NIETZSCHE: POSTCARDS FROM SWISS ALPS
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshippers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.
Dearest Mother: Yesterday I walked
into a cloud of newly hatched
ladybugs, the air insane with red,
hundreds of tiny bodies, tick-tick,
colliding with my straw hat.
I dine at The Alpine Rose,
make compresses for my eyes
with glacier water from the lake.
As for my sleep medicine,
don’t worry, I don’t go above
50 grams of chloroform.
Please send me some sausages.
dear Friend, This morning I noticed
my landlady’s powdered face,
her sweetish odor of valerian drops.
The geraniums on her balcony
trail after me, interrupting my thoughts.
What if I asked her point-blank,
“Madam, but suppose God
is an invention of the devil?”
Philosophers are such sadists.
We who think should present ourselves
for immediate execution.
Dear Fräulein M,
thanks for the kind gift
of your Memoirs of an Idealist.
Please stop complaining
that women are slaves.
That’s what makes
civilization possible.
Dear Cosima, Dear Lou,
Dear Stranger on the Train:
love was the screaming
of the nightingales.
Solitude is a dawn.
In the red silence I write bitter,
I mean better — yet,
if only at the mouth of the question,
outlined with a thread of light,
stood Ariadne —
Respected Colleagues
and Illustrious Dead:
I want back
the coin under your tongue.
I climbed as high as I could.
On the ledge of heaven I saw
a swift’s nest, festooned with droppings.
Dear Sister: are we not
still the fools of a dead god?
Through the snowy
labyrinths of sleep,
through the granite
swirls of birth I shout:
There is no truth, only
perspectives,
the sacred word is
‘perhaps’
My soul too
is the song of a lover
Dearest Sister:
are we not happy
*
ON NIETZSCHE MOUNTAIN
Every year, people gather in a luxury hotel perched above Sils Maria, a small village in the Swiss Alps, to discuss the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche. This year, I was among the 50 or so guests who came together at the Waldhaus Hotel to listen to lectures, go on walks, debate and drink wine.
The topic of this year’s conference was Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s last work, written before he collapsed into madness and published posthumously in 1908. It is an unusual text, a quasi-biography that discusses his life and the creation of his works. Chapters are headed “Why I am so wise,” “Why I am so clever,” “Why I write such excellent books.” It seems to contain signs of the oncoming breakdown.
The Nietzsche Colloquium typically takes place over four days at the Waldhaus. The first day began at 4 p.m. in the great hall of the hotel. We sat in comfortable velvet seats, beside large glass windows that look out over the valley. A trio played live music. More guests were over 50 than under, and there were nearly as many women as men. The majority were staying at the five-star hotel. They would dine together every night, a set menu with many courses. Others were staying in the town of Sils Maria and would be left to their own devices in the evenings. (I stayed a few villages away). This year, there were lectures by Swiss, German and Italian academics, as well as by one American, exploring some facet or interpretation of Ecce Homo.
Each lecture was followed by a debate. Guests could also sign up for reading groups, to discuss Nietzsche’s texts in more depth. For most of the guests, the event was a yearly pilgrimage, an opportunity to mingle with academics and intellectuals in an idyllic setting.
Besides the luxurious hotel, the big draw is, of course, the promise of new insight into one of the most influential, and controversial, modern philosophers. Nietzsche, who famously proclaimed that “God is dead,” was a powerful critic of traditional conceptions of morality, religion and philosophy. Arguing that society held a false understanding of “good” or “bad,” he undertook a “revaluation of values.” His thinking was full of contradictions, and he made a point of accepting them.
He championed the idea that there is no one absolute truth and that knowledge is always based on perspective. Crucially, he claimed that all people are driven by a “will to power” — the idea that there is not only an instinct to survive but to thrive.
His ideas made an indelible mark on 20th-century theology, psychology and philosophy, influencing thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus and Michael Foucault. They also have a darker legacy. After Nietzsche’s death, his sister Elisabeth, who was married to a virulent antisemitic activist and who would later support Adolf Hitler, took control of his literary estate. Among other posthumous works, including Ecce Homo, she published a book titled The Will to Power that took fragments of Nietzsche’s work and pasted them together in service of her own ideas. Nazi propagandists went on to misuse phrases like “Übermensch” and “the blond beast” to justify their ideas of a racial hierarchy.
At the conference, though, there was no mention of how Nietzsche’s ideas were coopted by the Nazis, or why his philosophy continues to find traction among today’s alt-right. This unpalatable aspect of his legacy was, it seemed, considered out of place in the tasteful, hushed atmosphere of the Waldhaus Hotel. For many people Nietzsche is simply whoever they want him to be.
*
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father and younger brother died when he was five and he grew up with his sister, mother, grandmother and two aunts. He was smart and could debate his classmates in Latin. He started and then stopped studying theology, turning to philology instead, a subject in which he became the youngest ever professor at Basel, when he was only 24.
Ten years later, he left the post and wandered around Europe on his pension, not settling anywhere. He suffered from chronic headaches, terrible eyesight and debilitating stomach pain, which he treated with all sorts of tinctures, opioids and acids. The search for a place with a climate suited to his illnesses led him around Europe: He spent time in Nice, Genoa and Turin, and in 1881 discovered Sils Maria, where he would return every summer for seven years.
His many published works were not successful — some sold no more than 100 copies. Yet he was convinced that he would be recognized by later generations. In 1888 he wrote four books, including Ecce Homo, while he was residing in Sils Maria and then Turin. In January 1889, he had a breakdown. He spent the next three days singing, crying, dancing naked and sending letters to friends and family of such a concerning nature that his friend Franz Overbeck went immediately to Turin to pick him up. He was admitted into a mental institution, and around this time people started to express interest in his work. Nietzsche’s publisher decided to reprint his books, which so far had been gathering dust on the shelves, and they began to sell.
Why the sudden popularity? The German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski has a theory: Nietzsche’s descent into madness leant his work new allure because it suggested he had uncovered something so deeply true and unsettling about humanity that it drove him insane, Safranski wrote in his 2000 biography of Nietzsche.
*
The Waldhaus Hotel was not around when Nietzsche was alive. It opened in 1908, the same year Ecce Homo was published, eight years after his death. When he came to Sils Maria, he stayed in the village itself, in a simple room in a simple house. A visit to this house, which has been renamed the Nietzsche House and turned into a small museum about the philosopher and his time in Sils Maria, is part of the colloquium’s agenda every year.
The nature surrounding the town is beautiful in the superlative: rough mountain tops against blue sky, moody dark forests lining milky-blue lakes and a cloud formation named the “Maloja Snake,” which slithers through the valley almost every day. Intellectuals and artists, including Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and Alberto Giacometti, came here to be inspired. It was easy to see why.
On the first day of the conference, after a drinks reception and the first lecture, we examined one of only seven remaining copies of Thus spoke Zarathustra 4 that Nietzsche printed himself. We were invited to carefully touch the thin book and to notice Nietzsche’s handwriting on the blue cover page. In another box lay a first edition of German scholar Oscar Levy’s English translation of Ecce Homo, published in 1910. Levy’s granddaughter, Julia Rosenthal, told us the story of how Levy fled Germany and its antisemitism in the 1890s for England, where he became a Nietzsche scholar. After dinner, we reconvened for another lecture — this one on the question of self-criticism according to Nietzsche.
The next day, we toured the Nietzsche House. A permanent exhibit presented the philosopher’s famous fans from the last century — among them the Romanian-born French poet Paul Celan and the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. There was also a tribute to Mazzino Montinari, the Italian communist editor who founded the Nietzsche Colloquium in 1978. Back then, the event was still held in the Nietzsche House, and the few attendees would sleep in the guest rooms. Montinari would come down the creaking stairs in the morning to smoke a cigarette as young Nietzsche scholars quizzed him in the same kitchen where Nietzsche had once eaten.
At night they, too, drank wine and debated philosophy. Today, a photograph of Montinari standing outside the house, cigarette in hand, hangs on the wall. Here, people are not just fans of Nietzsche, but fans of his fans.
The colloquium “is always enlightening,” a woman in her 50s, who has attended 10 of these events, told me. It is the highlight of her year. There’s just something about being around educated people, and the atmosphere of the hotel, she said.
One philosophy student, who was there for the third time, complained that Nietzsche, because of his high regard for the aristocracy, seemed to attract people who have money. “They don’t go to Nietzsche to reflect on or question themselves, but to confirm their beliefs.” But the student added that true Nietzscheans — people who believe in him like a prophet — also sometimes attend. Last year, a guest went on stage and got down on all fours to demonstrate the Über-Tier — the idea, which Nietzsche mentions only briefly in Human, all too Human (1878), that people believe they are the most supreme animal. The bizarre performance showed how seriously some people take Nietzsche here, the student said.
A handful of guests were attending the conference for the first time. I met a woman who fell in love with Nietzsche when she read Beyond Good and Evil (1886) at 16 and went on to study philosophy as an undergraduate. Another guest said he had recently retired and enrolled in a university philosophy course; over the next four days, he was hoping to deepen what he had learned about Nietzsche in his first seminar. One woman had stumbled into the colloquium by chance; she was in the area to hike, but the weather was bad.
Also Spruce Zarathustra, one of the surviving seven copies of the first edition, printed by Nietzsche himself.
*
Deciphering Nietzsche is like learning a secret language. His prose veers wildly from judgments full of disgust to wonder at the beauty of the world (he describes a day in Switzerland’s Upper Engadine, the region that includes Sils Maria, as “containing within itself all opposites, all gradations between ice and south”). He is also known to conjure up vivid images to convey abstract ideas. In Ecce Homo, when he talks about a previous work, Twilight of the Idols, whose hypothesis is that “the old truth is coming to an end,” he writes: “A great wind blows through the trees, and all around fruits drop down — truths.”
