New York Street with Moon, *
O trees of life, when will your winter come?
the end of day unspools the richest light.
into words, is it you when the sun
ignites tree after tree
In every poem I can trace
an alphabet of wings.
Which must be you, Angel,
bearing a wreath of clouds.
~ Oriana
Clinique Valmont
Charles:
My favorite lines:
In every poem I can trace
an alphabet of wings.
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RILKE’S WISDOM
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
[In February, 1903, a nineteen-year-old Austrian military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus received a letter whose contents, he hoped, would teach him how to live. “The envelope,” he later wrote, “bore a blue seal and a Paris postmark, weighed heavy in my hand, and presented the same clear, beautiful, confident handwriting on the envelope as the letter itself had from first line to last.” The confidence that Kappus saw in the hand of his correspondent offered an inverse image of the self-doubt that had led him, months earlier, to write to that man—the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Kappus wanted to know if his own poems were any good; he wanted to know what to write and how to be. ~ https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/can-rilke-change-your-life]
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Let everything happen to you:
Beauty and terror.
Just keep on going.
No feeling is final.
Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend.
Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again. Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
~ Letters to a Young Poet
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
~ Letters to a Young Poet
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
~ The Book of Hours
To work is to live without dying.
This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose…
If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.
And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?
A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
There is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?) Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.” ~ The Third Duino Elegy
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
The most fleeting of relation between people is governed by the state of mind they bring to it. Now at once a vastness will enter into it if that vastness is there to begin with. ~ Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence
These things cannot be measured by time. A year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count, but to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!
For beauty’s but the beginning of terror
which we are still just able to endure,
and we adore it so
because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”
~ First Duino Elegy
Oriana:
One of the best known poems by Rilke is The Archaic Torso of Apollo, which ends:
For here there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life.
And Rilke did change my life. I first encountered his poems in a class on modern German poetry, a good half of which focused on Rilke’s New Poems. Next to those poems, the work of others like Gottfried Benn and even Georg Trakl seemed insignificant. I was at that point a beginning poet; Rilke made me understand that what I wrote was not poetry. The class ended, but I kept on reading Rilke. He showed me what poetry was. He taught me seriousness.
Mary:
There is such wisdom in Rilke's letters! "Every angel is terrible": to know that alone is to know everything. His description of the necessity of those who love not to merge, to become less, but to enlarge, to ripen, to embrace the distance between them, seems to me truer and more real than any romantic idea of 'becoming one' — which always means to subsume one in the other, to reduce and give up on your perhaps most important differences. He understands the need for solitude and the necessity of work — that work is love. And he knows that no matter the circumstance the memories of childhood alone are a treasury of substance and inspiration. The imagination is never empty. Patience and receptiveness will be richly rewarded.
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MASSIVE UKRAINIAN DRONE STRIKE
Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack in the early hours of Wednesday, April 9, claiming that 158 drones were allegedly shot down over Russian territory and the temporarily occupied Crimean Peninsula.
The head of North Ossetia, Sergey Menyaylo, said:
“A drone attack was repelled in the Mozdok district. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, 15 drones were destroyed by air defense systems.” He insisted there were “no casualties or destruction,” while adding that a “drone danger alert” is in effect across North Ossetia.
The Mozdok airbase, which was reportedly targeted, is used by Russia to launch Tupolev strategic bombers and MiG-31K (NATO: “Foxhound”) fighter-bombers involved in missile strikes against Ukraine.
The Mozdok airbase, which was reportedly targeted, is used by Russia to launch Tupolev strategic bombers and MiG-31K (NATO: “Foxhound”) fighter-bombers involved in missile strikes against Ukraine.
Additionaly, Ukrainian drones reportedly targeted a military airfield in Russia’s Orenburg region, according to acting governor Yevgeny Solntsev. He claimed that all drones were shot down by air defense systems, with no casualties or damage.
ASTRA reported that the strike was aimed at the “Orenburg-2” airbase. As of now, Russia’s Ministry of Defense has not commented on the incident.
According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, the drones were allegedly shot down as follows:
67 over Krasnodar Krai
29 over Rostov region
15 over North Ossetia
11 over Voronezh region
5 over Belgorod region
3 over occupied Crimea
2 over Penza region
1 each over Saratov and Oryol regions, and Stavropol Krai
7 over the Sea of Azov
6 over the Black Sea
Sources: Kyiv Post, Ukrinform
Oil depot near Rostov on fire after a drone strike
Charles:
How can anybody really know what actually happened or what was shot down? We do have pictures of the oil depot fire which is wonderful.
Oriana:
I agree the photo is wonderful — the flame like a strange large animal, a moose perhaps.
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THE SEQUEL TO SNAKE ISLAND
A little story:
After the Moskva was sunk, some brilliant Russian general decided to make Snake Island a fixed version of the Black Sea Fleet flagship. This was because the Moskva was to provide air defenses, communications, and overall command-and-control for the Mykolaiv landing that was to capture both Odesa and the remainder of Moldova. The ultimate purpose was likely to gain control of the world’s largest ammunition dump at Cobasna.
The Russians brought in about 1,500 troops, most of them irreplaceable technicians, and about a billion US dollars worth of SAMs, radars, communications gear, COMINT gear, tactical missiles, anti-ship missiles, and other gear. The Ukrainians just waited until it was all set up and then they simply wiped the island clean. About 450 Russian troops were killed, several landing boats destroyed, and all the equipment was completely destroyed.
The Russians appear to have a unique inability to think things through and determine what might be done against them. They make blunder after blunder. But an Iranian drone factory in Russia will be a major target —- after it is completely build and about to go operational.
~ R.W. Carmichael, Quora
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UKRAINE’S VIDAR SYSTEM DESTROYS 122 RUSSIAN ARTILLERY UNITS IN ONE DAY
Ukraine’s General Staff reported on March 28 the destruction of 122 Russian artillery systems in just one day, setting a new record for the war.
By the end of March, 1,644 Russian artillery units were destroyed, three times more than in 2022. While the General Staff's data is difficult to verify, satellite imagery confirms Russia is depleting its Soviet-era weapon stockpiles.
Russia has increasingly turned to glide bombs for tactical operations, shifting away from artillery. In response, Ukraine introduced the Vidar system, which uses acoustic location to detect enemy artillery.
This technology allows drones and artillery to target enemy positions before they can retreat. Artillery's role in the conflict has diminished as drones take over reconnaissance and strikes, with artillery systems becoming less relevant.
This marks a significant shift in warfare tactics, and the use of advanced detection systems like Vidar is expected to continue to reduce artillery’s effectiveness in the future. ~ Foxmeister, Quora
Kyiv Pechersk Monastery
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WHAT SURPRISED RUSSIAN DEFECTORS ABOUT THE WORLD OUTSIDE: THEN AND NOW
People who emigrated 40 years ago from the Soviet Union were shocked by abundance in stores, freedom to earn money and say whatever you want on the street and in the media.
People who fled Russia after 2022 are shocked at how everything is uncomfortable, less freedom than in Russia, no familiar, favorite products and services. Everything seems backwards, shabby, overly bureaucratized, hypocritical and way too expensive.
What a time to be alive. ~ Sergey Bereznikov, Quora
Susan B:
When a friend from Russia came to visit me, she asked how many people lived in the larger homes. I said one family…she found it hard to believe. By the time she left (one month) she wanted to come back and live in the good old USA!
Malstrom Fonseca:
Russia has that developing country freedom charm that only someone who was born with such freedom appreciates. That's not some ringing endorsement, we pay for it in safety, sometimes efficiency and other variables, but it does have its advantages, especially if you have some money.
After my father moved to this country from our native Nicaragua, he would often rant about it — “land of the free but I can’t paint my house the color I want or do certain modifications without an inspector, I have lifeguards at the beach like hawks, you can’t collect rain water, everything is safety focused to the point that buying fresh milk from a farmer can break a law etc.” If you didn’t grow up with the de facto freedom of developing countries all these complains sound almost alien but they are real.
Norman Cook:
It’s still much better to be living in the west than Russia. The mass exodus of young professional men will severely limit Russia’s ability to recover from the war. Infrastructure will degrade faster than here in the west but Russia’s income from fossil fuels is much lower now. Even if Russia wins the war, Russian people will suffer more in the long term.
Oriana:
While there are excellent reasons to live in the West, immigrants almost universally are full of complaints. It doesn’t matter if they come from an advanced country like Norway or a third-world country like Nicaragua. The common factor is THE LOSS OF THE FAMILIAR. Even if the familiar, as seen by an outsider, wasn’t exactly magnificent, losing it can be traumatic, eliciting grief.
I repeat: to become an immigrant is to lose the familiar. It is a loss so vast it doesn’t fit into words. Yes, it is the loss of Eden — never mind that the new country is richer, larger, and altogether better by objective standards. The native-born can’t understand the immigrant trauma, that decades’ long grief. That unending grumbling. I can’t explain it: it seems irrational. All I can say that the immigrant trauma exists, the way that love and suffering exist. The loss of the familiar is a huge loss, but it can't be understood by those who haven't experienced it.
