust to the darkness — without
|
looking at your phone — so the meteors will be easier to spot.
If the meteor shower’s name sounds odd, it’s probably because it doesn’t sound like it’s related to a constellation, like other meteor showers. That’s because the Quadrantids’ namesake constellation no longer exists — at least, not as a recognized constellation.
The constellation Quadrans Muralis, first observed and noted in 1795 between Boötes and Draco, is no longer included in the International Astronomical Union’s list of modern constellations because it’s considered obsolete and isn’t used as a landmark for celestial navigation anymore, according to EarthSky.
Like the Geminid meteor shower, the Quadrantid comes from a mysterious asteroid or “rock comet,” rather than an icy comet, which is unusual. This particular asteroid is 2003 EH1, which takes 5.52 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The shower’s peak is short because only a small stream of particles interacts with our atmosphere, and the stream occurs at a perpendicular angle. Each year, Earth passes through this debris trail for a short time.
Catch a comet, too
In addition to the meteor shower, a recently discovered comet will soon make its appearance in January’s night sky.
Discovered in March 2022, the comet will make its closest approach to the sun on January 12, according to NASA. The comet, spotted by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, is named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) and will make its closest pass of Earth on February 2.
The comet should be visible through binoculars in the morning sky for sky-watchers in the Northern Hemisphere during most of January and those in the Southern Hemisphere in early February, according to NASA.
Here are the rest of 2023’s top sky events, so you can have your binoculars and telescope ready.
Mark your calendar with the peak dates of other showers to watch in 2023:
- Lyrids: April 22-23
- Eta Aquariids: May 5-6
- Southern delta Aquariids: July 30-31
- Alpha Capricornids: July 30-31
- Perseids: August 12-13
- Orionids: October 20-21
- Southern Taurids: November 4-5
- Northern Taurids: November 11-12
- Leonids: November 17-18
- Geminids: December 13-14
- Ursids: December 21-22
Full moons and supermoons
Most years, there are 12 full moons — one for each month. But in 2023, there will be 13 full moons, with two occurring in August.
The second full moon in one month is known as a blue moon, like the phrase “once in a blue moon,” according to NASA. Typically, full moons occur every 29 days, while most months in our calendar last 30 or 31 days, so the months and moon phases don’t always align. This results in a blue moon about every 2.5 years.
The two full moons in August can also be considered supermoons, according to EarthSky. Definitions of a supermoon vary, but the term generally denotes a full moon that is brighter and closer to Earth than normal and thus appears larger in the night sky.
Some astronomers say the phenomenon occurs when the moon is within 90% of perigee — its closest approach to Earth in orbit. By that definition, the full moon for July will also be considered a supermoon event, according to EarthSky.
Here is the list of full moons for 2023, according to the Farmer’s Almanac:
- January 6: Wolf moon
- February 5: Snow moon
- March 7: Worm moon
- April 6: Pink moon
- May 5: Flower moon
- June 3: Strawberry moon
- July 3: Buck moon
- August 1: Sturgeon moon
- August 30: Blue moon
- September 29: Harvest moon
- October 28: Hunter’s moon
- November 27: Beaver moon
- December 26: Cold moon
While these are the popularized names associated with the monthly full moon, each one carries its own significance across Native American tribes (with many also referred to by differing names).
Solar and lunar eclipses
There will be two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses in 2023.
A total solar eclipse will occur on April 20, visible to those in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Antarctica. This kind of event occurs when the moon moves between the sun and Earth, blocking out the sun.
And for some sky-watchers in Indonesia, parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea, it will actually be a hybrid solar eclipse. The curvature of Earth’s surface can cause some eclipses to shift between total and annular as the moon’s shadow moves across the globe, according to NASA.
Like a total solar eclipse, the moon passes between the sun and the Earth during an annular eclipse — but it occurs when the moon is at or near its farthest point from Earth, according to NASA. This causes the moon to appear smaller than the sun, so it doesn’t completely block out our star and creates a glowing ring around the moon.
A Western Hemisphere-sweeping annular solar eclipse will occur on October 14 and be visible across the Americas.
Be sure to wear proper eclipse glasses to safely view solar eclipses, as the sun’s light can be damaging to the eye.
Meanwhile, a lunar eclipse can occur only during a full moon when the sun, Earth and moon align and the moon passes into Earth’s shadow. When this occurs, Earth casts two shadows on the moon during the eclipse. The partial outer shadow is called the penumbra; the full, dark shadow is the umbra.
When the full moon moves into Earth’s shadow, it darkens, but it won’t disappear. Instead, sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere lights the moon in a dramatic fashion, turning it red — which is why the event is often referred to as a “blood moon.”
Depending on the weather conditions in your area, it may be a rusty or brick-colored red. This happens because blue light undergoes stronger atmospheric scattering, so red light will be the most dominant color highlighted as sunlight passes through the atmosphere and casts it on the moon.
A penumbral lunar eclipse will occur on May 5 for those in Africa, Asia and Australia. This less dramatic version of a lunar eclipse happens when the moon moves through the penumbra, or the faint, outer part of Earth’s shadow.
A partial lunar eclipse of the hunter’s moon on October 28 will be visible to those in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, parts of North America and much of South America. Partial eclipses occur when the sun, Earth and moon don’t completely align, so only part of the moon passes into shadow.
|
It’s been more than two weeks since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling chemicals onto the ground and into waterways, and releasing them into the air as damaged cars burst into flames. A few days later, on Feb. 6, officials intentionally released vinyl chloride gas from five train cars and burned it in order to avoid an explosion.
Many questions have since been raised about toxic exposures sustained by humans and wildlife — not just in East Palestine, with its 4,700 residents, but along the Ohio River and farther north. The New Republic reported that residents endured burning and itchy eyes, sore throat, rash, and migraines in the aftermath of the train derailment. Around 3,500 fish have reportedly died in local waterways, and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced that chemicals had been found in the Ohio River in the northern panhandle of the state.
Here’s a look at what we know so far about the potential hazards of air, soil, and water contamination stemming from the train derailment, and what experts say about the chemicals’ possible long-term risks to health.
Are the air and water in East Palestine, Ohio, actually safe now?
On Feb. 16, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan met with residents and reassured them that robust air quality testing and 24/7 monitoring found the air and water quality to be safe. “We are testing for all volatile organic chemicals,” Regan announced. “We’re testing for everything that was on that train.” That said, state officials have advised residents with private wells to keep drinking bottled water until those wells can be tested.
Testing for volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in air and water should cover potential hazards, said Ted Schettler, science director at the environmental nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network.
“They should be testing for individual compounds, and if they are testing for total VOCs as a screen, they need to have very sensitive instruments because some VOCs are much more toxic than others,” he said. Schettler is concerned about news reports that people are smelling chemicals in their homes and being told that their air testing shows no elevated levels. That suggests that the EPA may not be using sufficiently sensitive instruments, he said.
Some experts are raising additional concerns about that EPA statement. First of all, air monitoring of vinyl chloride may not be useful by now. “Vinyl chloride has a short half-life,” said chemist Matt Hartings of American University in Washington, D.C. “After a day and a half, it’s likely gone from the air anyway. I’m not surprised they’re not finding it now.”
Air monitoring right now doesn’t answer questions about acute exposure that first night after the train derailment and the following day, Hartings said. On the first night, temperatures in the teens and very light winds would have kept airborne contaminants close to the ground over the town.
Moreover, several experts commented that they were uncertain what equipment the EPA was using for testing, and what exactly it was testing for. “I am still unclear on the timeline of what was released when,” said Hartings. “A lot of people are. I think it’s really important to pin them down on what measurements they are actually making.”
Chemist Nicole Karn of Ohio State University also said on Twitter that the EPA did not correctly preserve five of its six water samples before testing, adding: “These data cannot be trusted.” In the wake of these and other concerns, the New York Times reports that some locals are planning to pay for independent testing for chemicals.
“Removal of impacted materials, including soils, continues to be the top priority, in order to limit the spread of contaminants,” an Ohio EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “A full delineation of impacts to soil and ground water will be required, but has not yet been completed.”
What were the five chemicals the EPA found at the site?
On Feb. 10, the EPA sent a letter to Norfolk Southern Railway Company reporting five toxic chemicals found in air, soil, or water surrounding the crash site. They are: vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate. Here’s a quick rundown of each chemical’s toxicity — and their byproducts when burned, which can also be toxic.
Vinyl chloride has gotten the most attention so far. It’s a colorless, flammable gas and known carcinogen.
Most studies on vinyl chloride are related to occupational exposure or to residents who live near factories that produce it. Those longer-term, chronic exposures have been linked to certain liver, brain and lung cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.
Short-term exposures, like those in East Palestine, can lead to irritation in eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. People can also suffer from headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, nausea, or tingling in the arms and legs.
As vinyl chloride burns, the gas can form byproducts including hydrogen chloride, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and traces of phosgene. The EPA tested at least 480 homes around East Palestine and did not detect vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride in any of them.
The EPA has not indicated whether it tested for phosgene, and has not yet returned STAT’s request for comment on the matter. Phosgene is hazardous at very low levels, noted Schettler, and has been used as a chemical weapon in war. “It’s highly corrosive to the lungs at really low levels, at fractions of a part per million.”
Since vinyl chloride in the air breaks down and dissipates in a day or two, it would not be found in air now. However, it may persist in soil and water, according to soil and crop scientist Murray McBride of Cornell University, who advises farmers and residents near the derailment site to test their soil and water. “Vinyl chloride is highly mobile in soils and water and can persist for years in groundwater,” wrote McBride.
Butyl acrylate was released in large amounts when a car full of the chemical derailed. It’s a colorless liquid used to manufacture paints, solvents, and sealants. Exposure can cause irritation to the nose and eyes, nausea, and vomiting, as well as allergic skin reactions, said Schettler.
State EPA officials have found butyl acrylate at multiple sampling sites along the Ohio River, though they say the concentrations are low and the river large enough that it poses no risk — it has been found at levels below 3 parts per billion, while the CDC considers levels above 560 parts per billion hazardous.
The Department of Environmental Protection tested groundwater near the derailment site and concluded that wells in town would be safe.
As for contamination of the Ohio River, cities and towns on the river have been monitoring closely. Greater Cincinnati Water Works planned to shut off access to the water reserve once butyl acrylate reached the city, letting it pass through and using reserve water. Other cities also shut down their water plants while the plume of butyl acetate went by.
Ethylene glycol is a solvent used in paints, inks, and cleaning products. It’s highly flammable and acutely toxic. “It irritates the skin and eyes, causing sore throat, coughing and skin rashes,” said Schettler.
Isobutylene is a gas used as an antioxidant in packaging and plastics. “At moderate concentrations it can cause dizziness and drowsiness,” said Schettler, but the train’s cargo manifest, which has been widely shared, did not show this chemical leaking. “If that’s true,” said Schettler, “there are no exposures.”
Ethylhexyl acrylate is a colorless liquid used to make paints and plastics that can cause skin and respiratory irritation, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea at levels starting at 5 ppm in air.
Benzene, petroleum lubricating oil, and other substances likely burned as well.
What other toxic chemicals were created or used in the fires?
Dioxin. One big concern is the possibility of contamination by dioxin, a highly toxic, carcinogenic, and persistent compound released when polyvinyl chloride burns. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, was present in four of the cars originally on fire. PVC is widely used in plumbing and pipes, flooring, and health care settings.
“Dioxins are persistent pollutants, highly toxic, and on the international dirty dozen list,” said environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman, author of the forthcoming “The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics.”
The EPA has not yet tested for dioxin contamination, but a similar train derailment in Germany in 2000 found high levels of dioxin in the area where fires had burned polyvinyl chloride.
Elevated levels of dioxins have been found in other industrial accidents involving chlorinated chemicals, as well. “The EPA should be testing for dioxins in water and soil,” said Mike Schade, an environmental activist with Toxic-Free Future.
Cornell’s McBride concurs, as does Schettler, who said: “We know when polyvinyl chloride burns it creates dioxins. I’m certain from the view of that black smoke plume that it was a witch’s brew of chemicals on fire, and I’m quite certain dioxins would be among them.”
PFAS (perfluoroalkyl substances), which are typically found in firefighting foams, may also have been released. The U.S. government has said that high levels of exposure to these chemicals, called “forever” toxins because they don’t break down naturally, may be linked to a number of health conditions including increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer, changes in liver enzymes, and increased cholesterol levels.
EPA officials have not yet tested the water for PFAS, but have promised to start.
As for other novel compounds released as a result of the derailment, we may never know their full extent. “Studies of wildfire smoke in California find that new and dangerous compounds form when fires burn into communities,” said Schettler. “The chemicals, plastics and paints in homes are much like the materials that were on this train.”
Hartings agreed. “The EPA’s testing is not necessarily monitoring novel toxins and compounds.”
Schettler said the EPA needs to continue to test soil and water away from the actual site. “They are carrying out extensive cleanup in the immediate area, but they need to continue monitoring further away. There is a lot of contaminated soil that could be a continued reservoir for hazardous chemicals that get into homes and food.”
Experts highlight need for tighter regulations on trains carrying hazardous materials
Because the Norfolk Southern train had some cars containing semolina wheat and vegetables as well as about 20 cars carrying hazardous chemicals, the entire train was not labeled hazardous, and officials were not notified the train would be passing through the state. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called for this to change at a press conference last week: “We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials through Ohio,” he said.
The train derailment has also reignited a conversation about trains’ braking systems. A 2014 Obama-era regulation required high-hazard freight trains to be equipped with electronically controlled pneumatic brakes by 2023. This allows the trains to brake faster. But in 2017, the Trump administration repealed this regulation. Thus far, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has not moved to reinstate the rule. The current, age-old technology of hydraulic brakes meant that in the Norfolk Southern train’s case, when one car derailed, the entire train contracted and expanded like an accordion, sending many more cars off the rails.
Just as significant a problem is the way trains are scheduled, said Anne Junod, senior research associate at the Urban Institute. “Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) is likely a key contributor,” she explained. “It’s an industry model that is meant to increase efficiency and on-time deliveries while reducing costs.”
PSR encourages companies to expand the length of trains, because adding more cars means fewer train trips. But more cars can also increase the risk of a derailment. At the same time, she said, there has been a decline in staffing. “We used to see two engineers per train. Now we see increasing industry pressure for one engineer, for these long trains carrying incredibly hazardous materials.”
The number of train inspectors has also been reduced, so that the regions they are responsible for are bigger. “The responsibility for the inspectors is so immense,” Junod said, “that it’s literally impossible for them to do their jobs well.”
Junod points out that the U.S. has had dozens of derailments in the last 20 years, and that most of them are in small towns, simply because much of the 140,000 miles of train tracks in America traverse rural areas. “This is a real industry failure to self-regulate,” she said, “but then communities like East Palestine are left holding the bag.”
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It’s been more than two weeks since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling chemicals onto the ground and into waterways, and releasing them into the air as damaged cars burst into flames. A few days later, on Feb. 6, officials intentionally released vinyl chloride gas from five train cars and burned it in order to avoid an explosion.
Many questions have since been raised about toxic exposures sustained by humans and wildlife — not just in East Palestine, with its 4,700 residents, but along the Ohio River and farther north. The New Republic reported that residents endured burning and itchy eyes, sore throat, rash, and migraines in the aftermath of the train derailment. Around 3,500 fish have reportedly died in local waterways, and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced that chemicals had been found in the Ohio River in the northern panhandle of the state.
Here’s a look at what we know so far about the potential hazards of air, soil, and water contamination stemming from the train derailment, and what experts say about the chemicals’ possible long-term risks to health.
Are the air and water in East Palestine, Ohio, actually safe now?
On Feb. 16, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan met with residents and reassured them that robust air quality testing and 24/7 monitoring found the air and water quality to be safe. “We are testing for all volatile organic chemicals,” Regan announced. “We’re testing for everything that was on that train.” That said, state officials have advised residents with private wells to keep drinking bottled water until those wells can be tested.
Testing for volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in air and water should cover potential hazards, said Ted Schettler, science director at the environmental nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network.
“They should be testing for individual compounds, and if they are testing for total VOCs as a screen, they need to have very sensitive instruments because some VOCs are much more toxic than others,” he said. Schettler is concerned about news reports that people are smelling chemicals in their homes and being told that their air testing shows no elevated levels. That suggests that the EPA may not be using sufficiently sensitive instruments, he said.
Some experts are raising additional concerns about that EPA statement. First of all, air monitoring of vinyl chloride may not be useful by now. “Vinyl chloride has a short half-life,” said chemist Matt Hartings of American
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University in Washington, D.C. “After a day and a half, it’s likely gone from the air anyway. I’m not surprised they’re not finding it now.”
Air monitoring right now doesn’t answer questions about acute exposure that first night after the train derailment and the following day, Hartings said. On the first night, temperatures in the teens and very light winds would have kept airborne contaminants close to the ground over the town.
Moreover, several experts commented that they were uncertain what equipment the EPA was using for testing, and what exactly it was testing for. “I am still unclear on the timeline of what was released when,” said Hartings. “A lot of people are. I think it’s really important to pin them down on what measurements they are actually making.”
Chemist Nicole Karn of Ohio State University also said on Twitter that the EPA did not correctly preserve five of its six water samples before testing, adding: “These data cannot be trusted.” In the wake of these and other concerns, the New York Times reports that some locals are planning to pay for independent testing for chemicals.
“Removal of impacted materials, including soils, continues to be the top priority, in order to limit the spread of contaminants,” an Ohio EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “A full delineation of impacts to soil and ground water will be required, but has not yet been completed.”
What were the five chemicals the EPA found at the site?
On Feb. 10, the EPA sent a letter to Norfolk Southern Railway Company reporting five toxic chemicals found in air, soil, or water surrounding the crash site. They are: vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate. Here’s a quick rundown of each chemical’s toxicity — and their byproducts when burned, which can also be toxic.
Vinyl chloride has gotten the most attention so far. It’s a colorless, flammable gas and known carcinogen.
Most studies on vinyl chloride are related to occupational exposure or to residents who live near factories that produce it. Those longer-term, chronic exposures have been linked to certain liver, brain and lung cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.