Sometimes he sounds like a disgruntled newspaper columnist (“The English diet too … is profoundly at odds with my own instinct; it seems to me that it gives the spirit heavy feet — the feet of Englishwomen…”); other times, like a writer of mystical fairytales (“We have an as yet undiscovered land ahead of us, whose borders no man has yet descried, a land beyond all previous lands and corners of the ideal, a world so over-rich in what is beautiful, alien, questionable, terrible and divine”).
His grasp of language and unexpected turns of phrase made him one of the most read, quoted and debated philosophers of the past century. In 1932, the German writer Kurt Tucholsky quipped: “Tell me what you need, and I’ll get you a Nietzsche quote for that.”
Nietzsche also contained contradictions. He railed against religion, but the titular character of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a religious figure, and Ecce Homo is full of biblical references. He wrote things like, “When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality,” but was friends with smart and outspoken women, such as the Russian writer Lou Andreas-Salomé and composer and pianist Cosima Wagner.
Ecce Homo further complicates attempts to understand who Nietzsche really was. In it, Nietzsche portrays himself as healthy even though he was ill. He claims he is Polish even though he was German. He makes himself out as successful even though objectively he was not. He writes about glowing friendships even though he was isolated. In one of the colloquium’s most well-received lectures, Anthony Jensen, a professor from Providence College who is on the editorial board of Walter de Gruyter’s Nietzsche scholarship series and was previously an associate editor of The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, suggested that this was not a sign of madness but an attempt to rewrite his failures and to heal.
*
On the last day of the conference, the sun was shining, and a cold wind blew from the Maloja mountain pass. The organizers announced the date for next year’s event. The topic, they said, would be “Justice and Violence.”
After the conference concludes, the path to the peninsula in the Sils lake is busy with wanderers. Among them, several from the colloquium, who are taking these final moments to walk the path that Nietzsche himself walked.
I wondered what Nietzsche would make of us attempting to follow in his footsteps. In his foreword to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote in 1888: “I need only to talk with one or other of the ‘educated people’ who come to the Upper Engadine in the summer to convince myself that I am not alive.”
I asked Wolfram Groddek, a professor from Zurich who gave the first lecture of the colloquium, an introduction to the pleasure of reading Nietzsche, what Nietzsche meant by this.
“It means he had no success,” he told me. “The educated people did not understand him.”
https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-23/nietzsche-colloquium-2024?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit+Hub+Daily%3A+December+11%2C+2024&utm_term=lithub_master_list
*
A handful of Nietzsche’s quotations, starting with the three that are my great favorites.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
God is dead, and we have killed him.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
To improve one’s style means to improve one’s thinking.
He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
*
THE FALL OF ASSAD IS A BLOW TO RUSSIA
Until the extraordinary recent events.
Damascus has fallen, Syria's president has been toppled and has, reportedly, flown to Moscow.
Quoting a source in the Kremlin, Russian news agencies and state TV reported that Russia has granted Assad and his family asylum "on humanitarian grounds”.
In a matter of days, the Kremlin's Syria project has unravelled in the most dramatic circumstances, with Moscow powerless to prevent it.
In a statement the Russian foreign ministry announced that Moscow was "following the dramatic events in Syria with extreme concern.”
The fall of the Assad regime is a blow to Russia's prestige.
By sending thousands of troops in 2015 to shore up President Assad, one of Russia's key objectives had been to assert itself as a global power.
It was Vladimir Putin's first major challenge to the power and dominance of the West, away from the former Soviet space.
And a successful one, it had seemed. In 2017 President Putin visited Russia's Hmeimim air base in Syria and declared that it was mission accomplished.
Despite regular reports that Russian airstrikes were causing civilian casualties, the Russian defense ministry felt confident enough to fly international media out to Syria to witness the Russian military operation.
On one such trip I remember an officer telling me that Russia was in Syria "for the long haul”.
But this was about more than just prestige.
In return for military assistance, the Syrian authorities awarded Russia 49-year leases on the air base in Hmeimim and naval base in Tartous.
Russia had secured an important foothold in the eastern Mediterranean.
The bases became important hubs for transferring military contractors in and out of Africa.
A key question for Moscow: what will happen to those Russian bases now?
The statement announcing Assad's arrival in Moscow also mentioned that Russian officials were in contact with representatives of "the Syrian armed opposition”.
The state TV anchor said opposition leaders had guaranteed the security of Russian military bases and diplomatic missions on the territory of Syria.
Russia's foreign ministry says the bases in Syria have been put "on a state of high alert", but claims there is "no serious threat to them at the current time.”
Bashar al-Assad was Russia's staunchest ally in the Middle East. The Kremlin had invested heavily in him. The Russian authorities will struggle to present his toppling as anything but a setback for Moscow.
Still, they're trying… and looking for scapegoats.
On Sunday night Russian state TV's flagship weekly news show took aim at the Syrian army, apparently blaming it for not fighting back against the rebels.
"Everyone could see that the situation was becoming more and more dramatic for the Syrian authorities," anchor Yevgeny Kiselev said.
"But in Aleppo, for example, positions were given up virtually without a fight. Fortified areas were surrendered one after another and then blown up, despite [government troops] being better equipped and outnumbering the attacking side many times over. It's a mystery!”
The anchor claimed that Russia "had always hoped for reconciliation [between different sides] in Syria.”
Then his final point:
"Of course we are not indifferent to what is happening in Syria. But our priority is Russia's own security – what is happening in the zone of the Special Military Operation [Russia's war in Ukraine].”
There's a clear message here for the Russian public.
Despite nine years of Russia pouring resources into keeping Bashar al-Assad in power, Russians are being told they have more important things to worry about.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clygege97qwo
*
What happens to Russian assets in Syria?
With Assad’s demise, the future of Russia bases in Syria — its only military foothold outside the former Soviet Union — is in question.
The number of Russian warplanes at Hemeimeem air base has shrunk from several dozen to just a few, although it continues to be a key logistics point. Russian military cargo planes ferrying private contractors and supplies to Africa used it for refueling, and its loss would pose logistical problems for operations there.
“The importance of Syria for Russia’s operations in Africa has been invaluable,” Moscow-based Middle East expert Nikolai Sukhov said in televised comments.
The Tartus naval base is used by Russian warships for maintenance, refueling and replenishing supplies on visits to the Mediterranean. While opposition forces that eventually ousted Assad swept across Syria in late November, the Russian navy and air force held drills in the eastern Mediterranean, with Tartus as its operational center.
Even as Putin granted Assad and his family an asylum in Russia, Moscow reached out to the new Syrian authorities to try to ensure the security of its bases and to extend their stay. An opposition flag quickly was hoisted at the Syrian Embassy in Moscow.
Asked about the bases, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be a topic for future discussions with the new authorities.
“For now, we are witnessing a period of transformation and extreme instability, so it will obviously take time and require a serious conversation with those who will have power,” he said.
Syria’s new leaders reportedly promised not to attack Russian military facilities.
Bronwen Maddox, director and chief executive at Chatham House, noted in a commentary that “whatever government emerges in Damascus is expected – for the moment -– to respect the deal that Assad struck granting Russia use of a military base on the Syrian coast.”
But she added that this “important asset is vulnerable,” and that risks Russia’s regional influence.
What does Assad’s demise mean for Russia?
Assad’s rapid downfall dealt a heavy blow to Putin at a time when he is preparing for a new U.S. administration and what that means for the war in Ukraine. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to negotiate an end to the conflict.
Many observers note that the humiliating loss of Russia’s only ally in the Middle East has dented Kremlin prestige on the global stage and could weaken Putin’s hand in any negotiations on Ukraine.
“The key issue is how Moscow will now try to adapt to the new realities and whether it will have enough flexibility to deal with the new masters of Syria, who seem to be interested in avoiding conflict with Moscow for now,” Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center wrote in a commentary.
There is also the possibility that Putin could take an even more uncompromising stance in negotiations to avoid looking weak.
“Assad’s collapse has also shaken Putin, making him less inclined to demonstrate flexibility with Ukraine,” Stanovaya added. “The war in Ukraine has, to some extent, cost him Syria, which reinforces his unwillingness to compromise.”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-syria-assad-ukraine-war-31fa9b933372b3704ed285c96863892b
Hongquan Cand:
Do you know what the pinnacle of injustice is? Please join us in welcoming Syria's new leader, Abu Mohammed al Golani. Opposition political activists will no longer have to worry about being secretly imprisoned. They will be beheaded or burned alive publicly on the street.
Derek Owen:
The Middle East will always be a shithole as long as Islam exists.(Israel excluded, the only civilized country in the region.)
Rai:
Breaking: In over 300 targeted strikes during the past 24 hours, Israel destroyed the entire air force of Syria, including all aircrafts (MiG and Sukhoi), all helicopters, and all anti-aircraft systems.
*
Putin Assad
Putin stayed away from public since the fall of Assad — every time a disaster happens, Putin disappears.
If you remember, Assad immediately flew to Putin when the rebels attacked Aleppo — that was on November 28. Putin was in Astana, at the meeting with military allies of Russia’s “NATO” (the Collective Security Treaty Organization — CSTO).
Formally, CSTO unites 6 post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.
De-facto, Armenia is out — after Russia refused to help them in Sep. 2023, when Azerbaijan returned its Artsak (Nagorny Karabakh), which Armenia was occupying since 1994. Putin was unwilling to help Armenia not only because Azerbaijan was backed by Turkey, but also because all the Russian forces were involved in Ukraine.
A year later, Erdogan’s allies came for Syria.
Russia is still overextended in Ukraine, but this may end soon — and there never would be a better time. That’s another yatagan in Putin’s back. And another Putin’s ally left helpless at the time of need.