Mary:
The comment about less freedom here than in Russia or Nicaragua puzzled me at first...until I realized they were responses to all the many regulations we live under—regulations it is illegal to disobey—regulations principally designed for safety. These can feel like restrictions that are unpleasant, uncomfortable, and unreasonable. And no one can deny there are really a lot of them. Helmets, seatbelts, baggage checks, metal detectors, speed limits, environmental regulations on industry, construction and behavior (as regards hunting, for instance) — there are a lot of things we're not allowed to do.
And many do grouse...because we did all these things in the past without harm — for us, though others were harmed or even killed for instance, by riding without seatbelts, biking without helmets, speeding, etc. Industry may hate complying with environmental regulations, construction may chafe against code standards — all these do curtail "freedom" by regulating things that are unsafe, even if obeying the regulations can decrease profits or make people feel over-controlled.
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TRUMP AND “GETTING RIPPED OFF”
All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.
As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy.
An easy example of this, before the tariffs, was Ukraine. Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.
This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States. And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer.
We don't know now, though it is not hard to guess, who told Trump that Ukraine was ripping him off. The Russians have a keen sense of psychological vulnerabilities, and they have been paying close attention to Trump for a long time.
Trump also cites the made-up number of $350 billion to justify tariffs. He claims that Europeans, curiously, somehow "owe" the United States that exact same amount. Trump believes that if Americans buy more from another country than residents of that country buy from us, that is a loss, that he personally is somehow being ripped off. And so when the United States formulated tariffs on the whole world last week, the operating principle was that all trade deficits — cases where we buy more than we sell — should be eliminated.
This is nonsensical. There is no state of nature where countries buy and sell the exact same amount from one another.
Imagine a party where people are freely talking to each other. Then someone jumps up on a table and insists that in every conversation each speaker should use the exact same number of words as the person with whom he or she is in dialogue. What would happen then? Every conversation would grind to a halt, because an artificial planned equality of words is not how conversations work. An artificial planned equality of the value of imports and exports is, by the same token, not how trade works.
There is much injustice in international trade. And there is much to be said for a thoughtful trade policy that protects or encourages certain industries. Manufacturing is of inherent value. But none of this will arise from the hurt feelings of an oligarchical president.
Because Trump's policy is based on personal vulnerability, it is erratic. If someone makes him feel more vulnerable than he was already, he will stop. He will not, for example, impose tariffs on Russia, because he is afraid of Russia. On the other hand, if someone convinces him that he has won, then he will also reduce the tariffs, as has just happened. If he no longer feels that he is being ripped off, then he yields. Until the moment when his feelings change.
To a person which such a obvious vulnerability, everything seems out of control. And so control is the only answer. Everyone is acting to rip me off. And so I must establish control by calling them all out, and making them deal with me from a position of weakness and ridicule. And so now the United States — so goes the theory — will now negotiate individually with every single country of the world. We have broken agreements with many of them, and now we will sign new agreements, which will probably be worse: we lack time now, and patience, and focus. And we can never get back the trust of our closest trade partners.
The same is true in domestic policy. By establishing the tariffs, Trump thinks that he is creating leverage for himself against American companies. They will all have to come to him personally to seek the "carve-out," the exception, that will allow them to continue to trade in world markets and function as they had before. And so Trump can enjoy feeling less vulnerable as he tries to bully companies. But this amounts to central planning, and of a particularly irrational sort: one that depends upon one man's feelings. Investing inside the United States no longer means what it once did. And this will not quickly change.
We all have our foibles, our whims, our vulnerabilities. But when one person has unchecked power, irrationality becomes unchecked. Donald Trump thinks that everyone is always ripping him off. If he were the president in a normal situation, this would be a minor problem. But in a situation in which he has gotten away with an attempted coup, in which the Supreme Court has told him he is immune from prosecution, in which members of his own party rarely challenge him, in which Congress no longer sees the need to pass laws, and so on, in which too much of the media normalizes him, Trump's vulnerability can bring about the destruction of the country.
We have thousands of years of political theory and indeed great literature to instruct us on this point: too much power brings out the worst in people — especially among the worst of people. As the founders understood, the purpose of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of regular elections, is to prevent precisely such a situation. Allowing our republic to be compromised has many costs, for example to our rights, and to our dignity. But it also has costs in a very basic economic sense. When you elevate the mad king, you elevate the madness.
~ Timothy Snyder, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQZVJvVQgvcPkzqPwFGbrfPJJfj
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Money might not buy happiness but it does keep a lot of unhappiness away. ~ Margie Jusick
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THE BRUTAL BATTLE OF THE SOMME
Summer 1916. The British and the French had thought as much — break through the German lines, hit them hard near the River Somme, and maybe shorten the war. Sounds great, right?
It wasn’t.
Millions of British shells were fired into the German trenches. The ground shook for a whole week. They assumed nothing could survive it. But the Germans were dug in deep. Many of the shells didn’t even work. When the shelling stopped, the Germans came out — alive and ready.
Then came July 1. British soldiers went ‘over the top,’ expecting to walk across no man’s land to an easy win. What they got was a bloodbath. Machine guns tore them apart. By the end of the day 60,000 were dead or wounded. The worst day in British military history.
Soldiers lived in trenches filled with mud, rats, barbed wire and the constant sound of gunfire. Cold, scared, tired and sick. Same thing, every day: survive, fight, repeat.
By November, the Allies had gained just six miles. That’s it. Six. Over a million men killed or wounded. All that loss for almost nothing.
The Battle of the Somme didn’t end the war. But it changed how people saw it. No more glory. No more honor. Just horror. Just death. It was brutal, messy and completely unforgiving — war at its most real.
~ Atif Chimma, Quora
Edward Jennings:
It's still very much remembered in Britain and the Royal Family celebrate the sacrifices every year! 60,000 dead or wounded in ONE DAY!
John Moye
Despite all the preparation, all the shelling, all the training, all the deployment, it amounted to this: whoever reached the German front line first won.
It turned out to be the Germans.
Roger Mohler:
In visiting the Newfoundland Memorial near Beaumont-Hamel, one can see how close the front lines really were in July 1916. It had to be brutal beyond belief — and for what?
Timothy Gaffney:
For control of the oil fields in the Middle East.
Armando Cardona:
Add Salonika, the Dardanelles, Palestine and Verdun to the mix and you begin to understand why 1916 was such a horrible year for all WW 1 combatants but marginally more for the Allies.
Remi Doyen:
At least these were either victories or draws for the Entente… Worst was to come in 1917…
David Newman:
Bear in mind, the Germans weren’t unscathed. The Somme broke them, too.
Read ‘Covenant with Death’ by John Harris.
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TIME APART CAN STRENGTHEN A MARRIAGE
Good luck finding a podcast, blog, or marriage book that will give you that advice. But this idea can actually strengthen your marriage.
In the first year of marriage, couples naturally go into the honeymoon phase or what my dad calls "the cave" for about a year. It is a time when they are learning to be a couple. It is almost like they are in their own little world. It is a good season; everything is new and everybody is happy. The mistake that many couples make, however, is assuming that all activities must be done together. Spending time apart from each other can strengthen your marriage. Studies have found that depending on your spouse to fulfill all your needs doesn’t work. Neither spouse should try to be the be-all, end-all partner if you want your marriage to be strong and healthy.
Time for yourself refreshes your soul and enables you to be a better partner. The options for personal time are quite simple. It could be working out, reading a book, or relaxing in the bath. The quality of your alone time strengthens the quality of your together time. It is also true that healthy couples need other friendships and connections in their lives whether it be with other couples or in groups. Most couples find that community and friendships contribute to their overall health and happiness.
An easy way to find other friendships is within the small group concept, and they are all around you. Try your church, the YMCA, the library, the local coffee shop, a social club, or a sport activity. You will find people who have some of the same interests as you do. It could be a group of moms who like to run at the track on Saturday mornings or a group of guys who meet every week over breakfast. Small groups can be a source of encouragement and support. If the group makes you feel welcomed, challenged, and accepted, it makes you stronger and more confident in your personal life and in your marriage.
Most groups typically have six to twelve people who just have something in common with each other. The group is large enough to create a community but not so big as to make someone feel like they are lost in the crowd. Meetings can be set on a regular basis or at least often enough to continue to be interesting and friendly. Your time together is when you develop a fellowship that turns into a camaraderie, a feeling of friendship and goodwill. When you have people supporting you, you feel better and your marriage is stronger.
This concept of spending time apart is not new. Before television came along, couples made it a point to find and include others in their lives.
Taking time for a life group develops a habit that produces growth in yourself and developing a community helps you come home refreshed after meeting together. Find a group that makes you feel welcomed, challenged, and accepted. A group that can support you through failures, help you face fears, and calm anxieties that worry you. When you find a good group, often you are open to share about your marriage.
You begin to realize nobody's marriage is perfect and there is a community that wants to encourage you through hard seasons. At the heart of it, we don’t want to see anyone fail. Like watching a movie, we want people to win. In a group, that is often the dynamic. We cannot always see the things we need to work on, but we want those around us to do well and improve.
Being a part of a community of faith or a community of common interests will help to make your marriage union stronger.
You can find the people who want to see your marriage succeed they want to watch you grow. You will see your marriage come out better on the other side when you begin to build community to protect your marriage union.
https://www.weddingchaplain.com/media/blog/post/time-apart-can-strengthen-a-marriage
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PLASTIC RAIN
Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.
