Hill of Witches, Lithuania
*
BEFORE WISDOM
That last Polish August that glows
in my mind like the last ruddy pear,
my mother would point and say,
Take a good look: you may never
see it again — like the Valley of the Varta,
kneeling in the greenest green,
or a birch tree touched by the wind,
so delicate it seemed
about to tremble away —
while in school we learned by heart
Oh Lithuania, my fatherland,
you are like health; only he knows
your worth who has lost you —
but we hadn’t yet lost
health or fatherland, and the scent
of forest mushrooms
was a prayer —
*
What if a prophet, a seer
were to rise from the moonlight
spilled on on a Baltic bay,
point to everything and say,
Take a good look:
You will never see it again.
And I was seventeen
on the stroke of fate.
*
Later, like a good-luck charm,
I carried these words in my mind:
The worst has already happened.
Then I chanced to read
the reverse of my amulet:
The best has already happened.
What, no more great love?
Only the bitter sage who taught,
Life is a cruel joke —
no greater lover and seer?
Where were my palaces of clouds?
Where was my will to believe?
*
Now I don’t even care to travel —
I say, too many stairs to climb.
I want to sleep in my own bed.
After the summer when I thought
I chose a larger destiny, no sleep
has seemed deep enough —
not the deepest granite cradle,
the High Tatras’ bluest lake. Dear
wisdom, what I’ve paid for you —
My fatherland, you are like health.
But I sing that amber August
before wisdom, before
the wasps flew in
to feast on wounded pears
*
THE ANCIENT NATURE OF THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE
Icelandic is isolated on an island, but the closest living blueprint to Europe's ancient ancestral tongue sits right in the middle of the continent: modern Lithuanian.
Lithuanian is widely considered the most conservative living Indo-European language. It has retained archaic sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical structures from Proto-Indo-European—the unwritten ancestor of languages ranging from English and Spanish to Hindi and Russian—that most other branches lost millennia ago. For instance, while English has largely shed its noun cases, Lithuanian retains seven (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative). Its grammar and pronunciation are so archaic that Lithuanian shares striking similarities with ancient Sanskrit. Linguists often study Lithuanian specifically to reconstruct the extinct languages of antiquity.
The stability of Lithuanian comes down to a potent combination of geography and historical defiance.
Geographical Isolation: For centuries, the Baltic tribes lived in territories covered by dense, impenetrable forests and treacherous swamps. While other European languages were rapidly evolving due to the mixing of populations along major trade routes, Roman conquests, and mass migrations, the Lithuanians remained largely insulated. This environmental barrier allowed their language to freeze in time.
Late Christianization: Lithuania was the last pagan nation in Europe, only officially converting to Christianity in the late 14th century. Because the region resisted outside religious and political integration for so long, it also resisted the linguistic influences of Latin and Old Church Slavonic that reshaped neighboring languages.
Fierce Cultural Preservation: In the 19th century, the Russian Empire banned the publication of Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet in an attempt to assimilate the population. Instead of fading, the language became the ultimate symbol of resistance. A vast underground network of knygnešiai (book smugglers) risked their lives to bring printed materials across the border from Prussia. This struggle cemented the preservation of the exact, historical language as a core pillar of Lithuanian identity.
Languages typically change when people move, mix, and conquer. When a population stays firmly rooted in an insulated environment—and actively decides that their historical tongue is worth defending at all costs—the spoken word can remain remarkably intact across the centuries. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
Radzivill Castle in Nesvish, Lithuania
*
“We are liberating them, and they’ll never forgive us for it.” ~ Marshal Georgy Zhukov, toward the end of WW2. (Oriana: Perhaps the most brilliant insight Zhukov ever had, if I may speak on behalf of all the countries “liberated” by the Red Army.)
Balžis Lake, Lithuania
*
PRESERVATION OF THE ‘TH’ SOUND (AN INTERDENTAL FRICATIVE)
The "th" sound is an acoustic failure. It is so quiet and hard to pronounce that it is missing from over 92% of the world's languages. Yet, specific geographical and historical forces kept it alive.
Geography is perhaps the strongest defender of the "th" sound, and Icelandic serves as the perfect example. During the Viking Age, Old Norse was spoken across Scandinavia, complete with the "th" sounds represented by the runic letters thorn (þ) and eth (ð). However, as mainland Scandinavia engaged in heavy trade with Low German speakers and underwent rapid linguistic shifts, languages like Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish entirely lost their "th" sounds. Iceland, however, sat geographically isolated in the North Atlantic. Without the constant friction of neighboring languages smoothing out its phonetic edges, Icelandic preserved the Old Norse dental fricatives intact for over a thousand years.
Historical preservation through religion is another powerful anchor. Classical Arabic originally featured these interdental fricatives. As historical conquests spread the language across vast territories, many regional dialects naturally smoothed out these sounds into "t," "d," or "z" for ease of pronunciation. However, the precise recitation of the Quran demanded strict phonetic accuracy. Because Classical Arabic remained the ultimate prestige dialect and the liturgical standard, the "th" sounds were preserved by religious and academic institutions, ensuring they never vanished from the formal language.
English managed to keep its "th" sounds through a combination of island geography and grammatical stubbornness. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, England was ruled by French-speaking elites who lacked the "th" in their native phonetic inventory. In a highly connected mainland environment, the prestige language might have eradicated the sound entirely.
But because English was structurally confined to an island and the "th" sound was deeply embedded in the absolute most common function words—such as "the," "this," "that," "then," and "they"—it survived. The sheer daily repetition of these vital, structural words created a phonetic anchor that centuries of foreign linguistic influence simply could not break. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
THE THUCYDIDES TRAP
A statue of the Greek historian, Thucydides, in Vienna. The Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, it can lead to war.
A messy war in the Middle East. Tensions in Taiwan. When the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met in Beijing this week, these were the flashpoints everyone expected they would talk about.
Instead, Chinese leader Xi Jinping threw another, ancient war, into the mix.
In his opening remarks on Thursday, Xi made reference to the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece, a decades long conflict that erupted between Athens and Sparta in 431BC.
In a shot across the bow of hegemonic rivalry, Xi asked:
“Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
What is the Thucydides Trap?
A staple of foreign policy commentary, including by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, the Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war.
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides wrote in his book, the History of the Peloponnesian War.
Just as Athens once warred with Sparta, the implication is that China’s rise provokes anxiety and potential conflict with the US.
Observers have noted that Xi has used the term for years, but deploying the classical reference during Trump’s visit may be have been a foreshadowing of his position on Taiwan.
The Chinese leader later warned Trump that any missteps on Taiwan could push their two countries into “conflict”.
“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations,” Xi said, of the self-governing island that China claims as its own.
“If mishandled, the two nations could collide or even come into conflict, pushing the entire China-US relationship into a highly perilous situation,” he added.
But at a state banquet in the evening the Chinese leader struck a more conciliatory note, insisting the US and China could manage the seemingly inevitable friction.
“Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can totally go hand in hand … and advance the wellbeing of the whole world,” Xi said.
Responding on social media Trump said that Xi had “very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation”.
Of course, though, that was not a reference to the US under his watch, Trump said.
“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline,” Trump posted on social media early on Friday.
“Now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/15/thucydides-trap-explained-xi-jinping-donald-trump-us-china-taiwan
*
TWO WAYS MEN LOVE DIFFERENTLY THAN WOMEN
When it comes to love, women are often purported to be the romantics: they feel deeply, invest early, and sustain the emotional heartbeat of a relationship. Men, by contrast, are presented as more stoic and less infatuated. They’re guarded, slower to open up, and, by extension, even quicker to check out. This is a story that we’ve all heard countless times, yet according to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, it’s largely wrong.
Two recent peer-reviewed studies have finally offered us a more accurate and more hopeful picture of how men experience romantic love. Beyond just challenging hegemonic stereotypes, these findings also offer us a much clearer map of how men and women fall in love differently.
Here’s a breakdown of the differences the studies found, as well as what those differences mean in practice for a romantic relationship.
1. Men Fall in Love Faster, But Women Feel It More Intensely
In a landmark 2025 study published in Biology of Sex Differences, researchers surveyed 808 young adults aged 18 to 25 who were actively experiencing romantic love — including participants of varying sexual orientations from across 33 different countries.
This was the first study of its kind to investigate gender differences in romantic love, using validated measures among people currently in love. This contrasts with most studies, which mostly rely on retrospective recall. Among other things, one of the most striking discoveries the researchers made was that male participants tended to fall in love about one month earlier than women, on average. Women, however, were also more likely to experience romantic love slightly more intensely, as well as to think about their loved ones more.
The researchers offered an evolutionary explanation for these findings. More specifically, they suggest that an increased frequency of falling in love, as well as earlier timing, may have been a means of overcoming the male-specific challenges of courting and demonstrating commitment to women. This suggests that men evolved to fall hard and fast because, historically, hesitation would have been a competitive disadvantage. Women, who face various adaptive pressures around mate selection, evolved instead to take more time; however, when they do love, they do so with greater intensity and cognitive preoccupation.
We can surmise from this that a man who says “I love you” first likely isn’t being a reckless or performative love-bomber, as media and popular culture might suggest. Instead, he might just be wired to arrive there sooner. On the other hand, a woman who takes longer to reach that declaration—but who thinks about her partner more deeply and feels the emotion more acutely—is simply experiencing love differently, not less.
Understanding this timing gap, as well as resisting the urge to interpret one partner’s pace as a referendum on their feelings, is perhaps one of the most important things a couple can do in their early stages together.
2. Women’s Love Peaks Early in Marriage, While Men’s Stays Steadier
In a 2024 longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, researchers took an unusually rigorous approach to measuring love as it is actually lived. Rather than asking people to rate their relationships in surveys, the authors tracked 3,867 U.S. adults who reported their emotions (including love) every 30 minutes for 10 days via a mobile phone diary. This was repeated four times over more than a year, resulting in one of the richest real-time portraits of experienced love ever assembled.
The key finding was that, in heterosexual relationships, women were more than double as likely as men to report feelings of love when spending time with their partner during their engagement to be married. However, this was followed by a sharp reduction in women’s feelings of partner love within the first two years of marriage, at which point men and women experienced similar levels. Contrastingly, men’s reported love declined only modestly.
These findings don’t tell us that women stop loving their partners after marriage. The study carefully notes the broad similarities between men and women in overall experiences of love.
However, this suggests meaningful gender differences in how romantic emotions evolve over a lifetime. While women experience a steeper early peak and a more pronounced transition, men sustain a steadier, more gradual curve.
One of the authors’ interpretations is that women are more attuned to the emotional texture of a relationship’s different phases, especially the heightened charge of early commitment and the eventual settling into partnership.
Another notable interpretation is that women often carry a disproportionate share of relational labor within marriage. For this reason, they may find that the administrative and domestic realities of married life can mute some of the fiery romance that sustained them during courtship, dating, and even engagement phases.
Either way, for couples navigating the transition from engagement to early marriage, this data normalizes that love changes shape over time. The feeling your partner carries for you today likely looks and feels different from how it did two years ago. However, this difference in no way suggests that this love has diminished; rather, it has moved through a phase that affects men and women differently.
What Both Studies Tell Us About Men in Love
Taken together, these two pieces of research dismantle two opposing myths simultaneously. The notion that men are emotionally unavailable and slow to love has been overhauled: men fall in love sooner, more frequently, and with a steadiness that research increasingly suggests is one of the undervalued gifts they bring to long-term relationships.
Similarly, the idea that women are the more romantic sex in every dimension has also been complicated by data showing that while women do love with greater early intensity, their experience of love across marriage follows a more volatile trajectory than men’s.
Instead, the reality of love is that two people can arrive at the same destination through different routes, at different speeds, and with different emotional rhythms. And in both cases, each is fully capable of the deep, sustained connection that makes a relationship worth building, despite how different their experience of the journey was.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202605/2-ways-that-men-love-differently-than-women
*
BESIDES THE KIDS, TIME AND MONEY DIFFERENTIATE PARENTS FROM NON-PARENTS
It takes nearly 60,000 hours for a set of parents to raise two kids to age 18.