Assad begged Putin for a statement that Russia would stand against the rebels to protect him with boots on the ground — but Putin decided to only help with the forces he had available in Syria. And Syria for a long time was the place where commanders who badly screwed up in other places were sent. So, it was a cesspool of corruption and incompetence.
The most capable force in Syria has always been ‘Wagner’ — but Putin killed Prigozhin in August 2023 and then destroyed ‘Wagner’.’
Russian ministry of foreign affairs states that they hope to build relations with the new Syrian government — but only a few days ago they called them “terrorists” and bombed the hospitals at Idlib, where the group was based for years.
If Russia can’t get agreement to keep its military bases on the Syrian coast, it may not be able to continue operating in Africa, supporting its militants who run diamond and gold mines in Burkina-Faso and Mali.
Putin’s inability to support the dictators he’s propping at time of need may also encourage his protégés seek other patrons.
The loss of Syria is an enormous geopolitical blow to Putin — not only at the external stage, but also among the ranks of the Russian military.
Over 120 Russian officers and hundreds of soldiers died in Syria, and Putin refused to even make an effort to defend the cities they spent years taking. It only took 10 days to dismantle Russia’s 10-year involvement.
Hundreds of Russian soldiers and officers were surrounded, as rebel forces approached — and Putin just left them.
While Putin took care to evacuate Assad and his family, the Russian servicemen and their families haven’t been warned in advance to evacuate. All the FSB and GRU operatives, as well as Russian civilians who worked in Syria, were left behind. Some of them, no doubt, will end up dead — as I said, Russian pilots were bombing Iblib hospitals just days ago. “Russia” and “Assad” are basically synonyms in Syria.
Reportedly, around 7,000 Russian soldiers and officers were in Syria. Let’s say, they are evacuated back to Russia — what stories will they tell their comrades? If Putin decides to throw them into fighting Ukrainians, will they be willing to give it their best?
The loss of Syria and Putin’s abandonment of Russian troops had a huge demoralizing effect on Russian military bloggers — who are actually talking to soldiers fighting at the front in Ukraine.
The military bloggers posting anonymously have a very sarcastic view of Putin as the result of Russia’s Syria disaster – despite having the example of imprisoned Girkin in front of them.
Former “war hero” of Donbas wars Igor Girkin was imprisoned for his critique of Putin in July 2023.
Even the most vocal western promoters of the idea “give Putin what he wants, or it’s WW3” now have no ground to stand on — Putin was humiliated in Syria, his military lost, and he simply quietly retreated — no WW3, not even nuclear threats, and his propagandists now insist that “Russia doesn’t need Syria at all.”
The parallels to the situation in Ukraine are apparent.
We now know what will happen when Putin loses.
And not only we know that, but Putin’s commanders know it, too. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
*
ISRAEL DEVASTATES SYRIAN AIR FORCE
The numbers include 80% of the short-to medium-range SA-22, also known as the Pantsir-S1; and 90% of the Russian SA-17 medium-range air defense system, also known as the Buk. Both Russian-made systems had posed challenges to the IAF during its so-called campaign between campaigns — or Mabam, as it's known by its Hebrew acronym — aimed at countering Iranian weapon deliveries to Hezbollah in Lebanon and attempts by Iran-backed groups to gain a foothold in the country, which began in 2013.
Only a handful of air defense systems now remain in Syria, and they are not considered a major threat to the IAF, which says it can operate freely across the country's skies. "The Syrian air defense array is one of the strongest in the Middle East and the blow caused to it is a significant achievement for the Air Force's superiority in the region," the IDF says. The new freedom of aerial action also brings the IAF new opportunities. If in the past, the IAF would not fly directly over Damascus when carrying out strikes on Iran-linked targets in the capital, it now can. The IAF can also send surveillance drones over the Syrian capital without the fear of them being shot down by the advanced Russian-made air defense systems.
While the Iran-backed Assad regime has fallen, Israel still will operate over Syria to ensure that advanced weapons from the former government's army do not reach Hezbollah in Lebanon or any other group hostile to Israel in the region. The bombing campaign on Sunday and Monday, which began hours after Assad's regime fell, also hit Syrian airbases, weapon depots, weapon production sites, and chemical weapons sites, in addition to the air defense systems. The strikes destroyed hundreds of missiles and related systems, 27 fighter jets, 24 helicopters, and more. A total of 1,800 munitions were used in the strikes, taking out nearly every site of "strategic military capabilities" that Israel was aware of.
The IDF assesses that it did not destroy all of the Assad regime's military capabilities, and Hezbollah will most certainly try to get its hands on advanced weapons that were so far spared. The chances of weapons from Syria finding their way to Hezbollah in Lebanon are considered to be high, according to the IDF's assessments. To prevent weapons from reaching Hezbollah, the IAF has bombed all of the border crossings between Syria and Lebanon, leaving just one of them, Masnaa, open for pedestrian traffic. The IAF says it is constantly monitoring the crossings to ensure that Hezbollah does not return to use them for weapon deliveries.
At the same time, the military also believes it has dealt a major blow to the weapon manufacturing capabilities of the entire Iran-led axis, in Lebanon, Syria, and in Iran itself with October's strike in response to Tehran's ballistic missile attack. ~
https://x.com/manniefabian/status/1867222919165739042
Charles:
So wonderful that Putin is blaming the Syrian army for not fighting back. But they did fight back and lost “Russia” and “Assad” are basically synonyms in Syria. This will certainly prove to be demoralizing to the Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Oriana:
*
GAZA CLERICS DISAGREE OVER OCTOBER 7
Salmon al-Diyah
Hamas's attack on Israel on Oct. 7 last year, which sparked the current Gaza war, has sparked debate among Palestinian clerics. Some clerics say the attack was not worth the heavy civilian casualties that followed, while others blamed the October 7 attack on Muslims.
In response to questions posted by Gaza residents on an online messaging platform, prominent preacher Salman al-Diyah said Muslim leaders should avoid going to war if the harm done to civilians outweighs the gains.
If damage to religion, life, honor, children or wealth or land grabbing increases, let alone destroying "the foundations of life", he said, the fighters must question the wisdom of the struggle.
Diyah beliefs in Gaza are revered by ordinary people and Islamists. He also has influence among Palestinians in the West Bank.
A former senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist movement in the Arab world, he was also close to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders and leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, but later pursued more moderate Islam.
Al-Diyah says: "Whenever the goals and objectives of jihad are not likely to be achieved due to the absence or lack of its pillars, causes or conditions, it should be avoided.”
Last year's Hamas attack on Israel, which shattered Israel's invincibility, marked the bloodiest day in Israel's history, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli statistics.
Israel reacted strongly to the attack, and according to the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 44,000 people have been killed and more than 103,000 injured in Israeli attacks in Gaza.
The Gaza Strip has now become a land full of rubble, and more than two million people in the area are seeking food, fuel, water and sanitation.
But on Monday, a group called a "group of clerics" in Gaza issued a statement defending Hamas' attack on Israel as "a legitimate act and the fulfillment of a jihadi duty, and without doubt its legitimacy.”
However, the issue of the timing of the attack and its circumstances remains to be examined, the statement said.
"But such considerations and accusations are not appropriate in time of war, they should be done afterwards, because they have no results at the moment, but rather cause harm," the statement added.
In its statement, the group of clerics said they appreciated al-Diyah's faith and religious status, but warned that his sentence could cause misunderstandings and affect the morale of ordinary Palestinians as well as fighters.
Some Gazans also question the wisdom of Hamas, as it orchestrated an attack that led to a relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Even before the war began, Gaza was struggling with widespread poverty and high unemployment.
For Israelis and Israel's Western allies, Hamas is a terrorist group.
However, Hamas supporters see the group's members as heroes who lead the struggle for the establishment of a Palestinian state, which they say was off the agenda of the international community.
Israel, which has killed several senior Hamas leaders, has vowed to destroy the group. ~ Ex-Muslim Nabi Asli, Quora
Nick:
Notice how none of them appear to be all that concerned with the evil perpetrated by the attack itself, merely about the consequences for the Palestinians.
“it wasn't worth it”, not “it was a terrible thing to do”.
Ben Nahum:
So he wasn't saying that the Hamas attacks were wrong and opposed to Islam..
Just that: ‘in retrospect, it wasn't worth it'.
It's amazing how it took him over a year to reach that conclusion.
Dr Patrick Liew:
If they believe that the Jihad is from the Divine, then the Divine is sending many to death? The Divine is blessing Israel to win the battle?
Carol E. Smith
Only a YEAR too late. What a COWARD.
*
RUSSIA AT ONE OF ITS LOWEST POINTS: THE HEAVY TOLL OF NOVEMBER 2024
November marked one of the darkest chapters for Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine. As the conflict continues, the toll of the war became particularly evident, with both military and civilian losses mounting at an alarming rate. Russia is grappling with significant casualties, stretched military resources, and an increasingly unified resistance from Ukraine and its allies.
The month of November saw intense fighting, with Russia enduring substantial losses, including a heavy death toll among its soldiers and setbacks on key battlefronts. Ukrainian forces, bolstered by continued Western support, made notable gains, putting Russian forces on the back foot in several areas. The war's toll is not only measured in terms of military losses but also in the strain it places on Russia's economy, with international sanctions hitting hard.
President Vladimir Putin's claims of "progress" are increasingly seen as hollow, as Russian troops struggle to maintain their positions. The situation is a stark reminder of the long-lasting impact of the conflict on Russia, both in terms of international standing and domestic stability.