Writing in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”
It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.
Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans.
What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet. Even worse, plastic waste is expected to skyrocket from 260 million tons a year to 460 million tons by 2030, according to the consultancy McKinsey. More people joining the middle class in economically developing countries means more consumerism and more plastic packaging.
To quantify just how bad the problem has become across the American West, the researchers used collectors in 11 national parks and protected areas, sampling both rain and air. Each had a “wet” bucket to collect rainwater, and a “dry” bucket to collect air. A sensor would detect rainfall and open up the “wet” bucket while closing the dry one. And vice versa, when it’s sunny out the dry bucket would collect microplastic particles carried on the wind while the wet bucket stayed shut. The researchers also modeled where each particular storm they collected rain from had originated, looking at the size of the cities it traveled through before dumping water, and microplastics, into the wet bucket.
Overall, they found that a stunning 98 percent of samples collected over a year contained microplastic particles. On average, 4 percent of captured atmospheric particulates were actually synthetic polymers. The particles that fell in rain were larger than those deposited by wind—lighter particles are more easily caught up in air currents.
Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. “I was just completely floored to see little brightly-colored pieces of plastic in nearly every single sample,” says Brahney. Plus, the team wasn't able to count clear or white particles and fibers with their equipment, so their tally is likely conservative.
Looking at the path of the storms that deposited the wet microplastic samples, Brahney and her colleagues were able to map how weather systems transport the particles. Winds, for instance, might kick up microplastic particles off the ground in an urban area and carry them downwind before forcing them to the surface once more.
“Rain is very effective at scrubbing the atmosphere of everything that's in it,” says Brahney. “And so there could be a fair amount of dust and plastics in the atmosphere and a rainstorm will wash those out.” Microplastic particles could even be acting as condensation nuclei, bits of debris that attract water vapor to form a cloud.
The dry fallout, on the other hand, appears to be traveling longer distances. These particles’ smaller size indicates they’re more easily carried on winds for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles—consider that dust from the Sahara readily blows across the Atlantic and falls in the Amazon rainforest—instead of getting caught up in storms, a more regional phenomenon. And microplastics are probably traveling even farther than soil particles because they're far less dense.
“We saw relationships to the location of the jet stream, which implies that the air masses that are controlling deposition are really high in the atmosphere,” says Brahney. (In the US, the fast-moving jet stream runs from west to east across the continent.) This jibes with what other scientists are starting to see elsewhere around the world: Tiny pieces of plastic—largely synthetic fibers from clothes—are getting caught in the wind and spread far and wide, tainting formerly pristine habitats. For example, the cities of Europe seem to be seeding the Arctic with microplastic.
This research comes with another troubling surprise: 30 percent of the sample particles were microbeads, tiny synthetic spheres that the United States banned from beauty products in 2015. The microbeads in the samples, though, were generally smaller than the ones you’d find in those products. “We did see a lot of brightly-colored microbeads, in all colors of the rainbow, and some of those we identified as acrylic,” says Brahney.
That leads the researchers to speculate that the microbeads are coming from industrial paints and coatings. If these are sprayed, they could easily spew the microbeads into the atmosphere, where they’d be picked up by winds and carried afar. If that’s indeed the case, the paint industry may be in for the same kind of microbead reckoning that sullied the beauty industry. Still, if one country bans microbeads in paints, the stuff could well blow in from a neighboring country.
More troubling still, microplastics eventually break into nanoplastics, bits so small that researchers may not be able to detect them without the right equipment. “I couldn't see anything smaller than four microns, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there,” says Brahney. “Just because we can't see them in front of us, doesn't mean we're not breathing them in.”
Scientists don't yet know what inhaling microbeads might mean for human health, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s not beneficial. Bits of plastic tend to leach their component chemicals over time, and have been known to transport microbes like viruses and bacteria. Researchers are just beginning to explore what this means for other organisms: One study published earlier this year found that hermit crabs exposed to microplastics have difficulties choosing new shells as they grow, a particular problem since they need those shells to survive.
In the soils of America’s national parks, the arrival of plastics could have cascading effects. “These can not just block up the digestive tract of small animals, like worms,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Steve Allen, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “But it's also the chemicals that are on these plastics and in these plastics that can have an effect on the soil. A lot of that is still theoretical—we're still trying to work it out.”
Brahney and her colleagues note that microplastics may be changing the thermal properties of soil, for instance, altering how it absorbs and stores heat. They may also lead to the growth of more or less of the microbes that normally live there, rearranging communities and altering the way the dirt cycles nutrients. Microplastics may also change how water moves through these soils.
But setting these many remaining unknowns aside, this research puts in place a critical piece of the puzzle regarding the microplastic life cycle, which grows increasingly complex with each new study. Scientists have been trying to figure out what happens to the world’s plastic pollution, nearly all of which seems to “disappear” in the environment. But studies like this one are showing that the stuff never truly goes away, it just gets shredded into smaller bits that disperse all over the world, perhaps spending many years cycling through different systems—air, land, and sea.
Scientists have discovered, for instance, that currents are carrying microplastic particles into deep-sea ecosystems—when the currents slow, the suspended particles fall out and settle on the seafloor. “Deep sea currents basically behave in the same way as atmospheric currents do,” says University of Manchester earth scientist Ian Kane, who was lead author on that study, but wasn’t involved in this new work. “They're part of a global recirculation pattern, and the particles are transported according to the shape and the density. And so it's the same process. What these authors found is that the heavier particles tended to fall out in the wet conditions.”
Other research by Steve Allen and his spouse Deonie Allen, also a microplastic researcher University of Strathclyde, found that the oceans are burping up microplastic particles, which then float onshore on sea breezes. Previously, it was believed that when microplastics flowed into the sea via wastewater, they’d stay there. So it may also turn out that microplastics landing on soil are also not staying put. “It may not be static,” says Deonie Allen. “It's not going to just sit. Some of it ends up going down through our water table, some of it moves because of erosion, or gets rereleased back into the atmosphere.”
There’s still much that science has to learn about this microplastic cycle, but this much is clear: There’ll be no putting the plastic back in the bottle.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rain?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Mary:
The problem of microplastics in the environment and in our bodies is frightening because it is already accomplished and we don't know what the effects will be. I seem to remember some of these are due to plastics containing hormone disrupting chemicals that can play havoc with the endocrine system. Frogs have already been seen to suffer such disruption, and in this case the frogs may be the canary in the mine.
Oriana:
I love how “the frogs may be the canary in the mine.” But the problem is real, alas, and I fear it will become even greater in the future. We are suffocating the earth with our waste. If nothing is done, microplastics may end up suffocating us.
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A LINK BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND LONGEVITY?
Recent work suggests a connection between verbal factors and a longer lifespan.
A new study has found that verbal fluency is associated with decreased mortality.
This result is in line with earlier research on reading and longevity.
Flexing one’s linguistic muscles may confer significant cognitive benefits.
What exactly is verbal fluency, and how is it measured? Simply put, verbal fluency refers to how quickly people can produce words when asked to provide terms that match specific criteria.
Specifically, participants in the Berlin Aging Study had been assessed on two measures of fluency. One of these was categories, and this involved naming as many animals as they could think of in ninety seconds (such as aardvark, lion, hippopotamus, and so forth).
The second measure was word beginnings. In this task, participants were urged to produce as many words as they could think of starting with the letter “s” (such as sea, shepherd, or surely) in 90 seconds.
Language, however, is a multifaceted cognitive ability. And the study’s other linguistic construct, verbal knowledge, was not associated with longevity. The participants’ verbal knowledge had been measured in two ways: in terms of vocabulary (providing definitions for 20 words), and performance on a spot-a-word task (identifying a real word when presented in the company of four pronounceable non-words).
It's important to understand what can and cannot be concluded from studies of this kind. Because the findings are correlational, it’s not possible to conclude that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between verbal fluency and longevity. The reverse could even be true: something about longevity itself might facilitate verbal fluency.
It may also be the case that some third, unmeasured variable—or perhaps many of them—are responsible for both greater verbal fluency and a longer lifespan.
However, the study by Ghisletta’s team echoes earlier research on this topic. In 2016, for example, researchers found an association between reading and longevity. A group at the Yale University School of Public Health found that participants who read books had a 23-month “survival advantage” compared to non-readers.
In addition, this association persisted even after a host of other variables, such as “age, sex, race, education, comorbidities, self-rated health, wealth, marital status, and depression” were controlled for.
But how much reading was necessary for such an association to be observed? The researchers found that reading for an average of just 30 minutes a day was sufficient for the activity to be associated with a survival advantage.
An important caveat, however, is that the strongest association in this study was found for participants who predominantly read books as opposed to newspapers and magazines. The authors asserted that “most of the book readers in our study were reading fiction,” so it may be that only certain types of reading are associated with longevity.
Why might reading fiction confer advantages not seen with reading factual material? One possibility is that the labor required to create a fictional world in one’s head, along with the effort required to keep track of who said what, and who knows what, can have salutary cognitive effects.
Another study published earlier this year suggests additional benefits of reading, over and above an association with longevity. Nicola Currie and her coauthors in the U.K. interviewed older adults who are avid readers of fiction.