The average cost to raise a single child through high school graduation is $322,427.
Allocating time and money differs for people who are childfree or childless.
Sure, children are the key component that make someone a parent. And they’re most often in the picture for years. What if the most fundamental differences between parents and nonparents also boil down to time and money? Understanding how these aspects of life play out could help us better appreciate the other side of the parent/nonparent divide.
Researchers at Cornell University looked at how much time parents of two children separated by two years of age spend raising them. They concluded that, on average, parents spend 57,661 hours caring for their children from birth until they turn 18. Assuming a standard American workweek of 40 hours, that equates to nearly 28 years of full-time work! (40 hours/week x 52 weeks = 2,080 hours/year; 57,661 hours/2080 hours = 27.72 years.)
Couple that time commitment with the average cost of raising a child to age 18, which the US Department of Agriculture estimated in 2015 to be $233,610. Adjusted for inflation, by 2025, that number increased to $322,427, not including college. No wonder so many parents feel harried and overburdened compared with the childless and childfree, who face different challenges.
I didn’t have access to this data when my then-husband and I were deciding whether to have kids, though I clearly remember thinking that if we didn’t, we’d very likely have time and money to allocate to purposes other than raising our family. What would we do with all those hours and money our parent pals were investing in their offspring?
It all felt rather daunting at the time. Sometimes it still does.
Choosing can be challenging. A friend with four grown kids, none of whom are parents, wonders why it takes them so long to make decisions. “When I was their age,” she said,” I didn’t have time to consider options. I had to get everyone fed, clothed, and off to school. And then I’d do my paid work.”
The traditional parent track is well trodden—get the kids through school, then hope for grandkids a decade or so later. Aging surrounded by offspring. When not a parent, it’s up to us as individuals to decide how we budget our “extra” resources from a palette of infinite possibilities. A childfree therapist friend refers to this as the burden of choice.
Unencumbered by the responsibility for the care of our own young, we can choose to invest in other people’s kids, including those in our families of origin. We can pursue higher education, fulfilling jobs with lower pay, and pastimes of interest.
During the pandemic, I read through all my old journals. It was eye-opening. I realized I tend to relocate every decade or so. Along with my geographical changes, I made new friends, shifted jobs, and learned skills appropriate to my new environment, whether urban, rural, or coastal.
I noticed I also tend to explore new interests on a similar timetable and tend to dive deep. Attending yoga classes evolved into getting certified to teach them. A weekend writing workshop led to an MFA in creative writing and ultimately a published book. Over the years, I’ve also volunteered in primary grade classrooms, acted in community theater, taught swimming overseas, and mediated small claims court cases. I feel like my life is chock full of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
We nonparents can be accused of immaturity, and I think I know where that impression originates. Because we don’t mark the many milestones that parents share with their kids—birthdays, graduations, wedding roles, birth of grandkids—it can be hard to anchor our own aging process in time. I almost always need to do the math to figure out how old I am, and I’m never quite sure how old my friends are. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. Having friends of all ages keeps one young at heart.
We also know no one is morally obligated to oversee our aging, so we’re more likely to depend on chosen family and hired help than on our families of origin during our senior years. Savvy nonparents save for their elder years, make estate plans that suit their intentions, and identify supportive services to manage their well-being. If not planned for, those expenditures can hit hard when one is elderly.
While most parents name their children as beneficiaries of their estates, those who don’t have children can also leave lasting legacies. According to a study by Russell James, director of Texas Tech’s Graduate Studies in Charitable Financial Planning, “Childlessness is the single strongest demographic predictor of including a charitable bequest in one’s estate plan.”
It’s no wonder, then, that parents and nonparents approach life from significantly different perspectives. But that’s no reason why we can’t appreciate the myriad roles we play in making a difference in the world that surrounds us all.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unapparent/202603/besides-the-kids-time-and-money-differentiate-parents-from-nonparents
*
ARE WE “UNDERBABIED”?
Are you one of the 30 percent of Americans who are, according to Dr. Oz, “underbabied”?
Unfortunately, he does not mean “underbabied” in the sense that you’re being insufficiently pampered (you and I both, friend). During a White House event on Monday, Dr. Oz defined underbabied as having fewer children than you’d like or having no children at all. (The term didn’t catch on the first time Oz tried to make it happen in October 2025, so it’s unclear why he imagines it will take off now.) Since 2.1 children per woman is the generally accepted fertility rate required to maintain a stable population, I suppose having two or more kids could be termed “adequately babied.” I wonder what number of children would qualify a person as “overbabied.”
“We’re way below what we need just to replace the people that we have in America,” Dr. Oz said, going on to plug the Trump administration’s new website for discounted drugs including fertility medications. Oz predicted that, thanks to such efforts, there will be a wave of “Trump babies” in the near future. “You have to get moms healthy enough to do the most creative thing the universe knows,” he continued, “which is making babies.” Nowhere did Oz mention child-care costs or paid parental leave.
It is true that fertility rates in the United States have fallen below that 2.1 replacement level and are now at historic lows. However, this lacks some important context. A large part of the drop in fertility rates is due to the rapidly declining rate of teen pregnancies, which fell by 7 percent in 2025. Simultaneously, fertility rates among women in their 30s and 40s have been rising, and more women are having children in their late 40s than ever before.
Regardless, if Dr. Oz wants to get America sufficiently “babied,” I suspect it’s going to take a lot more than markdowns on Clomid to get us there.
https://www.thecut.com/article/dr-oz-under-babied-americans.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
The current US fertility rate is 1.57. Russia’s has stopped releasing its birth rate statistics, so displeasing to Putin, who, like all dictators, desires a larger population.
*
RUSSIA HITS TWO-CENTURY LOW IN BIRTH RATES DESPITE KREMLIN PUSH FOR LARGE FAMILIES
A woman pushes a baby stroller past patriotic graffiti in Krasnogorsk, a suburb of Moscow on April 10, 2023.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s calls to increase the birth rate, combined with abortion restrictions and the promotion of “traditional values,” have failed to halt Russia’s demographic decline, The Moscow Times reported on April 23.
The number of births in Russia has declined for the 11th consecutive year, according to estimates by demographer Alexei Raksha, as quoted by The Moscow Times. In the first quarter of 2026, roughly 272,000 babies were born—a 6% drop from the previous year.
For context, the first quarter of 2025 saw 289,000 births, which Raksha noted was already the lowest figure recorded since the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
This year, that 200-year floor was shattered. Compared to the first quarter of the pre-war year of 2021, the number of births plummeted by 12.5%. When compared to Russia’s modern record high in 2014, the decline has reached a staggering 38%.
The Moscow Times notes that official demographic data in Russia has been classified since the spring of 2025, halting the state publication of figures on births, deaths, and the overall population size
The last available annual data from Rosstat , covering 2024, revealed that births had dropped to 1.222 million. That was the lowest number since 1999, a year marked by extreme economic crisis and soaring inflation following the country’s default. According to Raksha’s calculations, the number of newborns fell another 4% in 2025 to 1.178 million, marking the absolute lowest point in the country’s modern history.
Despite heavy state campaign promoting large families, the total fertility rate (TFR)—the average number of children per woman of childbearing age—continues to sink. In 2025, the TFR hit 1.418, which is 20% lower than the rates seen a decade ago.
Back in 2018, Putin set a national goal to halt the natural population decline that began shortly after the annexation of Crimea. Yet, despite launching a “Demography” national project costing 4 trillion rubles ($52.8 billion), Russia lost approximately 4 million people between 2018 and 2024 due to the mortality rate heavily outweighing the birth rate.
The Moscow Times writes that, in 2020, the Kremlin pushed its population recovery targets back to 2030. At the start of Putin’s sixth term, he mandated a new “family-centered” demographic strategy. The plan demands that the country’s fertility rate rise to 1.6 by 2030 and 1.8 by 2036. Achieving this would mean reaching the highest levels since the Soviet era.
As part of this strategy, Russian officials intend to “strengthen the institutions of family and marriage.” The government plans to heavily feature images of large families in advertising and media content, while introducing state awards for grandparents with numerous grandchildren.
The Russian authorities have recently been prosecuting officials tasked with implementing the state’s demographic programs. In February, law enforcement arrested the director of the Institute for Demographic Development in Nizhny Novgorod on large-scale fraud charges after his state-funded projects to increase fertility and promote family values failed to produce results.
The institute, established by the regional government, was tasked with creating measures to support fertility, conducting social research, and promoting “family values.”
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-hits-two-century-low-in-birth-rates-despite-kremlin-push-for-large-families-18174
Oriana:
According to Misha Firer, a typical Russian family consists of a single mother, one child, and the maternal grandmother. That sounds about right for urban ethnic Russians. The higher figure in country-wide statistics is due to higher birth rate in Russia’s Turkic republics.
*
THE WAR ON UKRAINE MAY TURN INTO PUTIN’S UNDOING
A battered economy, huge numbers of casualties and very little territorial gain – it’s no wonder even stalwart Putin supporters are showing signs of disquiet
Putin at the Victory Parade, May 9, 2026
On 9 May, Russia held its iconic annual Victory Day parade to honor the sacrifices of its soldiers and civilians during its four-year war against Nazi Germany. When the president, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, he didn’t anticipate a fight that would last longer than the Red Army’s epic struggle against the Wehrmacht. But his war drags on. Worse, it’s failing and threatening his grip on power.
Despite Putin’s boasts about Russian troops advancing on every front, even pro-war military bloggers are criticizing military mismanagement. Some say the momentum favors Ukraine and at least one warns that Russia could lose. With the frontline stalled, an estimated 1.3 million Russian troops dead or wounded, and ordinary Russians under increasing economic pressure, the war Putin believed would produce his crowning achievement may prove to be his undoing.
For Russians, the war was once something that happened over there. Now it’s happening inside Russia itself. Ukraine’s drones and missiles routinely hit targets deep inside the country – often more than 1,000 miles from the border. They include Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Yaroslavl, Murmansk and the Baltic Sea oil-loading ports at Primorsk and Ust-Luga. The refineries at Tuapse, on the Black Sea’s northern coastline, and Yaroslavl have been set ablaze repeatedly. Ukrainian drones have also caused numerous airport closures and flight delays across Russia.
Ukraine’s relentless drone attacks forced Putin to pare back Saturday’s military parade. In a phone call with Donald Trump on 29 April, Putin floated the idea of a three-day ceasefire from 9 May to avoid the humiliation of a Ukrainian attack on Red Square. The Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, later accepted the proposal at Trump’s urging, especially because a prisoner exchange was included, but he didn’t allow Putin to avoid embarrassment completely: his official ceasefire decree exempted Red Square from attack, but not all of Russia.
The war has also battered Russia’s economy. The army and military industry’s huge appetite for manpower has created an acute labor shortage. That has produced a low unemployment rate (2.2% in March), but it has also slowed economic growth, squeezed small businesses already reeling from tax increases and raised inflation as companies compete for workers. Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry reports that nearly two-thirds of small businesses didn’t turn a profit in the first quarter of this year. Economic growth fell from 4.9% in 2024 to 1% in 2025, and will probably remain at that level this year. But 2026 is already off to a bad start: GDP shrank by 0.3% year-on-year during the first quarter.
If things in the rear don’t look good, the same goes for the front. The Russian army’s advances this year have been minimal, in part because Ukrainian drone warfare has transformed the battlefield. For about two years, Russian commanders have struggled to mass armored and mechanized units capable of punching through the 900-mile frontline and seizing territory because Ukraine’s ubiquitous drones quickly spot concentrations of men and material. Russia switched to sending small groups of soldiers to infiltrate Ukrainian lines and establish footholds for follow-on forces, but because drones strike infiltrating infantry so effectively, this adaptation won’t produce major advances.
Last year, Russia gained a mere 0.8% of Ukrainian territory at the cost of more than 400,000 casualties, including 200,000 dead. Its momentum has slowed markedly this year, and in April it lost more territory than it captured – a first since the reverses in Kursk in the autumn of 2023 – though the ubiquity of drones can complicate precise assessments of territorial control. Although Russia may launch a big summer push in Donetsk, Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk still haven’t been fully conquered despite offensives that began there in the spring and summer of 2024, respectively.