As the war grinds on, the human cost continues to rise. Russia's position in the war appears to be at one of its lowest points, and many wonder how much longer it can sustain this level of loss and international isolation. The outlook for December remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: Russia is facing a serious and growing challenge as the war enters yet another grim phase. ~ Maria Siddika, Quora
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EVERYONE WAS POOR IN THE SOVIET UNION — EXCEPT FOR PARTY OFFICIALS
Everyone was poor in the Soviet Union (which ended in 1991) — absolutely everyone, except top communist officials.
Communist party officials were earning about the same wages, but had access to special party stores with cheap food of great quality. They could buy goods that weren’t available at Soviet stores for regular people.
And only about 2% of people lived like that. My parents were both engineers and were bosses at the factory that was making consumer goods, with 5,000 employees (my mother was chief of factory’s laboratory, and father was chief engineer) — and we lived very poor.
There weren’t even any grains to make porridge with. To buy bread, you had to wait in a queue for an hour before the store opening, and the bread that was delivered would be sold out in 20 minutes — only 1 loaf of bread per person.
People had wages that they earned for 4–5 years in savings in the bank — there was nothing in stores to spend the money on.
To buy any food, you had to stand in a queue for hours. I was little, so my parents were sending me to wait in a store to buy some food after school — parents were at work. Something would be delivered — ham, cheese, eggs, butter, etc. — people would be already standing in a queue waiting. Hundreds of people waiting for hours. Kids, elders, mothers with babies.
Then they would start selling the food — 1 piece per person. You buy whatever it is.
Sometimes the food ends before you and they say, “That’s it, there won’t be anything else for sale today.” You go home and come tomorrow at the opening time.
Parents were sometimes getting some food at work (through the labor union), which they could buy — sugar, tea, pasta, grains for porridge (non-perishables). They were allowed to buy 2–3 kg.
You could buy some semi-rotten potatoes and carrots at veggie shops — by spring, you literally had to dig through dirty unwashed vegetables, trying to find a few that were edible.
Horrible times.
That’s why the Soviet Union collapsed and no one had any problem with that.
It was bad. ~ Elena Gold
Elena Gold:
There were rations for butter, sugar, “meat products” in the USSR in 1980s. After the USSR collapse, the rations were gone, food became available in stores — but the prices were high.
Piotr Bienaszewski:
There was also private farming in Poland, so food was largely available (there were temporary shortages, but these were the exception rather than the rule).
Seth Merango:
Clearly “real communism” was just around the corner! Insane that such a system was clung onto for as long as it was, and now there are certain despots that would love to return to such a system.
Bojacks:
My ex was from Russia, I think you're both around the same age, she may be older. Her name is Elena too, but she preferred I called her Lenochka. She didn't like talking about the old days in Russia and forbid that I went with her as an American to see her family with her. I couldn't imagine how hard it was for her back then.
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GLOBAL WARMING AND THE SPREAD OF FUNGI
In 2009, a patient in Japan developed a new fungal infection on their ear. The highly transmissible Candida auris fungus had been previously unknown to science (and resistant to the drugs available to treat it), but within a few years, cases started emerging in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and South Africa.
Scientists assumed that the spread was due to human travel, but when they sequenced the cases, they were surprised to find that these strains weren't closely related at all. Instead, scientists were seeing multiple, independent infections of an unknown fungal disease, emerging around the world, all at the same time. About a third of people infected with Candida auris die from the infection within 30 days, and there have now been thousands of cases in 47 countries. Some scientists think this sudden boom in global cases is a harbinger of things to come.
Humans should consider ourselves lucky that they don't have to constantly worry about fungal infections. "If you were a tree, you'd be terrified of fungi," says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins university who studies fungal diseases. And if you happened to be a fish, a reptile, or an amphibian, fungus would also be quite high on your list of fears, were you able to enumerate them. (Fungal infections are known to wipe out snakes, fish, corals, insects, and more.) In recent years, a fungal infection called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid) has decimated amphibian populations around the world, with some scientists estimating that chytrid is responsible for population decline in over 500 amphibian species. To put that into context, that's around one out of every 16 amphibian species known to science.
One of the reasons fungal infections are so common in so many creatures is that fungi themselves are ubiquitous. "This is dating myself, but you know the Sting song 'Every Breath You Take'? Well, every breath you take you inhale somewhere between 100 and 700,000 spores," says Andrej Spec, a medical mycologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "They've made it to the space station. They are absolutely everywhere."
Humans can and do get fungal infections (athlete's foot, for starters, and fungal diseases are one of the leading causes of death for immunocompromised people with HIV). But people are generally unlikely to fall to a fungus for one big reason: humans are hot. (Although, if you want to be the pedant at a party, you might enjoy learning that humans are generally not, in fact, the commonly cited 98.6° Fahrenheit (37° C). That number comes from a German study done in 1851. In fact, human body temperature seems to have been cooling recently, and the global average is between 97.5 and 97.9° Fahrenheit (36.4 and 36.6°C.) Warm-blooded environments, in general, tend to be too warm for a fungus to survive. One of Casadevall's studies estimated that 95 percent of fungal species simply cannot survive at average human internal temperature.
You can see this temperature barrier in action when you look at animals that hibernate, which requires dropping their internal temperatures to survive the winter. Bats, for example, have recently suffered huge declines due to white nose syndrome, which infects them while they're hibernating and therefore cooler than usual.
For Casadevall, these findings support his theory about the animal world's long history with fungi. He argues that perhaps our warm-blooded natures evolved specifically to avoid the kinds of fungal infections that can wipe out cold-blooded populations.
Being warm-blooded has its costs. Keeping your body at such a high temperature takes a lot of energy, which requires a lot of food. In fact, some warm-blooded animals have to eat more in a single day than a cold-blooded reptile of the same size would in a whole month. Constantly seeking out food puts you at increased risk of predation (or that toxic gas station meal that could kill you). Why expend all that energy if you can simply bask in the Sun?
Of the many benefits to being warm-blooded, one of them, Casadevall argues, is the fungal filter. He says that this could help explain one of evolution's great mysteries: after the asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, why didn't they simply repopulate and once again dominate the Earth? "If the reptiles were so fit, how come we didn't have a second reptilian age?" he asks. "The reason that we are the dominant animal is because it was a fungal filter," he says. In other words, it was the warm-blooded creatures' resistance to fungal infections that allowed them to become dominant, while the remaining cold-blooded dinosaurs fell to the infections.
This is a tricky theory because it's almost impossible to prove. There are very few places where evidence of fungi, or fungal infections, has been preserved in the fossil record—not because they weren't present, but because fungi tend to be squishy and degradable, not ideal for turning into fossils. "I think it's definitely a fringe theory at this point to say that that's the only thing that happened," says Spec. "But did it contribute? I think it's fascinating, and we probably will never know until we start sequencing stuff and we find invasive mold and things like that in dinosaur fossils, if we ever do."
But even if fungi had nothing to do with the modern age of mammalian dominance, we should still be paying a lot more attention to them. Throughout history, at least according to this theory, we've been protected from fungi because they haven't adapted to live at the temperatures inside our bodies. But as the planet warms, that could change. The most recent global estimates say that without serious intervention, the Earth's temperature could rise 5° Fahrenheit (2.8° C) by the end of the century. And those five degrees could be the difference between fungal resistance and fungal death.
To be sure, fungal infections are already more common in warm locations—the rates of a fungus called cryptococcosis, which can be deadly to people with AIDS, can reach 30 percent in Africa, compared to just 5-10 percent in more temperate regions. But there's still a fine yet crucial line between internal human body temperature and the conditions in tropical environments. For a fungus to live or die, even a few degrees can make all the difference. As the world continues to warm, a growing number of places will approach internal human body temperature more of the time. Sooner or later, the fungi will learn to adapt. And if they do, they might find a whole new set of hosts in us.
This is what Casadevall thinks is happening, at least in part, with the recent surge in Candida auris cases all over the globe. In one study, scientists showed that the fungus is capable of growing and reproducing at higher temperatures than its close relatives. And it might not be the last fungal infection to emerge in our age of climate change—Casadevall estimates that for every 1 degree increase in global temperature, the thermal gradient barrier between our guts and fungi could decrease by 5 percent.
Right now, Casadevall and his colleagues are trying to come up with a list of the most likely fungal species to be able to cross over to humans—species that already live on the threshold of our body temperatures. We're a long way from having that information, as it's not even clear which species we need to worry about most and where those species live.
If all of that wasn't scary enough, doctors don't currently have great tools to fight fungal infections, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, since life-threatening fungal infections have historically been relatively rare in humans, the field is tragically underfunded. In Africa, for example, cryptococcosis kills more people than tuberculosis, but research into cryptococcosis received just 1 percent of the funding allocated to tuberculosis. (In fact, some researchers argue that fungal pathogens should be considered "neglected diseases.") Doctors aren't generally trained in identifying these kinds of infections, and often miss them until it's too late. And even when they do identify them, only three kinds of antifungal drugs exist. Fungi are more closely related to humans than they are to viruses or bacteria, which means that, in general, things that kill them also kill us.
Plus, the fungal infections we're talking about here aren't athlete's foot or dandruff—they're infections within the body that can wreak havoc. Already, over 300 million people globally contract serious fungal infection each year and over 1.5 million of them die. People with certain kinds of infections can develop "fungal balls" inside their lungs. "I have taken care of many patients who've gotten wound infections and horrible, incurable musculoskeletal infections, where the fungus will eventually burrow out and drain," says Spec. And he often has no way of treating these patients. "I can only refer them to hospice because there absolutely is nothing that works against them."
So what happens next, and what should we do? Casadevall gave the same answer every scientist gives to this question: the field needs more funding. "Humanity should be investing more in learning about what is the largest kingdom on the planet," he says.