The responses from their informants included the themes of positive affect associated with reading; a connection to books and their friends and family; and personal growth, such as facilitating reflection and promoting empathy.
The cultivation of one’s verbal fluency and the reading of fiction are not elixirs that can magically stave off the effects of aging on the mind and body. But evidence is accumulating that specific cognitive abilities and behaviors are associated with a host of benefits, including a longer lifespan.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/small-talk-and-big-questions/202504/a-link-between-language-and-longevity
Oriana:
Thanks to verbal ability — thanks to language — we feel more in control of life. To name something is to domesticate it, at least in part. It can also mean gaining distance from it, which is helpful when dealing with difficulties.
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NEW YORK’S LONG AND BUMPY ROAD TO ELECTRIFICATION
New York skyline at night
By 1880, while some homes were lit by electricity, they were rare and, like J P Morgan's, required individual generators. In fact, gas was more commonly used for lighting in New York. "Manufactured gas – essentially the gas produced by heating coal – was being piped to the wealthier parts of the city, lit and used for illumination," says Lifset.
But the city was already eager for a better alternative to gas, says Harold Wallace, curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington DC. "Politicians are complaining about companies that aren't maintaining their systems well, users are complaining about odors and impure gases that are being used, and there's a lot of calls for something to replace, or at least provide competition for, the gas systems," he says.
An enthusiastic group of engineers and inventors centered in New York were eyeing this opportunity. The sheer size and density of New York, already a very populous city, provided an incredibly handy backdrop for field tests on electricity networks. "Being able to test at scale in New York City was really advantageous," says Wallace. "[Edison and his team] figure if they can make the system work in New York, then they should be able to scale it down, basically, and make it work in other markets."
Another reason New York City was such an important early hub for the development of electric power systems was its stature as a finance center, adds Wallace. "[It was] a locus for investors and what we today would call venture capital.”
First came experiments in arc lighting which could light up huge areas of streets with blinding light. Invented in the early 1800s, arc lamps produce light by passing a high current across a gap between two conducting electrodes, usually carbon rods. New York installed arc lights on towers in the 1860s; and in 1880 a huge array of arc lighting was installed two miles down Broadway, gaining it its moniker, "The Great White Way.”
But the dazzling arc light was too bright for use in homes, and for some, too bright to use anywhere. New York's real field test was still to come.
A softer light
The inventor Thomas Edison had gained widespread fame with his inventions of an improved telegraph and telephone, as well as the phonograph, the first device to play back recorded sound. In 1878, he saw arc lights for the first time and quickly became obsessed with the potential for rolling out electric lighting more widely, writes Bell.
In 1879, he announced that he had invented the first practical incandescent lightbulb – which avoided the intense brightness of arc lights – at his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
Dynamos, or self-excited generators, invented around 1870, now existed which could put out a "tremendous amount of electric power", sufficient to power arc lights and other high-power electrical systems, says Wallace. The components of domestic lighting were ready for use.
Edison had opened a small coal-fired power station, the world's first to generate electricity for public use, in London in early 1882. But New York was his real focus. After his trial run at Morgan's house in June 1882, in September of the same year the Edison Illuminating Company opened its Pearl Street station in lower Manhattan, widely credited as being the world's first commercial power station.
It featured six coal-powered generators using several miles of cables laid under the street. These under-street cables gave an advantage over the hated muddle of overhead wires starting to criss-cross New York, although installing them did require the temporary inconvenience of closing off streets.
The station provided electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas, and by 1883 had over 500 customers. "Customers around Pearl Street were given the special introductory offer of a box of lightbulbs for free, and block by block, the lightly twinkling electric-lit cityscape we are now so familiar with emerged from the shadows," writes Bell.
Edison was adamant that he was creating a lighting system, not a general overall electrical system, which evolved later, says Wallace. But he did want to make sure it was competitive with gas, he adds, coming up with a figure of a 16-candlepower output, so as to top the 15-candlepower he had surveyed as the average light produced by a gas jet in New York City.
Current wars
Edison had plans to expand his system throughout Manhattan and New York City, says Wallace. As the Pearl Street station used purely direct current (DC), though, it could only power homes within around a quarter mile radius, he says. This is because the voltage of DC could not be easily converted at the time, making it hard to transmit DC at high voltages, thus meaning DC electricity would see large losses over long distances.
A larger DC network would therefore require many small stations. "Edison was going to put a series of these stations throughout Manhattan," says Wallace.
While working for Edison, the charismatic Serbian-American scientist Nikola Tesla had proposed using a different electricity system based on alternating current (AC). "With alternating current, you can transmit the power over much further distances," says Wallace. "You can have a few much larger power stations." AC could be more easily converted between high and low voltages using transformers, which only work on AC electricity.
But Edison dismissed the proposal, arguing his more established DC was safer than the experimental AC which had "no future to it". Tesla soon quit and teamed up with railway entrepreneur George Westinghouse, who was also interested in the ability of AC generators to transport electricity over long distances.
Soon Westinghouse and Edison were head to head in the notorious war of the currents, with Edison attempting to discredit AC. The bitter feud included a series of patent suits, a booklet publicly issued by Edison warning about the dangers of AC, and public electrocutions of stray animals using AC in an attempt to demonstrate its danger. Edison also advised the New York State Death Commission that AC was the best choice for human electrocution (the reality is that it's complicated to answer which is more unsafe).
By 1891, though, there were almost 1,000 AC central stations across the US, five times the number of Edison stations. A huge win for the AC proponents was its winning bid to provide electricity for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition. Westinghouse undercut the bid from Edison's General Electric, a huge chance to publicize and demonstrate the competence of AC.
AC's dominance was solidified that same year: after much wrangling, the Niagara Falls Power Company gave Westinghouse (using Tesla's all-important AC patents) the contract to generate power from a new hydro plant being built at Niagara Falls.
This was to be the world's first large-scale hydroelectric power plant. "The two Niagara stations would generate a mind-boggling 100,000 horsepower, equal to all the central stations then operating in America," writes Jones. "Never had electricity been generated on such a scale."
In 1895, a 26-mile (42km) AC line was energized from Niagara to Buffalo and began supplying electricity for the city's bulbs, industry and streetcars. Buffalo would soon become the first American city to have widespread electric lighting, earning it the name the "City of Light."
The war of the currents was hugely important in determining the future of electrical systems, according to Lifset. "The switch to AC power allowed for the use of larger power plants located further away from their customers," he says. "This served as the foundation for the industry's emerging business model. It's what allowed electricity to become cheap and was a significant factor in the spread of electrification."
Over the following decades, electrification swept through New York. Early adopters included commercial businesses looking to attract customers, the wealthy and the city itself, says Lifset. "Industry was not far behind. It took longer for middle and working-class people to get access." By 1899, though, anyone in Manhattan could connect to electricity.
Electricity also spread out further afield, although not to everyone. "Most urban landscapes in the US were electrified by the 1910s," says Lifset. "[But] it took considerably longer for this process to play out in rural America.”
Back to DC
The last remaining DC electricity supply in New York City was shut down in 2007. However, DC power has made a comeback in recent years: computers (including data centers), smartphones, flat-screen TVs, solar cells, LEDs and electric vehicles all run on DC power and thus require converter boxes to turn AC in wall plugs to DC.
The insatiable rise of these technologies mean we are actually using growing proportion of DC in electricity consumption, while some of world's longest transmission lines now use high-voltage DC electricity. Some researchers argue that this increases the case for direct DC power to end users over a century after AC won out.
Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla had proven that electricity was a game changer for lighting. But it wasn't the end for gas. "The gas industry went back, they upgraded their systems, they came up with new refinements so they could put out cleaner gas that didn't have the smell or create quite as much soot," says Wallace. "They also came up with new applications." The industry began promoting gas for cooking, heating and even refrigerators.
Electricity also soon expanded to more than lighting. "Very quickly within the 1880s other applications occur," says Wallace, including electric fans and irons as well as larger items like refrigerators and stoves. "[Electric refrigerators and stoves] take quite a bit more of an investment, so most people couldn't afford them early on, but they could afford an electric fan, or especially an electric iron was marketed very heavily early on."
Since most tenements or apartment homes had only a single light bulb socket hanging in the middle of the room, these early irons and fans would have light bulb bases that could be attached to an adapter and plugged into this socket, says Wallace. "It was not until the late 1890s, into the early 1900s, when what they called convenience outlets, [what] we think of as wall sockets today, first really started coming on the market.”
A new transition
Electricity has long reached dominance in the industrial world for lighting and most appliances. But when it comes to heating and transport, fossil fuels remain the principal player.
What's more, while some electricity comes from renewables like hydropower, as it did in Buffalo in the late 19th Century, most comes from coal and gas generating stations. Even today, fossil fuels account for the majority of electricity generation in New York State, in the US and around the world.
So in the current era of climate crisis, New York, like the rest of the world, is facing another energy transition: the move from fossil fuel to renewable energy. A huge piece of the puzzle in how to do this is further electrification of our energy use – in particular, heat and transport.
In May 2023, New York became the first state in the US to ban natural gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings from 2026. By 2029, taller new buildings will have to do the same. That means electric devices, such as heat pumps, electric heaters and induction ovens, will need to be used for heating and cooking instead of gas-powered ones. The state also aims for all new vehicles to be zero-emissions by 2035.