Ukraine has certainly suffered substantial casualties (at least 300,000 soldiers and, according to some estimates, more than 500,000 – plus 59,000 civilians), extensive destruction and territorial losses of about 8% since 2022 – and about 20% since 2014. But these figures are unsurprising (as are Ukraine’s struggles with recruitment and retention), given Russia’s advantage in firepower; what is remarkable is the magnitude of Russian losses.
Those losses reflect Ukraine’s ramp-up of drone production and development of models that are harder to jam or shoot down. The early versions were followed by first-person view (FPV) drones (remotely operated through real-time video feeds), then fiber-optic models impervious to jamming, and most recently AI-assisted models. Ukraine has also started using aerial and ground-based autonomous systems for supplying the front, evacuating the wounded and even for assaults. Those successes have reduced its casualties while increasing Russia’s, which now equal the number of monthly recruits – roughly 35,000 – with drones accounting for 70-80% of casualties.
The signs of anxiety within the Kremlin are unmistakable. Putin’s security cordon has been tightened, his travel within the country curtailed. Bocharov Ruchey, his Black Sea residence in Sochi, was demolished and rebuilt with added security. In contrast to Zelenskyy, he hasn’t visited frontline soldiers since March last year. The government has also clamped down on social media, blocking Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube. In February it started restricting access to Telegram, which nearly 50% of Russians use for news and messaging, and in April moved towards a full ban.
Last month, the Communist party chief, Gennady Zyuganov, a stalwart Putin supporter, warned his fellow parliamentarians of the example of 1917, when wartime strains on society sparked two revolutions.
Though Putin’s fate isn’t necessarily sealed his war is floundering, and the signs of disquiet at the top are too numerous to dismiss. The Victory Day parade was meant to celebrate Russia’s martial glory; instead, it could prove to be a requiem for Putin’s military ambitions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/15/russia-war-ukraine-vladimir-putin-economy-casualties?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1778833734
*
SINGLE WOMEN BUYING HOUSES
Female home owners report feeling stuck between men’s contradictory expectations – they are told to be independent, but not assume the breadwinner role
~~
When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.
“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.
Tiffany, then 29, had just ended a long-term relationship and moved from her home town of Winston-Salem to Charlotte for a new job at a career development center. She had just joined Match.com and was starting to dip her toe into the Charlotte dating scene. Her date, previously promising, was clearly struggling to understand why she would want a serious relationship if she was going to buy her own home.
Tiffany was thrown. “I was like, ‘I don’t understand the question.’”
With all the speculation over declining marital and birthrates in the US, a disconnect between men and women’s expectations of heterosexual relationships is coming into focus. While 31% of gen Z men agree that “a wife should always obey her husband”, young women rank career satisfaction and financial independence as their top personal priorities.
“It was pretty jarring,” Tiffany said of that date. “Why would me buying a house be a deterrent for a guy? Wouldn’t that be a positive? He went from seeming really nice to kind of aggressive. Like, ‘Good luck finding somebody as good as me when you’re Miss Independent.’”
While theories like the 6-6-6 rule have gained popularity in the manosphere – claiming that women are only interested in dating men who are 6ft tall with six-pack abs and six-figure incomes – in actuality, many women are facing the fallout of being financially independent.
Stories like Tiffany’s have emerged across women’s whisper networks, support groups and on social media in recent years, as single women across the US continue to surpass their male counterparts in rates of homebuying. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 2025 profile of homebuyers and sellers, single women now make up 25% of US first-time homebuyers, more than twice the percentage of single men (10%).
Despite earning less than men on average, NAR’s 2025 data show that single women report a greater willingness to make financial sacrifices to prioritize their homebuying goals: 41% reported spending less on entertainment, vacations, clothing and other non-essential goods, compared with 31% of single men.
“There’s more women who just aren’t waiting on a spouse in order to achieve their life goals,” said Daryl Fairweather, the author of Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes For Life, Love and Work and chief economist at the real estate website Redfin.
“Home ownership right now is pretty unattainable,” added Fairweather – even more so as a single person compared with dual income households, especially as prices and interest rates rise. “I think there is also an urge to buy a home earlier,” she said, suggesting women may be prioritizing their window of financial opportunity in a competitive market over waiting for milestones such as marriage.
“I’ve always wanted to have equity, especially because I’m a single Black woman,” a woman, whom I’ll call Tonya, told me. “I wanted to make sure that I have something to lean on.”
Tonya, who wanted to be anonymous because of the backlash she experienced while pursuing her ownership goals, moved to San Francisco in 2021 to accept a faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco. Given the historic rise in Bay Area rental prices, Tonya considered home ownership an investment. She wasn’t in a serious relationship, but she didn’t want to wait for one to prioritize her financial future. “I just wanted to make sure that there was something in my name,” she said.
Tonya was 36 when she closed on her condo, and before long, she experienced friction in her love life. She would go on a few dates, and everything would be going well. “And then they find out,” said Tonya.
It wasn’t just that men lost interest when they found out she owned her own place – it also seemed to trigger combativeness, even hostility, in them. “I feel like it immediately puts men on the defensive, so they start talking about their own finances and what they’re able to do.”
It wasn’t Tonya’s first time managing the discomfort her achievements elicited in prospective partners. She had already learned to downplay her successes as a professional woman working in the sciences. “As soon as I tell people I’m a scientist, they shut down or they start talking about what they’re doing.”
But she had hoped things might play out differently after being set up with someone through a mutual acquaintance. “He was mature. He was in his late 40s, so in a position where there wasn’t time to just play around. I felt he was someone I could talk to.”
When he arrived at her condo to visit, things unfolded in a painfully familiar way. “It was a nice building and I think that really threw him off,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Oh, the rent must be crazy here.’ And I was like, ‘No I actually own it. I thought I told you that.’ The energy shifted immediately.
“I could feel his male ego kicking in, like, ‘I can provide too,’” Tonya remembered. She tried to reassure him, clarifying that she did not expect a man to take care of her and that she wanted to build something together. But things only escalated from there. “He was just being volatile and angry over mild things,” she said. When she voiced her opinion, he would call her needy or ask her point blank: “Do you want to be the husband in the relationship now?”
For women caught in between these contradictory claims – labeled both too independent and not independent enough – heterosexual dating and relationships can start to feel futile.
“The options are small to begin with, so they tell you to be open minded,” said Tonya, citing popular red-pill claims that women are only interested in hypergamy, or “dating up”. “But then the men don’t take that very well,” she said, referring to her experiences dating men with comparatively fewer financial resources. “They view it as you trying to emasculate them, even when you specifically say, ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to do.’”
For men, however, women’s home ownership may be signaling something else entirely.
“My research suggests men can experience more psychological distress when they feel they are deviating from the breadwinner role,” said Dr Joanna Syrda, an economist whose 2019 paper found that men’s stress levels rise when their wives earn more than 40% of the household income. “So the issue may be less home ownership itself than what it symbolizes,” she added.
Men in couples where women earned more money at the start of the marriage did not report heightened levels of stress. This means “these responses are unlikely to be universal […] some men are quite comfortable with a higher-earning or more financially established female partner when this is known from the outset”, she said.Yet in Tonya and Tiffany’s stories, the revelation came early on. I asked Dr Y Joel Wong, a counseling psychology professor at Indiana University who studies the psychology of men and masculinities, what might be driving men’s responses to single women’s growing independence.
One core feature of masculinities that can lead to problems “is a fear or avoidance of femininity”, he said. Some research has found that men feel an urge to restore their manhood when they feel they may be identified with stereotypical femininity: “So if women are more successful economically, then it’s almost like, ‘I have lost a little bit of my manhood.’”
A growing body of data shows that men engage in higher rates of infidelity and emotional and physical abuse when outpaced by female partners in traditional markers of wealth and status such as income.
Dr Jennie Young is a professor of rhetoric who popularized the Burned Haystack Method, which consists of analyzing how men communicate on dating apps. Young feels this is connected to how people view gender roles; many women seek partnership with men still unwilling to trade in the traditional “provider” identity to meet them there.
“It’s interesting because the same gender group that’s constantly complaining about how women are gold diggers who exploit them for labor and money … It turns out even they [men] can’t think of what they bring to the table other than money,” she observed.
It was as recently as 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in the US, making it illegal for lenders to discriminate against credit applicants on the basis of protected characteristics like sex and marital status. Many of the single women taking out mortgages today were raised by women who couldn’t do the same.
When women couldn’t have their own bank accounts, earn meaningful amounts of their own money, or obtain credit in their own name, they were largely dependent on men for access to money, property and personal financial security. “You took on a certain amount of risk and even trauma from men in order to be provided for,” said Young.
“We’ve been living in a world whose social, political and economic mechanisms have been dependent upon women’s willingness to self-sacrifice,” Young said. But now that women can claim their own piece of the American dream without having to make the same trade-offs as their predecessors, “a lot of men really don’t know what to do,” she said.
*
“I think it speaks to values more so than anything else,” said Diana Pegoraro, an attorney who bought her condo on the Toronto waterfront back in 2020. “Having housing stability wasn’t part of my childhood,” she said; she saved up a downpayment as soon as she paid off the last of her law school loans.
For the most part, the men she has dated haven’t owned homes, but she doesn’t see it as a downside. Even so, her condo has become a point of conflict in most of her relationships.
“In multiple cases, I’ve been dating a man who could afford to own his own condo but rents, and has asked me to move in with him as opposed to moving into my own condo – and that’s become a major sticking point,” she said.
Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, suggested that for many men, living under a woman’s roof goes too far against historical social norms. “Then she would become their landlord, right? And the landlord has power over you. They can evict you.”
Diana said she made many efforts to be flexible and open minded to her partners’ preferences. She got rid of furniture to make space for their things and with one partner, she did actually rent out her place to move into his. But she repeatedly found herself in a pattern of one-way compromise – the men’s wishes shaped the way she lived, and she rarely received the same consideration or sacrifice.
Now in her mid-30s, Diana is less accommodating. “[My home] has become a key aspect of my identity,” she said. “It’s where I host. It’s become a center for my friend group to gather.” She now sees negativity around her condo ownership as an early red flag.
Los Angeles-based realtor Angela Johnson has seen a growing number of single women among prospective homebuyers. “Rather than being like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t find anybody,’ or ‘I had to,’ or ‘It’s my only option,’ we’re seeing a lot of women that are excited about the idea of buying on their own,” she said. “They’re psyched about it.”
Looking back on her own home ownership journey, Tiffany, now 40, is proud of it. “I have been able to experience freedom and joy and fun and cool stuff with my kid that statistically, on paper, I should not have been able to do,” she said, referencing the barriers that keep most first generation college students, single mothers, and Black women like herself from accessing the same opportunities.
She also has learned to spot the early warning signs. “Sometimes on dating apps, men will have in their profile little comments about what they’re not looking for – like ‘don’t swipe if you’re an independent woman or if you’re not feminine.’”
Even in early conversations, she has learned to be wary when men address her with “preconceived notions about their level in relation to you. Like, ‘hey, big money’, or ‘boss lady’,” she said.
She recently deleted all of her dating apps after coming to the conclusion that her time and energy is better spent elsewhere.
“Where is the pool of men who are self-sufficient and like to read, are willing to go to therapy and are not afraid of a woman who has a passport? That sounds really wild to say out loud, but I don’t feel like I’m missing a ton by choosing to read a book instead of swiping on Hinge.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/may/13/women-home-buyers-men-dating
*
THE SECRET OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES: INHERITANCE
Forget boomers v millennials: is the real divide between people who inherit from their parents – and those who don’t?
Isobel had a hard time getting pregnant. After several heartbreaking miscarriages and three grueling rounds of IVF, she had begun to worry that, at 34, she was running out of time. But, miraculously, the fourth round worked, and when we speak she is weeks from giving birth. Her parents are “amazingly excited” about meeting their first grandchild, not least because they funded Isobel’s fertility treatment – as is the case for an estimated one in eight British couples needing IVF – meaning she and her partner could throw everything into trying to conceive, undergoing several treatment cycles in quick succession.