If the COVID pandemic has shown us anything, it's that we should be better prepared for disease outbreaks. It's relatively clear that we're not ready for the next pandemic, even if it were another coronavirus. Yet we knew far more about coronaviruses as a class than we do about many of these potentially risky fungi. The world of things that could kill us is larger than we thought—and very possibly growing.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/it-s-time-to-fear-the-fungi?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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COLLEGE ENROLLMENT IS FALLING AT “CONCERNING” RATES
College enrollment is dropping at a “concerning” rate, according to new data.
Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped by 5% this fall semester. The data reflects enrollments reported for 1.4 million 18-year-old freshmen as of 31 October 2024.
The decline is most significant at both public and private, non-profit four-year colleges, which have seen a more than 6% decline in enrollment. For 46 states, Inside Higher Ed noted, the average drop was almost 7%.
At prestigious universities with lower acceptance rates, the largest drops in enrollment were among freshmen of color. Black freshmen, for example, enrolled 16.9% less at highly selective public and private, non-profit four-year schools.
The primary reason for the drop, experts say, is more complicated.
Julie J Park, an education professor at the University of Maryland, cited “a national conversation that’s been going on for a while” about a “potential ‘enrollment cliff’”.
The enrollment cliff concept came about within higher education after years of declining birth rates in the US, triggered by the Great Recession. Earlier this year, the CDC released data indicating that the US had hit a historic low in its annual number of births – declining 2% from 2022 to 2023 and then 3% in 2023.
“Since the most recent high in 2007, the number of births has declined 17%, and the general fertility rate has declined 21%,” the August 2024 data shows.
While Park said an seeing an enrollment cliff isn’t occurring just yet, there are other factors with dropping enrollment rates – particularly when it comes to the cost of higher education.
“It could be any number of issues. There are issues related to Fafsa,” Park explained.
The US Department of Education, which administers federal student aid, made changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, to simplify it last year, but efforts backfired. Technical difficulties and glitches caused massive delays in rolling out the application, leaving many without any idea of the kind of financial aid package they might be entitled to and how much college might cost them.
And Fafsa isn’t the only problem.
Park also cited last year’s supreme court ruling as a potential roadblock, referencing the nation’s highest court ruling against Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
Under that loan forgiveness plan, up to $20,000 of an individual’s federal student debt could have been forgiven for borrowers who were also Pell grant recipients; up to $10,000 of debt could have been forgiven for other borrowers. More recently, Republicans have gone after Biden’s other debt relief effort, the Saving on a Valuable Education, or Save, repayment plan. That plan would have cut undergraduate loan payments in half and ensured borrowers would never see their balance grow from unpaid interest.
Millions signed up for the plan, only to see it challenged in court. The move created yet another roadblock for graduates with debt as well as for aspirational college students who hoped to see a more affordable way to pay for an education.
Park noted that there’s also “the competing pressures of the labor market” for prospective students to contend with.
“As work becomes more attractive to some students or individuals, it’s a lot to give up not working and that way to help support your family. And so that’s something that also might be at play,” she said.
The cost of college is the number one barrier to enrolling in higher education for adults not enrolled in such a program, according to a 2024 report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That report also found that for more than three-quarters of the more than 3,000 unenrolled adults polled, cost and the need to work were preventing them from pursuing further education.
Most notably, nearly all adults without a college degree polled said that they felt at least one type of credential is “extremely” or “very” valuable.
Jenny Rickard, the CEO of Common App, one of the websites most widely used by students to apply to colleges every year, echoed this sentiment.
“This new data showing a 5% year-over-year decline in enrollment for 18-year-old freshmen is concerning, but it is not due to students’ declining interest in higher education,” said Rickard, who also served as the chief enrollment and communications officer at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Rickard noted a “continued growth in applications” as something that “underscores that students remain eager to pursue a four-year degree”. She also pointed to “an admissions year wrought with uncertainty” and the aforementioned Fafsa and other affordability concerns as reasons why enrollment is down.
The College Board found in-state tuition at public four-year colleges and universities costs an average of $11,610, which is $300 higher than last academic year. Out-of-state tuition at the same schools is an average of $30,780, a whopping $940 higher in just one year.
Rickard pointed to Common App’s end-of-season report for the 2023–24 application cycle, which showed a 7% increase in students applying to four-year colleges. This includes a 12% rise in applicants from low- and middle-income backgrounds.
“It’s crucial that we, as a higher education community, double down on our commitment to supporting students,” she said. “That means not only ensuring they feel welcome on campus, but also addressing the affordability and accessibility obstacles that stand in their way.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/08/college-enrollment-declining
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THE MOURNFUL SONG OF ICEBERGS
Antarctica’s biggest icebergs act like giant tuning forks when they collide with each other and the sea floor
From the surface, the ice shelves of Antarctica are vast, white deserts – almost featureless save for a few ruts and crevices. Occasionally, cracks as long as a small country can widen and a piece breaks off, forming huge icebergs that drift out into the Southern Ocean.
When played at frequencies audible to human ears, it could easily be mistaken for whale song. But in fact, the noise is produced by the grinding and scraping of the craggy underside of these icebergs on the seafloor and as they rub against each other. The resulting song can be detected thousands of miles away in the far-off waters of the Indian Ocean.
"An iceberg plate works as a tuning fork," says Alexander Gavrilov, a professor at the Centre for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Australia. "The song frequencies depend on iceberg's dimensions."
It is a haunting lament to the final, inevitable fate of all icebergs. As they drift into warmer waters, they begin to collapse and the sounds they produce change from a song to a raucous clanging.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic Ocean, icebergs create a different, but almost as deafening, noise as they calve off Greenland's enormous tongues of glacier ice and break apart.
Now, at both ends of the planet, scientists are tuning into the music of icebergs in the hope of gaining new insights into the birth and death of icebergs, and how climate change is altering these processes.
"These are really powerful noises," says Vera Schlindwein, a professor of polar and marine seismology at the University of Bremen in Germany and a researcher with the Alfred Wegener Institute's Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. "When they were first discovered, research on iceberg sounds was mainly just out of curiosity."
With modern satellite imagery and the ability to set up seismic and acoustic monitoring systems close to the source of the sounds, that is now changing, says Schlindwein.
In the Antarctic, the effects of climate change are a complicated picture. Some parts of the continent are warming far faster than others, while in some areas the extent and thickness of the ice shelves that stretch out over the ocean, along with the amount of seasonal sea ice, has been increasing. One signal that has emerged in recent years is extreme variability in conditions around the frozen continent. And this has a corresponding effect on the icebergs Antarctica gives birth to.
The amount of noise produced by icebergs waxes and wanes on many different timescales. The tides generate movement on a daily basis that causes neighboring icebergs to rub against each other or grind the seafloor, the frequency of the noise they produce changing with the speed of that grinding. There are seasonal signals too – the amount of noise generated by icebergs in the Southern Ocean goes up and down as Antarctica moves from summer to winter. As giant icebergs collapse in the warmer temperatures, enormous blocks crash into the ocean, generating a cacophony of deep booming sounds and "bloops" that radiate out across the ocean.
Variation over longer timeframes, however, is much more mixed. One study in the South Atlantic, for example, found that as total iceberg volume decreased between 2004 and 2012, so did the low-frequency noise levels produced by melting icebergs. Others, however, have struggled to see any trends in long-term acoustic recordings. Gavrilov recently did some preliminary analysis of a set of hydroacoustic recordings from between 2002 and 2022, obtained by three listening stations in the Indian Ocean that are used to monitor for nuclear explosions under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. There wasn't any obvious interannual trend, although he cautions a more thorough analysis is needed and the results haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal or made public yet.
Iceberg songs are generated by harmonic tremors that occur when icebergs rub against each other or scrape along the seafloor
The harmonic songs of Antarctic icebergs are particularly difficult to associate with individual events, says Schlindwein. When the strange wailing they produce was first detected in 2002 in recordings taken by hydroacoustic sensors in Polynesia, scientists were able to attribute them to a large iceberg that calved off Antarctica's enormous Ross Ice Shelf. There had been hopes that it might be possible to use these songs as a way of monitoring the break-up of ice around the continent remotely, but as more researchers analysed such recordings, it became apparent that the songs were a near constant noise emanating from the south of our planet.
"It doesn't work for the continuous songs at a distance as you don't know the beginning of the signal," says Schlindwein. "But sometimes icebergs run really powerfully into the ground and make a short earthquake. If you can pick that up on a seismic array and see an iceberg turning in satellite images, you can be say, 'OK, this iceberg has been in ground contact'," she says.
To really understand what is going on you need to get your seismic arrays and hydrophones as close as possible to the icebergs themselves. "It's all a question of logistics," says Schlindwein. "Go to the iceberg, bring your seismometers, leave them out, pick them up again in the next survey.”
That is expensive and time-consuming work. Scientists at the Ukrainian Antarctic research base Vernadsky Station have installed seismic and infrasound detectors to monitor the ice cap and glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula. Although the 2022 escalation of the war in Ukraine has waylaid their research, the equipment is allowing them to monitor avalanches and iceberg calving remotely, says Alex Liashchuk, a geophysicist working at the State Space Agency of Ukraine, who was one of those leading the project.
"The data is sent to Ukraine, and the staff at the Antarctic station maintain the equipment," he says.
In the Arctic, however, it is a different story. Here the icebergs don't sing as they don't reach the kind of sizes needed for this, but the underwater booms as glacier ice calves off into fjords, the roar as they tumble through the water and clangs as the icebergs break apart offer a window into the effects of climate change. Scientists have also detected the underwater crackle of bubbles being released from the melting glacier ice in fjords.
Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, have found they can estimate levels of ice loss from Arctic glaciers from the underwater noise produced. Such techniques are proving to be particularly useful during winter, when sea ice makes accessing such areas difficult. Scientists working around Svalbard in Norway, for example, found underwater noise associated with melting could help to identify abnormal spikes in sea temperatures. These events are often related to sudden intrusions of warm water due to extreme cyclone events – sometimes called weather bombs – and may play an important role in the loss of Arctic.