Short-term exposures, like those in East Palestine, can lead to irritation in eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. People can also suffer from headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, nausea, or tingling in the arms and legs.
As vinyl chloride burns, the gas can form byproducts including hydrogen chloride, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and traces of phosgene. The EPA tested at least 480 homes around East Palestine and did not detect vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride in any of them.
The EPA has not indicated whether it tested for phosgene, and has not yet returned STAT’s request for comment on the matter. Phosgene is hazardous at very low levels, noted Schettler, and has been used as a chemical weapon in war. “It’s highly corrosive to the lungs at really low levels, at fractions of a part per million.”
Since vinyl chloride in the air breaks down and dissipates in a day or two, it would not be found in air now. However, it may persist in soil and water, according to soil and crop scientist Murray McBride of Cornell University, who advises farmers and residents near the derailment site to test their soil and water. “Vinyl chloride is highly mobile in soils and water and can persist for years in groundwater,” wrote McBride.
Butyl acrylate was released in large amounts when a car full of the chemical derailed. It’s a colorless liquid used to manufacture paints, solvents, and sealants. Exposure can cause irritation to the nose and eyes, nausea, and vomiting, as well as allergic skin reactions, said Schettler.
State EPA officials have found butyl acrylate at multiple sampling sites along the Ohio River, though they say the concentrations are low and the river large enough that it poses no risk — it has been found at levels below 3 parts per billion, while the CDC considers levels above 560 parts per billion hazardous.
The Department of Environmental Protection tested groundwater near the derailment site and concluded that wells in town would be safe.
As for contamination of the Ohio River, cities and towns on the river have been monitoring closely. Greater Cincinnati Water Works planned to shut off access to the water reserve once butyl acrylate reached the city, letting it pass through and using reserve water. Other cities also shut down their water plants while the plume of butyl acetate went by.
Ethylene glycol is a solvent used in paints, inks, and cleaning products. It’s highly flammable and acutely toxic. “It irritates the skin and eyes, causing sore throat, coughing and skin rashes,” said Schettler.
Isobutylene is a gas used as an antioxidant in packaging and plastics. “At moderate concentrations it can cause dizziness and drowsiness,” said Schettler, but the train’s cargo manifest, which has been widely shared, did not show this chemical leaking. “If that’s true,” said Schettler, “there are no exposures.”
Ethylhexyl acrylate is a colorless liquid used to make paints and plastics that can cause skin and respiratory irritation, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea at levels starting at 5 ppm in air.
Benzene, petroleum lubricating oil, and other substances likely burned as well.
What other toxic chemicals were created or used in the fires?
Dioxin. One big concern is the possibility of contamination by dioxin, a highly toxic, carcinogenic, and persistent compound released when polyvinyl chloride burns. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, was present in four of the cars originally on fire. PVC is widely used in plumbing and pipes, flooring, and health care settings.
“Dioxins are persistent pollutants, highly toxic, and on the international dirty dozen list,” said environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman, author of the forthcoming “The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics.”
The EPA has not yet tested for dioxin contamination, but a similar train derailment in Germany in 2000 found high levels of dioxin in the area where fires had burned polyvinyl chloride.
Elevated levels of dioxins have been found in other industrial accidents involving chlorinated chemicals, as well. “The EPA should be testing for dioxins in water and soil,” said Mike Schade, an environmental activist with Toxic-Free Future.
Cornell’s McBride concurs, as does Schettler, who said: “We know when polyvinyl chloride burns it creates dioxins. I’m certain from the view of that black smoke plume that it was a witch’s brew of chemicals on fire, and I’m quite certain dioxins would be among them.”
PFAS (perfluoroalkyl substances), which are typically found in firefighting foams, may also have been released. The U.S. government has said that high levels of exposure to these chemicals, called “forever” toxins because they don’t break down naturally, may be linked to a number of health conditions including increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer, changes in liver enzymes, and increased cholesterol levels.
EPA officials have not yet tested the water for PFAS, but have promised to start.
As for other novel compounds released as a result of the derailment, we may never know their full extent. “Studies of wildfire smoke in California find that new and dangerous compounds form when fires burn into communities,” said Schettler. “The chemicals, plastics and paints in homes are much like the materials that were on this train.”
Hartings agreed. “The EPA’s testing is not necessarily monitoring novel toxins and compounds.”
Schettler said the EPA needs to continue to test soil and water away from the actual site. “They are carrying out extensive cleanup in the immediate area, but they need to continue monitoring further away. There is a lot of contaminated soil that could be a continued reservoir for hazardous chemicals that get into homes and food.”
Experts highlight need for tighter regulations on trains carrying hazardous materials
Because the Norfolk Southern train had some cars containing semolina wheat and vegetables as well as about 20 cars carrying hazardous chemicals, the entire train was not labeled hazardous, and officials were not notified the train would be passing through the state. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called for this to change at a press conference last week: “We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials through Ohio,” he said.
The train derailment has also reignited a conversation about trains’ braking systems. A 2014 Obama-era regulation required high-hazard freight trains to be equipped with electronically controlled pneumatic brakes by 2023. This allows the trains to brake faster. But in 2017, the Trump administration repealed this regulation. Thus far, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has not moved to reinstate the rule. The current, age-old technology of hydraulic brakes meant that in the Norfolk Southern train’s case, when one car derailed, the entire train contracted and expanded like an accordion, sending many more cars off the rails.
Just as significant a problem is the way trains are scheduled, said Anne Junod, senior research associate at the Urban Institute. “Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) is likely a key contributor,” she explained. “It’s an industry model that is meant to increase efficiency and on-time deliveries while reducing costs.”
PSR encourages companies to expand the length of trains, because adding more cars means fewer train trips. But more cars can also increase the risk of a derailment. At the same time, she said, there has been a decline in staffing. “We used to see two engineers per train. Now we see increasing industry pressure for one engineer, for these long trains carrying incredibly hazardous materials.”
The number of train inspectors has also been reduced, so that the regions they are responsible for are bigger. “The responsibility for the inspectors is so immense,” Junod said, “that it’s literally impossible for them to do their jobs well.”
Junod points out that the U.S. has had dozens of derailments in the last 20 years, and that most of them are in small towns, simply because much of the 140,000 miles of train tracks in America traverse rural areas. “This is a real industry failure to self-regulate,” she said, “but then communities like East Palestine are left holding the bag.”
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Earth's growing population: 'A direct affront to our own survival'Play
Sign up for the On Point newsletter here.
Listen: What Earth's growing population means for our planet's future.
The population of planet Earth reached 8 billion people late last year. By the year 2100, we're headed for 2 billion more.
What does that mean for us and our planet?
Elizabeth Hadly is a professor of biology at Stanford University, and director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.
For four decades, she's been an eyewitness to dramatic changes in the plant and animal kingdoms caused by human beings.
ELIZABETH HADLY: Remember all those insects you used to have on your windshield when you drove across the West? Gosh, they're not there anymore. Why? So I did a lot of work in Yellowstone driving back and forth from either here or Berkeley, wherever I was living at the time. And sometimes I would have to stop more frequently to clean my windshield than I did to fill up with gas. And no more. I can drive across the country, which I just did, by the way, and not clean my windshield. And that's horrifying to me.
So in my 40-some years of doing this, I have seen fewer large game animals like rhinos, like grizzly bears, like bighorn sheep, like whales. I have seen fewer fish in the sea. And the fish that I have caught, I like to fly fish, the fish that I have personally handled in some of these amazing streams in the American West are smaller and harder to find. Why do we have a loss of almost 70% of the wild animal populations in the world?
Why is this happening? And the bottom line is that there are so many people and we are consuming so much of the biomass of the planet, we're kind of harboring it for ourselves and for our domesticated animals. I learned this from a farmer. If you look at a ranch where there's a lot of cow patties, you know, they're drugging their animals big time. And those cow patties are going to stay there for a long time because they're basically sterilizing their soil. If you look at another ranch where they're not applying so many of those pesticides, there's not as many cow patties.
And it's because the dung beetles and the worms and everything that kind of helps decompose is working at it. So even if you don't care about the ethical considerations of eliminating species on the Tree of Life, it's important to realize that we're actually doing the culling. The great acceleration is a compilation of data that shows it's not just the increase in human population size, but it's the increase in our consumption. And it's not just per capita consumption that stays the same. And so therefore, you just add more people and you increase consumption that way. We're actually consuming more than we used to.
There's only so much solar radiation that reaches the earth, and that solar radiation for millions of years is the only thing that's kind of governed biomass. And now, of course, you know, we're getting solar energy from fossil fuels and we're adding to that. And what we're doing is we are now replacing all wild biomass with the biomass we choose. And the problem is that's not sustainable.
And there are all sorts of ways that it could unravel. But the one I'm the most concerned about is that as we lose biomass, as we lose biodiversity, the biomass of diversity, we're losing our potential solutions. And if we're losing populations of species, the way all of the data suggests, more than 60% of them in the last few decades, then what that means is it's a direct affront to our own survival. They are the canary in the coal mine, and we're living in the coal mine, too.
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Earth's growing population: 'A direct affront to our own survival'Play
Sign up for the On Point newsletter here.
Listen: What Earth's growing population means for our planet's future.
The population of planet Earth reached 8 billion people late last year. By the year 2100, we're headed for 2 billion more.
What does that mean for us and our planet?
Elizabeth Hadly is a professor of biology at Stanford University, and director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.
For four decades, she's been an eyewitness to dramatic changes in the plant and animal kingdoms caused by human beings.
ELIZABETH HADLY: Remember all those insects you used to have on your windshield when you drove across the West? Gosh, they're not there anymore. Why? So I did a lot of work in Yellowstone driving back and forth from either here or Berkeley, wherever I was living at the time. And sometimes I would have to stop more frequently to clean my windshield than I did to fill up with gas. And no more. I can drive across the country, which I just did, by the way, and not clean my windshield. And that's horrifying to me.
So in my 40-some years of doing this, I have seen fewer large game animals like rhinos, like grizzly bears, like bighorn sheep, like whales. I have seen fewer fish in the sea. And the fish that I have caught, I like to fly fish, the fish that I have personally handled in some of these amazing streams in the American West are smaller and harder to find. Why do we have a loss of almost 70% of the wild animal populations in the world?
Why is this happening? And the bottom line is that there are so many people and we are consuming so much of the biomass of the planet, we're kind of harboring it for ourselves and for our domesticated animals. I learned this from a farmer. If you look at a ranch where there's a lot of cow patties, you know, they're drugging their animals big time. And those cow patties are going to stay there for a long time because they're basically sterilizing their soil. If you look at another ranch where they're not applying so many of those pesticides, there's not as many cow patties.
And it's because the dung beetles and the worms and everything that kind of helps decom
|
pose is working at it. So even if you don't care about the ethical considerations of eliminating species on the Tree of Life, it's important to realize that we're actually doing the culling. The great acceleration is a compilation of data that shows it's not just the increase in human population size, but it's the increase in our consumption. And it's not just per capita consumption that stays the same. And so therefore, you just add more people and you increase consumption that way. We're actually consuming more than we used to.
There's only so much solar radiation that reaches the earth, and that solar radiation for millions of years is the only thing that's kind of governed biomass. And now, of course, you know, we're getting solar energy from fossil fuels and we're adding to that. And what we're doing is we are now replacing all wild biomass with the biomass we choose. And the problem is that's not sustainable.
And there are all sorts of ways that it could unravel. But the one I'm the most concerned about is that as we lose biomass, as we lose biodiversity, the biomass of diversity, we're losing our potential solutions. And if we're losing populations of species, the way all of the data suggests, more than 60% of them in the last few decades, then what that means is it's a direct affront to our own survival. They are the canary in the coal mine, and we're living in the coal mine, too.
|
Sign up for CNN’s Sleep, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide has helpful hints to achieve better sleep.
Are you waking up in a puddle of sweat — if you can sleep at all? That’s the grim reality for millions of people around the globe suffering through severe, unbearable heat waves.
July is the hottest month on record for the planet and very likely the hottest period in 120,000 years, according to global climate authorities. “These are the hottest temperatures in human history,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told CNN recently.
It’s expected to get worse: A new study found the number of days of “dangerous heat” — defined as 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius) — will more than double by 2050 in the midlatitude regions, which include Western Europe and countries such as China, Japan and the United States. Tropical areas could face those temperatures for the majority of the year.
No relief at night
It’s not just the unbearable sunshine — temperatures at night aren’t dropping as they should. Nights are warming faster than days on average in most of the US, the 2018 National Climate Assessment found. That’s dangerous for sleep — a vital period when the body and brain do housekeeping chores such as repairing and discarding old cells and generating new ones.
Warm nighttime temperatures have robbed people around the world of an average of 44 hours of sleep annually during just the first two decades of the 21st century, according to a 2022 study. And unfortunately, daytime naps and longer sleep on cooler nights did not seem to make up for that lost sleep, researchers found.
To get the best quality sleep, experts have long recommended sleeping in a cool room — between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6 to 19.4 degrees Celsius) is best. What happens when you can’t achieve that during a heat wave?
Studies have shown higher nighttime temperatures increase wakefulness and reduce deep wave and REM (rapid eye movement), both critical to how well the body repairs and refreshes itself at night.
Exposure to heat waves during pregnancy may be associated with adverse outcomes such as preterm birth, according to a 2019 study. Older adults may have higher heart rates and more physiological stress when sleeping in warmer temperatures. A 2008 Australian study even found deaths due to mental and behavioral disorders rose during heat waves, especially for older adults.
10 tips for sleeping in the heat
Learning how to better cope with sleep problems during heat waves might limit the negative impact on our health, according to a team of experts from the European Insomnia Network. Here are their top tips, along with some guidance from experts in the US.
Stay hydrated. Drinking plenty of water during the day can help your body better regulate your temperature at night.
But don’t drink for the hour or two before bed, or you’ll end up waking yourself in the night to go to the bathroom, said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Instead, “try sucking on ice cubes before bed.”
Eat light. Eating lighter, especially for the last meal of the day, can help set you up for better sleep, experts say. Avoid sugar and carb-laden foods, saturated fats and too much fiber as the day goes on, as that can disrupt sleep as well, according to a 2016 study.
Dress lightly. Sleep in the buff or choose loose, cotton clothing — avoid synthetics, which can trap heat next to the skin.
Look for chances to cool the bedroom. If you’re lucky enough to have a cooler period during the day, open windows and doors and start up fans to ventilate the bedroom, then close it off when the temperature rises.
If there are no breaks from the heat, close blinds, pull window shades, and do what you can “to keep the house and bedroom as cool and dark as possible both during day and night,” the network experts suggested.
Avoid alcohol. Drinking booze in the evening dehydrates the body and sets you up for nighttime sweats, said Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine and professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Set aside time to relax. For you and your child, set aside an hour or more before bedtime for calming activities, such as “reading a book, listening to a story or to music. This could help in cooling down and relaxing,” according to the network.
Shower in tepid water. Before you hit that hot sack, take a lukewarm or cool (but not cold) shower or foot bath, which may help to reduce your heat stress and set you up for sleep. How does that happen?
“Your body temperature lowers after you leave the shower or bath as your body adapts to the cooler environment,” Dasgupta said. “This drop in temperature prepares your body for sleep because our body temperature has a natural circadian rhythm — the body is primed to cool down when you lay down and warm up when you get up.”
Find the coolest place to sleep. Try your best to keep your bedroom cooler than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) if you can. To do so, try using ceiling fans or floor or bedside electric fans, which use “up to 50-times less electricity” than air conditioning,” the review noted.
“There are also fairly inexpensive ice cooling fans that can be placed near the bed,” Zee told CNN. “If you’re unable to keep the bedroom cool, sleeping temporarily on lower floors like the basement (if there is one) will be cooler.”
Keep a regular sleep schedule. If you sleep badly one night, don’t go to bed early the next, experts said. It’s important to stick to a regular bedtime to train the brain that it’s time to sleep, regardless of the temperature.
If you do wake up early and can’t go back to sleep without 15 to 20 minutes, get up and do something soothing and mindless, such as folding laundry, until you’re sleepy. If that doesn’t work, start your day, the network experts suggest.
Exercise safely. Don’t put aside exercise, even in the heat. Try to do some physical activity in the early morning, when it is still relatively cool outdoors, experts suggest, as a key way to keep a regular sleep and wake schedule.
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Sign up for CNN’s Sleep, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide has helpful hints to achieve better sleep.
Are you waking up in a puddle of sweat — if you can sleep at all? That’s the grim reality for millions of people around the globe suffering through severe, unbearable heat waves.
July is the hottest month on record for the planet and very likely the hottest period in 120,000 years, according to global climate authorities. “These are the hottest temperatures in human history,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told CNN recently.
It’s expected to get worse: A new study found the number of days of “dangerous heat” — defined as 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius) — will more than double by 2050 in the midlatitude regions, which include Western Europe and countries such as China, Japan and the United States. Tropical areas could face those temperatures for the majority of the year.
No relief at night
It’s not just the unbearable sunshine — temperatures at night aren’t dropping as they should. Nights are warming faster than days on average in most of the US, the 2018 National Climate Assessment found. That’s dangerous for sleep — a vital period when the body and brain do housekeeping chores such as repairing and discarding old cells and generating new ones.
Warm nighttime temperatures have robbed people around the world of an average of 44 hours of sleep annually during just the first two decades of the 21st century, according to a 2022 study. And unfortunately, daytime naps and longer sleep on cooler nights did not seem to make up for that lost sleep, researchers found.
To get the best quality sleep, experts have long recommended sleeping in a cool room — between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6 to 19.4 degrees Celsius) is best. What happens when you can’t achieve that during a heat wave?
Studies have shown higher nighttime temperatures increase wakefulness and reduce deep wave and REM (rapid eye movement), both critical to how well the body repairs and refreshes itself at night.
Exposure to heat waves during pregnancy may be associated with adverse outcomes such as preterm birth, according to a 2019 study. Older adults may have higher heart rates and more physiological stress when sleeping in
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warmer temperatures. A 2008 Australian study even found deaths due to mental and behavioral disorders rose during heat waves, especially for older adults.