“I’m so grateful to have been able to rattle through it at the speed we did, when I know friends have taken big gaps between IVF rounds because they had to save up,” says Isobel, who works for a London-based charity. “I didn’t have to think about how much it cost, which really took the pressure off.” The pandemic had also made her acutely aware of her parents’ mortality, worrying they might not live to see any grandchildren. So she and her partner gratefully accepted their offer.
It’s not the first time family money has helped her out. Isobel’s parents inherited legacies from their own parents in their 50s, which helped them pass on “living gifts” to her. They helped her buy a house in London when she was 27, and paid off her student loan when she was 22, so she could start saving for a pension. “When I think of the money that’s gone into that pension, it just starts a whole cycle of privilege over again,” Isobel says. Although she couldn’t be more grateful for her parents’ life-changing generosity, like many recipients of family money, she isn’t comfortable discussing it publicly; Isobel isn’t her real name and she hasn’t been upfront with colleagues about how she came to buy a house so young. It was awkward, she admits, when they started holding Zoom meetings from home during the pandemic and everyone could see where she lived. “It doesn’t feel fair – and it makes you feel guilty.”
house made of
Britain is entering a golden age of inheritance, as the trillions accumulated by the postwar baby-boom generation begin trickling down to their children and grandchildren in what’s been dubbed the great wealth transfer. By 2025, £100bn – more than half the annual budget of the NHS – could be changing hands every year, according to a landmark analysis commissioned by estate administrators the Kings Court Trust. By 2047, they estimate that number could more than treble. Around £5.5tn in total could flow down through families over the next 30 years, both in conventional legacies and increasingly in living gifts like Isobel’s, which don’t attract inheritance tax if the donor survives for seven years after handing them over. In wealthy families, these can be part of a carefully crafted strategy to reduce death duties, often funneled into property or school fees. “As a grandparent, have you considered investing in your grandchild’s education instead of paying 40% inheritance tax?” asks the website of fee-paying Bolton school, suggesting brightly that it’s one way to “leave a worthy bequest whilst avoiding giving away lifetime earnings to the taxman!”
But wealth transfers aren’t confined to the rich. Research into lifetime gifting by HMRC found nearly a quarter of over-70s had helped their children out financially in the last two years alone, with the instinct to help so strong that some were getting into debt to do it. Half of first-time buyers have financial help from family, according to the annual Bank of Mum and Dad report from financial services company Legal & General, while roughly a third of grandparents plan to help grandchildren with university costs. A generation who enjoyed free education, and could become homeowners even on relatively modest incomes, are watching in alarm as their children struggle to reach the same milestones, and stepping in if they can.
The sums involved in the great wealth transfer are so staggeringly high partly because the so-called boomers make up such a big chunk of the population – roughly a fifth – but partly because they got lucky. Historically, it’s perfectly normal for older people to be richer than younger ones, having had a lifetime to accumulate property, pensions and savings. What has happened to those assets over a generation, however, is unusual. House prices trebled in real terms between 1980 and 2020, and even a council house bought through Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy can be worth seven figures in some London postcodes. One in four pensioner households are now worth over £1m on paper, even if they’re not cash rich. Now this windfall is heading down to the next generation – or to some of them.
As the Kings Court Trust analysis warns, there is a “deep and growing divide” between younger people who expect to be left something and those painfully aware they won’t be, in a world where family money is becoming increasingly critical to life chances. Research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank last year showed that for children born in the 60s, a quarter of the difference in living standards between rich and poor was explained solely by inherited capital. For 80s children, a third of it is. And the harder it feels to make it on merit in tough economic times, the more inherited wealth may grate, making it an extraordinary wellspring of guilt, rivalry and sometimes gnawing resentment. Last summer, New York magazine rather melodramatically asked, “Will the Great Wealth Transfer trigger a millennial civil war?”, arguing that the supposed generational conflict between boomers and millennials might soon morph into conflict between the young haves and have-nots.
It’s something Isobel worries about. “Of my friends who have bought houses, most have got money from their parents,” she says. “When people talk about our generation having a terrible time, I think the divide is between people who do and don’t have inherited wealth.” No wonder inheritance has become the middle class’s dirty secret, harder to talk about than sex.
A child of Nigerian immigrant parents, the writer Otegha Uwagba did not grow up with money. But getting a full scholarship to a private school, then moving on to Oxford, brought her into contact with a very different social circle. In her bestselling memoir We Need To Talk About Money, she describes her new friends’ strange coyness about how they became homeowners in their 20s: “Few people are forthcoming in noting the often massive inheritances underwriting these purchases. Instead, we see Instagram photos of beaming twentysomethings standing proudly on the steps of their new home, or engage in polite dinner party chitchat about paint swatches and mid-century Ercol furniture, even as we silently wonder, ‘How?’” Puzzled, Uwagba once asked a friend how she’d secured a mortgage aged only 24. It turned out the woman’s parents had bought the flat outright, and she was just pretending to need a loan.
“I think people are coy about sharing the reality of any form of privilege, whether it’s racial or gender or financial. They think it diminishes them,” Uwagba says. After all, they haven’t made it on merit.
“Intergenerational gifting is sensitive,” write sociologists Liz Moor and Sam Friedman, in a research paper examining how people whose parents have helped them to buy justify their good fortune. “It can elicit feelings of guilt, embarrassment, even shame, and therefore often goes unspoken in everyday life.” Some of the heirs they interviewed felt judged by friends for not having made it on their own, while those with leftwing views struggled to reconcile personal gratitude with political conscience. Participants tended to say inheritance tax was a good thing, but mainly if it fell on people richer than them.
Moor, who set out to examine why there isn’t more social pressure to tax inherited wealth, says interviewees tended to defend themselves by citing the working-class roots of relatives who made money generations ago. “People could find a way to reconcile a belief in meritocracy with receiving unearned income by making that connection to upward social mobility over time,” she says. “It’s a bit self-serving, but it lends itself to the status quo when you can say, ‘Yes, but it was my working-class grandparents selling their bungalow that helped me buy my flat.’” What they found harder to explain away was the disparity between them and friends in similar jobs who couldn’t afford to buy. One interviewee, Alicia, simply hid the fact that she had bought her flat outright.
As Uwagba points out, this embarrassed silence just leaves those without family money to self-flagellate over why they can’t seem to get their lives together when the truth is their friends haven’t really done so either; they just have parents who did. For most of her 20s she assumed financial success was “a question of working hard, getting further up the career ladder”, but not any more: “If I can’t figure it out, I just assume it’s family money, and that’s a good rule of thumb, especially with people working in the media and publishing.”
Wealth acquired young, she points out, has a powerful multiplier effect. Get your student loan paid off and you can save for a deposit earlier. The sooner you buy property, the sooner money that would have gone on rent is building assets your own children might inherit. Wealth breeds wealth, so much so that one study tracing the descendants of wealthy Victorians found their great-great-grandchildren were still disproportionately likely to be well off five generations later. Some of Uwagba’s contemporaries had their education funded by grandparents: “So now your life trajectory is determined not even by your parents’ money but by your grandparents’ – how do you compete with that?”
Inherited money, or the expectation of it, also has less tangible advantages. It can free people to take professional risks, entering potentially lucrative fields that don’t pay well initially – from insecure gigs such as acting to professions with surprisingly low earnings for juniors, like criminal law. Uwagba herself went into advertising after graduating, worrying that writing for a living seemed too precarious. But friends from wealthier families were more confident about taking unpaid internships in creative industries: “It’s the knowledge that there’s money coming down the line eventually. You can take more risks, think more long term.”
That’s true for Beth, who works in PR, and discovered in her mid-40s she was to inherit a “life-changing” amount after her parents died in quick succession. The windfall was a surprise, as her parents are from ordinary backgrounds and she hadn’t considered them rich. But her father started a successful engineering business in her native Australia; her parents bought property, managed their money carefully, and left enough for Beth to pay off her mortgage. But she has also worked out that, if she wants to, she could now move to a hot country where overheads are cheap, and not work for a decade. She isn’t sure if that life is for her, but knowing that, for the first time in her life, she could quit has transformed her attitude to a stressful job. “If you have a bad day at work, you can think, ‘Screw this, I don’t need it.’ No wonder the confidence of rich folk!”
Yet for some, family money comes with more complex feelings attached. Philippa, a 39-year-old NHS worker, says her parents are not wealthy but stretched themselves to help her buy a small flat on the outskirts of London she couldn’t otherwise have afforded on a public sector salary. She worries whether they have left themselves enough for a comfortable retirement, and whether she invested wisely (she recently discovered some issues with the flat that may make it harder to resell). “They trusted me to make the right decisions, and I worry about letting them down,” she says. Like Isobel, Philippa views her good fortune with both gratitude and guilt that she isn’t more financially independent. “You want to be self-sufficient, but to be in a position to have help – that’s a really difficult thing to turn down.” The hopes and fears bound up with inheritance can make it an emotionally loaded issue not just in broader society, but also within families.
It was back in the early noughties, just as the baby boomers were entering their 50s, that marketing analysts first identified what became known as the “ski set”; empty nesters who had paid off their mortgages and were unashamedly out to Spend the Kids’ Inheritance on bucket-list holidays, sports cars and pleasures they had denied themselves while raising families.
The ski-ers had worked hard and meant “to make the most of it while they can” instead of leaving legacies, a report by the analysts Datamonitor concluded. Hidden in the small print was the fact that many had already given their children money to buy property first. But still, the idea of hedonistic pensioners caught on. When the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conducted research into attitudes to legacies back in 2005, it found two-thirds of those potentially wealthy enough to leave something weren’t worried about organizing their finances to do so, and more than half of adults didn’t expect to get anything.
Older people wanted to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and some might even have worried about inheritance doing more harm than good: this was, after all, the era of celebrities from software billionaire Bill Gates to cookery writer Nigella Lawson declaring they wouldn’t leave fortunes to their children because (in Lawson’s words) “it ruins people not having to earn money”.
But in 2005, Britain was in the middle of a seemingly endless economic boom. Three recessions later, parents are far less confident about their children’s prospects and also potentially their own, with rocketing inflation disrupting retirement plans. The original ski-ers are now in their 70s and 80s, and worrying about this winter’s central heating bills, even as they may be fretting about their adult children growing older in rented flats.
Rachael Griffin is head of tax and trusts at the wealth management company Quilter, and specialises in inheritance advice. Some clients still worry about spoiling their children by passing money on, she says, but she senses attitudes shifting: most want to see their hard-earned wealth passed down the family, not collected by the taxman. “There’s always this sort of underlying concern that people want their children or grandchildren to achieve on their own, and understand the value of money and work. But that way of thinking is changing, just because trying to get on the housing ladder now is completely different from how it would have been for baby boomers.”
Even for those wealthy enough to need advice from a firm like hers, the cost of living crisis is making itself felt. Some clients worry about keeping back enough to pay for nursing care in their old age, given uncertainty about what the government will fund (a promise to cap care costs has just been delayed for another two years). Others are seeking advice on conserving capital, not giving it away. “We’re in a crisis, so people feel like they need their own money today,” Griffin says. “It’s that fear of running out of money during their lifetimes.”
A society that has become overly reliant on inherited money may have potentially painful consequences not just for those who don’t inherit, but also for people’s quality of life at an age when they should be free to please themselves. According to a recent report on inheritance from low-income thinktank the Resolution Foundation, some older people are now making significant sacrifices in order to leave something to their children, with 9% downsizing, 16% saving more and 4% working longer into retirement. “It’s not just about younger people missing opportunities if they don’t happen to have rich parents – it penalizes older people, too,” says Jack Leslie, senior economist at the foundation and co-author of the report. This often unspoken intergenerational clash of expectations makes inheritance a sensitive subject in many families.
Fiona is a 33-year-old single parent, working in local government. Her parents chipped in for her older sister’s house deposit and promised to do the same for her, she says. But when she was ready to buy, her parents told her they had plowed everything into a house abroad, hoping for a retirement in the sun, leaving Fiona torn between accepting that it was their hard-earned cash to do with as they wanted, and feeling privately bitter.