Some researchers are now hoping to use acoustic arrays deployed in the Arctic to help them monitor rates of iceberg calving from glaciers over longer timescales to help them spot changes that are occurring annually as the climate warms.
Schlindwein herself is planning a project next summer where she will install seismometers in front the Nioghalvfjerdsbrae glacier in Greenland. "There's a lot of local seismicity there," she says. "It may be related to the contact of icebergs with the ground or crashing against something."
But the noise produced by icebergs isn't just of interest to climate researchers. It could also be affecting the marine wildlife around the poles.
The sounds produced by calving icebergs in Greenland, for example, are the loudest natural source of noise in the Arctic. One recording of an iceberg breaking off the Bowdoin Glacier in Greenland in July 2019 produced a "detonation-like" sound that lasted for around 30 minutes and was equivalent to an explosion of 0.1-7.6 tonnes TNT. The event, produced noise in frequencies that also happen to be within the same frequency range as that used by the enigmatic horned Arctic sea mammal, narwhals.
"The loudest noise is usually associated with iceberg capsize, which occurs after calving at glacial fronts," says Evgeny Podolskiy, an associate professor at the Arctic Research Center of Hokkaido University in Japan. "Calved icebergs are gravitationally unstable. After rupturing off, the iceberg rotates, may even pop-up above the level of the calving front, hit the newly formed ice cliff, and disintegrate further into smaller and smaller chunks."
There are more than 200 glaciers that spill ice into the ocean around Greenland, so together they contribute a significant amount of noise to the marine environment, says Podolskiy.
Podolskiy and his colleagues have suggested that the noise produced by calving icebergs could pose a risk to the hearing of narwhals and other sea mammals.
"The animals can be very close to such events and that the corresponding sound exposure may lead to direct mechanical damage to their hearing," says Podolskiy. But during their observations of narwhals during calving events, the creatures don't seem to adjust their calls to compensate for the background noise.
In the Southern Ocean, however, iceberg noise may be having a direct effect on the calls produced by the largest animals on the planet. Scientists have found that the songs of blue whales have been getting deeper in pitch over the past several decades. They also get louder at certain times of the year. This, the researchers from University of Brest, France, suggest, could be because the whales are compensating for changes in the noise produced by icebergs as the climate changes as the harmonic songs produced by giant icebergs occur at similar frequencies to the calls of blue whales and other whales in the Southern Ocean.
But without long-term data tying changes in iceberg behavior around Antarctica to changes in noise, it is hard to be completely sure what effect climate change may be having, warns Schlindwein.
Note the penguins
And if predictions for how rising ocean temperatures will alter the polar regions come to pass, there could be some dramatic changes ahead. The icebergs could stop singing altogether.
Research suggests that rising ocean temperatures are increasing the level of melting at the bottom of the vast ice sheets that project out over the sea from the continental landmass of Antarctica. This is thinning the ice shelves – which can be up to 600m (1,980ft) thick – in many places, leaving them more fragile and vulnerable to calving events. But it could also mean the icebergs themselves will fragment into smaller pieces, meaning fewer of the really vast tabular icebergs that can travel far out over the Southern Ocean, creating unique ecosystems around them as they melt.
Thinner ice sheets will also mean they are less likely to scrape along the seafloor when icebergs do break off. Less sea ice would also mean icebergs would be freer to drift around. But the noise of smaller icebergs breaking apart could also increase, says Schlindwein.
"I really wouldn't want to predict what would happen," says Schlindwein.
But if the iceberg songs were to disappear, it would be one more natural wonder lost to the world.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241206-how-the-sounds-of-icebergs-reverberate-around-the-world
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WHY THE HUMAN BRAIN IS SO LARGE
A new study has finally provided a reason for why our brains evolved to be so large: the microbes in our gut. Specifically, the gut may have helped the body to produce enough energy over time to encourage the growth of our most important organ.
The research found that organisms with larger brains compared to body size, like humans and the squirrel monkey (our close evolutionary relative), can – thanks to their digestive microbes – consume more food and generate more energy than those with smaller brains.
It’s the first study showing how microbiota in your gut can create biological differences between animal species.
“I think we all have an innate understanding that the gut and the brain are linked. We talk about ‘feeling it in the gut’, and we know that stress and anxiety often lead to gut symptoms," first author of the study, Northwestern University Associate Professor Katherine Amato, told BBC Science Focus.
"However, this study goes even further to show how what happens in the gut may actually be the foundation that allowed our brains to develop over evolutionary time.”
There are more than 100 trillion microbes in your gut, which is at least double the number of cells in your body. In total, your gut microbiome weighs around 2kg (4.4 pounds), about the same as a large pineapple.
Scientists were particularly interested in how these tiny gut organisms impacted brain size relative to body size. Humans may not have the biggest brains – that award goes to the sperm whale whose neuro-processing organ is five times bigger. However, humans have a much larger brain-to-body ratio – sperm whales are around 450 times heavier than an average US male over 20 years old.
During the experiments, detailed in journal Microbial Genomics, scientists implanted gut microbes into mice from one of three animals: two large-brained primates – humans and squirrel monkeys – and a smaller-brained primate, the macaque, an African monkey.
Researchers noticed mice with gut microbes from the larger-brained species produced more energy to power brain activity. They also ate more and created higher levels of glucose (which the body uses to fuel energy production). However, the mice with gut microbiota from the smaller-brained primate stored more energy as fat.
“These findings suggest that when humans and squirrel monkeys both separately evolved larger brains, their microbial communities changed in similar ways to help provide the necessary energy,” Amato explained.
Scientists previously believed mice with human microbes would deliver unique results. Instead, they discovered we are more similar to the other large-brained species than they thought.
“While we did see that human-inoculated mice had some differences [from mice with microbes from the other primates], the strongest pattern was the difference between large-brained primates (humans and squirrel monkeys) and smaller-brained primates (macaques),” Amato added.
Researchers are now looking to study other primates to understand how gut microbes influence brain evolution.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/human-brain-evolution?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THEORIES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: A GENETIC-INFLAMMATORY-MICROVASCULAR SYNTHESIS
The fact that the schizophrenia syndrome, as currently defined, is relatively common provides important information about the frequency of causal factors. About 1% of the population will experience schizophrenia during the lifespan. Except for a few rare exceptions, this 1% risk is remarkably constant around the globe regardless of culture, geography, or ethnicity. Men and women are affected equally. These facts mean that the risk factors for schizophrenia must also be common and ubiquitous. Given that the
concordance rate for schizophrenia in identical twins is only about 50%, there must be at least two global risk-increasing categories for schizophrenia, i.e., something(s) genetic and something(s) environmental.
To account for the panoply of signs and symptoms seen in schizophrenia, any complete theory of schizophrenia must include organism wide systems. In addition to the nervous system, the immune system and the vascular system are defensible candidates. Both are invoked in the following theory:
~ Some schizophrenia psychoses are the result of damage to the micro-vascular system in the brain initiated by genetically influenced abnormal inflammatory processes acting in response to ubiquitous environmental factors that trigger inflammatory responses, including infection, trauma, or hypoxia. It is the relative infrequency of the vulnerable genotypes in the population that results in only a small proportion developing overt psychosis. ~
We wish to emphasize that our hypothesis specifically identifies the microvascular system as the critical site of inflammation. We postulate that the inflamed micro-vessels lose their coupling with astrocytes [star-shaped glial cells] , leading to disrupted regulation of cerebral blood flow and damage to the blood brain barrier. These disruptions in homeostatic mechanisms then lead to abnormal signal processing. We are proposing a chronic [low-level] inflammation of the vessels alone.
Ongoing neurodegenerative processes are suggested by increased levels of S100B, a small calcium binding astrocytic protein that is involved in inducing apoptosis and modulating proinflammatory cytokines.
The post-strep psychopathologies provide a precedent for the hypothesis of this paper by demonstrating that an infectious process can trigger a series of inflammatory reactions that lead to a variety of somatic and psychiatric syndromes, including psychoses where vascular pathology is implicated.
The pathogenicity of a strep infection is a function of the strain (genotype) of the bacterium and the genetically mediated inflammatory mechanisms of the host and illustrates how a ubiquitous and often relatively benign environmental factor can create more serious sequelae in a limited number of genetically predisposed individuals-true genotype by environment interaction.
The ideas here are not completely new. Eugen Bleuler remarked: "The fragility of the blood vessels which appears in many schizophrenics, both acute and chronic, seems to indicate a real vascular pathology (p.167)." We bring old ideas forward into the light of new understandings offered by molecular genetics and inflammatory diseases.
Since the late 1800's there has been evidence of inflammatory neuro-vascular abnormalities in psychiatric illness that were initiated by infectious agents. Syphilis is the best-known example. This paper expands the concept to suggest that a variety of environmental insults —infection, trauma, anoxia — may follow a common final pathway to psychopathology by stimulating inflammatory processes that damage the capillary-glial-neuron triad.
Another oddity is the negative association between schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis. As postulated for Alzheimer disease, dementia is also less common in people treated for arthritis, the anti-inflammatory treatments for arthritis might reduce the risk of inflammatory brain disease. Neuroleptic treatment may be synergized by addition of anti-inflammatory drugs.
[The mechanisms behind the inverse relationship between schizophrenia and RA are unknown. However,
it's possible that autoimmune disorders and schizophrenia are both
caused by an immune response that's triggered by an environmental
factor, such as an infection.]