New York's 2019 Climate Act targets an 85% cut in greenhouse gas emissions on 1990 levels. To help achieve this, it mandates that 70% of electricity should be generated by renewables by 2030 and that all electricity should be zero-carbon – including nuclear – by 2040.
Currently, renewables, largely from hydroelectric plants, provide almost 30% of the state's electricity generation. But half of electricity still comes from natural gas.
It's still not clear if New York will hit its 2030 renewables target, although Hochul has said she remains steadfast in her commitment to the goals. Speaking to delegates at the energy and economy summit, she called on them to take the story of Edison, Tesla and their contemporaries at the beginnings of electricity as a source of inspiration for today's climate action.
"New York state has been an energy pioneer for 150 years…electricity was made here," she said. "[Today], we are called to invest in an emissions-free energy economy… Let's engage, let's strategize and solve these [emissions] problems with the same can-do spirit.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240923-the-feud-at-the-beginning-of-new-yorks-electricity
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REJECTED DESIGNS FOR THE EIFFEL TOWER
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AN ENORMOUS “GRAVITY HUM” MOVES THROUGH THE UNIVERSE TELESCOPE
The 100-meter Green Bank Telescope has precisely measured the timing of dozens of pulsars over the course of 15 years.
Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe.
The discovery shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015. But whereas LIGO’s waves might vibrate a few hundred times a second, it might take years or decades for a single one of these gravitational waves to pass by at the speed of light.
The finding has opened a wholly new window on the universe, one that promises to reveal previously hidden phenomena such as the cosmic whirling of black holes that have the mass of billions of suns, or possibly even more exotic (and still hypothetical) celestial specters.
“It’s beautiful,” said Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva and CERN in Switzerland who was not directly involved in the work. “A new era in the observation of the universe has opened up.”
The results come from studies that stretch back more than a decade by four teams based in the U.S., Europe, Australia and China. Today, in a coordinated data release (opens a new tab), the teams present evidence for a background “hum” of gravitational waves that were detected by tracking changes in the impossibly regular beats of objects called pulsars.
As long-wavelength gravitational waves pass through our cosmic neighborhood, they distort the space-time around us, which changes the arrival time of a pulsar’s pulses. Researchers had to map the correlations of these arrival times across dozens of different pulsars for decades in order to pick up the signal.
“I had butterflies when I first saw this,” said Stephen Taylor, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University and chair of the team known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav. “I’m so excited we can finally talk about it.”
Most likely, the gravitational waves come from pairs of supermassive black holes that are spiraling around each other inside merging galaxies. But we might be seeing something else entirely, perhaps something exotic such as ruptures in space-time itself resulting from loops of energy called cosmic strings.
“Finding for the first time the suggestion of background gravitational waves is fascinating,” said Juan García-Bellido, a theoretical cosmologist from the Autonomous University of Madrid who was not involved in the work. “It’s really Nobel Prize-winning research.”
A Galaxy-Size Hack
There’s two ways to start the story of this discovery. The first, as usual, is with Albert Einstein. His general theory of relativity in 1915 suggested that the universe is an ocean of space-time on which objects like black holes and stars sit. Movements of these objects would send ripples across this space-time ocean — gravitational waves.
The other place to start the story is in 1967, with a graduate student from Lurgan, Northern Ireland, named Jocelyn Bell. Using a radio telescope that she helped build near Cambridge, U.K., she spotted an unusual signal in space (opens a new tab) that repeated every second. She and other astronomers later classified these signals as a new class of celestial object known as pulsars — the rapidly spinning cores of dead stars. Today, some are known to spin exceedingly fast, emitting regular pulses of radio waves hundreds or even thousands of times per second.
The stopwatch-like regularity of pulsars makes them valuable cosmic timekeepers. In 1983, the U.S. astronomers Ron Hellings and George Downs suggested a novel way to put them to use: If gravitational waves were squeezing and stretching space-time, that motion would change the arrival time (opens a new tab) of the pulsars’ radio flashes.
The key is to look at many pairs of pulsars and compare their time delays. “If they’re close together on the sky, they’re both going to be early or late,” said Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and chair of NANOGrav’s Gravitational Wave Detection Working Group. “As you pull them apart, they become out of sync, but in a way you can predict.”
To catch these fluctuations, pulsar timing arrays such as NANOGrav use multiple radio telescopes to observe many pulsars over many years. These projects are cosmic cousins of LIGO and other earthbound observatories that detect gravitational waves by looking for tiny changes in the relative lengths of its two arms.
While LIGO’s arms are each four kilometers long, pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm — one hundreds or thousands of light-years in length. “What we’ve essentially done is hack the entire galaxy to make a giant gravitational wave antenna,” Taylor said.
This longer distance makes pulsar timing arrays sensitive to a different variety of gravitational wave. Whereas LIGO can detect high-frequency gravitational waves, which might occur when star-size black holes orbit each other tens or hundreds of times a second before merging, pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to processes occurring across years or even decades. That’s one reason why pulsar timing arrays need many years of data — if it takes a decade for a single wave to pass by, you can’t detect it in just a few months.
Of the four groups releasing data today, NANOGrav is the most confident in its result. The project was founded in 2007 and has largely used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which collapsed in late 2020, near the end of NANOGrav’s 15 years of data collection). “We’re still mourning the loss of Arecibo,” Taylor said.
Separate pulsar timing array projects were also established in different parts of the globe. The four teams, which together form the International Pulsar Timing Array, coordinated today’s announcements, but they have not yet performed a combined data analysis. “It’s complex,” said Andrew Zic, an astronomer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia and part of that country’s Parkes Pulsar Timing Array team.
“We’re ready to move towards being a more unified thing.” In 2020, NANOGrav released preliminary data from 12.5 years of observations. Those showed a tentative hint of gravitational waves affecting the pulses of some 45 pulsars.
Now they’ve added a few more years of data, along with data from nearly two dozen more sources, and a more consistent pattern has emerged. “It really jumps out to us,” Vigeland said. “We’re looking at deviations in time that are a couple of hundred nanoseconds,” said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a founding member of NANOGrav. They’ve detected a particular pattern in the data, called the Hellings-Downs curve, that makes them confident that what they’re seeing is the gravitational-wave background. “That’s the smoking gun of gravitational waves.”
The European team, which observed 25 pulsars over 25 years with six telescopes, sees similar hints of timing delays but is less certain of their results. “The Americans are very confident,” said Michael Keith, an astrophysicist at the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics and part of the European team. The Australian team is reporting observations from 32 pulsars over 18 years, while the Chinese team has observed 57 pulsars for a little more than three years.
Supermassive Dances
So what’s causing these waves? The most likely sources are supermassive black holes — behemoths millions to billions of times the mass of our sun.
These are found at the center of massive galaxies such as our own Milky Way. When two galaxies collide, as sometimes happens, the supermassive black holes at their centers may also begin to orbit each other, twirling around at a cosmically ponderous rate, and perturbing space-time as they do.
“If you have a rotating distribution of mass that’s not symmetric” — even something small, like a spinning pen — “gravitational waves are coming out,” Keith said. On big enough scales, with supermassive black holes, the low and steady rumble of these waves becomes detectable as they permeate space.
NANOGrav can’t yet make out individual gravitational wave sources. Instead, the team has found evidence for the background hum of all low-frequency gravitational waves. It’s like a buoy bouncing up and down in a busy harbor — it can’t distinguish the wake of a single boat, but its motion can reveal that there are some big objects slicing through the water.
Supermassive black holes, however, are not the only possible explanation for the background hum. Another possibility is cosmic strings. First predicted in the 1970s, these would essentially be cracks in space-time caused by the expansion of the universe. The cracks would emit gravitational waves as they spun around in loops.
“The idea of cosmic strings is you have some extension of the Standard Model [of particle physics] in which, in addition to pointlike particles, you can get strings of energy stretching out across the universe,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at King’s College London and CERN who is a proponent of cosmic strings. “Those strings of energy move around and can collide, spawning loops of string that eventually collapse by emitting gravitational waves.”
While the idea is somewhat extravagant, the observations so far from NANOGrav and the other teams are consistent with what we’d expect to see from cosmic strings. “They’d be constantly wriggling, and from time to time they crack like a whip and send out gravitational wave bursts,” said Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. If the pulsar timing arrays don’t see individual sources start to emerge from their upcoming data, that could point toward this exotic physics beyond the Standard Model. “Cosmic strings will give you a much smoother signal,” Ellis said.
But while strings and other exotic phenomena can’t be ruled out, for now supermassive black holes are the favored explanation. “From an Occam’s razor point of view, we know galaxies merge and almost all galaxies have supermassive black holes,” Ransom said. “So we think it’s probably most likely that the signal we’re seeing is from supermassive black holes. But we could be wrong.”
Discovering a population of supermassive black hole pairs would help answer open questions in astrophysics. For example, what happens when two orbiting supermassive black holes get relatively close to each other? There were reasons to think that instead of merging, as smaller black holes do, supermassive black holes just rotate around each other forever. “This is called the last-parsec problem,” Caprini said; a parsec is a unit of distance measuring 3.26 light-years across.