10 tips for sleeping in the heat
Learning how to better cope with sleep problems during heat waves might limit the negative impact on our health, according to a team of experts from the European Insomnia Network. Here are their top tips, along with some guidance from experts in the US.
Stay hydrated. Drinking plenty of water during the day can help your body better regulate your temperature at night.
But don’t drink for the hour or two before bed, or you’ll end up waking yourself in the night to go to the bathroom, said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Instead, “try sucking on ice cubes before bed.”
Eat light. Eating lighter, especially for the last meal of the day, can help set you up for better sleep, experts say. Avoid sugar and carb-laden foods, saturated fats and too much fiber as the day goes on, as that can disrupt sleep as well, according to a 2016 study.
Dress lightly. Sleep in the buff or choose loose, cotton clothing — avoid synthetics, which can trap heat next to the skin.
Look for chances to cool the bedroom. If you’re lucky enough to have a cooler period during the day, open windows and doors and start up fans to ventilate the bedroom, then close it off when the temperature rises.
If there are no breaks from the heat, close blinds, pull window shades, and do what you can “to keep the house and bedroom as cool and dark as possible both during day and night,” the network experts suggested.
Avoid alcohol. Drinking booze in the evening dehydrates the body and sets you up for nighttime sweats, said Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine and professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Set aside time to relax. For you and your child, set aside an hour or more before bedtime for calming activities, such as “reading a book, listening to a story or to music. This could help in cooling down and relaxing,” according to the network.
Shower in tepid water. Before you hit that hot sack, take a lukewarm or cool (but not cold) shower or foot bath, which may help to reduce your heat stress and set you up for sleep. How does that happen?
“Your body temperature lowers after you leave the shower or bath as your body adapts to the cooler environment,” Dasgupta said. “This drop in temperature prepares your body for sleep because our body temperature has a natural circadian rhythm — the body is primed to cool down when you lay down and warm up when you get up.”
Find the coolest place to sleep. Try your best to keep your bedroom cooler than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) if you can. To do so, try using ceiling fans or floor or bedside electric fans, which use “up to 50-times less electricity” than air conditioning,” the review noted.
“There are also fairly inexpensive ice cooling fans that can be placed near the bed,” Zee told CNN. “If you’re unable to keep the bedroom cool, sleeping temporarily on lower floors like the basement (if there is one) will be cooler.”
Keep a regular sleep schedule. If you sleep badly one night, don’t go to bed early the next, experts said. It’s important to stick to a regular bedtime to train the brain that it’s time to sleep, regardless of the temperature.
If you do wake up early and can’t go back to sleep without 15 to 20 minutes, get up and do something soothing and mindless, such as folding laundry, until you’re sleepy. If that doesn’t work, start your day, the network experts suggest.
Exercise safely. Don’t put aside exercise, even in the heat. Try to do some physical activity in the early morning, when it is still relatively cool outdoors, experts suggest, as a key way to keep a regular sleep and wake schedule.
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An area south of Boston, from Mattapan Square to Franklin Park, used to be home to a thriving Jewish community. But over the course of four years - between 1968 and 1971 - an area that was 90-percent Jewish became 90-percent Black and African American. The shift is a tale of what happens when good intentioned housing policies are left unchecked. We look at that history with two housing historians.
Lew Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Action for Justice, and Jim Vrabel, author of A People's History of the New Boston joined WBUR's Simón Rios to discuss.
On life in Mattapan in the mid 1960s:
Finfer: "Well, it was very vibrant and people used to talk about the wall at Franklin Field — Franklin Field is a big park in Dorchester and that area and has a wall that you can sit on and how people of all ages would gather in groups — it was a huge park. There was a huge wall. So the teenagers of 13 to 15 were in this group. And the teenagers, you know, 15 to 20... And they went on to the elderly gatherings. It was all there. And there were settlement houses — the Lena Park Community Center was called the Hecht House and was a settlement house recreation area. There were lots and lots of temples and, you know, all kinds of shops, you know, like kosher butchers and all those kind of things that went with that kind of life. It wasn't 100-percent Jewish, but it was probably about two-thirds Jewish in those areas of Mattapan and what I would call western Dorchester, that's like Franklin Field, Franklin Park kinds of areas."
On the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG):
Vrabel: "It was part of a time when government decided that cities needed rebuilding and they wanted big ideas. The federal government was putting a lot of money into helping cities, and local politicians wanted to have something to run on and have big ideas and big programs. The assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was what got BBURG restarted. It was actually conceived in 1961, but somehow got lost in the shuffle of urban renewal and was never enacted. But Kevin White, as mayor in '68, needed something to show the minority community that he was listening and that he was doing something, and dusted off BBURG and made a quick announcement and quickly implemented the program. And it turned out probably too quickly."
"It should be noted that not only did the original homeowners leave Boston, but the new homers came in. Half of them within five years, had those mortgages foreclosed on and lost their homes. They weren't set up for success."Jim Vrabel
On redlining and blockbusting in the Mattapan neighborhood:
Finfer: "So this goes back to the Housing Act of 1968, a federal law that outlawed housing discrimination for the first time. Before that, the guidelines of the federal government in housing had phrases in it like 'maintain homogeneous neighborhoods.' And then with this change, African-Americans could get mortgages, but they were restricted by the redlining, by the banks, that they could only get the mortgages in parts of Dorchester and Mattapan. They couldn't go to Hyde Park. They couldn't go to Quincy. They couldn't go to Newton — just in those places. And then 12 real estate firms opened offices around the corner of Morton and Blue Hill, in that area, and they started soliciting."
"Blockbusting means realtors solicit sales and use fear to increase the sales. So they sent letters, they dropped fliers, they knocked on doors — all those practices to encourage people to sell. And then it says in the article ['Confessions of a Blockbuster'] things that people had heard about. They sat there and brainstormed a story, the kinds of stories that would scare people. One of the stories they used was we're going to say to this homeowner, 'Oh, this family's moving across the street from you, and a Black family with six kids is going to move in and their oldest son raped a white woman and he's getting out of Walpole Prison in three months. Do you want to live across the street from him?' And it worked."
On how the era of blockbusting in Mattapan delivers us into the period of bussing and beyond:
Vrabel: "I'd like to give credit first to Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon for the book they wrote, The Death of a Jewish Community. It's a great book. And the subtitle is 'A Tragedy of Good Intentions.' And BBURG and bussing can be seen as very similar. This is a public policy. The city was involved in this. It wasn't just the banks. It wasn't just the realtors. It wasn't just the private sector. The city was involved. And because it was involved, it had a responsibility to make sure that the details of public policy were correct, that they paid attention to how people lived and could anticipate outcomes. The idea of dumping this much mortgage money into one small area for a certain group — first time African-American homeowners — had the effect of setting all this off: the panic selling, the blockbusting, the violence, the rage, and eventually driving one group out of the city, replacing it with another."
"It should be noted that not only did the original homeowners leave Boston, but the new homers came in. Half of them within five years, had those mortgages foreclosed on and lost their homes. They weren't set up for success. They weren't screened very well. Just like the recent mortgage scandals we've had across the country. And they weren't given home repair loans because they weren't federally subsidized as the mortgages were. So the design of the program was wrong and it could have been foreseen to be wrong."
"Similarly, with bussing, the idea of — for good intention — for integrating the schools and well, for desegregating the schools, a plan was drawn up, but the plan was not sold to the community, did not heed community wishes, did not try to preserve ways of life, and people responded en masse by leaving Boston — 30,000 of the children were taken out of the Boston Public Schools within five years, and most of them and their parents left the city. So the details of public policy really matter."
This segment aired on June 14, 2023.
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An area south of Boston, from Mattapan Square to Franklin Park, used to be home to a thriving Jewish community. But over the course of four years - between 1968 and 1971 - an area that was 90-percent Jewish became 90-percent Black and African American. The shift is a tale of what happens when good intentioned housing policies are left unchecked. We look at that history with two housing historians.
Lew Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Action for Justice, and Jim Vrabel, author of A People's History of the New Boston joined WBUR's Simón Rios to discuss.
On life in Mattapan in the mid 1960s:
Finfer: "Well, it was very vibrant and people used to talk about the wall at Franklin Field — Franklin Field is a big park in Dorchester and that area and has a wall that you can sit on and how people of all ages would gather in groups — it was a huge park. There was a huge wall. So the teenagers of 13 to 15 were in this group. And the teenagers, you know, 15 to 20... And they went on to the elderly gatherings. It was all there. And there were settlement houses — the Lena Park Community Center was called the Hecht House and was a settlement house recreation area. There were lots and lots of temples and, you know, all kinds of shops, you know, like kosher butchers and all those kind of things that went with that kind of life. It wasn't 100-percent Jewish, but it was probably about two-thirds Jewish in those areas of Mattapan and what I would call western Dorchester, that's like Franklin Field, Franklin Park kinds of areas."
On the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG):
Vrabel: "It was part of a time when government decided that cities needed rebuilding and they wanted big ideas. The federal government was putting a lot of money into helping cities, and local politicians wanted to have something to run on and have big ideas and big programs. The assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was what got BBURG restarted. It was actually conceived in 1961, but somehow got lost in the shuffle of urban renewal and was never enacted. But Kevin White, as mayor in '68, needed something to show the minority community that he was listening and that he was doing
|
something, and dusted off BBURG and made a quick announcement and quickly implemented the program. And it turned out probably too quickly."
"It should be noted that not only did the original homeowners leave Boston, but the new homers came in. Half of them within five years, had those mortgages foreclosed on and lost their homes. They weren't set up for success."Jim Vrabel
On redlining and blockbusting in the Mattapan neighborhood:
Finfer: "So this goes back to the Housing Act of 1968, a federal law that outlawed housing discrimination for the first time. Before that, the guidelines of the federal government in housing had phrases in it like 'maintain homogeneous neighborhoods.' And then with this change, African-Americans could get mortgages, but they were restricted by the redlining, by the banks, that they could only get the mortgages in parts of Dorchester and Mattapan. They couldn't go to Hyde Park. They couldn't go to Quincy. They couldn't go to Newton — just in those places. And then 12 real estate firms opened offices around the corner of Morton and Blue Hill, in that area, and they started soliciting."
"Blockbusting means realtors solicit sales and use fear to increase the sales. So they sent letters, they dropped fliers, they knocked on doors — all those practices to encourage people to sell. And then it says in the article ['Confessions of a Blockbuster'] things that people had heard about. They sat there and brainstormed a story, the kinds of stories that would scare people. One of the stories they used was we're going to say to this homeowner, 'Oh, this family's moving across the street from you, and a Black family with six kids is going to move in and their oldest son raped a white woman and he's getting out of Walpole Prison in three months. Do you want to live across the street from him?' And it worked."
On how the era of blockbusting in Mattapan delivers us into the period of bussing and beyond:
Vrabel: "I'd like to give credit first to Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon for the book they wrote, The Death of a Jewish Community. It's a great book. And the subtitle is 'A Tragedy of Good Intentions.' And BBURG and bussing can be seen as very similar. This is a public policy. The city was involved in this. It wasn't just the banks. It wasn't just the realtors. It wasn't just the private sector. The city was involved. And because it was involved, it had a responsibility to make sure that the details of public policy were correct, that they paid attention to how people lived and could anticipate outcomes. The idea of dumping this much mortgage money into one small area for a certain group — first time African-American homeowners — had the effect of setting all this off: the panic selling, the blockbusting, the violence, the rage, and eventually driving one group out of the city, replacing it with another."
"It should be noted that not only did the original homeowners leave Boston, but the new homers came in. Half of them within five years, had those mortgages foreclosed on and lost their homes. They weren't set up for success. They weren't screened very well. Just like the recent mortgage scandals we've had across the country. And they weren't given home repair loans because they weren't federally subsidized as the mortgages were. So the design of the program was wrong and it could have been foreseen to be wrong."
"Similarly, with bussing, the idea of — for good intention — for integrating the schools and well, for desegregating the schools, a plan was drawn up, but the plan was not sold to the community, did not heed community wishes, did not try to preserve ways of life, and people responded en masse by leaving Boston — 30,000 of the children were taken out of the Boston Public Schools within five years, and most of them and their parents left the city. So the details of public policy really matter."
This segment aired on June 14, 2023.
|
Sign up for CNN’s Fitness, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide will help you ease into a healthy routine, backed by experts.
Even if you’ve never been physically active, you can start moving now and see benefits.
That’s according to a new study, which found that any amount of physical activity starting at any age is helpful for long-term cognitive health.
Researchers already knew that people who participate in physical activity in their leisure time have a lower risk for dementia and higher cognitive function later in life than those who are inactive, said study author Dr. Sarah-Naomi James, a research fellow at MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at University College London.
What researchers didn’t know was whether there was a specific time in life by which a person needed to get active or if there was an activity threshold they needed to meet to see those benefits, James said.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, tracked the physical activity patterns of nearly 1,500 people over the course of 30 years in adulthood. At age 69, the participants were tested on their cognitive state, verbal memory and processing speed, according to the study.
While lifelong physical activity was associated with the best cognitive results later in life, being active at any time to any extent was associated with higher cognition, the study found.
Even people who became active in their 50s or 60s achieved better cognitive scores when they reached 70 years old, James said. A surprisingly small amount of activity — as little as once a month — at any time across adulthood was helpful, she added.
“It seems clear from this study and others that small doses of exercise across the lifespan and starting young is very beneficial to long term health,” said Dr. William Roberts, professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, via email.
Roberts was not involved in the research.
On a societal level, the findings show a need for more access to education that encourage skills and motivation for physical activity at any age, according to the study.
How to get active
For people who have been active regularly, the results should be encouraging and suggest that their investment can pay off, Roberts said.
“For people who have never been physically active, or have gone through a period of inactivity, start!” James said via email.
If you are not exactly an athlete who loves to break a sweat, there are still ways to work some activity into your life.
To build a habit that sticks, it is important to set a goal, make a specific plan, find a way to make it fun, stay flexible and get social support, said behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, author of “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” in a 2021 interview with CNN. Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
You can start slow, said Dana Santas, CNN fitness contributor and mind-body coach for professional athletes.
“Fitting in 10 minutes of exercise every day is so much easier than people think. Consider how fast 10 minutes goes by when you’re mindlessly scrolling social media or watching your favorite TV show,” Santas told CNN in a 2022 interview. “It’s not a big-time investment, but it can deliver big health benefits.”
Yoga is a great way to be active while relieving stress — and is easily accessible for all levels online, she said.
And walking outside or on a treadmill is one of the simplest ways to bring exercise in consistently, Santas said.
“Walking is the most underrated, corrective, mind-body, fat-burning exercise available to humans,” she added. “I walk every single day.”
Regular walks can be a great opportunity to multitask, if you use them to bond with family, friends and neighbors, Santas added.
If you want to boost the intensity of you walk, Santas recommended adding in harder intervals, weights or a heavy backpack.
“Walking for five minutes every hour goes a long way,” Evan Matthews, associate professor of exercise science and physical education at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, told CNN in 2021. “It doesn’t need to even be moderate intensity. Just move.”
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Sign up for CNN’s Fitness, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide will help you ease into a healthy routine, backed by experts.
Even if you’ve never been physically active, you can start moving now and see benefits.
That’s according to a new study, which found that any amount of physical activity starting at any age is helpful for long-term cognitive health.
Researchers already knew that people who participate in physical activity in their leisure time have a lower risk for dementia and higher cognitive function later in life than those who are inactive, said study author Dr. Sarah-Naomi James, a research fellow at MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at University College London.
What researchers didn’t know was whether there was a specific time in life by which a person needed to get active or if there was an activity threshold they needed to meet to see those benefits, James said.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, tracked the physical activity patterns of nearly 1,500 people over the course of 30 years in adulthood. At age 69, the participants were tested on their cognitive state, verbal memory and processing speed, according to the study.
While lifelong physical activity was associated with the best cognitive results later in life, being active at any time to any extent was associated with higher cognition, the study found.
Even people who became active in their 50s or 60s achieved better cognitive scores when they reached 70 years old, James said. A surprisingly small amount of activity — as little as once a month — at any time across adulthood was helpful, she added.
“It seems clear from this study and others that small doses of exercise across the lifespan and starting young is very beneficial to long term health,” said Dr. William Roberts, professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, via email.
Roberts was not involved in the research.
On a societal level, the findings show a need for more access to education that encourage skills and motivation for physical activity at any age, according to the study.
How to get active
For people who have been active regularly, the results should be encouraging and suggest that their investment can pay off, Roberts said.
“For people who have never been physically active, or have gone through a period of inactivity, start!” James said via email.
If you are not exactly an athlete who loves to break a sweat, there are still ways to work some
|
activity into your life.
To build a habit that sticks, it is important to set a goal, make a specific plan, find a way to make it fun, stay flexible and get social support, said behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, author of “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” in a 2021 interview with CNN. Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
You can start slow, said Dana Santas, CNN fitness contributor and mind-body coach for professional athletes.
“Fitting in 10 minutes of exercise every day is so much easier than people think. Consider how fast 10 minutes goes by when you’re mindlessly scrolling social media or watching your favorite TV show,” Santas told CNN in a 2022 interview. “It’s not a big-time investment, but it can deliver big health benefits.”
Yoga is a great way to be active while relieving stress — and is easily accessible for all levels online, she said.
And walking outside or on a treadmill is one of the simplest ways to bring exercise in consistently, Santas said.
“Walking is the most underrated, corrective, mind-body, fat-burning exercise available to humans,” she added. “I walk every single day.”
Regular walks can be a great opportunity to multitask, if you use them to bond with family, friends and neighbors, Santas added.
If you want to boost the intensity of you walk, Santas recommended adding in harder intervals, weights or a heavy backpack.
“Walking for five minutes every hour goes a long way,” Evan Matthews, associate professor of exercise science and physical education at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, told CNN in 2021. “It doesn’t need to even be moderate intensity. Just move.”
|
America's electric grid needs an upgrade
Why it matters: Access to air conditioning is not only an economic imperative, but increasingly a life or death issue.
Case in point: Extreme heat delivers a triple whammy to the electric grid, Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a podcast interview.