Identification of high-risk individuals, combined with such tools as immunizations or anti-inflammatory agents may promote prevention of much psychiatric morbidity. Already, the cytokine regulator and vascular growth factor erythropoietin [a hormone secreted by the kidneys that increases the production of red blood cells in response to falling levels of oxygen in the tissues] is suggested as a possible neuroprotective factor in schizophrenia.
Our use of examples of psychoses associated with known inflammatory-vascular pathologies (e.g. autoimmune CNS vascular disease or infectious CNS vascular disease as seen in syphilis) makes it clear that a vascular-inflammatory theory may apply to a wide range of psychotic conditions that may also include psychoses associated with mood disorders.
The classical genetic studies support the separateness of schizophrenia and mood disorders there are modern molecular signs that schizophrenia and mood disorders share genetic elements in common.
Furthermore, mood disorders, like schizophrenia, show evidence of frontal lobe pathology, enlarged ventricles, abnormal cerebral blood flow and vascular abnormalities]. To what extent all of these changes are epiphenomena of being psychotic (treatment effects or stress, etc) remain debatable.
A broad spectrum of observations leads to a working hypothesis that schizophrenia and, possibly, other psychiatric syndromes are the result of genetically mediated inflammatory reactions that damage the neuron-glial-capillary triad with resultant loss of ability to fine tune regional brain metabolism.
This hypothesis in
corporates genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors. Furthermore, an inflammatory/vascular theory can explain the variety of behavioral symptoms seen in schizophrenia, the variable course of the illness, and the numerous other puzzling observations such as an excess of minor physical anomalies.
~ Daniel R Hanson, Irving I Gottesman
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC554096/
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”HYPOACTIVITY OF THE PREFRONTAL LOBES" IN SCHIZOPHRENIA
refers to a decreased level of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region crucial for executive functions like planning, decision-making, and working memory, which is consistently observed in individuals with schizophrenia, often contributing to the cognitive symptoms of the disorder; this phenomenon is commonly called "hypofrontality" in the context of schizophrenia research.
Key points about prefrontal lobe hypoactivity in schizophrenia:
Neuroimaging evidence:
Studies using techniques like fMRI and PET scans show reduced blood flow and metabolic activity in the prefrontal cortex of individuals with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls.
Cognitive implications:
This hypoactivity is linked to cognitive impairments frequently seen in schizophrenia, including difficulties with working memory, attention, problem-solving, and planning.
Specific regions affected:
While the entire prefrontal cortex can show hypoactivity, research often highlights decreased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), regions particularly involved in executive control.
Negative symptoms:
Hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex is often associated with the "negative symptoms" of schizophrenia, such as flattened affect, alogia (reduced speech), and avolition (lack of motivation).
~ AI-generated summary
Oriana:
One oddity: people who are born blind never become schizophrenic. Not a single case has ever been reported. There is no explanation, though I suspect that 1) no visual output means less risk of sensory overstimulation 2) a blind person learns to concentrate on information coming through the other senses; this early training in deep concentration may be important in learning to tell what matters (I heard one scientist say that all mental dysfunction comes from paying attention to the wrong things).
Another oddity: schizophrenics have abnormal fingerprints.
LACK OF CAPACITY FOR VISUAL “SMOOTH PURSUIT”
In addition, an experienced neurologist can diagnose (or at least consider) schizophrenia by looking at the patient’s eyes. If the patient is incapable of “smooth pursuit” — i.e. smoothly following a moving object, let’s say the neurologist’s moving finger — but his eyes keep “jumping around” from the object to the side and up and down, that can be a tell-tale sign of schizophrenia.
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Oriana:
I realize that I’ve presented a very “biological” picture of schizophrenia, in contrast to the early-childhood stress theories in the past. It’s not that early-life trauma doesn’t matter; it matters, but childhood trauma has been studied extensively, to the detriment of exploring schizophrenia as a brain disease. I have always been interested in differences between siblings; given the same trauma, some children (or adolescents or young adults — schizophrenia often first manifests in late teens), do much better than others — note that even identical twins have only 50% chance of becoming schizophrenic if their sibling is.
There may be a gazillion causes for this, possibly including, to some extent, volition. Based on my own life experience, we often face the question — not always on the conscious level — do you want to practice being strong and cope, or do you want to practice falling apart? I will never forget the moment when I chose to be strong. Yes, I realize that underlying this “choice” is a multitude of factors including both genetics and past experiences — but making a conscious, verbalized choice does carry a significant weight.
To those who are prone to say, “Oh, that’s just your unconscious making the decision that life is worth living,” I reply, “Yes, that may well be, but let’s not try to dismiss or diminish what happens on the conscious level.” At the same time, when the protective effect of having a pet dog is being discussed, I don’t think it makes sense to speak strictly in terms of improved microbiome and thus a better immune system. First of all, we need to note a massive release of positive emotions that a child experiences when interacting with his beloved puppy.
At the same time, I am all for research into fields such as abnormal proteins in schizophrenia. If it’s obvious that we should study such proteins in Alzheimer’s disease, then it should be just as obvious that we ought to be examining protein abnormalities associated with schizophrenia.
Below is the link to an interesting video on schizophrenia that's critical of the heavy use of antipsychotics. It's long, but for those with special interest in mental illness, it will be worth it:
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OLIVE OIL LOWERS THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
A daily spoonful of olive oil could lower your risk of dying from dementia, according to a new study by Harvard scientists.
For more than 92,000 adults observed over 28 years, consuming at least 7 grams — a bit over half a tablespoon — of olive oil daily was linked with a 28% lower risk of dementia-related death, compared with those who never or rarely ate olive oil, found the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The study is the peer-reviewed and finalized version of an abstract — early research the authors presented in July 2023 at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting. To the authors’ knowledge, it was also the first to investigate whether the Mediterranean diet staple is linked with risk of death from the disease.
“Our study reinforces dietary guidelines recommending vegetable oils such as olive oil and suggests that these recommendations not only support heart health but potentially brain health, as well,” study coauthor Anne-Julie Tessier, a research associate in nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a news release for the abstract last year. “Opting for olive oil, a natural product, instead of fats such as margarine and commercial mayonnaise, is a safe choice and may reduce the risk of fatal dementia.”
At the beginning of the study, research participants were age 56 on average. The pool included nearly 60,600 women who had participated in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1990 to 2018, and nearly 32,000 men who had been in the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study during the same period. The former study investigated risk factors for major chronic diseases among women in North America, while the latter is looking into the same topics but for men.
The authors of the latest study assessed participants’ diets every four years via a questionnaire and the Alternative Healthy Eating Index, which assigns ratings to foods and nutrients predictive of chronic disease. The higher someone scores on this index, the better.
Replacing 5 grams — around 1.2 teaspoons — of margarine or mayonnaise consumed daily with olive oil was associated with an 8% to 14% lower risk of death from dementia. The results of substituting with other vegetable oils or butter weren’t significant, the authors found.
Participants with the APOE e4 gene — the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease — were five to nine times more likely than noncarriers to die from dementia, but the findings regarding olive oil still stood after the authors took this factor into account.
Duane Mellor, a registered dietitian who wasn’t involved in the study, noted in July that the research doesn’t prove a causal relationship, but rather an association.
“More research is needed,” Mellor, the Aston Medical School lead for nutrition and evidence-based medicine at Aston University in the United Kingdom, said in a news release.
Lowering dementia risk
The potential benefits of olive oil for brain health could be due to antioxidant compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier, directly affecting the brain, Tessier said.
“It is also possible that olive oil has an indirect effect on brain health by benefiting cardiovascular health,” she added.
Though participants’ overall diet quality didn’t make a difference in the findings, those who consume olive oil may have overall healthier lifestyles.
“There are many, many differences between people who consume olive oil and those who do not, and it is never possible to fully account for all possible confounding factors,” said David Curtis, an honorary professor of genetics, evolution and environment at University College London, said in a July news release.
Additionally, the way the Mediterranean diet was scored — as part of the dietary quality assessment — had “only” nine points and is based on the average intake of the population, Mellor told CNN in a May interview.
“It might be more accurate to use an assessment of diet which looks at a wider number of foods, as more than (nine) things make up a healthy diet,” Mellor added.
Another important point to keep in mind is that about half of dementia cases are caused by vascular disease, Curtis added.
“Anything which improved cardiovascular health, such as not smoking, would be expected to reduce dementia risk,” he said. “It has been shown that olive oil consumption is associated with better cardiovascular health, so one would expect that it would also be associated with lower dementia risk.”
Olive oil has been found to be helpful for health of the heart, brain, bones and more. Besides cooking with olive oil, you can also use it to make salad dressings or vinaigrettes, mayonnaise, pesto or bread dip. People should also remember that when it comes to food and brain function, it’s not just about what we eat, but how we eat, Mellor said.
“Remaining sociable around mealtimes and eating with others can benefit our mental health in the short term and cognitive function as we age,” Mellor added.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/health/olive-oil-dementia-study-wellness
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EFFECTS OF COFFEE ON GUT BACTERIA
Coffee consumption may have a positive effect on gut bacteria, but more research is needed:
Gut bacteria composition: Coffee consumption may increase the abundance of beneficial bacteria like Firmicutes and Actinobacteria, while decreasing Bacteroidetes. One study found that coffee drinkers had up to eight times higher levels of the bacteria Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus than non-drinkers.
Gut health: Coffee may support gut health through its anti-inflammatory properties and compounds like chlorogenic acid, which can promote beneficial bacteria.
Gut microbiota diversity: Moderate coffee consumption may increase gut microbiota diversity.
Bowel function: Moderate coffee consumption may improve bowel function.
Excessive coffee consumption: Drinking more than five cups of coffee per day may be linked to reflux disorders, periodontal diseases, and Crohn's disease.
However, there are conflicting results on the effects of coffee on the gastrointestinal tract. Experts say that eating a fiber-rich diet of various plant foods is the best way to maintain a healthy gut.