“Even with my parents, it’s very difficult to talk about. There’s a lot of emotion attached, and a lot of shame,” she says. “They are quite prickly about it. But this is what I struggle to reconcile – I do sound entitled; my parents came from very working-class backgrounds, worked hard and ended up well off, and if they want to buy houses overseas, they can.” But she struggles not to feel short-changed, compared with her sister. What makes the passage of money down through families so emotionally loaded is that money is rarely just that. All too often, it can stir painful memories of who was the favorite child, or who felt overlooked growing up. No wonder some families end up squabbling over seemingly trivial trinkets following a bereavement, or blowing their inheritances on fighting each other in court.
“I’ve had people come to me for a legal consultation and describe incidents in their highchairs,” sighs Barbara Rich, a family law barrister specializing in high-value inheritance cases and a mediator trained to resolve family disputes over wills. Her first question to clients, she tells me over Zoom from her elegant study, is now invariably about their place in the birth order and relationships with siblings; she has never forgotten overhearing, as a young barrister, a conversation that sounded like “something out of a Larkin poem” unfolding outside court. “A middle-aged woman turned and said to [the sibling] next to her: ‘Mum never loved you, you know, and those candlesticks aren’t real pewter.’ That really sums it up.”
Perhaps surprisingly, such legal wrangling over legacies is no longer confined to families who would regard themselves as rich. Especially in London and the south-east, the property boom has created a new class of unexpected heirs. “People whose parents or grandparents were working-class Windrush arrivals and council house right-to-buy owners – their descendants are in this net now,” Rich says. “Someone who came over on the Windrush could have a secure blue-collar job and afford a mortgage on what would then have been a run-down house in Brixton or Tottenham.” She has represented clients who grew up in “really unimaginable poverty – broken windows, not enough shoes for all the children to go to school every day”, and yet found themselves in line for seven-figure inheritances.
What commonly brings them into dispute, she says, is that older people who don’t consider themselves rich may not bother making a will. In the absence of one, estates usually pass by default to surviving children or spouses – an arrangement that may suit traditional nuclear families, but not always those broken and remade by migration. “A grandfather who came on the Windrush might well have left siblings and parents in Jamaica; they might even have left children to come and work, then perhaps formed a new relationship. There are perhaps children they barely know who are entitled to inherit in the absence of a will, and someone they’ve lived with, children they’ve had from a long relationship, living in the house, who aren’t.”
Sometimes it’s only in death that the tensions and secrets beneath the surface of family life emerge. Rich has handled several disputes where the existence of a mistress or even a second family with a claim to money emerged posthumously. Another common source of tension, she says, is wealthy men divorcing, then marrying younger women, who outlive them and clash with the children of the first marriage over the inheritance. But perhaps the most painful disputes are between siblings not treated equally in a will – in some cases because parents are trying to compensate for perceived hardship in one child’s life. “Sometimes parents get an idea about their children, even when the children are quite small – who’s the pretty one, who’s the clever one – and then perhaps subconsciously mould their children’s lives to fit that pattern,” Rich says.
Sheila, a 60-year-old retired City dealer and mother of two grown-up children, inherited nothing from her father when he died. There wasn’t much to leave, she says, as she comes from a “very ordinary” family. But her father told her in advance her younger sister would get the family house, because Sheila had a successful career and didn’t need it. When I ask if being cut out was hurtful, she insists it made her proud of being self-reliant. “I feel almost aggressively righteous about not having received a penny from anybody,” she says. “As a child, my sister was always the one who was asking for stuff, she always feels hard done by, and you think: how many of these things should come easily? She had conversations with my dad saying, ‘I have nothing, she’s got everything,’ and he just thought, ‘Well, OK then.’”
Some of her friends think millennial children have it too easy and should give up luxuries rather than rely on their parents. (More than half of boomers still think overspending on things like Netflix and holidays is a key reason young people can’t buy property, according to research published in June by King’s College London.) But Sheila fervently disagrees. “My husband bought his first house in 1975 for about tuppence ha’penny. He and his first wife had very ordinary jobs – she was a manager in a shop – but they bought a three-bedroom semi in London. That would be impossible now,” she says, pointing out that her children’s generation is also burdened with student debt.
When her husband inherited from his father, the couple passed the money directly to their children – but have given their 30-year-old son more help than his older sister. “She’s very ambitious, works hard. We have given money to both of them, but he has received far more. He’s not married – he’d be living with us still if we hadn’t topped up the inheritance money he already had.” She pauses. Though she plans to even things up in her will, her daughter isn’t happy about it: “We have a strained relationship – she says, ‘Oh, he’s always the golden child.’”
Will and his wife are on the other side of a similar family divide. His mother-in-law, a wealthy widow, is generous with presents to each of her three children. Two are high earners, but Will’s wife is not. When their now teenage children were small, Will and his wife were struggling to trade up to a bigger family house and his mother-in-law offered to give them £100,000. His wife’s richer siblings objected, arguing that it was unfair not to do the same for them.
“It was really clear that it was important neither my wife nor I ever referred to our relative income – that would have been a red rag to a bull,” Will recalls. “My brother-in-law is earning more in a month than my wife and I are earning in a year, which to us means they don’t need this money – and his response was, ‘You don’t need it either, you don’t have to live in a house that’s worth another £100,000.’”
To avoid ill-feeling, his wife declined the money. But years later, when they were house-hunting again, his mother-in-law quietly repeated the offer – adding that this time she wouldn’t ask the rest of the family. The money will come off his wife’s share of her inheritance, but Will still isn’t sure if the other siblings know about it.
Squabbling over money looks, he admits, a “nice problem to have” – at least there’s something to fight over. But having seen the distress it caused his in-laws, Will has encouraged his own parents to be open about their wishes. “It’s not OK to think about it at some point in the future, because it causes so much grief and misunderstanding.”
*
If inherited money can be a double-edged sword within families, there is arguably an easy way to relieve people of the burden, and that’s via the taxman. The Treasury is quietly anticipating a hidden windfall from the great wealth transfer, with inheritance tax receipts due to hit £7.8bn by 2027-2028 (up from £2.4bn in 2009). More and more families are being drawn into the net, thanks to the freezing of the tax-free threshold for the last 13 years, at a time of rising property prices. But still, only around 4% of British estates are liable for inheritance tax, and a married couple passing on the main family home can leave up to £1m between them tax-free.
Successive governments have embraced the idea that, as David Cameron once promised, “The home that you’ve worked and saved for belongs to you and your family. We’ll help you pass it on.” (The exception was the one led by Theresa May, who nearly lost the 2017 election after suggesting more pensioners should sell their family homes to fund nursing care.) But is there scope for the left to be bolder, using the great wealth transfer to raise cash for progressive ends?
If inheritance is a deeply conservative idea, arguably its most conservative function is to underpin the status quo. Historically it’s always helped the rich make their children rich in turn, consolidating wealth and power within the same tight circle. But family money has also insulated many Britons from what would otherwise have been a more painful middle-class squeeze over the last decade.
That ability to live off past glories, creating the illusion of good times still rolling even as real wages flatlined, has arguably kept an artificial lid on pressure for change. “There’s a lot of talk about Generation Rent and how millennials aren’t well off. But there are enough people who are inheriting money, so it doesn’t affect as many people as you think,” Otegha Uwagba says. “When you think about the system of power, who are the gatekeepers, who goes into media and politics – I wonder how many MPs have had to do London renting on a very average salary?”
Yet for all that, the idea of the taxman coming between parent and child remains startlingly unpopular, even among those who might stand to benefit. The Resolution Foundation’s Jack Leslie didn’t ask his focus groups about inheritance tax, reasoning that they weren’t rich enough to be liable for it, but found they were strongly resistant to the idea: “It feels deeply unfair to people – basically, people feel it’s right that they should be able to help their children or their grandchildren.”
In October, amid rumors that the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, might be eyeing up inheritance tax as one way of bailing out the public finances, a YouGov poll found two-thirds of Britons opposed a higher rate, and almost half wanted the entire tax abolished. The parental instinct to protect your own can be fiercer sometimes than reason.
When I ask Isobel if she has a solution to the uncomfortable social divide she describes, she says instantly: “Tax us more!” But it may be a brave politician who takes her up on that in a country where inheritance is increasingly central to middle-class ambitions, or seen as a shield against the slings and arrows to come. Too many lives are shaped by family money, perhaps, to give it up without a fight.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/dec/03/why-inheritance-is-the-dirty-secret-of-the-middle-classes-harder-to-talk-about-than-sex
*
EUROPE FINALLY STANDING UP TO TRUMP
Friedrich Merz’s criticism of Donald Trump last month reflected more than a moment of personal candor or a split between Berlin and the White House. It pointed to a broader shift under way among European leaders. Increasingly they are willing to publicly confront the Trump administration on issues ranging from Iran to Ukraine and European sovereignty.
The Trump administration’s ever-more erratic policies and the belief that they necessitate a more forceful response partly explains this shift.
The German chancellor directed his remarks at the war on Iran. He did not believe, he told an event at a school in his constituency, that Trump had a viable exit strategy. Moreover, Tehran’s clever diplomacy had “humiliated” the US. But Merz’s comments do not exist in isolation – they followed a series of tough interventions from European leaders including Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and even Giorgia Meloni.
The US’s attempt to acquire Greenland earlier this year crossed clear European red lines regarding the territorial integrity of a Nato ally and the right to self-determination of the Greenlandic people. So did attempts by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, to influence Hungary’s election in favor of Viktor Orbán.
Yet none of these crises alone explain Europe’s harder stance. More important is the growing and justified belief inside European capitals that Washington holds less leverage over the continent than it did a year ago.
The Iran war has demonstrated that the US needs Europe-based military infrastructure to project power in the Middle East, suggesting that military dependency is not entirely one-sided. Europe’s military spending has also risen sharply since Trump’s return to office, and a growing share is being directed towards European arms manufacturers.
The US remains Europe’s dominant arms supplier. Yet the Sipri thinktank estimates that the US share of arms transfers to Europe fell to 58% from 2021-25, down from 64% over the 2020-24 period.
The same logic now shapes European thinking on Ukraine. Since March 2025, the US has halted all financing to Kyiv, meaning the bulk of Ukraine’s funding now comes from the EU. Ukraine continues to purchase weapons through Nato’s US-inspired prioritized Ukraine requirements list but it sources a much larger share of its military needs from outside the US. About 60% of military hardware comes from Ukrainian domestic production and 20% from European suppliers.
The US still provides critical capabilities, particularly when it comes to intelligence and air defense. But European officials increasingly believe that even a significant reduction in US support in these areas would not produce an immediate Ukrainian collapse. A less US-dependent Ukraine means a less US-dependent Europe.
European governments have also come to see that many of Trump’s threats never fully materialize. Resistance to the president – from Congress, the courts and even parts of his own Maga coalition – is growing.
EU leaders are less worried, too, about the potency of the Maga movement and its influence on elections in Europe after Trump and Vance’s interventions failed so spectacularly in Hungary. Given the widespread unpopularity of Trump among the European public, standing up to the US is giving European leaders a much-needed opinion poll bounce.
This shift in mood is likely to shape Europe’s response to future disputes with the US, particularly on trade. If Washington proceeds with higher tariffs on European exports such as cars, as Trump is now threatening, the EU will respond more forcefully than it did last year, when it swallowed a 15% tariff hike as part of the US-EU Turnberry trade deal.
EU member states have already approved retaliatory measures covering €93bn of US exports, even if the European Commission would initially leave some room for negotiation. The EU will also continue to take steps to promote “de-risking” from the US in defense, digital services and other critical areas.
The Greenland risk could yet resurface. Danish, Greenlandic and US officials tasked with addressing US security concerns in the Arctic are not making much progress. If Trump’s territorial threats are renewed, the EU would most likely respond with its powerful anti-coercion instrument that would target US hi-tech service providers.
In sum, Europe’s relationship with the US is becoming less deferential. European governments believe that they have greater capacity to resist US pressure. Trump’s aura of invincibility has been dispelled in the US – but also in Europe. His allies no longer feel that they have to flatter and pander their way to the end of his second term.