- The hotter it is outside, the less efficient power plants are and the less power they can actually make.
- Same with the power lines. The hotter they get, the less electricity you're able to move through them.
- Meanwhile, the heat drives up demand for electricity — right when the grid is making less power, and is less efficient about moving it around.
The basics: It's helpful to know exactly what people mean when they refer to "the grid." Rhodes described it as "the biggest machine we've ever built." The grid consists of:
- The power plants that make electricity.
- The wires and poles that move the electricity out of the plants (called the transmission grid).
- And the distribution grid, the smaller wires and poles that directly connect your home to power.
"The grid is basically how electricity gets to you. It's how electricity is made. It's how electricity is moved around."
- You could even argue that the electric devices we use are part of the grid, he said. "Whether that's electric cars or toasters or computers, are also part of that system because they're the ones that are consuming that electricity. And they can do that dumbly or they can do that smartly."
What's needed: A lot of money. According to an estimate Rhodes did a few years ago, replacing the grid and adapting it to modern-day needs would cost something like $5 trillion. That would include:
- Replacing the lines, and many of the power plants, and bringing everything up to modern standards.
- Taking into account "the new reality of climate change," by weatherizing power systems in areas that experience extreme heat, cold, wildfires or hurricanes that their current system can't handle. (Think: Burying power lines in California, or getting Texas's grid in shape to handle snow and ice.)
- Adapting to increasing electricity use, as things like electric vehicles or electric heat pumps become more common.
- And, moving toward more sustainable sources of power, like wind and solar — and building more storage for that power so it can be used on days that aren't windy or sunny.
What to watch: There are a host of renewable power projects in the works in the U.S., and more "demand response programs," which try to limit electric demand during surge times to keep the grid stable.
- "There are going to be challenges, going forward and there are going to be other times when the grid goes down and because nothing's perfect, but I think we're moving in the right direction."
🎧 Go deeper: America's $5 Trillion Grid Problem (Slate)
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America's electric grid needs an upgrade
Why it matters: Access to air conditioning is not only an economic imperative, but increasingly a life or death issue.
Case in point: Extreme heat delivers a triple whammy to the electric grid, Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a podcast interview.
- The hotter it is outside, the less efficient power plants are and the less power they can actually make.
- Same with the power lines. The hotter they get, the less electricity you're able to move through them.
- Meanwhile, the heat drives up demand for electricity — right when the grid is making less power, and is less efficient about moving it around.
The basics: It's helpful to know exactly what people mean when they refer to "the grid." Rhodes described it as "the biggest machine we've ever built." The grid consists of:
- The power plants that make electricity.
- The wires and poles that move the electricity out of the plants (called the transmission grid).
- And the distribution grid, the smaller wires and poles that directly connect your home to power.
"The grid is basically how electricity gets to you. It's how electricity is made. It's how electricity is moved around."
- You could even argue that the electric devices we use are part of the grid, he said. "Whether that's electric cars or toasters or computers, are also part of that system because they're the ones that are consuming that electricity. And they can do that dumbly or they can do that smartly."
What's needed: A lot of money. According to an estimate Rhodes did a few years ago, replacing the grid and adapting it to modern-day needs would cost something like $5 trillion. That would include:
- Replacing the lines, and many of the power plants, and bringing everything up to modern standards.
- Taking into account "the new reality of climate change," by weatherizing power systems in areas that experience extreme heat, cold, wildfires or hurricanes that their current system can't handle. (Think: Burying power lines in California, or getting Texas's grid in shape to handle snow and ice.)
- Adapting to increasing electricity use, as things like electric vehicles or electric heat pumps become more common.
- And, moving toward more sustainable sources of power, like wind and solar — and building more storage for that power so it can be used on days that aren't windy or sunny.
What to watch: There are a host of
|
renewable power projects in the works in the U.S., and more "demand response programs," which try to limit electric demand during surge times to keep the grid stable.
- "There are going to be challenges, going forward and there are going to be other times when the grid goes down and because nothing's perfect, but I think we're moving in the right direction."
🎧 Go deeper: America's $5 Trillion Grid Problem (Slate)
|
A new study found a moderately higher risk of autism spectrum disorder in children born to pregnant people exposed to tap water with higher levels of lithium, but experts caution that this association does not show a direct link between the two.
About 1 in 36 children in the US is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) each year, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Scientists still don’t know the exact cause of autism, a developmental disorder. Genetics may be a factor, but some have been looking at potential environmental causes, too.
Cases may be on the rise, but that is also unclear. One study published this year on cases in the New York-New Jersey area found that autism diagnosis rates tripled among certain age groups between 2000 and 2016. A 2021 report found similar increases in cases, but the CDC says the increased number of cases is most likely linked to more doctors screening for the condition.
Lithium is an alkali metal that can be found naturally in some food and ground water. It’s used in batteries, grease and air conditioners, as well as in the treatment of bipolar disorder and some blood disorders. Its levels in US drinking water are not regulated, according to the US Geological Survey.
A new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, found a small association between lithium and autism diagnosis in Denmark, where the researchers say the level of lithium in drinking water is similar to that in American water systems.
The researchers checked a database of people with psychiatric disorders for children born between 2000 and 2013 to find information on 8,842 cases of ASD and 43,864 participants who did not have ASD. They then measured the concentration of lithium in 151 public waterworks that served more than half of the Danish population and mapped out where pregnant people lived in relation.
As lithium levels in water increased, there was a modest increased risk of an ASD diagnosis. Specifically, compared with people at the lowest exposure level, those who had the second and third highest exposure during pregnancy had a 24% to 26% higher risk of ASD diagnosed in children. The group with the highest exposure had a 46% higher risk than those at the lowest level of exposure.
The researchers could not tell how much water the pregnant people drank, but they picked Denmark in part because residents there consume some of the lowest amounts of bottled water in Europe.
Experts say it’s important to note that the research can’t show that lithium exposure leads directly to an autism diagnosis.
Further study is required, said study co-author Dr. Beate Ritz, a professor of neurology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
“Any drinking water contaminants that may affect the developing human brain deserve intense scrutiny,” Ritz said in a news release. She added that the research would need to be replicated in other countries to look for a similar connection.
The implications of the findings are complex as far as public health policy is concerned, according to an editorial published alongside the study. Lithium levels in water, at concentrations that the study associated with a potential ASD risk, have also been linked with health benefits such as lower rates of hospitalization for psychiatric disorders and suicide.
“If all these of associations are valid, the wisdom of Solomon will be required to develop guidelines for lithium in drinking water that are maximally protective of the entire population,” wrote Dr. David C. Bellinger, a professor of neurology and psychology at Harvard Medical School. “Until the basic biology of ASD is better understood, it will be difficult to distinguish causal from spurious associations.”
Dr. Max Wiznitzer, director of the Rainbow Autism Center at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, points to other research on the effects of lithium on pregnant people who take it for mental health disorders. Those studies – which look at people exposed to much higher levels than are found in drinking water – do not show a connection with autism spectrum disorder.
“It’s an interesting association, but causation is definitely not proven,” said Wiznitzer, who was not involved in the new research. “We have to see if there’s a viable and biologically plausible mechanism by which a small amount of lithium in the water supply can somehow do this, yet pharmacologic dosing of lithium in women with bipolar disorder has not been reported to be causing increased risk of ASD.”
Other studies have also suggested connections between ASD and environmental exposures to things like pesticides, air pollution and phthalates. But none of them points to any of these factors as a direct cause of the disorder.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
A link between environmental exposure and ASD is hard to prove, Wiznitzer said. With research showing that increased exposure to air pollution raises the risk of giving birth to a child with ASD, for example, he often wonders whether pollution is the determining factor or if it’s just the populations who live in more polluted areas.
“There’s a lot of speculation about about environmental factors, but how many of them are truly causally associated?” Wiznitzer said. “We are bombarded with a variety of environmental stressors in our everyday lives. We have to figure out how to basically safely navigate them, and this is probably not one that’s high on our list.”
|
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A new study found a moderately higher risk of autism spectrum disorder in children born to pregnant people exposed to tap water with higher levels of lithium, but experts caution that this association does not show a direct link between the two.
About 1 in 36 children in the US is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) each year, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Scientists still don’t know the exact cause of autism, a developmental disorder. Genetics may be a factor, but some have been looking at potential environmental causes, too.
Cases may be on the rise, but that is also unclear. One study published this year on cases in the New York-New Jersey area found that autism diagnosis rates tripled among certain age groups between 2000 and 2016. A 2021 report found similar increases in cases, but the CDC says the increased number of cases is most likely linked to more doctors screening for the condition.
Lithium is an alkali metal that can be found naturally in some food and ground water. It’s used in batteries, grease and air conditioners, as well as in the treatment of bipolar disorder and some blood disorders. Its levels in US drinking water are not regulated, according to the US Geological Survey.
A new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, found a small association between lithium and autism diagnosis in Denmark, where the researchers say the level of lithium in drinking water is similar to that in American water systems.
The researchers checked a database of people with psychiatric disorders for children born between 2000 and 2013 to find information on 8,842 cases of ASD and 43,864 participants who did not have ASD. They then measured the concentration of lithium in 151 public waterworks that served more than half of the Danish population and mapped out where pregnant people lived in relation.
As lithium levels in water increased, there was a modest increased risk of an ASD diagnosis. Specifically, compared with people at the lowest exposure level, those who had the second and third highest exposure during pregnancy had a 24% to 26% higher risk of ASD diagnosed in children. The group with the highest exposure had a 46% higher risk than those at the lowest level of exposure.
The researchers could not tell how much water the pregnant people drank, but they picked Denmark in part because residents there consume some of the lowest amounts of bott
|
led water in Europe.
Experts say it’s important to note that the research can’t show that lithium exposure leads directly to an autism diagnosis.
Further study is required, said study co-author Dr. Beate Ritz, a professor of neurology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
“Any drinking water contaminants that may affect the developing human brain deserve intense scrutiny,” Ritz said in a news release. She added that the research would need to be replicated in other countries to look for a similar connection.
The implications of the findings are complex as far as public health policy is concerned, according to an editorial published alongside the study. Lithium levels in water, at concentrations that the study associated with a potential ASD risk, have also been linked with health benefits such as lower rates of hospitalization for psychiatric disorders and suicide.
“If all these of associations are valid, the wisdom of Solomon will be required to develop guidelines for lithium in drinking water that are maximally protective of the entire population,” wrote Dr. David C. Bellinger, a professor of neurology and psychology at Harvard Medical School. “Until the basic biology of ASD is better understood, it will be difficult to distinguish causal from spurious associations.”
Dr. Max Wiznitzer, director of the Rainbow Autism Center at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, points to other research on the effects of lithium on pregnant people who take it for mental health disorders. Those studies – which look at people exposed to much higher levels than are found in drinking water – do not show a connection with autism spectrum disorder.
“It’s an interesting association, but causation is definitely not proven,” said Wiznitzer, who was not involved in the new research. “We have to see if there’s a viable and biologically plausible mechanism by which a small amount of lithium in the water supply can somehow do this, yet pharmacologic dosing of lithium in women with bipolar disorder has not been reported to be causing increased risk of ASD.”
Other studies have also suggested connections between ASD and environmental exposures to things like pesticides, air pollution and phthalates. But none of them points to any of these factors as a direct cause of the disorder.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
A link between environmental exposure and ASD is hard to prove, Wiznitzer said. With research showing that increased exposure to air pollution raises the risk of giving birth to a child with ASD, for example, he often wonders whether pollution is the determining factor or if it’s just the populations who live in more polluted areas.
“There’s a lot of speculation about about environmental factors, but how many of them are truly causally associated?” Wiznitzer said. “We are bombarded with a variety of environmental stressors in our everyday lives. We have to figure out how to basically safely navigate them, and this is probably not one that’s high on our list.”
|
Not every Michigan school has a machine that could save a student's life during a cardiac arrest
If a child's heart stops beating in school, the right training — and equipment — can make all the difference.
Some schools in Michigan are prepared, according to officials, but Michigan doesn’t require schools or school athletic facilities to have automated external defibrillators (AEDs). Twenty other states and the District of Columbia do, according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, which conducted a 2022 review of state laws.
Sudden cardiac arrest is relatively uncommon, but still a threat for young people, particularly those who play sports: Nationally, about 39% of all incidents of sudden cardiac arrest among those younger than 18 occurred in a sports-related setting in 2022, according to the American Heart Association. Among those ages 19-25, about 13% were sports-related.
This week, a community in Detroit felt the shattering impact of a sudden cardiac arrest in a young person. Cartier Woods, an 18-year-old senior at Northwestern High School, died Tuesday, a week after suffering cardiac arrest during a Jan. 31 basketball game. Woods remained on life support for a week before his passing.
A CLASSMATE MOURNED:Cartier Woods remembered as a talented sports player and a 'friendly giant'
Coach George Tyson performed CPR. As others were preparing to use an AED on Woods, emergency medical workers arrived, said Chrystal Wilson, assistant superintendent of communications for DPSCD.
All DPSCD schools have AEDs, Wilson said.
“All athletic directors and coordinators are CPR-certified,” she said. “Nurses are also trained to use AEDs.”
Dr. Peter Fattal, a cardiologist from Saginaw and past-advocacy chair of the Michigan Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, said there’s little that’s more emotional than watching a young athlete succumb to sudden cardiac arrest.
“We just saw it with Damar Hamlin on a national TV and think about the millions of people that witnessed that,” he said of Hamlin, who suffered sudden cardiac arrest during a January Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals. “There’s a lot of messages kind of hidden in there. … When you see that, there is this overwhelming desire to think: ‘Well, what can I do about that? How can we prevent that from happening?’ There are things we can do now.”
Why rapid intervention matters
In March 2011, 16-year-old Wes Leonard shot a game-winning basket at Fennville High School, about 45 minutes southwest of Grand Rapids.
His teammates hoisted him into the air. And Wes collapsed, prompting, at first, a wave of confusion from teammates. An AED previously affixed to a wall near the high school's gym had been removed at some point before the Thursday night game. A principal found the machine in a storage room, but the battery was dead. Minutes passed. And Wes died. His mother was later told that his heart could have been started again with assistance from an AED.
Wes had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is found in about 1 in 500 people, said Dr. Justin Trivax, an interventional cardiologist at Corewell Health. It occurs when the bottom chamber of the heart gets abnormally thickened and electrical conduction does not move well through that thicker heart muscle. It can cause cardiac arrest during high levels of exercise.
Wes' parents, crushed by their loss, started a nonprofit, Wes Leonard Heart Team, which helps get AEDs in schools. The organization has since donated 393 AEDs, primarily to schools, many in Michigan.
Experts say that unless there’s immediate intervention, the chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest are low. According to the American College of Cardiology, the odds of survival fall 10% for every minute that passes between when a person collapses and when a shock is applied from an automated external defibrillator.
“If there is any delay (in treatment), most cardiac arrests that occur outside of the hospital will die,” Trivax said. “About 90% of people who have a cardiac arrest outside of the hospital do not survive."
Cathy Farris, lead district nurse for the Novi Community School District and a nurse in the pediatric cardiothoracic intensive care unit at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan, said teenagers in particular are more likely to have arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, than a younger child.
Farris said chances are high that older students, from middle school on, would require AED intervention in the event of a cardiac emergency.
CPR and AED requirements in Michigan
Wes was on the mind of then-state Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker, R-Lawton, when she introduced legislation that passed in 2016, requiring schools to offer instruction on CPR and AED operation. Schools can decide whether to offer a certification program, or provide hands-only CPR, a tactic for survival. The Michigan High School Athletic Association, however, requires head coaches of varsity, junior varsity, and ninth grade teams to have valid CPR certification.
Schuitmaker, who is no longer in office, said her priority was training at the time. Requiring AEDs, which usually cost about $1,500 each, in every school would have come with a hefty price tag, especially for large districts.
"We tried to do it with the least cost impact of school districts," she said.
While state law does not require AEDs on campus, many schools have them. The MI HeartSAFE School Program — supported by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the Michigan Department of Education, the American Heart Association, the Michigan High School Athletic Association and the Michigan Alliance for Prevention of Sudden Cardiac Death of the Young — developed criteria for schools to be designated HeartSAFE.
Among the requirements: CPR/AED certification for at least 10% of staff and 50% of coaches, properly maintained AEDs on campus, and annual cardiac emergency drills. Currently several hundred schools, which can include private schools and universities, have the designation, according to MDHHS. However, the program is optional.
Novi has 52 AEDs spread across nearly a dozen institutions in the district, Farris said. When Farris joined the district more than a decade ago, she said she found some AEDs needed better placement, and some buildings needed more. AEDs are located in Novi concession stands, too, in case doors to the inside of a school are locked.
"For instance, some were in areas that were not accessible in the evenings, which wasn't helpful when you had Zumba going on in the gym," she said.
The district has deployed the machines in a few instances, but on adults. If the cost of AEDs are restrictive, Farris recommends that other schools turn to nonprofits like Wes Leonard or Beaumont for sponsorship of the machines.
AEDs also require maintenance, Farris said. Pads need to be changed every three years and batteries every four years.
The Michigan law that mandated CPR training in schools after Wes' death was one step forward, said Fattal. Requiring AEDs in all schools and athletic facilities in Michigan would also be another leap toward saving lives.
Michigan already requires health clubs, such as gyms, to have and maintain the devices.
"There is no doubt that the more we can do to make AEDs available everywhere, but certainly within our schools, the better the chances are people will be able to survive these really devastating things," Fattal said.
Fattal, who founded the Pulse3 Foundation, said his organization has supplied about 350 AEDs to schools and other athletic facilities in Saginaw, Midland and Bay counties over the last 15 years.
“For the first seven years, we tracked the AEDs we put in, and we were able to identify 12 lives that were saved with the AEDs that we put in, which is very powerful,” he said.
Contact Kristen Jordan Shamus at <email-pii> and Lily Altavena at <email-pii>.
|
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Not every Michigan school has a machine that could save a student's life during a cardiac arrest
If a child's heart stops beating in school, the right training — and equipment — can make all the difference.