From another source:
THE BENEFITS ARE NOT NECESSARILY FROM CAFFEINE
A new study underscores that drinking coffee may alter the composition of your gut microbiome, the environment of microorganisms like bacteria inhabiting your intestinal tract.
Researchers specifically found that regular coffee drinkers had higher levels of a specific strain of bacteria—Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus—than people who don’t usually drink the beverage.
“This study further establishes the fact that there is a specific link between the food we eat and the microbes in our gut,” Kelsey Russell-Murray, MS, RD, a clinical dietitian and founder of the Gut Healthy Dietitian, a virtual private clinic, told Health.
Though scientists know little about L. asaccharolyticus, said study author Nicola Segata, PhD, a professor and head of the laboratory of occupational metagenomics at the University of Trento, it’s possible that the microbe contributes to coffee’s potential ability to protect the heart, brain, and other aspects of health.
Evidence increasingly shows that the bacteria and other microbes in our gut strongly influence overall health, including the development of chronic conditions. “Gut microbiome research continues to be fascinating, and the more we learn only further establishes how wide-reaching the impact of the microbiome is on every aspect of our health,” Russell-Murray said.
The new study, conducted by the nutrition company ZOE and published in the journal Nature Microbiology, builds on previous research finding that coffe e has the strongest food-microbiome association of more than 150 food and drinks. “The single food having the biggest impact on the composition of the gut microbiome was—by far—coffee,” Segata, who was also involved in that research, told Health.
Intrigued by this finding, the research group designed a study examining how coffee might interact with the gut microbiome in more detail. (“The fact that we love coffee in my lab also helped,” Segata added.)
The team looked at 23,115 participants from the United States and the United Kingdom involved in the ZOE PREDICT research program, the Mind–Body Study, and the Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study. The group was diverse in terms of health status.
Participants had their gut flora analyzed via metagenomics, a technique that can glean insights into gut microbiome composition based on sequencing the genetic content of stool samples. They also filled out questionnaires about their coffee intake.
“One advantage we have when working on coffee, but not for most other foods, is that it’s relatively easy to obtain accurate information about coffee drinking habits,” Segata explained. “Most of us either never drink coffee or drink coffee one or more times every single day—and usually the same type of coffee.”
Researchers divided participants by coffee intake: People who drank less than three cups per month were categorized in the “never” group, those who drank more than three cups daily were considered “high,” and everyone in between was in the “moderate” group.
After analyzing the gut flora of participants in each group, the team isolated L. asaccharolyticus as the microbe most associated with coffee intake.
Levels ranged from 4.5 to eight times higher in the “high” group compared to the “never” group and 3.4 to 6.4 times higher in the “moderate” group versus the “never” group. The difference between the “high” and “moderate” groups was only 1.4-fold and not statistically significant in most cohorts.
These links were consistent regardless of the health status of participants and across the U.S. and U.K. populations, meaning the findings are “rather independent from the type of coffee and the composition of the general diet,” Segata explained.
Additionally, the researchers validated the results through test-tube experiments, where they isolated L. asaccharolyticus and analyzed its growth when supplemented with coffee. The bacteria grew with caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, suggesting the findings aren’t necessarily related to caffeine.
Chlorogenic acid
It’s possible that chlorogenic acid, a polyphenol found in coffee believed to contribute to its health benefits, may be behind coffee’s encouragement of L. asaccharolyticus growth, the study noted. After being metabolized, chlorogenic acid produces metabolites like caffeic acid and quinic acid, which stimulate the growth of microbes like Bifidobacterium animalis, Bifidobacterium lactis, and Escherichia coli. Researchers found more quinic acid in the blood of coffee drinkers with higher L. asaccharolyticus levels, suggesting that chlorogenic acid may also help that microbe thrive.
“[With] growing this bacterium in vitro, we have seen that it grows faster if you add coffee to the culture medium,” study author Paolo Manghi, PhD, said in a press release.
https://www.health.com/coffee-change-gut-microbiome-health-8756603#:~:text=Drinking%20coffee%20can%20support%20the,1
DRINKING THREE CUPS OF COFFEE A DAY ASSOCIATED WITH LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE
Drinking three or more cups of coffee each day has been associated with lower blood pressure readings, according to new research published last month in the journal Nutrients.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers at Sant’Orsola-Malpighi University Hospital in Bologna, Italy, found that self-reported regular coffee drinkers had significantly lower readings of both peripheral and central aortic blood pressure, compared to non-coffee drinkers.
“In our study, carried out on a large population sample, we observed that current consumers of three or more cups per day have lower peripheral and central blood pressure—a marker of arterial stiffening or aging—compared with non-drinkers,” study author Arrigo F. G. Cicero, PhD, an associate professor at Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, told Health.
People who consume less than three cups of coffee daily may even see blood pressure benefits. “The trend seems to be positive from two cups of coffee per day,” Cicero said.
With an estimated 66% of Americans drinking coffee every day—more than any other beverage including tap water—the drink has the potential to greatly impact the lives and health of the nation. Here’s how the new study adds to the current research on coffee and heart health, and what experts have to say about reaching for an extra cup—or two—of coffee each day.
The new study joins a large body of previous research on the interplay between coffee and cardiovascular health—and it may help begin to piece together the complicated relationship between coffee, caffeine, and blood pressure.
Although the benefits of coffee include a lower risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cognitive decline, among other things, the effect of coffee on blood pressure is still unclear—primarily due to the known impacts of caffeine on blood pressure.
“Caffeine is only one of the several coffee components and certainly not the only one with an active role.” Cicero said in a news release. “We know that caffeine can increase blood pressure, but other bioactive components in coffee seem to counterbalance this effect with a positive end result on blood pressure levels.”
To look more closely at the impact of coffee on blood pressure, Cicero and his team examined data from 720 men and 783 women who were involved in the Brisighella Heart Study—an ongoing study that has been in place since 1972 and is a randomized sample that’s representative of a rural town in Northern Italy.
The researchers analyzed data on participants’ self-reported coffee drinking habits, as well as blood pressure readings and other cardiovascular health markers.
“The results are very clear: peripheral blood pressure was significantly lower in individuals consuming one to three cups of coffee a day than in non-coffee drinkers,” Cicero said in the news release.
“Specifically, they found this [coffee’s link to lower blood pressure] to be true when measuring both the central aortic and peripheral pressure, which is furthest away from the heart,” Don Pham, MD, cardiologist at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Southeast Hospital, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Health. “Prior to this study, most research done in this area looked at mainly the peripheral pressures, which some experts believe may not be as accurate as the central pressure measurements.”
These benefits were seen despite coffee’s caffeine content—which makes experts believe that any blood pressure-lowering effects coffee has likely come from antioxidants found in the beverage. [O: caffeine is also an anti-oxidant]
“Intuitively, one would expect coffee to raise your blood pressure from the caffeine but, in fact, experts believe that there are several antioxidant compounds in your cup of java that counteract this to lower your blood pressure,” Dr. Pham said.
“The antioxidant substances included in coffee (flavonoids, as quercetin, caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid, but also tannins) could exert an anti-inflammatory effect on the inner wall of the artery, exerting a kind of anti-aging effect on the vessel,” Cicero said. “This could prevent the artery wall stiffening.” In fact, previous research has shown that flavonoids like quercetin could help modulate blood pressure. Chlorogenic acid and caffeic acid have also been linked to lower numbers.
While the new findings are promising, they should be interpreted with caution, said Bibhu D. Mohanty, MD, assistant professor of cardiovascular sciences and director of the Neuro-Cardiac Program at the University of South Florida.
According to Dr. Mohanty, the study has some limitations—namely due to its self-reported data. “The metric used in this study is ‘cups’ of coffee,” he said. “Right off the bat, what is a ‘cup’? Every single individual, within each country, within each coffee growing region, and between commercial allegiances, defines ‘cup’ differently.”
It’s also important to remember that coffee drinking is just one factor in the bigger picture of healthy (or not-so-healthy) lifestyle.
“It could very well be that a person drinking three cups has a more active lifestyle or more demanding employment responsibilities, and that activity level—not the coffee itself—is the driving force behind the [blood pressure] effects seen,” Dr. Mohanty said.
Cicero also noted that, since his team’s research focused only on a specific Italian population, its results can’t necessarily be extrapolated to the whole world.
With all the back and forth of research on coffee and your heart, the bottom-line question remains: If you’re not a coffee fan, should you take up the habit for heart health? Or if you’re the several-cups-a-day type, should you continue?
“This data is exciting in that you may receive additional benefits with your blood pressure if you are a coffee drinker. But if you are not already a coffee drinker, then I would not advise you to start now as a means to lower your blood pressure,” Dr. Pham said. “I would recommend instead sticking with a healthy diet and regular exercise, which we know works. Also, don’t forget to avoid the temptation of adding extra sugar or excessive toppings to your drink, ultimately turning it into a full-blown dessert.”
“I would not recommend coffee to lower BP, nor would I ask someone to start if they are not a coffee drinker,” Dr. Mohanty added. “I would simply offer reassurance that if an individual drinks coffee within a normal range, then they need not worry about cardiovascular harm [as long as your doctor hasn’t advised you to reduce stimulants], and, on the contrary, may accrue some benefit.”
https://www.health.com/coffee-drinkers-low-blood-pressure-7109145
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Ending on beauty:
We’ll die in crystal Petropolis
Where
Proserpina rules.
We swallow deadly air with every breath,
And every hour becomes a year of death.
Goddess of oceans, terrible Athena,
Resign your helmet’s stone magnificence.
We’ll die in crystal Petropolis
Where not you, but Proserpina rules.
~ Osip Mandelstam, written in the early years of the Revolution