*
WAS RICHARD THE THIRD A JUST KING?
When taking stock of Richard III’s short reign, one of the positive developments cited by his modern-day supporters is his extension of kingly justice to the poor. Not long after his accession in 1483 Richard reportedly made a ‘proclamation general’ that ‘every man wronged that would complain should have hasty remedy’. Accounts by civic administrators and local gentry confirm that the freshly crowned king spent his progress through the Midlands that summer ‘determining the complaints of poor folks with due punishment of offenders’. In private correspondence the Bishop of St David’s, Thomas Langton, observed that ‘many a poor man that has suffered wrong many days has been relieved and helped’ under Richard’s early governance.
Whether or not one believes that Richard dispatched his nephews on his way to the throne, he plainly had good reason to appear as a bountiful and generous king. His accession was abrupt, involving several executions, and to the political community around London he was associated with those northern reaches that he had governed as Duke of Gloucester.
At the same time, every treatise-writer of the age concurred that justice was the ‘chief charge’ of the king’s office. Every English monarch swore at their coronation to uphold it, equitably and indifferently. Putting Richard’s judicial advancements within this broader historical context is long overdue.
Late-medieval overtures about the king’s judicial duties referred not only to his observation of the law and punishment of crime but also to his
resolution of disputes between subjects. Neighbors fought over the boundaries, occupation and use of land. Families feuded over the terms of testamentary bequests, especially the inheritance of household goods, money and legal deeds. Merchants and their business associates came to loggerheads about the money and material they exchanged. Since these matters impinged on the peace of the realm, the king was theoretically the ideal mediator.
In practice, this had long meant that kings were expected to minister remedies to subjects personally. Henry V received petitions from aggrieved subjects while he was besieging French castles in 1420, responding by referring cases on to his ministers back in England. Edward IV was similarly diligent, passing petitions received in his household to local judges with a covering note proclaiming his own care to see justice done ‘as well to the poor as to the rich’. By the time Richard III came to the throne, offshoots of the central government had been established in the marches of Wales and in the northern reaches of England to keep the peace and to examine subjects’ complaints directly. Court of common pleas at Westminster Hall The key piece of evidence for Richard’s improvement of these practices is an entry in his financial accounts documenting the appointment of a ‘clerk of our council of requests and supplications’, with specific reference to the bills of ‘poor persons’, in December 1483. The timing is certainly telling. Richard openly invited petitions throughout the autumn, seeking to win favor after Buckingham’s Rebellion – an attempt to overthrow his reign – in October. By that winter the king’s council had perhaps become so inundated with cases that it required dedicated personnel.
The allusion to ‘poor persons’ in the appointing grant has been taken to mean that Richard’s justice was especially progressive, amounting to the introduction of ‘legal aid’. In fact, England’s monarchs had long demonstrated an especial care for the disadvantaged, especially when it came to justice-giving.
In 1390 Richard II’s council ordained to prioritize petitions submitted by ‘people of small charge’. In 1429 Parliament decreed that the council for the seven-year-old Henry VI should ‘look which is the poorest suitor’s bill, that first to be read and answered’. The appointment of Richard’s clerk therefore represented a continuity in practice.
Nor did his deposition by the first Tudor king at Bosworth in 1485 put a stop to these developments. A diary of certain burgesses present at Henry VII’s first parliament reports a bill calling for the abolition of the ‘court of requests’ – interpreted by some historians as a targeted take-down of a Yorkist tribunal. Yet the bill does not appear to have passed, and just one year later Henry VII’s council moved to support judgments made by that same ‘court’. In the following decades, under early Tudor rule, the Court of Requests further flourished, gaining its own registers and clearer routines. What remained was the flexible and personalized nature of royal remedies. Plaintiffs to Henry VIII recalled meeting him at the gates to Greenwich Palace, rehearsing complaints verbally and then being directed to submit a formal petition to his councillors. These men worked quickly to order the production of a powerful writ of summons, under the royal seal, demanding the attendance of the accused – often within days. They heard both sides of the case and gathered testimonies from witnesses and neighbors of the parties to aid their investigations. If necessary they passed a final judgment, often seeking to please both parties and achieve lasting peace.
By the middle of the 16th century this popular court had a professional bench of judges and a permanent seat in the White Hall at Westminster. And it did offer some formal succor to the poor. From the 1510s onwards the Court of Requests recorded some of its petitioners as ‘paupers’, and seemingly waived their fees for lawyers and for the production of documents.
This meets modern definitions of ‘legal aid’, even if did not relieve complainants of their considerable expenses for hiring horses and accommodation as they ventured to submit petitions. It was unlikely to have helped the very poorest. Still, these interventions were enough for contemporaries to refer to this as the ‘court of poor men’s causes’. Without earlier, detailed records it is difficult to know whether the same provisions were being offered by Yorkist regimes. All late medieval kings, Richard III included, were concerned about justice-giving – and about being seen to be doing it. Administering justice was, after all, a core expectation of government in this period. The 15th and 16th centuries certainly saw the formalization of procedures around royal justice. Yet the principle transcended the individual on the throne. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/richard-iii-and-kingly-justice-all?utm_source=Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8f2ac0308e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-8f2ac0308e-1214148&mc_cid=8f2ac0308e
*
MICROBE ‘CITIES’ MAY SOLVE A KEY OCEAN MYSTERY
Some of Earth’s tiniest life-forms inhabit slowly sinking particles of fish poop and debris, playing a crucial role in ocean carbon storage
When “marine snow” made of dead plankton’s shells, fish poop, dust particles, and other debris descends to the ocean floor, it carries atmospheric carbon the plankton used to make their calcite shells. It’s one of the ways the ocean stores carbon, helping to keep greenhouse gases from turning the planet into an oversize toaster oven. Yet scientists realized that something has been dissolving those calcite shells and releasing carbon dioxide, reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA identified the culprit: dense microbe “cities” living inside the marine snow.
The individual cities are microscopic, but collectively they have powerful effects on Earth’s climate because the ocean is home to an inconceivable number of microbes. A shot glass full of seawater can contain millions of bacterial cells. “If you were to take every bacterial cell in the ocean and string them end to end like a chain of pearls, it would stretch 50 times around the Milky Way,” says study co-author Andrew Babbin, an oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To study the microbial cities, “we brought the ocean into the laboratory,” says Benedict Borer, lead study author and a biogeochemist at Rutgers University. The scientists introduced microbes to a microfluidic chip designed to mimic marine-snow particles and added fluorescent molecules whose glow changed with oxygen levels and acidity. (The system was so sensitive that at first, people breathing in the lab were affecting measurements.)
The researchers found that the cities’ chemical microenvironments increase calcite dissolution. Many oxygen-breathing microbes feed on carbon, then release carbon dioxide, which turns into carbonic acid in seawater. The sheer number of microbes breathing in such tight quarters creates concentrated pockets of carbonic acid in and around the marine-snow particles, which dissolve the snow’s calcite.
As marine-snow particles dissolve and get lighter, they also sink more slowly, the researchers say, giving carbon extra time to escape before it can reach long-term storage in the deep ocean and potentially increasing its release back into the environment. More research is needed to calculate microbial cities’ full influence on ocean acidity because dissolved calcite can counteract the carbonic acid to an extent.
“Large-scale biogeochemical processes often depend on very small-scale interactions,” says Hongjie Wang, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Babbin agrees: “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microbe-cities-may-solve-a-key-ocean-mystery/
*
*
WHEN INDIA’S VULTURE POPULATION COLLAPSED, HALF A MILLION HUMAN DEATHS FOLLOWED
Vultures may not be the most popular animal in the world, but the work they do is essential for human life, a new study has found. New research attributes 500,000 human deaths in India over the course of five years in the early 2000s to a collapse in the country's vulture populations.
"They perform this really important function in the environment that benefits us as society, as people," co-author Eyal Frank, a University of Chicago economist, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "They get rid of a lot of dead animals and sanitize and clean up the space for us.”
Without those sanitization services, waterways become polluted and diseases run rampant, especially in areas with a lot of livestock, according to new research due to be published in the journal American Economic Review. The findings are being touted by conservationists who have long been sounding the alarm about threats to the scavenger birds around the world. What happened to India's vultures? India was once home to tens of millions of vultures. But in the mid-90s, the birds started dying en masse, and their population was reduced to near-extinction levels.
For years, the sudden deaths were a mystery. But in 2004, scientists cracked the case. The birds were being poisoned by diclofenac, a non-steroidal painkiller widely used in cattle and other livestock. Even a trace amount of the drug causes kidney failure in vultures native to Europe, Asia and Africa. Crows and Himalayan Griffon vultures feed on a carcass in Dharmsala, India, in 2018
The drug's patent expired in 1994, and when cheaper generic versions hit the market, Indian farmers began using it to help sick and injured animals recover more quickly. That's when the birds, which feed on livestock carcasses, began to die. "That made a lot of sense for the livestock, animals and the farmers. What they didn't know is that there were inadvertently poisoning vultures," Frank said.
Diclofenac was banned from veterinary use in India in 2006, though conservationists say some farmers and vets still use it, or other equally toxic alternatives.
How did the study calculate its death toll? Frank and his co-author, University of Warwick economist Anant Sudarshan, estimate the loss of vultures led to an additional 100,000 human deaths per year in India between 2000 and 2005, for a total of 500,000. They arrived at that figure by comparing the human death rates in India before and after the vulture collapse.Areas that traditionally didn't have many vultures didn't see much change, they found. But in places where the birds once thrived, human death rates increased by more than four per cent. The effect was most dramatic in places with a high volume of livestock. The authors also tested water quality in the regions they studied, and found increased pathogen levels in areas where there had once been a lot of vultures. What's more, they tracked the sales of rabies vaccines, which rose sharply after the vultures' decline. This, Frank said, backs up anecdotal evidence that as vultures decreased in India, wild dogs — some carrying rabies — flourished. "I hope that people will see this as one point of evidence that highlights that the natural world, well-functioning ecosystems and biodiversity can truly have an impact on human well-being," Frank said. What do vulture experts have to say? Vulture expert Corinne Kendall, who was not involved in the research, cautioned that studies that rely on observational data are not strong as ones centered around experiments.
Nevertheless Kendall, the curator of conservation and research at the North Carolina Zoo, said this one "does a great job of demonstrating differences in effects on human mortality rate for areas that lost vultures versus those that did not.”
It also, she says, backs up previous research that suggest vultures play a role in preventing the spread of disease. Not only do they clean animal carcasses from the landscape, but their highly acidic stomachs may actually destroy disease-causing pathogens, she said, which prevents the birds from spreading diseases like some other scavenger species do. "This work should act as a wake-up call for other areas where vultures are in decline. We need to do something now as losing these scavengers could have significant consequences on people," Kendall told CBC in an email. "Vultures may not be glamorous or cute, but we need them.” Chris Bowden agrees. He's the vulture program manager at the U.K.'s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's vulture specialist group. He has been working with other conservationists and partners in India to help restore vulture populations by educating people on safe alternatives to diclofenac, running captive breeding programs and advocating for stronger pharmaceutical testing long before veterinary drugs make it to market. Those combined efforts, he says, have pulled the birds back from the brink of extinction. But, according to India's 2023 State of the Bird report, four species of vultures are still listed as critically endangered, and three have seen long-term population declines of between 91 and 98 per cent. "I don't think they're ever going to come back in the same density that they were," he said.
'Magnificent raptors'
Both Kendall and Bowden say vultures face a myriad of threats worldwide, including hunting, accidental poisoning, and collisions with human infrastructure. Bowden says he knows vultures have "a bit of an image problem." But as far as he is concerned, they are "magnificent raptors that are an amazing part of the biodiversity in their own right."