Some schools in Michigan are prepared, according to officials, but Michigan doesn’t require schools or school athletic facilities to have automated external defibrillators (AEDs). Twenty other states and the District of Columbia do, according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, which conducted a 2022 review of state laws.
Sudden cardiac arrest is relatively uncommon, but still a threat for young people, particularly those who play sports: Nationally, about 39% of all incidents of sudden cardiac arrest among those younger than 18 occurred in a sports-related setting in 2022, according to the American Heart Association. Among those ages 19-25, about 13% were sports-related.
This week, a community in Detroit felt the shattering impact of a sudden cardiac arrest in a young person. Cartier Woods, an 18-year-old senior at Northwestern High School, died Tuesday, a week after suffering cardiac arrest during a Jan. 31 basketball game. Woods remained on life support for a week before his passing.
A CLASSMATE MOURNED:Cartier Woods remembered as a talented sports player and a 'friendly giant'
Coach George Tyson performed CPR. As others were preparing to use an AED on Woods, emergency medical workers arrived, said Chrystal Wilson, assistant superintendent of communications for DPSCD.
All DPSCD schools have AEDs, Wilson said.
“All athletic directors and coordinators are CPR-certified,” she said. “Nurses are also trained to use AEDs.”
Dr. Peter Fattal, a cardiologist from Saginaw and past-advocacy chair of the Michigan Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, said there’s little that’s more emotional than watching a young athlete succumb to sudden cardiac arrest.
“We just saw it with Damar Hamlin on a national TV and think about the millions of people that witnessed that,” he said of Hamlin, who suffered sudden cardiac arrest during a January Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals. “There’s a lot of messages kind of hidden in there. … When you see that, there is this overwhelming desire to think: ‘Well, what can I do about that? How can we prevent that from happening?’ There
|
are things we can do now.”
Why rapid intervention matters
In March 2011, 16-year-old Wes Leonard shot a game-winning basket at Fennville High School, about 45 minutes southwest of Grand Rapids.
His teammates hoisted him into the air. And Wes collapsed, prompting, at first, a wave of confusion from teammates. An AED previously affixed to a wall near the high school's gym had been removed at some point before the Thursday night game. A principal found the machine in a storage room, but the battery was dead. Minutes passed. And Wes died. His mother was later told that his heart could have been started again with assistance from an AED.
Wes had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is found in about 1 in 500 people, said Dr. Justin Trivax, an interventional cardiologist at Corewell Health. It occurs when the bottom chamber of the heart gets abnormally thickened and electrical conduction does not move well through that thicker heart muscle. It can cause cardiac arrest during high levels of exercise.
Wes' parents, crushed by their loss, started a nonprofit, Wes Leonard Heart Team, which helps get AEDs in schools. The organization has since donated 393 AEDs, primarily to schools, many in Michigan.
Experts say that unless there’s immediate intervention, the chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest are low. According to the American College of Cardiology, the odds of survival fall 10% for every minute that passes between when a person collapses and when a shock is applied from an automated external defibrillator.
“If there is any delay (in treatment), most cardiac arrests that occur outside of the hospital will die,” Trivax said. “About 90% of people who have a cardiac arrest outside of the hospital do not survive."
Cathy Farris, lead district nurse for the Novi Community School District and a nurse in the pediatric cardiothoracic intensive care unit at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan, said teenagers in particular are more likely to have arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, than a younger child.
Farris said chances are high that older students, from middle school on, would require AED intervention in the event of a cardiac emergency.
CPR and AED requirements in Michigan
Wes was on the mind of then-state Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker, R-Lawton, when she introduced legislation that passed in 2016, requiring schools to offer instruction on CPR and AED operation. Schools can decide whether to offer a certification program, or provide hands-only CPR, a tactic for survival. The Michigan High School Athletic Association, however, requires head coaches of varsity, junior varsity, and ninth grade teams to have valid CPR certification.
Schuitmaker, who is no longer in office, said her priority was training at the time. Requiring AEDs, which usually cost about $1,500 each, in every school would have come with a hefty price tag, especially for large districts.
"We tried to do it with the least cost impact of school districts," she said.
While state law does not require AEDs on campus, many schools have them. The MI HeartSAFE School Program — supported by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the Michigan Department of Education, the American Heart Association, the Michigan High School Athletic Association and the Michigan Alliance for Prevention of Sudden Cardiac Death of the Young — developed criteria for schools to be designated HeartSAFE.
Among the requirements: CPR/AED certification for at least 10% of staff and 50% of coaches, properly maintained AEDs on campus, and annual cardiac emergency drills. Currently several hundred schools, which can include private schools and universities, have the designation, according to MDHHS. However, the program is optional.
Novi has 52 AEDs spread across nearly a dozen institutions in the district, Farris said. When Farris joined the district more than a decade ago, she said she found some AEDs needed better placement, and some buildings needed more. AEDs are located in Novi concession stands, too, in case doors to the inside of a school are locked.
"For instance, some were in areas that were not accessible in the evenings, which wasn't helpful when you had Zumba going on in the gym," she said.
The district has deployed the machines in a few instances, but on adults. If the cost of AEDs are restrictive, Farris recommends that other schools turn to nonprofits like Wes Leonard or Beaumont for sponsorship of the machines.
AEDs also require maintenance, Farris said. Pads need to be changed every three years and batteries every four years.
The Michigan law that mandated CPR training in schools after Wes' death was one step forward, said Fattal. Requiring AEDs in all schools and athletic facilities in Michigan would also be another leap toward saving lives.
Michigan already requires health clubs, such as gyms, to have and maintain the devices.
"There is no doubt that the more we can do to make AEDs available everywhere, but certainly within our schools, the better the chances are people will be able to survive these really devastating things," Fattal said.
Fattal, who founded the Pulse3 Foundation, said his organization has supplied about 350 AEDs to schools and other athletic facilities in Saginaw, Midland and Bay counties over the last 15 years.
“For the first seven years, we tracked the AEDs we put in, and we were able to identify 12 lives that were saved with the AEDs that we put in, which is very powerful,” he said.
Contact Kristen Jordan Shamus at <email-pii> and Lily Altavena at <email-pii>.
|
As reported this past week in the New York Times and elsewhere, more than half the states in the U.S. now allow the sale of raw milk. In some states, you can only buy raw milk at a farm, but in 14 states you can buy it in stores.
So why are some people excited about raw milk? Well, the implication is that if’ it’s less processed, it must be better, right? After all, we learned recently that ultra-processed foods are pretty bad for you. (There’s pretty good evidence for that.) And milk is one of those products that people associate with health. For the first few months of life, we humans live entirely on milk–but that’s milk from a woman’s breast.
Cow milk is a different matter. It’s not nearly so, shall we say, clean.
It only took a minute for me to find claims that raw milk has all kinds of benefits: supposedly it helps you digest food better, it has more vitamins and minerals, it boosts your immune system, and it’s better for people with lactose intolerance. (I won’t link to any of those claims because they’re all bogus, and I don’t want to give scammers any more web traffic.)
Before listing some of the special properties of raw milk, let’s consider how it’s processed. The main thing we do to milk is pasteurization: a very simple process where the milk is heated just enough to kill any bacteria in it. It’s not boiled, and the mild heating doesn’t destroy any of milk’s nutrients.
Pasteurization is named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who invented the process in the 1860s. Originally it was used to preserve wine, but people eventually discovered it worked just as well for milk and other foods. Back in the 1860s, people didn’t even know that bacteria caused disease, and Pasteur was one of the pioneers who figured that out.
So what does raw milk have in it? Well, it can carry a long list of delightful bacteria, including the ones that cause tuberculosis, brucellosis, scarlet fever, salmonella. And of course there is E. coli, including strains that can cause terrible diarrhea.
Bacteria just love milk, it turns out. Raw milk is teeming with them, and many of them are really not good for humans. Fortunately for most of us, pasteurization kills bacteria very effectively.
And there’s one more special thing you get in raw milk that you won’t get in pasteurized milk: cow poop. Funny thing, though: on the advertisements I found for the benefits of raw milk, none of them mentioned this.
So sure, get your raw milk and live like it’s 1850 again! Never mind that pasteurization has saved countless millions of lives. Seriously, folks: there’s no reason whatsoever to drink raw milk. And states that allow the sale of raw milk are endangering the health of their own people.
|
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As reported this past week in the New York Times and elsewhere, more than half the states in the U.S. now allow the sale of raw milk. In some states, you can only buy raw milk at a farm, but in 14 states you can buy it in stores.
So why are some people excited about raw milk? Well, the implication is that if’ it’s less processed, it must be better, right? After all, we learned recently that ultra-processed foods are pretty bad for you. (There’s pretty good evidence for that.) And milk is one of those products that people associate with health. For the first few months of life, we humans live entirely on milk–but that’s milk from a woman’s breast.
Cow milk is a different matter. It’s not nearly so, shall we say, clean.
It only took a minute for me to find claims that raw milk has all kinds of benefits: supposedly it helps you digest food better, it has more vitamins and minerals, it boosts your immune system, and it’s better for people with lactose intolerance. (I won’t link to any of those claims because they’re all bogus, and I don’t want to give scammers any more web traffic.)
Before listing some of the special properties of raw milk, let’s consider how it’s processed. The main thing we do to milk is pasteurization: a very simple process where the milk is heated just enough to kill any bacteria in it. It’s not boiled, and the mild heating doesn’t destroy any of milk’s nutrients.
Pasteurization is named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who invented the process in the 1860s. Originally it was used to preserve wine, but people eventually discovered it worked just as well for milk and other foods. Back in the 1860s, people didn’t even know that bacteria caused disease, and Pasteur was one of the pioneers who figured that out.
So what does raw milk have in it? Well, it can carry a long list of delightful bacteria, including the ones that cause tuberculosis, brucellosis, scarlet fever, salmonella. And of course there is E. coli, including strains that can cause terrible diarrhea.
Bacteria just love milk, it turns out. Raw milk is teeming with them, and many of them are really not good for humans. Fortunately for most of us, pasteurization kills bacteria very effectively.
And there’s one more special thing
|
you get in raw milk that you won’t get in pasteurized milk: cow poop. Funny thing, though: on the advertisements I found for the benefits of raw milk, none of them mentioned this.
So sure, get your raw milk and live like it’s 1850 again! Never mind that pasteurization has saved countless millions of lives. Seriously, folks: there’s no reason whatsoever to drink raw milk. And states that allow the sale of raw milk are endangering the health of their own people.
|
For families who have a child with autism, traveling can sometimes be a challenge. According to the CDC, Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain. Kids with autism often have problems with social communication and interaction and may have different ways of learning, moving, or paying attention.
Kids with autism often have sensitivity to smells and loud noises. Social situations can also be difficult and anxiety-provoking for them.
The good news is that resorts are starting to create programs specifically for kids with autism.
Beaches Resorts has innovative programming for kids with special needs. In fact, the properties have launched the Caribbean’s first autism-friendly kids camps.
What does this mean? The staff is trained in several different areas, including sensory awareness (knowing that kids with autism can quickly feel overwhelmed by too much stimuli).
The staff has also been instructed on how to work with kids with autism who have motor challenges, as well as social and communication challenges. The staff has gone through extensive training on what autism is and techniques to help those with ASD including how to make a soothing and fun environment.
Additionally, all three Beaches resorts have low-sensory areas/zones for kids who need a minute to decompress. And what child could not benefit from that?
Beaches has three different properties in the Caribbean: two in Jamaica—Beaches Negril and Beaches Ocho Rios—and one resort in Turks and Caicos. Beaches Turks and Caicos is the flagship property and the biggest and most expansive of the three.
According to the CDC, kids with autism often have delayed language skills so it’s hard to know what they want or need. They may be hyperactive, impulsive or have inattentive behavior. They often have GI issues (like being constipated), unusually eating or sleeping habits and unusual mood or emotional reactions. Without trained professionals overseeing kids with autism, these kids are often misunderstood and labeled as misbehaving.
Beaches is the first resort company in the world to complete the rigorous IBCCES (International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards) and Autism Certification, representing the gold standard in global cognitive disorder training and certification. In 2021, the brand became the only company in the world to recertify its credentials as an Advanced Certified Autism Center through the year 2023, with Beaches team members completing at least 40 hours of autism sensitivity training.
So, how does it work? Parents can call a dedicated number to speak with Beaches’ Special Services Team, certified by IBCCES, during the planning stages of their vacation. The trained team can assist in recommending experiences and advise on specific suite locations to limit stimuli, request cleaning products to alleviate sensitivities to smells and even recommend the most convenient airport transportation to take.
Through Beaches’ dedicated Culinary Concierge, families can pre-plan meals according to allergies and specific diets (many kids with autism are on specific diets including gluten-free). Parents can also request a One-on-One Beaches Buddy who has been accredited by IBCCES in advance autism training. This buddy can stay with the child for their entire stay or just for a few hours.
Beaches Resorts have also incorporated autism awareness and training into their Sesame Street offerings. One of the Sesame Street characters is Julia a 4-year-old girl with autism. Julia interacts with the other characters and the children through the activity Amazing Art with Julia. Through this activity Julia, who loves to paint, highlights how people can express themselves through art.
One of the most popular programs at Beaches is their PADI-certified scuba diving lessons. These instructors have also been certified through IBCCES (International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards), with Beaches team members completing at least 40 hours of autism sensitivity training. The certification makes scuba diving at Beaches accessible for everyone because of the autism-certified staff.
Many individuals on the autism spectrum are drawn to water, and the Autism Spectrum Disorder Foundation (ASDF) highlights that swimming can help children on the spectrum improve speech, coordination and balance, social skills, self-esteem, cognitive processing, communication skills and oral motor skills.
Often vacations can be a challenging time for families with a child with autism. Siblings may feel like their needs are not being met and parents of kids with ASD are hypervigilant at all times—which is not relaxing.
So knowing that a child is in good hands—either at a kid’s camp specially designed to meet their needs or with a one-on-one buddy trained in ASD—allows the whole family to enjoy their getaway.
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For families who have a child with autism, traveling can sometimes be a challenge. According to the CDC, Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain. Kids with autism often have problems with social communication and interaction and may have different ways of learning, moving, or paying attention.
Kids with autism often have sensitivity to smells and loud noises. Social situations can also be difficult and anxiety-provoking for them.
The good news is that resorts are starting to create programs specifically for kids with autism.
Beaches Resorts has innovative programming for kids with special needs. In fact, the properties have launched the Caribbean’s first autism-friendly kids camps.
What does this mean? The staff is trained in several different areas, including sensory awareness (knowing that kids with autism can quickly feel overwhelmed by too much stimuli).
The staff has also been instructed on how to work with kids with autism who have motor challenges, as well as social and communication challenges. The staff has gone through extensive training on what autism is and techniques to help those with ASD including how to make a soothing and fun environment.
Additionally, all three Beaches resorts have low-sensory areas/zones for kids who need a minute to decompress. And what child could not benefit from that?
Beaches has three different properties in the Caribbean: two in Jamaica—Beaches Negril and Beaches Ocho Rios—and one resort in Turks and Caicos. Beaches Turks and Caicos is the flagship property and the biggest and most expansive of the three.
According to the CDC, kids with autism often have delayed language skills so it’s hard to know what they want or need. They may be hyperactive, impulsive or have inattentive behavior. They often have GI issues (like being constipated), unusually eating or sleeping habits and unusual mood or emotional reactions. Without trained professionals overseeing kids with autism, these kids are often misunderstood and labeled as misbehaving.
Beaches is the first resort company in the world to complete the rigorous IBCCES (International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards) and Autism Certification, representing the gold standard in global cognitive disorder training and certification. In 2021, the brand became the only company in the world to recertify its credentials as an Advanced Certified Autism Center through the year 2023, with Beaches team members completing at least 40 hours of autism sensitivity training.
So, how does it work?
|
Parents can call a dedicated number to speak with Beaches’ Special Services Team, certified by IBCCES, during the planning stages of their vacation. The trained team can assist in recommending experiences and advise on specific suite locations to limit stimuli, request cleaning products to alleviate sensitivities to smells and even recommend the most convenient airport transportation to take.
Through Beaches’ dedicated Culinary Concierge, families can pre-plan meals according to allergies and specific diets (many kids with autism are on specific diets including gluten-free). Parents can also request a One-on-One Beaches Buddy who has been accredited by IBCCES in advance autism training. This buddy can stay with the child for their entire stay or just for a few hours.
Beaches Resorts have also incorporated autism awareness and training into their Sesame Street offerings. One of the Sesame Street characters is Julia a 4-year-old girl with autism. Julia interacts with the other characters and the children through the activity Amazing Art with Julia. Through this activity Julia, who loves to paint, highlights how people can express themselves through art.
One of the most popular programs at Beaches is their PADI-certified scuba diving lessons. These instructors have also been certified through IBCCES (International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards), with Beaches team members completing at least 40 hours of autism sensitivity training. The certification makes scuba diving at Beaches accessible for everyone because of the autism-certified staff.
Many individuals on the autism spectrum are drawn to water, and the Autism Spectrum Disorder Foundation (ASDF) highlights that swimming can help children on the spectrum improve speech, coordination and balance, social skills, self-esteem, cognitive processing, communication skills and oral motor skills.
Often vacations can be a challenging time for families with a child with autism. Siblings may feel like their needs are not being met and parents of kids with ASD are hypervigilant at all times—which is not relaxing.
So knowing that a child is in good hands—either at a kid’s camp specially designed to meet their needs or with a one-on-one buddy trained in ASD—allows the whole family to enjoy their getaway.
|
In 2007, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, realized that even though she did breathing exercises every morning, when she sat down at her laptop and opened up her inbox, it all went out the window. “I would be like, Huh, I was just breathing but I’m not breathing anymore,” she said. Her inhales and exhales became barely detectable and shallow, she noticed.
Ms. Stone decided to conduct an informal study (“dining room table science,” she called it), inviting 200 people into her home — friends, neighbors, family members — and monitoring their heart rate and breathing while they checked their email. Roughly 80 percent of participants periodically held their breath or altered their breathing, she said. She named the phenomenon “email apnea” and described her findings in a widely read 2008 piece in The Huffington Post.
Ms. Stone has since expanded the concept and renamed it “screen apnea,” referring to the disruption of breathing many of us experience doing all kinds of tasks in front of a screen.