“It is an unsolved problem.” If pulsar timing arrays are seeing gravitational waves from these moments, however, it would be “a demonstration that two supermassive black holes do get close enough and merge,” rather than remaining in distant orbits, Caprini said.
Just the existence of such a population has broad implications for our understanding of galactic evolution in the universe.
“It would mean that at the center of some galaxies, there are massive black holes that are not just alone,” Caprini said. “We can probe, through the history of the universe, how galaxies collide and the rate of collisions.”
Such work would require the discovery of individual supermassive black hole pairs, and so is not yet feasible. But as researchers combine the data sets from the different teams and take more observations over the next few years, individual sources may start to emerge, perhaps allowing astronomers to pinpoint binary supermassive black holes in space and time.
“Bright individual sources will start poking above this background hum,” said Maura McLaughlin, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University and one of the founding members of NANOGrav. “We’ll be able to say, in that direction, there is a supermassive black hole binary with [a certain] mass. We’ll learn a whole lot about galaxy mergers.”
What is clear is that these projects have given astronomers a completely new tool with which to study the cosmos. The rise of gravitational-wave astronomy “is like when Galileo first turned his telescope on the sky,” Brady said. We now know that a background of ripples in space-time pervades the universe. An ocean of gravitational waves awaits.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-enormous-gravity-hum-moves-through-the-universe-20230628/
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THE POTENTIAL OF RAPAMYCIN
There has been a growing interest in geroprotectors, or compounds that slow aging.
Rapamycin targets the mTOR pathway, which is linked multiple age-related disease processes.
Animal studies and human trials show some support for the ability of rapamycin to slow aging.
Although it’s true that average life expectancy is increasing, this increase is not driven by healthy years lived. Instead, it’s mostly driven by an increase in unhealthy years lived. As the disease burden is shifting to chronic disease, researchers are targeting age as the main driver for chronic aging-related diseases.
Consequently, there is a growing interest in geroprotectors, or compounds able to slow the aging process and delay the onset of tissue dysfunction related to aging. In particular, the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway has been tied to multiple age-related chronic disease processes, such as declining immune function, diminishing bone mineral density, deteriorating pulmonary function (e.g., chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), development of cancer, atherosclerosis and cardiac hypertrophy in cardiovascular disease, and neurodegeneration. Rapamycin (Sirolimus, Rapamune) and its derivatives are mTOR inhibitors.
Background on rapamycin
Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant indicated for prophylaxis against organ rejection in kidney-transplant patients aged 13 years or older. Rapamycin is also used with drug-eluting coronary stents, as well as to treat lymphangioleiomyomatosis (a rare cystic lung disease) and tuberous sclerosis (a rare disease that causes noncancerous tumors to grow in the brain, skin, heart, kidneys, and lungs).
Before 2009, the scientific consensus was that aging could only be treated with youth factors like growth hormones. Various scammers took advantage of people looking for anti-aging therapies and duped these victims out of their money; trust in anti-aging interventions plummeted.
To determine whether geroprotectors could be used to combat aging, the National Institute on Aging established a program to identify compounds that could be tested for aging effects under rigorous and standard conditions. They tested 64 compounds in mouse models, and 10 showed promise by increasing lifespan—including rapamycin.
Animal studies have demonstrated that decreased mTOR signaling extends lifespan by up to 19 percent in worms, 24 percent in flies, and 60 percent in mice.
What about humans?
Randomized controlled trials have demonstrated that rapamycin derivatives combined with vaccines against seasonal influenza can increase immune response by reversing immunosenescence, or the age-related decline in immunity.
In a 2024 systematic review published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, authors aimed to assess the effects of rapamycin and its derivatives on the severity of aging-related physiological changes and disease in adults. The researchers analyzed 13 studies representing 2,077 individuals. These studies included randomized controlled trials.
The investigators found that rapamycin and its derivatives enhanced the immune, cardiovascular, and integumentary systems [outer layers, mainly skin] in healthy individuals or individuals with aging-related diseases. However, these drugs exhibited no significant effects on the endocrine, muscular, or neurological systems. Moreover, the effects of rapamycin or its derivatives on the respiratory, digestive, reproductive, and renal systems were not analyzed.
The authors observed no clear relationship between the dose of rapamycin or its derivatives and the effects of these drugs on various organ systems. These drugs did not result in serious adverse events.
Although animal studies have demonstrated that rapamycin can improve learning and memory, as well as decrease neurodegeneration, the investigators didn’t find support for such improvement in humans. Moreover, the effects on aging-related macular (i.e., retinal) changes and macular diseases like wet AMD (age-related macular degeneration) were inconsistent, including decreased anti-VEGF usage (i.e., drugs used to treat macular disease).
The researchers noted the need for more clinical trials to determine whether rapamycin could mitigate the severity of age-related diseases in adults. Currently, such clinical trials are limited in size and scope.
Expert perspective
There currently is no consensus regarding the presence of short-term biomarkers of anti-aging. Thus, researchers are limited in their ability to demonstrate specific, tangible effects of rapamycin. Instead, they have focused on potential adverse effects and safety.
One issue that’s been raised based on animal studies is the risk of starvation pseudo-diabetes (SPD) due to rapamycin’s starvation effects. These effects are akin to those of the ketogenic diet. SPD is reversible and does not lead to complications, according to Mikhail V. Blagosklonny, in an editorial published in Aging. Moreover, rapamycin decreases the incidence of diabetic complications, including diabetic nephropathy in rodents. He writes,
“Chronic treatment with high doses of rapamycin may cause symptoms of reversible SPD. Diet-induced SPD, at least, is beneficial and therapeutic. Rapamycin-induced SPD is a relatively rare side effect and probably can be avoided by administering the drug intermittently or at lower doses, and if SPD does occur, it can be reversed by discontinuation of the drug.”
Blagosklonny goes on to write that even though rapamycin may reverse some manifestations of aging, it is more effective at slowing down aging than reversing it. Thus, rapamycin could be most effective when administered at the pre-disease stages of age-related diseases.
Blagosklonny explains that even if someone already has a chronic age-related disease like heart disease or type 2 diabetes, rapamycin—in addition to other potential anti-aging drugs like metformin, aspirin, ACE inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, and PDE5 inhibitors [Phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors include Viagra]—could someday be used to slow the onset of additional comorbid age-related diseases like cancer. He concludes,
“Self-medication (even by physicians themselves) should be avoided and strongly discouraged. Instead, we need anti-aging clinics that implement the entire anti-aging recipe, including a complementary low carbohydrate diet and life style changes. Blood levels of rapamycin should be measured, as the rapamycin concentration in blood varies greatly among individuals taking the same dose. Doses of rapamycin should be tailored: personalized dosing and schedules.”
Oriana:
CURCUMIN has similar anti-aging effects
Few of us have access to rapamycin — unless we are organ-transplant patients or research scientists. Fortunately, just as berberine provides more benefits than metformin, so CURCUMIN could be called a rapamycin mimic — without side effects.
“Curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, exhibits anti-aging properties due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, potentially mitigating oxidative stress and chronic inflammation, key factors in the aging process. Curcumin may also improve mitochondrial function, which is important for cellular energy production and overall health, and can protect against mitochondrial damage.
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ARE BLUE ZONES A MIRAGE?
Do you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where a disproportionate number of people live into very old age. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.
Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.
But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.
On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active.
Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy record keeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.
While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.
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Demsas: So why do people die?
Saul Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?
There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.
And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.
But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.
Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?
Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.
Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?
Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.
It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.
We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.
And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.
Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.
Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.
Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.
Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?
Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is.
And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.
I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.
So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.
Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?
There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?
Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old.
But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia who seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—
Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)
Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)
Demsas: Dear God.
Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.
So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.
Demsas: You mean birth certificates?
Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.
But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.
Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?
Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?
Demsas: Oh, wow.
Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.
Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?
Newman: Oh, yes.
Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?
Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.
Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.
So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.
Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?
Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.
Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate when the oldest person in a household has died.
And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.
So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?
Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.
Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.
But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?
And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.
So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.
Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)
Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.
Demsas: Yeah.
Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.
Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—
Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.
Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.
So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.
Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.
And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—where in some cultures and communities, of course, being older is quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?
Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.
And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.
And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish record keeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.
Demsas: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer? The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?
We know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?
Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.
So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.
So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.
So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.
Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?
Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money. It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.
But there is another aspect to this is that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.
Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.
I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.
Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai [purpose in life, reason to live], and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.
Demsas: Wow.
Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.
And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.
And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.
Demsas: Wow. Okay.
Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.
Demsas: Yeah.
Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.
Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?
Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?
You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.
Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.
I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?
Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot. The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.
But I think what is more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.
And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.
Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.
Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.
Demsas: Wow.
Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.
Demsas: Yeah.
Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.
Demsas: Yeah.
Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.
Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.
I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?
Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?
So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.
Demsas: Wow. Okay.
Newman: Right. So that’s simple.
Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.
I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.
Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?
Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.
So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.
And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.
Oriana:
Any advice related to health and diet seems to be particularly prone to being found inaccurate. Remember when margarine used to be recommended as healthier than butter, and egg yolks were demonized so that some people bought "egg substitutes" or ate exclusively eggs whites?
Now grass-fed butter is regarded as health food, and people consuming corn oil and other seed oils have been found to be more susceptible to cancer and heart disease. The term "toxic seed oils" is gaining ground.