"We hope that this [study] highlights that more clearly, so people take it more seriously to actually do something about conserving these amazing birds," he said. Frank says he hopes his work highlights the importance of biodiversity. "It matters for us … beyond just some fuzzy feelings we have towards, like, the more charismatic species out there," he said.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/vulture-human-deaths-1.7279955
*
HOW CHEAP COTTON UNDERWEAR HELPED COMBAT DISEASE
Long before antibiotics or vaccines, one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in human history wasn't discovered in a laboratory. It was mass-produced cotton underwear.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person wore undergarments made of wool or coarse linen. Fine linen was comfortable and washable, but it was incredibly expensive, restricting its use to the wealthy. Wool was affordable and warm, but it was notoriously difficult to clean and took forever to dry. Consequently, most people rarely washed their clothing, often wearing the same woolen base layers for weeks or months on end.
The invention of the cotton gin and mechanized power looms changed this dynamic entirely by flooding the market with inexpensive cotton fabric. For the first time, working-class populations could afford to own multiple sets of undergarments.
The true medical miracle of cotton, however, was its durability in high temperatures. Boiling wool shrinks and ruins the fibers, but cotton can easily endure boiling water and harsh lye soaps. Once people had a rotation of cheap cotton underwear, weekly laundering became a standard household practice. This simple act of boiling clothes broke the life cycle of the human body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus).
Unlike head lice, body lice do not live directly on the skin. They live and lay their eggs in the seams of clothing, venturing out only to feed on the host. These parasites were the primary vectors for epidemic typhus, trench fever, and louse-borne relapsing fever. Typhus alone was a devastating illness that routinely wiped out entire armies, prisons, and densely populated cities over the centuries.
By regularly changing and boiling their cotton underwear, people inadvertently eradicated the exact environment body lice needed to survive and multiply. As a result, typhus outbreaks plummeted across industrialized nations long before the discovery of modern antibiotics or chemical pesticides like DDT. The humble cotton undershirt acted as a crucial environmental barrier, drastically improving baseline hygiene and quietly saving millions of lives. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
When did cheap cotton underwear first become widely available?
Joseph Lurie:
Early to mid 19th Century, for those with sufficient means who lived near enough to major industrial centers. The poorest of the poor and those who lived away from the railroads had to wait quite a bit longer, and diseases like typhus weren't really eradicated until the late 20th Century, after global industrial infrastructure had fully recovered from WWII.
*
THE NEURONS THAT MAKE US FEEL HUNGRY
Maybe it starts with a low-energy feeling, or maybe you’re getting a little cranky. You might have a headache or difficulty concentrating. Your brain is sending you a message: You’re hungry. Find food.
Studies in mice have pinpointed a cluster of cells called AgRP neurons near the underside of the brain that may create this unpleasant hungry, even “hangry,” feeling. They sit near the brain’s blood supply, giving them access to hormones arriving from the stomach and fat tissue that indicate energy levels. When energy is low, they act on a variety of other brain areas to promote feeding.
By eavesdropping on AgRP neurons in mice, scientists have begun to untangle how these cells switch on and encourage animals to seek food when they’re low on nutrients, and how they sense food landing in the gut to turn back off. Researchers have also found that the activity of AgRP neurons goes awry in mice with symptoms akin to those of anorexia, and that activating these neurons can help to restore normal eating patterns in those animals. Understanding and manipulating AgRP neurons might lead to new treatments for both anorexia and overeating. “If we could control this hangry feeling, we might be better able to control our diets,” says Amber Alhadeff, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
To eat or not to eat
AgRP neurons appear to be key players in appetite: Deactivating them in adult mice causes the animals to stop eating — they may even die of starvation. Conversely, if researchers activate the neurons, mice hop into their food dishes and gorge themselves.
Experiments at several labs in 2015 helped to illustrate what AgRP neurons do. Researchers found that when mice hadn’t had enough to eat, AgRP neurons fired more frequently. But just the sight or smell of food — especially something yummy like peanut butter or a Hershey’s Kiss — was enough to dampen this activity, within seconds. From this, the scientists concluded that AgRP neurons cause animals to seek out food. Once food has been found, they stop firing as robustly.
One research team, led by neuroscientist Scott Sternson at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, also showed that AgRP neuron activity appears to make mice feel bad. To demonstrate this, the scientists engineered mice so that the AgRP neurons would start firing when light was shone into the brain with an optical fiber (the fiber still allowed the mice to move around freely). They placed these engineered mice in a box with two distinct areas: one colored black with a plastic grid floor, the other white with a soft, tissue paper floor. If the researchers activated AgRP neurons whenever the mice went into one of the two areas, the mice started avoiding that region.
Sternson, now at the University of California San Diego, concluded that AgRP activation felt “mildly unpleasant.” That makes sense in nature, he says: Any time a mouse leaves its nest, it’s at risk from predators, but it must overcome this fear in order to forage and eat. “These AgRP neurons are kind of the push that, in a dangerous environment, you’re going to go out and seek food to stay alive.” Sternson’s 2015 study had shown that while the sight or smell of food quiets AgRP neurons, it’s only temporary: Activity goes right back up if the mouse can’t follow through and eat the snack. Through additional experiments, Alhadeff and colleagues discovered that what turns the AgRP neurons off more reliably is calories landing in the gut.
First, Alhadeff’s team fed mice a calorie-free treat: a gel with artificial sweetener. When mice ate the gel, AgRP neuron activity dropped, as expected — but only temporarily. As the mice learned there were no nutrients to be gained from this snack, their AgRP neurons responded less and less to each bite. Thus, as animals learn whether a treat really nourishes them, the neurons adjust the hunger dial accordingly.
Next, the team used a catheter implanted through the abdomen to deliver calories, in the form of the nutritional drink Ensure, directly to the stomach. This bypassed any sensory cues that food was coming. And it resulted in a longer dip in AgRP activity. In other words, it’s the nutrients in food that shut off AgRP neurons for an extended time after a meal, Alhadeff concluded.Alhadeff has since begun to decode the messages that the stomach sends to the AgRP neurons, and found that it depends on the nutrient. Fat in the gut triggers a signal via the vagus nerve, which reaches from the digestive tract to the brain.
The simple sugar glucose signals the brain via nerves in the spinal cord. Her team is now investigating why these multiple paths exist. She hopes that by better understanding how AgRP neurons drive food-seeking, scientists can eventually come up with ways to help people keep off unhealthy pounds. Though scientists and dieters have been seeking such treatments for more than a century, it’s been difficult to identify easy, safe and effective treatments. The latest class of weight-loss medications, such as Wegovy, act in part on AgRP neurons but have unpleasant side effects such as nausea and diarrhea.
Therapies targeting AgRP neurons alone would likely fail to fully solve the weight problem, because food-seeking is only one component of appetite control, says Sternson, who reviewed the main controllers of appetite in the Annual Review of Physiology in 2017. Other brain areas that sense satiety and make high-calorie food pleasurable also play important roles, he says. That’s why, for example, you eat that slice of pumpkin pie at the end of the Thanksgiving meal, even though you’re already full of turkey and mashed potatoes.
Outflanking anorexia
The flip side of overeating is anorexia, and there, too, researchers think that investigating AgRP neurons could lead to new treatment strategies. People with anorexia avoid food, to the point of dangerous weight loss. “Eating food is actually aversive,” says Ames Sutton Hickey, a neuroscientist at Temple University in Philadelphia. There is no medication specific for anorexia; treatment may include psychotherapy, general medications such as antidepressants and, in the most severe cases, force-feeding via a tube threaded through the nose. People with anorexia are also often restless or hyperactive and may exercise excessively.
Researchers can study the condition using a mouse model of the disease known as activity-based anorexia, or ABA. When scientists limit the food available to the mice and provide them with a wheel to run on, some mice enter an anorexia-like state, eating less than they’re offered, and running on the wheel even during daylight, when mice are normally inactive.
“It’s a remarkable addictive thing that happens to these animals,” says Tamas Horvath, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine. “They basically get a kick out of not eating and exercising.
” It’s not a perfect model for anorexia. Mice, presumably, face none of the social pressures to stay thin that humans do; conversely, people with anorexia usually don’t have limits on their access to food. But it’s one of the best anorexia mimics out there, says Alhadeff: “I think it’s as good as we get.”
AgRP neurons
To find out how AgRP neurons might be involved in anorexia, Sutton Hickey carefully monitored the food intake of ABA mice. She compared them to mice that were given a restricted diet, but had a locked exercise wheel and didn’t develop ABA.
The ABA mice, she found, ate fewer meals than the other mice. And when they did eat, their AgRP activity didn’t decrease like it should have after they filled their tummies.
Something was wrong with the way the neurons responded to hunger and food cues.
Sutton Hickey also found that she could fix the problem when she engineered ABA mice so that AgRP neurons would spring into action when researchers injected a certain chemical. These mice, when treated with the chemical, ate more meals and gained weight. “That speaks very much to the importance of these neurons,” says Horvath, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It shows that these neurons are good guys, not the bad guys.”
Sutton Hickey says the next step is to figure out why the AgRP neurons respond abnormally in ABA mice. She hopes there might be some key molecule she could target with a drug to help people with anorexia. All in all, the work on AgRP neurons is giving scientists a much better picture of why we eat when we do — as well as new leads, perhaps, to medications that might help people change disordered eating, be it consuming too much or too little, into healthy habits.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-neurons-that-make-us-feel-hangry
*
ORGANIC MOLECULES CAN STORE SOLAR ENERGY, THEN RELEASE IT AS HEAT
When the sun goes down, solar panels stop working. This is the fundamental hurdle of renewable energy: how to save the sun's power for a rainy day—or a cold night.
Chemists at UC Santa Barbara have developed a solution that doesn't require bulky batteries or electrical grids. In a paper published in the journal Science, Associate Professor Grace Han and her team detail a new material that captures sunlight, stores it within chemical bonds and releases it as heat on demand.
The material, a modified organic molecule called pyrimidone, is the latest advancement in molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage.
"The concept is reusable and recyclable," said Han Nguyen, a doctoral student in the Han Group and the paper's lead author.
"Think of photochromic sunglasses. When you're inside, they're just clear lenses. You walk out into the sun, and they darken on their own. Come back inside, and the lenses become clear again," Nguyen continued.
"That kind of reversible change is what we're interested in. Only instead of changing color, we want to use the same idea to store energy, release it when we need it, and then reuse the material over and over.”
Bio-inspired design
To create this molecule, the team looked to a surprising source: DNA. The pyrimidone structure is similar to a component found in DNA that, when exposed to UV light, can undergo reversible structural changes.
By engineering a synthetic version of this structure, the team created a molecule that stores and releases energy reversibly. They collaborated with Ken Houk, a distinguished research professor at UCLA, to use computational modeling to understand why the molecule was able to store energy and remain stable for years without losing the stored energy.
"We prioritized a lightweight, compact molecule design," Nguyen said. "For this project, we cut everything we didn't need. Anything that was unnecessary, we removed to make the molecule as compact as possible."
A 'rechargeable battery' for heat
Traditional solar panels convert light into electricity; however, most systems convert light into chemical energy. The molecule acts like a mechanical spring: when hit with sunlight, it twists into a strained, high-energy shape. It stays locked in that shape until a trigger—such as a small amount of heat or a catalyst—snaps it back to its relaxed state, releasing the stored energy as heat.
"We typically describe it as a rechargeable solar battery," Nguyen said. "It stores sunlight, and it can be recharged."
The team's new molecule is a heavy hitter. It boasts an energy density of more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is roughly double the energy density of a standard lithium-ion battery—which comes in at around 0.9 MJ/kg—and significantly higher than previous generations of optical switches.
From theory to boiling water
The critical breakthrough for Han's group was translating high energy density into a tangible result. In the study, the researchers demonstrated that the heat released from the material was intense enough to boil water—a feat previously difficult to achieve in this field.
"Boiling water is an energy-intensive process," Nguyen said. "The fact that we can boil water under ambient conditions is a big achievement."
This capability opens the door for practical applications ranging from off-grid heating for camping to residential water heating. Because the material is soluble in water, it could potentially be pumped through roof-mounted solar collectors to charge during the day and stored in tanks to provide heat at night.
"With solar panels, you need an additional battery system to store the energy," said co-author Benjamin Baker, a doctoral student in the Han Lab. "With molecular solar thermal energy storage, the material itself is able to store that energy from sunlight."