The issue has most likely worsened with our increased use of screens, said James Nestor, who examined the phenomenon in his 2020 book, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.”
“You have 10 different screens open. Someone’s texting you, someone’s calling you, someone’s emailing you,” he said, adding that we have not evolved to be “constantly stimulated.”
Screen apnea is a manifestation of our body’s stress response, said Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in the autonomic nervous system. When we’re faced with any kind of stimuli, our nervous system looks for signals to decipher whether or not it’s a threat, Dr. Porges said.
That focus and attention requires mental effort, which kicks off a chain of physiological changes including shallower breathing and a slowing of heart rate to “quiet” your body and divert resources to help you focus, he said. He gave the example of cats stalking their prey; often right before they attack, they will freeze and their breathing will become shallow. That, he said, is essentially what is happening when you get an email, text or Slack message: You freeze, read and come up with a plan of action.
The more unexpected a stimulus is — say, getting a text notification out of the blue — the more likely the body is to perceive it as a threat.
While these reflexes aren’t harmful on occasion, they become an issue if they’re switched on all day, every day, because it shifts “the nervous system into a chronic state of threat,” Dr. Porges said. Hours of shallow breathing can make you feel exhausted after a day of work, he said, even if that work isn’t particularly stressful.
The lack of movement that comes from sitting in front a screen might also be a contributor to screen apnea, said Dr. David Spiegel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford Medicine. Disrupted breathing is the result of “a combination of not just what you’re doing but what you’re not doing,” he said, adding that he noticed screen apnea among patients who worked high-stress jobs for long hours without getting much exercise or sleep.
There are a few simple practices you can adopt for better breathing habits, even in our increasingly screen-bound lives.
Set up breath reminders
A few gentle-sounding alerts throughout the day can remind you to check in on your breathing, Mr. Nestor said.
Ask yourself: Are you breathing through your mouth (often an indicator of shallow breath)? Are you breathing at all? The awareness helps you snap out of it, he said.
If you catch yourself breathing shallowly or not at all, try sighing audibly, Dr. Spiegel said. Studies suggest that can be a quick and easy way to reset breathing patterns. In a study published in January, Dr. Spiegel and his team found that while many breathing techniques are valuable, cyclic sighing — in which the exhale lasts longer than the inhale — is particularly effective for improving mood.
Try larger screens
Dr. Porges hypothesizes that the larger your screen, the less mentally taxing it can be. “As you narrow the visual field, you’re increasing the demand on your nervous system to exclude everything outside of it,” he said. Responding to messages on a desktop monitor often feels easier than responding on a phone, which “is a more intensely focused constriction of movement,” Dr. Spiegel said.
Make your breaks count
People will often step away from their computers for a break only to end up responding to messages on their phones, Dr. Porges said. He suggested carving out a few moments to do things that don’t require too much mental effort — like listening to music — so that your nervous system can switch from a state of focus and vigilance to one of relaxation.
Adding physical activity to your breaks — like walking in nature — is another way of restoring balance, Dr. Spiegel said. It’s a simple thing, he said, “that can help our bodies work better.”
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In 2007, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, realized that even though she did breathing exercises every morning, when she sat down at her laptop and opened up her inbox, it all went out the window. “I would be like, Huh, I was just breathing but I’m not breathing anymore,” she said. Her inhales and exhales became barely detectable and shallow, she noticed.
Ms. Stone decided to conduct an informal study (“dining room table science,” she called it), inviting 200 people into her home — friends, neighbors, family members — and monitoring their heart rate and breathing while they checked their email. Roughly 80 percent of participants periodically held their breath or altered their breathing, she said. She named the phenomenon “email apnea” and described her findings in a widely read 2008 piece in The Huffington Post.
Ms. Stone has since expanded the concept and renamed it “screen apnea,” referring to the disruption of breathing many of us experience doing all kinds of tasks in front of a screen.
The issue has most likely worsened with our increased use of screens, said James Nestor, who examined the phenomenon in his 2020 book, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.”
“You have 10 different screens open. Someone’s texting you, someone’s calling you, someone’s emailing you,” he said, adding that we have not evolved to be “constantly stimulated.”
Screen apnea is a manifestation of our body’s stress response, said Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in the autonomic nervous system. When we’re faced with any kind of stimuli, our nervous system looks for signals to decipher whether or not it’s a threat, Dr. Porges said.
That focus and attention requires mental effort, which kicks off a chain of physiological changes including shallower breathing and a slowing of heart rate to “quiet” your body and divert resources to help you focus, he said. He gave the example of cats stalking their prey; often right before they attack, they will freeze and their breathing will become shallow. That, he said, is essentially what is happening when you get an email, text or Slack message: You freeze, read and come up with a plan of action.
The more unexpected a stimulus is — say, getting a text notification out of the blue — the more likely the body is to perceive it as
|
a threat.
While these reflexes aren’t harmful on occasion, they become an issue if they’re switched on all day, every day, because it shifts “the nervous system into a chronic state of threat,” Dr. Porges said. Hours of shallow breathing can make you feel exhausted after a day of work, he said, even if that work isn’t particularly stressful.
The lack of movement that comes from sitting in front a screen might also be a contributor to screen apnea, said Dr. David Spiegel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford Medicine. Disrupted breathing is the result of “a combination of not just what you’re doing but what you’re not doing,” he said, adding that he noticed screen apnea among patients who worked high-stress jobs for long hours without getting much exercise or sleep.
There are a few simple practices you can adopt for better breathing habits, even in our increasingly screen-bound lives.
Set up breath reminders
A few gentle-sounding alerts throughout the day can remind you to check in on your breathing, Mr. Nestor said.
Ask yourself: Are you breathing through your mouth (often an indicator of shallow breath)? Are you breathing at all? The awareness helps you snap out of it, he said.
If you catch yourself breathing shallowly or not at all, try sighing audibly, Dr. Spiegel said. Studies suggest that can be a quick and easy way to reset breathing patterns. In a study published in January, Dr. Spiegel and his team found that while many breathing techniques are valuable, cyclic sighing — in which the exhale lasts longer than the inhale — is particularly effective for improving mood.
Try larger screens
Dr. Porges hypothesizes that the larger your screen, the less mentally taxing it can be. “As you narrow the visual field, you’re increasing the demand on your nervous system to exclude everything outside of it,” he said. Responding to messages on a desktop monitor often feels easier than responding on a phone, which “is a more intensely focused constriction of movement,” Dr. Spiegel said.
Make your breaks count
People will often step away from their computers for a break only to end up responding to messages on their phones, Dr. Porges said. He suggested carving out a few moments to do things that don’t require too much mental effort — like listening to music — so that your nervous system can switch from a state of focus and vigilance to one of relaxation.
Adding physical activity to your breaks — like walking in nature — is another way of restoring balance, Dr. Spiegel said. It’s a simple thing, he said, “that can help our bodies work better.”
|
History Mystery: The mystery behind gravestone in the Marler Memorial Cemetery
The gravestone of Edward M. Knapp is the second tallest gravestone in the Marler Memorial Cemetery. The only gravestone taller is that of Leonard Destin, the founder of Destin. Just who was Edward M. Knapp and why is he buried in the Marler Memorial Cemetery? That is our History Mystery for this month.
Edward Knapp’s story is interesting and shows just what a tight-knit community Destin was in the early fish camp era, before roads, bridges, tourists, motels, and condos. It was a tight-knit community where a person could be buried in the local cemetery that actually never lived there.
The Knapp Family – Edward’s father, John Sullivan Knapp was born in 1844 in Illinois, and Edward’s mother, Christina, was born in 1853 in Missouri. Edward Morris Knapp was their oldest child. He was born in Asley (Scott County), Illinois on Aug. 14, 1871, and grew up in Westchester (Scott County), Missouri, which is located just north of Asley.
Searching historical records for Edward Morris Knapp found him living in Saint Louis, Missouri in the 1890s, likely attending school. On March 2, 1897, he married Cecily Flynn in Clayton (St. Louis County), Missouri. By the time of the 1900 federal census, Edward and his wife, Cecily, were living in Havana, Cuba at the Headquarters, Department of Matanzas, and Santa Clara Hospital Corps; Armed Forces-Foreign Company. Edward M. Knapp served in the Spanish-American War.
After the war, Knapp stayed in Cuba and he served as clerk, Engineer Department at Large, from April 17, 1899, to July 31, 1902, at the Engineer Office, Territorial Department. Then the same day, July 31, 1902, Knapp was appointed clerk in the classified service (Civil Service) in Cuba.
Edward Knapp continued working as a civil servant for the U.S. Army until Nov. 30, 1910, when he resigned. He and his family planned to join Edward’s parents in Northwest Florida, near Destin, when they returned to the United States.
Edward’s parents had staked a claim under the Homestead Act of 1862 on land in Shoals, Florida, (now called Miramar Beach) in 1909. They homesteaded Lots 1 & 2 in Section 29, Township 2-south, Range 21-west, containing 144 and 15/100 acres. One of these lots could have been where Edward Knapp planned to build his home.
Edward Knapp’s Relocation to Shoals, Florida - Edward Knapp resigned on Nov. 30, 1910, from civil service with plans to relocate to Shoals (Washington County), Florida on land that his parents owned. It does seem that he was in the area before 1910 because he was well-known to the locals in Destin. In 1925 the population of Shoals was 32 and Destin was 32. They were the same size. Destin had a post office and a store run by William T. “Billy” Marler. Billy Marler also took care of the local cemetery, made caskets, and took care of local burials.
On Dec. 26, 1910, four weeks after Edward retired from the government, he was in Florida moving his family to Shoals when he drowned in Choctawhatchee Bay between Santa Rosa and Shoals. From an affidavit from William T. “Billy” Marler, we know what happened to him. Edward fell off a motor boat while moving furniture to his home in Shoals and died. He was pulled from the water, but no one knew how to resuscitate him.
There wasn’t a cemetery in Shoals, and everybody who came to Shoals came through Destin because the water around Shoals was so shallow. Billy built the coffin, helped conduct the funeral service, and ordered the Woodman of the World gravestone. According to an affidavit handwritten by Billy, he had been the postmaster of Destin since 1899 and had been the light keeper for East Pass for 34 years. Billy and his son, William E. Marler, both knew Edward and were friends of his, and both were at his funeral.
The only thing that remains in the local area to remind us of the life of Edward M. Knapp, or the Knapp family, is that gravestone. The second tallest grave marker in the Marler Memorial Cemetery. That gravestone was ordered from the Woodman of the World fraternal insurance organization by William T. “Billy” Marler, and placed above Edward’s grave by his friend.
H. C. “Hank” Klein is a Destin historian, author, and speaker on local history. He lives in Bob Hope Village in Shalimar with his wife (the former Muriel Marler of Destin). Klein recently published two Destin history books - DESTIN Pioneer Settlers...A Land History of Destin, Florida from 1819-1940 and DESTIN’S Founding Father…The Untold Story of Leonard Destin. Both can be obtained from Amazon.com, The Destin History & Fishing Museum in Destin, Henderson Beach Resort in Destin, The Indian Temple Mound in Fort Walton Beach, and Sundog Books in Seaside. Klein can be contacted directly <email-pii>.
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History Mystery: The mystery behind gravestone in the Marler Memorial Cemetery
The gravestone of Edward M. Knapp is the second tallest gravestone in the Marler Memorial Cemetery. The only gravestone taller is that of Leonard Destin, the founder of Destin. Just who was Edward M. Knapp and why is he buried in the Marler Memorial Cemetery? That is our History Mystery for this month.
Edward Knapp’s story is interesting and shows just what a tight-knit community Destin was in the early fish camp era, before roads, bridges, tourists, motels, and condos. It was a tight-knit community where a person could be buried in the local cemetery that actually never lived there.
The Knapp Family – Edward’s father, John Sullivan Knapp was born in 1844 in Illinois, and Edward’s mother, Christina, was born in 1853 in Missouri. Edward Morris Knapp was their oldest child. He was born in Asley (Scott County), Illinois on Aug. 14, 1871, and grew up in Westchester (Scott County), Missouri, which is located just north of Asley.
Searching historical records for Edward Morris Knapp found him living in Saint Louis, Missouri in the 1890s, likely attending school. On March 2, 1897, he married Cecily Flynn in Clayton (St. Louis County), Missouri. By the time of the 1900 federal census, Edward and his wife, Cecily, were living in Havana, Cuba at the Headquarters, Department of Matanzas, and Santa Clara Hospital Corps; Armed Forces-Foreign Company. Edward M. Knapp served in the Spanish-American War.
After the war, Knapp stayed in Cuba and he served as clerk, Engineer Department at Large, from April 17, 1899, to July 31, 1902, at the Engineer Office, Territorial Department. Then the same day, July 31, 1902, Knapp was appointed clerk in the classified service (Civil Service) in Cuba.
Edward Knapp continued working as a civil servant for the U.S. Army until Nov. 30, 1910, when he resigned. He and his family planned to join Edward’s parents in Northwest Florida, near Destin, when they returned to the United States.
Edward’s parents had
|
staked a claim under the Homestead Act of 1862 on land in Shoals, Florida, (now called Miramar Beach) in 1909. They homesteaded Lots 1 & 2 in Section 29, Township 2-south, Range 21-west, containing 144 and 15/100 acres. One of these lots could have been where Edward Knapp planned to build his home.
Edward Knapp’s Relocation to Shoals, Florida - Edward Knapp resigned on Nov. 30, 1910, from civil service with plans to relocate to Shoals (Washington County), Florida on land that his parents owned. It does seem that he was in the area before 1910 because he was well-known to the locals in Destin. In 1925 the population of Shoals was 32 and Destin was 32. They were the same size. Destin had a post office and a store run by William T. “Billy” Marler. Billy Marler also took care of the local cemetery, made caskets, and took care of local burials.
On Dec. 26, 1910, four weeks after Edward retired from the government, he was in Florida moving his family to Shoals when he drowned in Choctawhatchee Bay between Santa Rosa and Shoals. From an affidavit from William T. “Billy” Marler, we know what happened to him. Edward fell off a motor boat while moving furniture to his home in Shoals and died. He was pulled from the water, but no one knew how to resuscitate him.
There wasn’t a cemetery in Shoals, and everybody who came to Shoals came through Destin because the water around Shoals was so shallow. Billy built the coffin, helped conduct the funeral service, and ordered the Woodman of the World gravestone. According to an affidavit handwritten by Billy, he had been the postmaster of Destin since 1899 and had been the light keeper for East Pass for 34 years. Billy and his son, William E. Marler, both knew Edward and were friends of his, and both were at his funeral.
The only thing that remains in the local area to remind us of the life of Edward M. Knapp, or the Knapp family, is that gravestone. The second tallest grave marker in the Marler Memorial Cemetery. That gravestone was ordered from the Woodman of the World fraternal insurance organization by William T. “Billy” Marler, and placed above Edward’s grave by his friend.
H. C. “Hank” Klein is a Destin historian, author, and speaker on local history. He lives in Bob Hope Village in Shalimar with his wife (the former Muriel Marler of Destin). Klein recently published two Destin history books - DESTIN Pioneer Settlers...A Land History of Destin, Florida from 1819-1940 and DESTIN’S Founding Father…The Untold Story of Leonard Destin. Both can be obtained from Amazon.com, The Destin History & Fishing Museum in Destin, Henderson Beach Resort in Destin, The Indian Temple Mound in Fort Walton Beach, and Sundog Books in Seaside. Klein can be contacted directly <email-pii>.
|
Inherited wealth, intergenerational gifts: these are touchy subjects. Many believe they drive a fundamental inequality in society that no amount of success in the workplace can match. And yet it is labour that gets taxed the most, that the State relies on financially, not taxes on wealth.
The notion that trust fund kids are still richer than young go-getters because of the actions of a previous generation is provocative and undoubtedly true in many cases. But inherited wealth – its spread, its impact – is more complex and more nuanced than that.
The Central Bank weighed into the debate last week with a new study, entitled “The Long and the Short of it: Inheritance and Wealth in Ireland”, which delivers some perhaps expected findings and one less obvious one. It reveals that over a third of households in Ireland (approximately 690,000) have received some kind of inheritance or gift in the last 20 years. The accumulated value of these intergenerational transfers was put at €97 billion. Money was the most common type of asset received (57 per cent) followed by dwellings (33 per cent) and land (19 per cent).
According to the authors, the average value of such transfers in 2020 terms was €229,335, with the median value being €80,913.
The study, conducted in the second half of 2020, found that households which had received inheritances or gifts were “substantially wealthier” than those that did not. Their median income was typically 17 per cent higher while their net wealth was 155 per cent higher.
Households that received inheritances also tended to own more homes and more businesses than their non-inheriting counterparts. The study also noted that inherited wealth in Ireland as a proportion of overall wealth has been rising, with a greater proportion of households in 2020 inheriting wealth in the past 20 years than any time before this.
These are perhaps the expected findings. The surprising one was that these transfers are not driving increased levels of inequality, which at first might seem counterintuitive.
The study found that inherited wealth represented a greater share of total net wealth for households in the middle of the wealth distribution curve than for the wealthiest households.
As a result, the study concluded, it contributed little to wealth inequality, “and may even have reduced it over time”.
In other words, inheritances for the super wealthy make less of a meaningful difference because they are already wealthy while inheritances for those in the middle of the income distribution do have a meaningful impact, lifting those in the middle up. Another way of saying this would be that inheritances are important for acquiring wealth, but they don’t make much difference to the overall distribution of wealth here.
If inheritances aren’t the primary driver of inequality here, what is?
Housing. Several studies bear that out. A recent one by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) concluded that home-ownership was the primary delineator of wealth in Ireland and that falling rates of home ownership coincided with increased level of inequality.
The wealth equation is a hard one to disentangle, however. We know that approximately 40 per cent of first-time buyers are being gifted money to help them build a deposit to buy a home. If housing is the chief driver of wealth, that would seem to link these gifts to inequality. Nonetheless, the Central Bank’s study concludes otherwise.