Pescaterian diet (fish and seafood), rich in omega-3 fatty acids, is now being promoted. But the carnivore diet is also gaining popularity. So it's hard to predict health advice ten years from now, much less one hundred years.
On the other hand, coffee and dark chocolate have turned out to be good for you. So there are these constant surprises and reversals that make longevity research seem like a minefield, especially since we still don't understand the basic biology of aging.
Personally, I recommend carefully listening to your own body. I remember the miserable years when I threw out egg yolks and ate oatmeal, whole grains, and yogurt, which made me feel bloated and drained of energy to the point of having to lie down after breakfast — after all, weren't those suppposed to be superfoods? Yet they were making me sick, which I was doing my best to ignore — until I no longer could.
One of the turning points in my life was chatting with a CDC expert on celiac disease. "Gluten is a universal allergen. It causes inflammation in everyone. It's only a matter of degree."
And I also remember the advice of the only centenarian in my family: “Eat less, walk more.” That is not likely to be overturned.
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RISING LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE UK
Boys born in the UK in 2023 can expect to live on average to the age of 86.7, and girls to 90, latest data suggest.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says figures show a continued trend of longer life expectancy for men and women.
The survival gap between the sexes is narrowing, partly down to men leading healthier lifestyles, experts say.
Projections suggest more than one in 10 boys and one in six girls born in 2023 will live to at least 100 years old.
The ONS report is based on the most up-to-date survival figures for 2023, and makes predictions for the future based on trends and projections.
For example, one in four baby girls and nearly one in five baby boys born in 2047 might expect to live to 100.
Overall, men born in 2047 could have a life expectancy of 89.3 years, and women 92.2 years.
The estimates could change though, and the life expectancy figures are for populations — they do not mean that each individual person will live into old age.
Men aged 65 years in the UK in 2023 can expect to live, on average, a further 19.8 years. For women who were 65 in 2023, the figure is 22.5 more years of life.
Projections suggest that by 2047, this could to rise to 21.8 more years of life for 65-year-old men and 24.4 more years for mid-60s women.
Kerry Gadsdon from the ONS said the statistics show that the life expectancy gap between men and women is closing, and has been for decades.
"This is likely due to improvements in lifestyle, for example reduction in smoking rates and the working conditions of men over several decades, as well as advances in healthcare, for example the prevention and treatment of heart disease.
The gap is projected to be down to 2.5 years by 2072.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgl6z423jeo
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THE BIBLE AND HISTORY
A very low proportion of the Bible can be considered as historically proven. Key to the Old Testament are the books of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and the Book of Joshua, but most biblical scholars regard these as simply containing myths and legends, to which were added rules and laws actually prescribed in the late monarchy and post-Exilic periods.
The Books of Judges and Samuel contain little of historical value, but can not be dismissed entirely. The Books of Kings and Chronicles contain some material that has been confirmed as historical, particularly for the late monarchy. At least, Ezra and Nehemiah are accepted as based on history. Biblical scholars consider the Books of Job, Ruth, Jonah, Daniel and Esther to be novelistic fiction. It may be unfair to look for history in books such as Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes or Song of Solomon, so we should not consider them unproven in the literal sense.
The four New Testament gospels tell more or less the same story, but repetition is not evidence of historical accuracy, especially as we now know that Mark’s Gospel was the principal source for the other New Testament gospels. In the absence of any contemporaneous support from other sources, we cannot say whether the gospels contain any real history.
On the other hand, comparisons of Acts of the Apostles with Paul’s undisputed epistles have led most New Testament scholars to conclude that that Acts is not in any sense a reliable history of early Christianity. The fact that I even have to refer to “Paul’s undisputed epistles” is a warning that many of the New Testament were written pseudepigraphically. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
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ABOUT ORTHODOX JUDAISM
~ I love Judaism. I believe in it and it means the world to me. However, as a religious Jew, grappling with aspects of the religion that don’t sit right with me is a lifelong process—and one of these aspects is a perceived lack of spirituality. Judaism, of course, is a deeply spiritual religion, but outwardly, Orthodox Judaism can seem obsessed with seemingly irrelevant details, totally blind to the spirit of the law, putting the letter of the law above God himself.
I don’t even think this is even the best example, but it’s one that non-Jews are often struck by because it’s so blatantly absurd.
Below is Miriam Ezagui, an Orthodox Jewish influencer. She obeys the Talmudic commandment that a woman must cover her hair after she is married, a commandment that was administered primarily for modesty reasons. Like Muslim women who wear the hijab, the hair of a woman becomes erva (forbidden to reveal) after marriage. Why then, is the ostensibly married woman below have a beautiful mane of hair on her head?
Spoiler: She’s wearing a $8,000 wig that most likely is far longer and more luxurious than the hair she is forbidden to show. I’ve noticed that whenever Miriam posts about her sheitels (wigs), the comment section is always slightly bewildered. Why wouldn’t they be? The commandment to cover hair, she explains, is due to modesty. What’s modest about a luxury wig?
The answer many Rabbis will give you is that the commandment is only to cover the hair; it doesn’t matter what with. However, in my view, this completely discards the original spirit of the law, which is about modesty—an idea that can actually be quite meaningful and transformative.
A better example is the Eruv, a thin wire that extends around many Jewish neighborhoods. Orthodox Jews cannot carry in public on the Sabbath, but the Rabbis argued that the presence of the wire can transform a neighborhood or even a city into a private domain, meaning that Jews are permitted to carry things on the street on the Sabbath. To me, it seems obvious that a tiny wire doesn’t make a somewhere a private domain in the same way the walls of a house do. It’s just as laborious to carry a big bag around the city whether the wire is there or not—meaning that it’s clearly still the public domain!
We’re not permitted to carry in public in the first place precisely because it’s laborious, violating the idea of the Sabbath as our day of rest. People who have studied the Tractace of Eruvin could probably give you a better explanation, but shouldn’t we, as Jews, be trying to follow the will of God in the most authentic way possible? This is yet another example of the letter of the law being elevated far above and beyond the spirit of the law.
I was learning Talmud recently and I came across a concept called Pruzbol, which was invented by Hillel the Elder. Loans between Jews are supposed to be cancelled on the Shemittah (Sabbatical) year of the Harvest, but the Pruzbol designates one’s personal debts to the court, allowing the individual to collect debt even after the Sabbatical year has ended.
Supposedly, the involvement of court means that you’re not “technically” collecting the debt. But to me, God seems totally absent from this picture. You care enough about God’s laws to twist them out of shape to suit you, but not enough to actually reflect on why we’re not permitted to collect debt in the first place. I hate to say it, but it does seem a little like we’re tricking God.
As Milan Kundera writes in his novel Immortality:
“The Jewish religion imposes a law on its believers. This law wants to be accessible to reason (the Talmud is nothing but the perpetual rational analysis of God’s commandments) and does not require any mysterious sense of the supernatural, no special enthusiasm or mystic flame in the soul. The criterion of good and evil is objective: it is a matter of understanding the written law and obeying it.”
I don’t think Kundera quite understands the nature of the Talmud, but he isn’t completely off.
In the minds of the Rabbis, these ideas aren’t loopholes designed to trick God, but legitimate practices that fit fully within the framework of Jewish Law. However, I do think it makes the spirituality at the core of Jewish practice a little harder to access.
Though we study to Talmud to interpret the Torah and understand the will of God, the complex legal systems within Orthodox Judaism can inadvertently end up excluding God altogether.
~ Rivki, Quora
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THE BENEFITS OF CHOLINE, THE “BRAIN VITAMIN”
The compound has been linked to improved cognitive performance and reduced anxiety – but are you getting enough of it?
You may not have heard of choline before, but studies show that it's crucial for our health, at various stages of life.
Choline is neither a vitamin or a mineral – it's an organic compound that's vital to the healthy functioning of the human nervous system. Now there's emerging evidence that consuming more choline can have a wide range of powerful effects, from improving cognitive performance to protecting against neurodevelopmental disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia.
The nutrient also seems to play a significant role in human neurodevelopment. In one study, babies who whose mothers took choline supplements during pregnancy gave birth to infants with higher information processing speeds – a measure of healthy cognitive functioning.
Scientists say that choline is a wonder-nutrient, but that it has been hugely overlooked. So, where does choline come from – and are you getting enough of it?
A crucial nutrient
Every cell in our body contains choline, says Xinyin Jiang, professor of health and nutrition sciences at Brooklyn College in New York, US.
Choline is an "essential" nutrient, which means we need it for our health, but our bodies don't produce enough on their own. Instead, we need to get some of it from our diets. In this sense, it's similar to omega-3 fatty acids, although it's actually closely associated with B vitamins, says Emma Derbyshire, science writer and founder and CEO of the consultancy Nutritional Insight.
Choline can be found mostly in animal-based foods, including beef, eggs, fish, chicken and milk, but it's also in peanuts, kidney beans, mushrooms and cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli – although animal foods tend to contain more choline than plant-based sources.
We need choline for numerous functions in our bodies, including liver function. Not having enough can cause a number of problems.
"Choline helps fat transport out of the liver, and when a person is deficient, they can get a fatty liver," says Jiang.