French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument is that the wealth generated from a return on assets – financial, property – will always outstrip earned wealth. He argues therefore that inherited wealth will, on average, “dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labour by a wide margin”. In Ireland, housing has generated high returns, much higher that what you could save out of your labour income to invest. Hence its central place in the equality debate here.
The authors of the Central Bank’s study also note that their research does not capture transfers of human capital or intangibles as they call them.
“There is evidence that human capital transfers across generations are persistent and that family environment is also important for these transfers,” they say. In other words, if your parents are better-educated, if they are well-connected, if they offer their children jobs in the family company, that unsurprisingly translates into better wealth outcomes for their offspring. We’ve no way of measuring this type of transfer.
Shifting the burden of taxation away from labour to property has long been advocated on the grounds that labour is more productive and beneficial to society and property less so. There’s a strong argument for affording labour a better roll of the tax dice. The Commission on Taxation has advocated just such a shift in emphasis, noting in a recent report that taxes on wealth and property here were too low and should be increased to broaden the tax base and protect the tax system from future challenges.
Most people tend to support increased levels of inheritance tax provided it falls on people richer than them.
Wherever people are in the income distribution curve, those with wealthier parents will inherit more than those with poorer ones. How much this damages social mobility is an open question.
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Inherited wealth, intergenerational gifts: these are touchy subjects. Many believe they drive a fundamental inequality in society that no amount of success in the workplace can match. And yet it is labour that gets taxed the most, that the State relies on financially, not taxes on wealth.
The notion that trust fund kids are still richer than young go-getters because of the actions of a previous generation is provocative and undoubtedly true in many cases. But inherited wealth – its spread, its impact – is more complex and more nuanced than that.
The Central Bank weighed into the debate last week with a new study, entitled “The Long and the Short of it: Inheritance and Wealth in Ireland”, which delivers some perhaps expected findings and one less obvious one. It reveals that over a third of households in Ireland (approximately 690,000) have received some kind of inheritance or gift in the last 20 years. The accumulated value of these intergenerational transfers was put at €97 billion. Money was the most common type of asset received (57 per cent) followed by dwellings (33 per cent) and land (19 per cent).
According to the authors, the average value of such transfers in 2020 terms was €229,335, with the median value being €80,913.
The study, conducted in the second half of 2020, found that households which had received inheritances or gifts were “substantially wealthier” than those that did not. Their median income was typically 17 per cent higher while their net wealth was 155 per cent higher.
Households that received inheritances also tended to own more homes and more businesses than their non-inheriting counterparts. The study also noted that inherited wealth in Ireland as a proportion of overall wealth has been rising, with a greater proportion of households in 2020 inheriting wealth in the past 20 years than any time before this.
These are perhaps the expected findings. The surprising one was that these transfers are not driving increased levels of inequality, which at first might seem counterintuitive.
The study found that inherited wealth represented a greater share of total net wealth for households in the middle of the wealth distribution curve than for the wealthiest households.
As a result, the study concluded, it contributed little to wealth inequality, “and may even have reduced it over time”.
In other words, inheritances for
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the super wealthy make less of a meaningful difference because they are already wealthy while inheritances for those in the middle of the income distribution do have a meaningful impact, lifting those in the middle up. Another way of saying this would be that inheritances are important for acquiring wealth, but they don’t make much difference to the overall distribution of wealth here.
If inheritances aren’t the primary driver of inequality here, what is?
Housing. Several studies bear that out. A recent one by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) concluded that home-ownership was the primary delineator of wealth in Ireland and that falling rates of home ownership coincided with increased level of inequality.
The wealth equation is a hard one to disentangle, however. We know that approximately 40 per cent of first-time buyers are being gifted money to help them build a deposit to buy a home. If housing is the chief driver of wealth, that would seem to link these gifts to inequality. Nonetheless, the Central Bank’s study concludes otherwise.
French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument is that the wealth generated from a return on assets – financial, property – will always outstrip earned wealth. He argues therefore that inherited wealth will, on average, “dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labour by a wide margin”. In Ireland, housing has generated high returns, much higher that what you could save out of your labour income to invest. Hence its central place in the equality debate here.
The authors of the Central Bank’s study also note that their research does not capture transfers of human capital or intangibles as they call them.
“There is evidence that human capital transfers across generations are persistent and that family environment is also important for these transfers,” they say. In other words, if your parents are better-educated, if they are well-connected, if they offer their children jobs in the family company, that unsurprisingly translates into better wealth outcomes for their offspring. We’ve no way of measuring this type of transfer.
Shifting the burden of taxation away from labour to property has long been advocated on the grounds that labour is more productive and beneficial to society and property less so. There’s a strong argument for affording labour a better roll of the tax dice. The Commission on Taxation has advocated just such a shift in emphasis, noting in a recent report that taxes on wealth and property here were too low and should be increased to broaden the tax base and protect the tax system from future challenges.
Most people tend to support increased levels of inheritance tax provided it falls on people richer than them.
Wherever people are in the income distribution curve, those with wealthier parents will inherit more than those with poorer ones. How much this damages social mobility is an open question.
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Horsehair worms are truly bizarre creatures | ECOVIEWS
My grandson Parker recently sent me an email and one of the strangest animal photos I have ever received.
Most of my ecologist colleagues have never seen the critter that Parker found, but he knew what it was, and like anyone finding an unusual animal in its natural habitat, he wanted to let others know about his encounter.
He knew it was safe to pick up this enigmatic creature, so sure enough, the attached photo was of him holding a 2-foot long, yellowish individual about the diameter of a toothpick. It looked like a tangled coil of thin copper wire. He found it at night in a wetland after excessive rains.
The animal was a horsehair worm, which belongs to a poorly understood group, the hairworms, with more than 300 species.
Hairworms’ biological relationship to other worms is ambiguous and they comprise their own separate phylum. The scientific name of one hairworm is Gordius, named after the Gordian knot, which, according to an oracle, could only be untied by the future ruler of Asia. (This was a difficulty Alexander the Great reportedly overcame by slicing the knot in half with his sword.)
The name “horsehair” comes from a dark-colored species sometimes found floating in water troughs. These long, thin worms were sometimes mistaken for horsehairs that had fallen into the trough. No doubt the first cowboy to pick one up and see it move around had his own story to tell. After seeing the twisted knotty mess that a 2-foot-long worm could get itself in, I thought the name most appropriate. The sex of some species of hairworms can be determined because the males have a forked tail.
Adults, which can reach a length of 3 feet, are in a free-living form, meaning they are not parasitic. But the larvae are. Paradoxically, hairworms are special because they are so unspecialized. They have no digestive system, no respiratory system and no circulatory system.
Adult horsehair worms do not eat. After leaving the insect forms they grew up in, the males and females find each other in the water, mate and reproduce. How one horsehair worm locates another with no eyes, no ears and no nose is a remarkable feat of nature. The female lays eggs that float in the water. If an egg is eaten by an insect, the egg hatches and the tiny parasite larva drills its way out of the insect's intestine and takes up residence in the body cavity. It feeds on the inside of the insect until it grows into a long worm ready to start the cycle again.
Invertebrates, including spiders and insects, serve as hosts for hairworm parasites. In what might appear to be the inspiration for the movie “Alien,” the larvae grow to the size of giant worms inside the unfortunate invertebrate host before they emerge. Imagine a 3-foot-long worm living inside a grasshopper!
Hairworm parasites have little use for people, although rare infections of humans in China, Japan and Canada have been reported in medical and parasitological scientific journals.
How does the worm know it will end up in water so it can mate? An impressive study by a team of French scientists on hairworms that infect crickets and grasshoppers may offer a partial explanation.
In laboratory studies that examined the brain of insects, the investigators found that the hairworm parasite actually alters the behavior of the insect by producing molecules that enter the insect's central nervous system.
The exact mechanisms are still unknown, but chemical alterations in the brain make the insect jump into the water and drown. Such abnormal behavior puts the now-developed worm where it wants to be.
Brainwashing at its most effective. As Parker put it, “The worm takes control of the half-alive insect’s nervous system and controls the zombie, making it go to the water and drown itself.” He also noted that “horsehair worms have one of the craziest lifecycles in nature. They are real-life aliens.”
Whit Gibbons is professor of zoology and senior biologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. If you have an environmental question or comment, email <email-pii>.
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Horsehair worms are truly bizarre creatures | ECOVIEWS
My grandson Parker recently sent me an email and one of the strangest animal photos I have ever received.
Most of my ecologist colleagues have never seen the critter that Parker found, but he knew what it was, and like anyone finding an unusual animal in its natural habitat, he wanted to let others know about his encounter.
He knew it was safe to pick up this enigmatic creature, so sure enough, the attached photo was of him holding a 2-foot long, yellowish individual about the diameter of a toothpick. It looked like a tangled coil of thin copper wire. He found it at night in a wetland after excessive rains.
The animal was a horsehair worm, which belongs to a poorly understood group, the hairworms, with more than 300 species.
Hairworms’ biological relationship to other worms is ambiguous and they comprise their own separate phylum. The scientific name of one hairworm is Gordius, named after the Gordian knot, which, according to an oracle, could only be untied by the future ruler of Asia. (This was a difficulty Alexander the Great reportedly overcame by slicing the knot in half with his sword.)
The name “horsehair” comes from a dark-colored species sometimes found floating in water troughs. These long, thin worms were sometimes mistaken for horsehairs that had fallen into the trough. No doubt the first cowboy to pick one up and see it move around had his own story to tell. After seeing the twisted knotty mess that a 2-foot-long worm could get itself in, I thought the name most appropriate. The sex of some species of hairworms can be determined because the males have a forked tail.
Adults, which can reach a length of 3 feet, are in a free-living form, meaning they are not parasitic. But the larvae are. Paradoxically, hairworms are special because they are so unspecialized. They have no digestive system, no respiratory system and no circulatory system.
Adult horsehair worms do not eat. After leaving the insect forms they grew up in, the males and females find each other in the water, mate and reproduce. How one horsehair worm locates another with no eyes, no ears and no nose is a remarkable feat of nature. The female lays eggs that float in the water. If an egg is eaten by an insect, the egg hatches and the tiny
|
parasite larva drills its way out of the insect's intestine and takes up residence in the body cavity. It feeds on the inside of the insect until it grows into a long worm ready to start the cycle again.
Invertebrates, including spiders and insects, serve as hosts for hairworm parasites. In what might appear to be the inspiration for the movie “Alien,” the larvae grow to the size of giant worms inside the unfortunate invertebrate host before they emerge. Imagine a 3-foot-long worm living inside a grasshopper!
Hairworm parasites have little use for people, although rare infections of humans in China, Japan and Canada have been reported in medical and parasitological scientific journals.
How does the worm know it will end up in water so it can mate? An impressive study by a team of French scientists on hairworms that infect crickets and grasshoppers may offer a partial explanation.
In laboratory studies that examined the brain of insects, the investigators found that the hairworm parasite actually alters the behavior of the insect by producing molecules that enter the insect's central nervous system.
The exact mechanisms are still unknown, but chemical alterations in the brain make the insect jump into the water and drown. Such abnormal behavior puts the now-developed worm where it wants to be.
Brainwashing at its most effective. As Parker put it, “The worm takes control of the half-alive insect’s nervous system and controls the zombie, making it go to the water and drown itself.” He also noted that “horsehair worms have one of the craziest lifecycles in nature. They are real-life aliens.”
Whit Gibbons is professor of zoology and senior biologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. If you have an environmental question or comment, email <email-pii>.
|
Nothing prepared Linda C. Johnson of Indianapolis for the fatigue that descended on her after a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer in early 2020.
But as she began to get her affairs in order, Johnson realized something else was going on. However long she slept the night before, she woke up exhausted.
“People would tell me, ‘You know, you’re getting old.’ And that wasn’t helpful at all. Because then you feel there’s nothing you can do mentally or physically to deal with this,” she told me.
Fatigue is a common companion of many illnesses that beset older adults, typically those 65 and older: heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, lung disease, kidney disease, and neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, among others. It’s one of the most common symptoms associated with chronic illness, affecting 40 to 74 percent of older people living with those conditions, according to a 2021 review by researchers at the University of Massachusetts.
This is more than exhaustion after an extremely busy day or a night of poor sleep. It’s a persistent, whole-body feeling of having no energy, even with minimal or no exertion.
“I feel like I have a drained battery pretty much all of the time,” wrote a user named Renee in a Facebook group for people with polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer. “It’s sort of like being a wrung-out dish rag.”
Fatigue doesn’t represent “a day when you’re tired; it’s a couple of weeks or a couple of months when you’re tired,” said Kurt Kroenke, a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, which specializes in medical research, and a professor at Indiana University’s School of Medicine.
When he and colleagues queried nearly 3,500 patients 60 and older at a large primary care clinic in Indianapolis about bothersome symptoms, 55 percent listed fatigue — second only to musculoskeletal pain (65 percent) and more than back pain (45 percent) and shortness of breath (41 percent).
A ‘vicious cycle’
Separately, a 2010 study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society estimated that 31 percent of people 51 and older reported being fatigued in the previous week.
The effect can be profound.
Fatigue is the leading reason for restricted activity in people 70 and older, according to a 2001 study by researchers at Yale University. Other studies have linked fatigue with impaired mobility, limitations in people’s abilities to perform daily activities, the onset or worsening of disability and earlier death.
Often, older adults with fatigue stop being active and become deconditioned, which leads to muscle loss and weakness, which heightens fatigue.
“It becomes a vicious cycle that contributes to things like depression, which can make you more fatigued,” said Jean Kutner, a professor of medicine and chief medical officer at the University of Colorado Hospital.
To prevent that, Johnson came up with a plan after learning her lung cancer had returned. Every morning, she set small goals for herself. One day, she’d get up and wash her face. The next, she’d take a shower. Another day, she’d go to the grocery store. After each activity, she’d rest.
In the three years since her cancer came back, Johnson’s fatigue has been constant. But “I’m functioning better,” she told me, because she has learned how to pace herself and find things that motivate her, such as teaching a virtual class to students training to be teachers and getting exercise under the supervision of a personal trainer.
When should older adults be concerned about fatigue?
“If someone has been doing okay but is now feeling fatigued all the time, it’s important to get an evaluation,” said Holly Yang, a physician at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego and board president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
“Fatigue is an alarm signal that something is wrong with the body, but it’s rarely one thing,” said Ardeshir Hashmi, section chief of the Center for Geriatric Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “Usually, several things need to be addressed.”
Among the items physicians should check: Are your thyroid levels normal? Are you having trouble with sleep? If you have underlying medical conditions, are they well controlled? Do you have an underlying infection? Are you chronically dehydrated? Do you have anemia (a deficiency of red blood cells or hemoglobin), an electrolyte imbalance or low levels of testosterone? Are you eating enough protein? Have you been feeling more anxious or depressed recently? And might medications you’re taking be contributing to fatigue?
“The medications and doses may be the same, but your body’s ability to metabolize those medications and clear them from your system may have changed,” said Hashmi, noting that such changes in the body’s metabolic activity are common as people become older.
Many potential contributors to fatigue can be addressed. But much of the time, the cause of fatigue cannot be explained by an underlying medical condition.
That happened to Teresa Goodell, 64, a retired nurse who lives just outside Portland, Ore. During a December visit to Arizona, she suddenly found herself exhausted and short of breath while on a hike, even though she was in good physical condition. At an urgent care facility, she was diagnosed with an asthma exacerbation and given steroids, but they didn’t help.
Soon, Goodell was spending hours each day in bed, overcome by profound tiredness and weakness. Even small activities wore her out. But none of the medical tests she received in Arizona and subsequently in Portland — a chest X-ray and CT scan, bloodwork, a cardiac stress test — showed abnormalities.
“There was no objective evidence of illness, and that makes it hard for anybody to believe you’re sick,” she told me.
Goodell started visiting long covid websites and chatrooms for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Today, she is convinced she has post-viral syndrome from an infection. One of the most common symptoms of long covid is fatigue that interferes with daily life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Several strategies can deal with persistent fatigue. In cancer patients, “the best evidence favors physical activity such as tai chi, yoga, walking or low-impact exercises,” said Christian Sinclair, an associate professor of palliative medicine at the University of Kansas Health System. The goal is to “gradually stretch patients’ stamina,” he said.
With long covid, however, doing too much too soon can backfire by causing post-exertional malaise. Pacing one’s activities is often recommended: doing only what’s most important when one’s energy level is highest and resting afterward.
“You learn how to set realistic goals,” said Andrew Esch, senior education adviser at the Center to Advance Palliative Care.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can help older adults with fatigue learn how to adjust expectations and address intrusive thoughts such as, “I should be able to do more.” At the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, management plans for older patients with fatigue typically include strategies to address physical activity, sleep health, nutrition, emotional health, and support from family and friends.
“So much of fatigue management is about forming new habits,” said Ishwaria Subbiah, a palliative care and integrative medicine physician at MD Anderson. “It’s important to recognize that this doesn’t happen right away: It takes time.”
This article was produced by Kaiser Health News, a program of KFF, an endowed nonprofit organization that provides information on health issues to the nation.
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Nothing prepared Linda C. Johnson of Indianapolis for the fatigue that descended on her after a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer in early 2020.
But as she began to get her affairs in order, Johnson realized something else was going on. However long she slept the night before, she woke up exhausted.
“People would tell me, ‘You know, you’re getting old.’ And that wasn’t helpful at all. Because then you feel there’s nothing you can do mentally or physically to deal with this,” she told me.
Fatigue is a common companion of many illnesses that beset older adults, typically those 65 and older: heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, lung disease, kidney disease, and neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, among others. It’s one of the most common symptoms associated with chronic illness, affecting 40 to 74 percent of older people living with those conditions, according to a 2021 review by researchers at the University of Massachusetts.
This is more than exhaustion after an extremely busy day or a night of poor sleep. It’s a persistent, whole-body feeling of having no energy, even with minimal or no exertion.
“I feel like I have a drained battery pretty much all of the time,” wrote a user named Renee in a Facebook group for people with polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer. “It’s sort of like being a wrung-out dish rag.”
Fatigue doesn’t represent “a day when you’re tired; it’s a couple of weeks or a couple of months when you’re tired,” said Kurt Kroenke, a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, which specializes in medical research, and a professor at Indiana University’s School of Medicine.