Choline also helps the body to synthesize phospholipids, which are the main component of the cell membranes in our bodies. Being deficient in the nutrient can affect the expression of genes involved in the process of our cells multiplying. During the development of a fetus, choline deficiency can be particularly harmful because it inhibits cell proliferation in the brain.
Choline's role in the brain is crucial – in fact it's primarily a "brain nutrient", says Derbyshire. It's needed for our bodies to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is a chemical that carries messages from your brain to your body through nerve cells. Acetylcholine plays a major role in brain nerve cells, which are needed for our memory, thinking and learning.
In one study involving almost 1,400 people aged 36 to 83, researchers found that people with a higher choline intake tended to have better memories, and that choline intake during midlife may help to protect our brains. Choline is commonly included as an ingredient in supplements taken as "nootropics" – a diverse group of substances which some people believe can enhance learning and memory.
On the other hand, choline deficiency has also been associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Another way choline may affect the brain is our mental health. One study found that higher intake of choline was associated with lower levels of anxiety. In another study, having a higher dietary intake of choline was linked to a lower risk of depression.
Having an adequate choline intake can also come with a number of other benefits. A higher dietary intake of this nutrient protects against heart disease.
Research in mice has found that choline can help to lower the levels of homocysteine, an amino acid which can increase the risk of heart disease. High levels of homocysteine can also be linked to osteoporosis, and research has found that people with higher choline intakes from their diets tend to have a higher bone density – an indicator of strong, healthy bones with a lower risk of being fractured.
"Choline can potentially have an effect against bone loss," says Øyen Jannike, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, who has studied the link between choline and bone health.
This may partly be because of homocysteine, she says, but also because choline is an essential structure in our cell membranes.
The first 1000 days
It's well established that a child's first two years are critical for their development, and that the mother's diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding has an integral influence on this.
Studies show that choline is vitally important for a baby's development in the womb. In fact, babies are born with three times as much choline as their mothers, which Derbyshire says shows how important it is at this stage of life.
According to one study, people who eat eggs tend to have roughly twice the choline intake of those who don’t.
Several studies have found that the supply of choline in the womb correlates to the cognitive outcome of the baby, and its benefits may continue for years as the child develops. In one study, pregnant women who had the highest dietary choline intake during the second trimester of pregnancy (from week 13 to week 28) went on to have children who scored higher on a test of short- and long-term memory at the age of seven.
Some research even suggests insufficient choline intake when a woman is pregnant could be linked ADHD behaviors in their offspring.
Are we getting enough choline?
In Europe, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has set recommendations for choline intake: 400mg for adults, and 480mg and 520mg for pregnant and breastfeeding individuals, respectively.
In the US, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) first established adequate choline intake recommendations in 1998: 550mg per day for men and 425mg per day for women, or 450mg during pregnancy and 550mg while breastfeeding.
An egg has around 150mg of choline, while a chicken breast has around 72mg, and a handful of peanuts has around 24mg.
In 2017, the American Media Association (AMA) also advised that prenatal vitamin supplements should contain "evidence-based" amounts of choline.
"We're seeing a lot more ADHD and dyslexia in schools, and some is genetic, but it's also possible that, in utero, they're not getting key nutrients," Derbyshire says. "These very subtle neurodevelopment changes are occurring and impacting them later on. We're treating the aftermath now."
Jiang has studied the relationship between the supply of choline during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and brain development. "In animal findings, when the mum has more choline, the cognitive development of their offspring is better," she says. "We're starting to find similar results in human studies, although, not exactly the same.”
Feeding the brain
A 2020 review of 38 animal and 16 human studies concluded that choline supplementation helps brain development. However, only animal studies currently show a strong link between choline and improved cognitive function. The paper doesn't define the ideal amount of supplementation, but says most human studies use supplements providing up to 930mg choline daily – an amount equivalent to the choline in roughly six chicken's eggs – with no adverse effects reported.
There may also be some people that require more choline than the recommended daily amounts, says Øyen – including post-menopausal women, for example, who have lower levels of oestrogen, and people with fatty liver disease.
We also know, Derbyshire says, that, due to the genetic differences from one person to another, some people may have higher requirements for choline. (Derbyshire has previously consulted for and advised The Meat Advisory Panel, Marlow Foods (Quorn), the Health Supplement Information Service and the British Egg Information Service, among other organizations).
Peanuts contain high levels of choline, with 61-66mg per 100g of peanut butter
When we eat foods containing choline, it's very easily absorbed into our blood, says Jiang, which should go some way to ensuring we're consuming enough choline.
However, several studies show that many of us aren't getting enough. One study found that only 11% of American adults consume the recommended daily amount.
Eggs are one of the most potent dietary sources of choline, and there is some concern that those who choose to follow a vegan diet may not be getting enough of this nutrient – though there are many plant-based sources and choline supplements are widely available in developed countries.
One study found that people who eat eggs have almost twice the usual choline intake compared with those who don't, leading the researchers to conclude that consuming the daily adequate amount of choline was "extremely difficult" without eating eggs or taking a supplement.
But the EFSA's recommendation of 400mg of choline per day is achievable for most people if you plan your diet carefully, says Jiang. Some vegan sources of choline include tofu (28mg of choline per 100g), peanut butter (61-66mg per 100g) and soy beans (120mg per 100g).
Anyone concerned they're not getting enough choline can take a daily supplement, Øyen says. In the meantime, she adds, there needs to be more animal and human research to better understand the mechanisms behind some of choline's health benefits.
However "clinicians are becoming more aware of [choline]", says Derbyshire. While it often seems to be slightly overlooked, she is hopeful that choline will soon start to enjoy the limelight.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250408-choline-the-underappreciated-nutrient-thats-vital-for-our-brains
FOOD SOURCES OF CHOLINE
Animal-based sources:
Meat and Organ Meats: Beef, beef liver, chicken, and turkey are good sources of choline. Beef liver is the richest source of choline, ahead of egg yolks.
Fish and Seafood: Salmon, tuna, cod, and other fish and shellfish are excellent sources.
Eggs: Egg yolks are particularly rich in choline.
Dairy Products: Milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese also contribute to choline intake.
Plant-Based Sources:
Legumes: Soybeans, kidney beans, and other beans are good sources.
Nuts and Seeds: Peanuts, almonds, and sunflower seeds contain choline.
Vegetables: Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and potatoes are good sources.
Grains: Quinoa, wheat germ, and brown rice can also contribute to choline intake.
Mushrooms: Shiitake mushrooms are a good source of choline.
from another source:
Humans can produce choline endogenously in the liver, mostly as phosphatidylcholine, but the amount that the body naturally synthesizes is not sufficient to meet human needs. As a result, humans must obtain some choline from the diet. Premenopausal women might need less choline from the diet than children or other adults because estrogen induces the gene that catalyzes the biosynthesis of choline. When a diet is deficient in folate, a B-vitamin that is also a methyl donor, the need for dietary choline rises because choline becomes the primary methyl donor.
The most common sources of choline in foods are the fat-soluble phospholipids phosphatidylcholine and sphingomyelin as well as the water-soluble compounds phosphocholine, glycerolphosphocholine, and free choline. When these choline-containing compounds are ingested, pancreatic and mucosal enzymes liberate free choline from about half of the fat-soluble forms and some water-soluble forms.
Free choline, phosphocholine, and glycerophosphocholine are absorbed in the small intestine, enter the portal circulation, and are stored in the liver, where they are subsequently phosphorylated and distributed throughout the body to make cell membranes. The remaining fat-soluble phospholipids (phosphatidylcholine and sphingomyelin) are absorbed intact, incorporated into chylomicrons, and secreted into the lymphatic circulation, where they are distributed to tissues and other organs, including the brain and placenta.
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Choline-HealthProfessional/
CHOLINE AND COFFEE
Coffee contains choline, a nutrient that can be converted into acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, and caffeine can enhance the release of acetylcholine.
Choline in Coffee:
Coffee beans naturally contain choline, although the amount varies depending on the bean source and processing methods, including roasting.
Choline and Acetylcholine:
Choline is a precursor to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in various brain functions, including memory, learning, and muscle control.
Caffeine and Acetylcholine:
Caffeine, a stimulant found in coffee, can enhance the release of acetylcholine in the brain.
Roasting and Choline:
The roasting process can reduce the amount of choline in coffee beans, as some choline is converted into other compounds during roasting.
Nicotine receptors:
Coffee contains compounds that can interact with nicotinic receptors, which are involved in nicotine addiction.
Oriana:
When I was growing up, eggs were regarded as a “perfect food,” nutritious bar none — especially the egg yolk. Then eggs became demonized and accused of causing heart attacks and stroke. Bad-tasting concoctions of chemicals were sold as “egg substitutes.” Now eggs are again being promoted as a nutritious superfood — especially the egg yolk. Reminds me of the situation with butter and margarine — it eventually turned out that it was the margarine eaters who had more heart disease and cancer. Perhaps we should have listened to Grandma after all.
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ending on beauty:
THE DEAD MOLE
Carpathia
I saw him by the roadside, dead —
his white, oversized
bulldozer hands
curved in the shape of their toil —
Brother, how did I know you
when I was still a child —
He had no face, only blackness,
tender velvet I feared to touch:
death would enter my hand,
the softness would be endless.
Teacher, how did you see
I had to touch or live blind —
~ Oriana
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