When he and colleagues queried nearly 3,500 patients 60 and older at a large primary care clinic in Indianapolis about bothersome symptoms, 55 percent listed fatigue — second only to musculoskeletal pain (65 percent) and more than back pain (45 percent) and shortness of breath (41 percent).
A ‘vicious cycle’
Separately, a 2010 study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society estimated that 31 percent of people 51 and older reported being fatigued in the previous week.
The effect can be profound.
Fatigue is the leading reason for restricted activity in people 70 and older, according to a 2001 study by
|
researchers at Yale University. Other studies have linked fatigue with impaired mobility, limitations in people’s abilities to perform daily activities, the onset or worsening of disability and earlier death.
Often, older adults with fatigue stop being active and become deconditioned, which leads to muscle loss and weakness, which heightens fatigue.
“It becomes a vicious cycle that contributes to things like depression, which can make you more fatigued,” said Jean Kutner, a professor of medicine and chief medical officer at the University of Colorado Hospital.
To prevent that, Johnson came up with a plan after learning her lung cancer had returned. Every morning, she set small goals for herself. One day, she’d get up and wash her face. The next, she’d take a shower. Another day, she’d go to the grocery store. After each activity, she’d rest.
In the three years since her cancer came back, Johnson’s fatigue has been constant. But “I’m functioning better,” she told me, because she has learned how to pace herself and find things that motivate her, such as teaching a virtual class to students training to be teachers and getting exercise under the supervision of a personal trainer.
When should older adults be concerned about fatigue?
“If someone has been doing okay but is now feeling fatigued all the time, it’s important to get an evaluation,” said Holly Yang, a physician at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego and board president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
“Fatigue is an alarm signal that something is wrong with the body, but it’s rarely one thing,” said Ardeshir Hashmi, section chief of the Center for Geriatric Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “Usually, several things need to be addressed.”
Among the items physicians should check: Are your thyroid levels normal? Are you having trouble with sleep? If you have underlying medical conditions, are they well controlled? Do you have an underlying infection? Are you chronically dehydrated? Do you have anemia (a deficiency of red blood cells or hemoglobin), an electrolyte imbalance or low levels of testosterone? Are you eating enough protein? Have you been feeling more anxious or depressed recently? And might medications you’re taking be contributing to fatigue?
“The medications and doses may be the same, but your body’s ability to metabolize those medications and clear them from your system may have changed,” said Hashmi, noting that such changes in the body’s metabolic activity are common as people become older.
Many potential contributors to fatigue can be addressed. But much of the time, the cause of fatigue cannot be explained by an underlying medical condition.
That happened to Teresa Goodell, 64, a retired nurse who lives just outside Portland, Ore. During a December visit to Arizona, she suddenly found herself exhausted and short of breath while on a hike, even though she was in good physical condition. At an urgent care facility, she was diagnosed with an asthma exacerbation and given steroids, but they didn’t help.
Soon, Goodell was spending hours each day in bed, overcome by profound tiredness and weakness. Even small activities wore her out. But none of the medical tests she received in Arizona and subsequently in Portland — a chest X-ray and CT scan, bloodwork, a cardiac stress test — showed abnormalities.
“There was no objective evidence of illness, and that makes it hard for anybody to believe you’re sick,” she told me.
Goodell started visiting long covid websites and chatrooms for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Today, she is convinced she has post-viral syndrome from an infection. One of the most common symptoms of long covid is fatigue that interferes with daily life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Several strategies can deal with persistent fatigue. In cancer patients, “the best evidence favors physical activity such as tai chi, yoga, walking or low-impact exercises,” said Christian Sinclair, an associate professor of palliative medicine at the University of Kansas Health System. The goal is to “gradually stretch patients’ stamina,” he said.
With long covid, however, doing too much too soon can backfire by causing post-exertional malaise. Pacing one’s activities is often recommended: doing only what’s most important when one’s energy level is highest and resting afterward.
“You learn how to set realistic goals,” said Andrew Esch, senior education adviser at the Center to Advance Palliative Care.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can help older adults with fatigue learn how to adjust expectations and address intrusive thoughts such as, “I should be able to do more.” At the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, management plans for older patients with fatigue typically include strategies to address physical activity, sleep health, nutrition, emotional health, and support from family and friends.
“So much of fatigue management is about forming new habits,” said Ishwaria Subbiah, a palliative care and integrative medicine physician at MD Anderson. “It’s important to recognize that this doesn’t happen right away: It takes time.”
This article was produced by Kaiser Health News, a program of KFF, an endowed nonprofit organization that provides information on health issues to the nation.
|
The oxbow, a horseshoe curve of the river that has transformed over time into a marsh, as seen from the San Antonio Bluffs on Albuquerque’s Westside. Consecutive years of drought dried parts of the marshland that are crucial habitats for birds, beavers and other animals. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
The Rio Grande is a silver thread ribboning its way through New Mexico, enhanced by a brocade of greenery. It roars to life through the tall pines, curves through the canyons carved by its steadfast course.
The river vertically bisects the entire state and touches 14 sovereign pueblos, sluicing into canals and creeping across fields.
In the lowlands, the bosque brush pops against beige grass and dun sand. It winds further still, its path a verdant mark against olive creosote and blue sage. It swells in the south in great catchments, stretching wide under skies, held back by the dams.
It also dries. Not every year, but most. Not always catastrophically, but more often so — and in 2022, worse.
“Drought and ever-increasing temperatures rob us of water at every stage,” said Dagmar Llewellyn, a hydrologist at the Bureau of Reclamation.
Direct interventions — like dams — outweigh global warming in reshaping the Rio Grande, said U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist C. David Moeser, but the loss of snow melt means a “regime change” for how the river is fed.
“We have climate change coming, and in order to reduce its impact, we need to think about how to reduce our footprints in this basin,” Moeser said.
In the center of Albuquerque, there is a marsh, one of the last in the middle of the desert. Named for the U-curves of the river resembling a harness, oxbows are lakes and pools where a bend in the river is cut off. It’s a 40-acre wildlife refuge, the first owned and managed by the City of Albuquerque’s Open Space department.
Usually created by the natural meandering of the river, this bastion of marsh in the center of the city was a man-made unintended consequence. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used X-shaped jetty jacks, now overgrown, to straighten the course of the Rio Grande, and support the banks.
“The river used to run right here, eroding the bluff we’re standing on,” said Wes Noe, a graduate student in water resources at the University of New Mexico.
Stands of grass below the overlook barely move in the still summer morning, cicadas already droning. The water isn’t blue. It’s shallow here, some of it murky brown and algae filled, other portions nearly a mustard yellow color in the shallows.
Some of the still ponds are choked by invasive grasses and sediment plugs, creating hot, shallow ponds. A beaver dam sits in deeper water, surrounding trees bearing the telltale signs of the inhabitants.
The oxbow is an important habitat for migratory birds, Noe said, who stop over to feed, rest and continue on miles-long journeys.
Outside the oxbow, at a fork of signs for federal, state and city agencies — the banks are thick with invasive species — slate-blue Russian olives and the frothy leaves of salt cedar, all enwrapped in the emerald vines of virginia creeper.
“We need some human input right here to cut back on some of this invasive species, or when you’re having sedimentation, and things are eroding,” Noe said, pointing out deep headcuts in the bluff left by runoff from the housing and roads.
Watching the oxbow dry in 2021, watching blue waters shrink to smaller and smaller patches of brown ground, just muddy patches, cut deep, he said.
“I’m so deeply connected to the oxbow,” Noe said. “I literally grew up in Albuquerque, and I worked in the Bosque in my undergrad, and never once did I hear about the oxbow.”
This project was funded by a grant from the Water Desk and by States Newsroom, a network of nonprofit news organizations and home to Source NM.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site.
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The oxbow, a horseshoe curve of the river that has transformed over time into a marsh, as seen from the San Antonio Bluffs on Albuquerque’s Westside. Consecutive years of drought dried parts of the marshland that are crucial habitats for birds, beavers and other animals. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
The Rio Grande is a silver thread ribboning its way through New Mexico, enhanced by a brocade of greenery. It roars to life through the tall pines, curves through the canyons carved by its steadfast course.
The river vertically bisects the entire state and touches 14 sovereign pueblos, sluicing into canals and creeping across fields.
In the lowlands, the bosque brush pops against beige grass and dun sand. It winds further still, its path a verdant mark against olive creosote and blue sage. It swells in the south in great catchments, stretching wide under skies, held back by the dams.
It also dries. Not every year, but most. Not always catastrophically, but more often so — and in 2022, worse.
“Drought and ever-increasing temperatures rob us of water at every stage,” said Dagmar Llewellyn, a hydrologist at the Bureau of Reclamation.
Direct interventions — like dams — outweigh global warming in reshaping the Rio Grande, said U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist C. David Moeser, but the loss of snow melt means a “regime change” for how the river is fed.
“We have climate change coming, and in order to reduce its impact, we need to think about how to reduce our footprints in this basin,” Moeser said.
In the center of Albuquerque, there is a marsh, one of the last in the middle of the desert. Named for the U-curves of the river resembling a harness, oxbows are lakes and pools where a bend in the river is cut off. It’s a 40-acre wildlife refuge, the first owned and managed by the City of Albuquerque’s Open Space department.
Usually created by the natural meandering of the river, this bastion of marsh in the center of the city was a man-made unintended consequence. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used X-shaped jetty jacks, now overgrown, to straighten the course of the Rio Grande, and support the banks.
“The river used to run right here,
|
eroding the bluff we’re standing on,” said Wes Noe, a graduate student in water resources at the University of New Mexico.
Stands of grass below the overlook barely move in the still summer morning, cicadas already droning. The water isn’t blue. It’s shallow here, some of it murky brown and algae filled, other portions nearly a mustard yellow color in the shallows.
Some of the still ponds are choked by invasive grasses and sediment plugs, creating hot, shallow ponds. A beaver dam sits in deeper water, surrounding trees bearing the telltale signs of the inhabitants.
The oxbow is an important habitat for migratory birds, Noe said, who stop over to feed, rest and continue on miles-long journeys.
Outside the oxbow, at a fork of signs for federal, state and city agencies — the banks are thick with invasive species — slate-blue Russian olives and the frothy leaves of salt cedar, all enwrapped in the emerald vines of virginia creeper.
“We need some human input right here to cut back on some of this invasive species, or when you’re having sedimentation, and things are eroding,” Noe said, pointing out deep headcuts in the bluff left by runoff from the housing and roads.
Watching the oxbow dry in 2021, watching blue waters shrink to smaller and smaller patches of brown ground, just muddy patches, cut deep, he said.
“I’m so deeply connected to the oxbow,” Noe said. “I literally grew up in Albuquerque, and I worked in the Bosque in my undergrad, and never once did I hear about the oxbow.”
This project was funded by a grant from the Water Desk and by States Newsroom, a network of nonprofit news organizations and home to Source NM.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site.
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Presented by Chevron
Sixteen young people are about to make history.
The first youth-led climate case to go to trial in the United States starts next week in Helena, Mont., where plaintiffs are accusing state officials of violating their right to a stable climate by rubber-stamping coal, oil and gas projects.
Even if the case does little to stop Montana from using its huge coal reserves, the case could influence U.S. policy by bolstering climate fights elsewhere, writes Lesley Clark.
“To have the ability to go to trial and submit evidence that the advancement of fossil fuels has an effect on the climate and warming … that’s a pretty tremendous thing,” Sandra Zellmer, a law professor at the University of Montana, told Lesley.
“It’s monumental that this is getting to trial in a state like Montana.”
Montana’s usable coal reserves, the largest in the nation, account for about 30 percent of the country’s total. The state also contributes about one in every 200 barrels of U.S. oil produced annually. Montana has never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project, Lesley writes.
A clean and healthful environment: The group of young people accuses Montana of violating the state’s 1972 Constitution, which provides a right to a “clean and healthful environment.”
State officials have vigorously rejected the accusation. Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen unsuccessfully petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to dismiss the case. State Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, also a Republican, called the lawsuit a “waste of time.”
“We support natural resources in this state,” Fitzpatrick said, “but the Legislature is certainly not going to adopt the ideology of the environmental movement.”
Kid trendsetters: The 16 plaintiffs in Montana are seeing the inside of a courtroom well before another case, Juliana v. United States, which makes similar accusations against the federal government. That complaint by 21 young activists was dismissed in 2020, but a judge in Oregon ruled last week that the plaintiffs can amend their complaint to revive the case.
The Montana suit builds on a global trend.
In Colombia, for example, 25 young people won a lawsuit in 2018 against their government for failing to protect their rights to a safe environment. A German court ruled in favor of youth plaintiffs in 2021, finding that the country’s climate law did not go far enough.
Thank goodness it’s Friday — thank you for tuning in to POLITICO’s Power Switch. I’m your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to [email protected].
Today in POLITICO Energy’s podcast: Zi-Ann Lum breaks down the health risks of this week’s wildfire smoke and the response from the U.S. and Canadian governments.
A coal dilemma
Pennsylvania isn’t part of a regional program to slash carbon emissions, but its coal plants are closing anyway — fueling a debate about the energy-producing state’s future, writes Miranda Willson.
Joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for the state. But critics say it would harm electric reliability and raise energy costs.
Debt ceiling fallout
Agencies responsible for tackling climate change and building energy infrastructure may escape a lapse in funding this year, thanks to provisions tucked inside the recently passed bipartisan bill preventing a national default, writes Kevin Bogardus.
At the same time, this week’s revolt by House Republican hard-liners that shut down floor action could complicate spending levels at agencies.
Greta Thunberg went on a school strike for the climate for the last time Friday, nearly five years after first sitting down in front of Sweden’s parliament with a hand-drawn sign, writes Zia Weise.
The Swedish activist wrote on Twitter that Friday was her graduation day, “which means I’ll no longer be able to school strike for the climate.” But the movement isn’t done, she added.
Labor: 240 Black Tesla workers are seeking a class-action lawsuit over racism.
Pollution: Smog is choking New York. But for these cities, it’s just another day.
A showcase of some of our best subscriber content.
Growing damage to property and people from rising temperatures is expected to jack up federal spending, while economic activity is being eroded in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing.
The Energy Department will provide an $850 million loan to KORE Power for the construction of an advanced battery cell manufacturing facility in Arizona to boost supply chains.
General Motors has joined Ford in adopting Tesla’s electric vehicles charging standard, jeopardizing the fate of $7.5 billion in federal funding for EV infrastructure.
That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
|
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|
Presented by Chevron
Sixteen young people are about to make history.
The first youth-led climate case to go to trial in the United States starts next week in Helena, Mont., where plaintiffs are accusing state officials of violating their right to a stable climate by rubber-stamping coal, oil and gas projects.
Even if the case does little to stop Montana from using its huge coal reserves, the case could influence U.S. policy by bolstering climate fights elsewhere, writes Lesley Clark.
“To have the ability to go to trial and submit evidence that the advancement of fossil fuels has an effect on the climate and warming … that’s a pretty tremendous thing,” Sandra Zellmer, a law professor at the University of Montana, told Lesley.
“It’s monumental that this is getting to trial in a state like Montana.”
Montana’s usable coal reserves, the largest in the nation, account for about 30 percent of the country’s total. The state also contributes about one in every 200 barrels of U.S. oil produced annually. Montana has never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project, Lesley writes.
A clean and healthful environment: The group of young people accuses Montana of violating the state’s 1972 Constitution, which provides a right to a “clean and healthful environment.”
State officials have vigorously rejected the accusation. Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen unsuccessfully petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to dismiss the case. State Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, also a Republican, called the lawsuit a “waste of time.”
“We support natural resources in this state,” Fitzpatrick said, “but the Legislature is certainly not going to adopt the ideology of the environmental movement.”
Kid trendsetters: The 16 plaintiffs in Montana are seeing the inside of a courtroom well before another case, Juliana v. United States, which makes similar accusations against the federal government. That complaint by 21 young activists was dismissed in 2020, but a judge in Oregon ruled last week that the plaintiffs can amend their complaint to revive the case.
The Montana suit builds on a global trend.
In Colombia, for example, 25 young people won a lawsuit in 2018 against their government for failing to protect their rights to a safe environment. A German court ruled in favor of youth plaintiffs in 2021, finding that the country’s climate law did not go far enough.
Thank goodness it’s Friday — thank you
|
for tuning in to POLITICO’s Power Switch. I’m your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to [email protected].
Today in POLITICO Energy’s podcast: Zi-Ann Lum breaks down the health risks of this week’s wildfire smoke and the response from the U.S. and Canadian governments.
A coal dilemma
Pennsylvania isn’t part of a regional program to slash carbon emissions, but its coal plants are closing anyway — fueling a debate about the energy-producing state’s future, writes Miranda Willson.
Joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for the state. But critics say it would harm electric reliability and raise energy costs.
Debt ceiling fallout
Agencies responsible for tackling climate change and building energy infrastructure may escape a lapse in funding this year, thanks to provisions tucked inside the recently passed bipartisan bill preventing a national default, writes Kevin Bogardus.
At the same time, this week’s revolt by House Republican hard-liners that shut down floor action could complicate spending levels at agencies.
Greta Thunberg went on a school strike for the climate for the last time Friday, nearly five years after first sitting down in front of Sweden’s parliament with a hand-drawn sign, writes Zia Weise.
The Swedish activist wrote on Twitter that Friday was her graduation day, “which means I’ll no longer be able to school strike for the climate.” But the movement isn’t done, she added.
Labor: 240 Black Tesla workers are seeking a class-action lawsuit over racism.
Pollution: Smog is choking New York. But for these cities, it’s just another day.
A showcase of some of our best subscriber content.
Growing damage to property and people from rising temperatures is expected to jack up federal spending, while economic activity is being eroded in sectors like agriculture and manufacturing.
The Energy Department will provide an $850 million loan to KORE Power for the construction of an advanced battery cell manufacturing facility in Arizona to boost supply chains.
General Motors has joined Ford in adopting Tesla’s electric vehicles charging standard, jeopardizing the fate of $7.5 billion in federal funding for EV infrastructure.
That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
|
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