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-molecule-solar-energy-years-demand.html
*
ALL LIFE ON EARTH COMES FROM A SINGLE ANCESTOR
Every plant leaf, eagle feather, and speck of pond scum spell out existence with the same four DNA letters. Ribosomes read that code, snap together twenty familiar amino acids, and pay each cellular bill with the energy token ATP.
That sameness keeps biologists chasing one big puzzle: if the instructions are nearly identical everywhere, who wrote the first edition?
The answer points to LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor – an organism that sat at the split between Bacteria and Archaea.
One genetic code, one single ancestor
Living systems are not fond of coincidence. A single genetic alphabet, the same protein‑making machinery, and a universal energy currency add up to more than luck.
“The evolutionary history of genes is complicated by their exchange between lineages,” explained Dr. Edmund Moody, lead author from the University of Bristol. His team sifted thousands of genomes to see how far back the shared toolkit stretches.
“We have to use complex evolutionary models to reconcile the evolutionary history of genes with the genealogy of species.”
By letting the data, rather than strict cutoffs, decide which features belonged to LUCA, the researchers landed on roughly 2,600 genes – about as many as a run‑of‑the‑mill modern bacterium carries.
Co-author Dr. Tom Williams noted, “One of the real advantages here is applying the gene‑tree species‑tree reconciliation approach to such a diverse dataset representing the primary domains of life, Archaea and Bacteria. This allows us to say with some confidence – and assess that level of confidence – in how LUCA lived.”
LUCA’s developmental toolkit
Previous estimates swung from a lean 80‑gene outline to libraries topping 1,500 families. The updated theory paints LUCA as anything but a genetic ghost.
Inside those 2,600 blueprints are membrane pumps, DNA‑repair crews, and all the ingredients for simple lipids. Better still, the cache includes the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway, a tidy chemical loop that welds carbon dioxide to hydrogen, spits out acetate, and releases usable energy in the process. Such provisions point to a self‑reliant cell thriving without outside help. That picture challenges older ideas that early life was a stripped‑down passenger riding geology’s coattails toward complexity.
Instead, LUCA seems to have been capable, adaptable, and ready to try new tricks the moment the planet cooled enough to keep liquid water in place. Chemistry of hydrothermal vents Tracking gene changes throughout Earth’s history, the study dates LUCA to about 4.2 billion years ago, only a few hundred million years after Earth itself pulled together.
“We did not expect LUCA to be so old, within just hundreds of millions of years of Earth formation. However, our results fit with modern views on the habitability of early Earth,” said Dr. Sandra Álvarez‑Carretero.
Back then, asteroid impacts and belching volcanoes regularly upended the crust. Yet seafloor hydrothermal vents likely offered warm, metal‑rich oases.
Iron, nickel, and sulfur minerals could have driven the very reactions scripted in LUCA’s genome.
The Wood–Ljungdahl pathway, still used by some present‑day microbes, fits neatly into that setting, turning vent chemistry into food and fuel.
LUCA’s peace was short-lived “Our study showed that LUCA was a complex organism, not too different from modern prokaryotes. What is really interesting is that it clearly possessed an early immune system, showing that even by 4.2 billion years ago, our ancestor was already engaged in an arms race with viruses,” said Professor Davide Pisani.
Genes resembling today’s CRISPR defenses suggest viral predators appeared almost as soon as cells did.
This constant sparring matters. Viral raids can shuffle genes between hosts faster than random mutation alone.
The pressure to dodge infection forces microbes to innovate, potentially speeding up the invention of new enzymes, pathways, and even entire metabolic lifestyles that later lineages would inherit.
Microbes sharing space with LUCA
It’s clear that LUCA was exploiting and changing its environment, but it is unlikely to have lived alone. “Its waste would have been food for other microbes, like methanogens, that would have helped to create a recycling ecosystem,” observed Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter.
In modern hydrothermal vents, acetate‑producers and methane‑makers trade leftovers, smoothing local chemistry and stabilizing energy flows.
Similar give‑and‑take could explain how early Earth cycled carbon and hydrogen long before photosynthesis took the stage.
By knitting together waste and resource, hydrothermal vent communities may have tempered extreme swings in temperature and acidity, opening fresh niches for the next wave of evolutionary experiments.
Why does LUCA matter?
“The findings and methods employed in this work will also inform future studies that look in more detail into the subsequent evolution of prokaryotes in light of Earth history, including the lesser‑studied Archaea with their methanogenic representatives,” said Professor Anja Spang, co-author from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.
Professor Philip Donoghue highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of the work, saying it brought together data and techniques from across multiple fields. This collaborative approach, he explained, made it possible to uncover insights into early Earth and the origins of life that no single discipline could have revealed on its own.
He also pointed out how swiftly ecosystems seem to have taken root on the early planet – an observation that opens the door to the possibility that life might be thriving on other Earth-like worlds in the universe. “This suggests that life may be flourishing on Earth‑like biospheres elsewhere in the universe,” Donoghue concluded.
What happens next?
To sum it all up, each genome pulled from ocean mud or desert crust adds a puzzle piece to LUCA’s portrait.
As sequencing tech grows faster and cheaper, scientists will keep hunting for ancient gene families, refining the ancestral blueprint, and scoping out early viral fossils hidden in microbial DNA.
New drilling missions aimed at untouched seafloor vents could reveal communities whose lifestyles echo those first biochemical gambles, tightening links between geology and genetics.
The storyline is still unfolding, but one takeaway already stands firm: life did not tiptoe onto the stage. It sprinted, armed with a full toolkit, ready to spar with viruses, and eager to reshape its surroundings – leaving every organism alive today carrying a hint of that four‑billion‑year‑old spark.
The full study was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
https://www.earth.com/news/luca-last-universal-common-ancestor-progenitor-all-life-on-earth/
From another source:
Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.
While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some 530 million years, the true timeline of life on Earth is much longer. For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation.
But a study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago, while also discovering some fascinating details about what life for LUCA might’ve been like. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2024.
The common ancestry of all extant cellular life is evidenced by the universal genetic code, machinery for protein synthesis, shared chirality of the almost-universal set of 20 amino acids and use of ATP as a common energy currency. As such, our understanding of LUCA impacts our understanding of the early evolution of life on Earth. Was LUCA a simple or complex organism? What kind of environment did it inhabit and when?
To zero in on exactly when LUCA appeared on Earth, scientists had to work backward. First, the team compared genes in living species and counted the mutations that have occurred since sharing a common ancestor with LUCA. Using a genetic equation based on the time of separation between species, the team worked out that LUCA must’ve been mucking around on Earth as early as 400 million years after its creation, which puts this organism smack in the middle of the hellish geologic nightmare known as the Hadean Eon.
“The evolutionary history of genes is complicated by their exchange between lineages,” University of Bristol’s Edmund Moody, the lead author of the study, said in a press statement. “We have to use complex evolutionary models to reconcile the evolutionary history of genes with the genealogy of species.”
Not satisfied with just learning its age, the team took things a step further and retraced the physiological characteristics of living species to understand what LUCA must’ve been like 4.2 billion years ago—and the results gave some surprising answers. The scientists estimate that while LUCA was a simple prokaryote, it likely had an immune system, meaning it was already fighting off primordial viruses.
“It’s clear that LUCA was exploiting and changing its environment, but it is unlikely to have lived alone,” University of Exeter’s Tim Lenton, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “Its waste would have been food for other microbes, like methanogens, that would have helped to create a recycling ecosystem.” While LUCA is the oldest common ancestor we know of, scientists still don’t understand how life evolved from its very origins to the early communities of which LUCA is a part. Further studies will need to dive deeper into this primordial history and uncover exactly how you, me, and every other living thing, came to be.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/life-earth-comes-one-single-131107444.html
*
SEVEN WAYS PREGNANCY CHANGES YOUR BODY FOREVER
We’ve all seen the photos: a celebrity gives birth on Tuesday and looks flawless in a bikini by Thursday. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still trying to figure out what happened to our feet.
The truth is pregnancy causes some surprising long-term changes to your body, regardless of whether you’re a celebrity or a soccer mom. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Dr. Shazia Malik, a consultant OB-GYN based in London, encourages women to reframe how they think about these changes. “I like to tell my patients that you see every change as a true badge of honor that you did this,” Malik tells Popular Science.
Here are seven ways pregnancy changes your body for good.
Your shoe size might increase
If you’ve ever inherited hand-me-down shoes from a new mom who complains they no longer fit, you might already know a bit about how pregnancy can affect shoe size. According to Dr. Sherry Ross, OB-GYN and co-founder of the women’s health podcast Pair-a-Docs, many women experience widening or lengthening of their feet due to hormones designed to help the body adapt to a growing baby.
“Relaxin is a hormone responsible for influencing and loosening the joints and ligaments in the feet, which can cause changes in shoe sizes,” Ross says. “Swelling of the feet and weight gain, especially in the third trimester, also contribute to a change in shoe size.”
For some women, this change is temporary, and they return to their pre-pregnancy shoe size. For others, the change is permanent and becomes a great excuse to go shoe shopping.
Some women also find their hands become slightly larger during pregnancy, a change that can be permanent. The exact mechanism behind these skeletal changes isn’t fully understood. It is, as Malik puts it, “one of the great mysteries of life.”
Breast feeding may protect against certain cancers — and change your breast size
As nurturing and life-giving as breastfeeding is, its long-term impact on breasts tends to get a bad rap. But it’s not all about sagging boobs—breastfeeding can have long-term protective effects for mothers.
According to Malik, breastfeeding decreases the risk of ovarian cancer. With each additional child, the risk of ovarian cancer lowers.
For breast cancer, the relationship is more nuanced. While pregnancy slightly increases your risk for certain aggressive breast cancers, breastfeeding may help offset that risk, according to Malik.
But those well-worn jokes about postpartum breasts aren’t entirely without merit. According to Ross, breasts can increase two to three times their normal size during pregnancy, and continue growing while nursing.
After weaning, breasts lose the glandular tissue that developed for milk production, and fatty tissue composition also changes. “This can ultimately lead to smaller, less dense, and less firm breasts,” Ross says.
“All of these collective changes during pregnancy and postpartum can affect breast size long-term.”
Pregnancy can reveal your future heart disease risk
Pregnancy might leave a few battle scars, but it also offers a surprising silver lining: information about potential health risks.
“Pregnancy is the first ‘stress test’ on a woman’s body,” says Ross. Complications like hypertension during pregnancy, preterm labor, gestational diabetes, or having an unusually small baby can indicate an increased risk for cardiovascular disease later in life.
This matters because cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women, affecting one in four. Pregnancy can help reveal these risk factors early, potentially decades before heart problems would otherwise show up. This gives women eye-opening information to make valuable lifestyle changes, such as monitoring blood pressure, staying physically active, and maintaining a healthy weight.
“Most pregnant women are surprised to learn that pregnancy can shine a light on future illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, or autoimmune conditions worsening after pregnancy,” Ross says. “The cliché that knowledge is power cannot be understated when it comes to understanding these risks associated with pregnancy and how to protect your future health.”
Your joints, back, and posture may never fully recover
Pregnancy doesn’t just change how you look. It fundamentally alters your body’s structural support system, often permanently.
According to Ross, normal hormonal changes during pregnancy impact posture and balance stability. Additionally, factors like increased body weight, increased abdominal pressure, and normal changes in spinal curvature can cause lasting pain and stiffness in the back, hips, and joints.
“These disruptive physical changes can lead to upper and lower back pain, pain in the hips, pelvis, knees, and tailbone, and movement and sitting limitations,” says Ross.
The causes are multifaceted: Relaxin (the same hormone associated with bigger feet) loosens ligaments that support weight-bearing joints. Meanwhile, the growing belly shifts your center of gravity and changes spinal curvature, while increased body weight puts additional strain on already-loosened joints.
Your pelvic floor may weaken permanently
You might have heard about the importance of strengthening your pelvic floor muscles in the same generic way you know you’re supposed to eat your vegetables, but it might take having a baby to truly understand the important job these muscles do.
The pelvic floor muscles support the uterus, bladder, and bowel—and pregnancy can weaken them significantly, even after just one vaginal birth.
According to Ross, when pelvic floor muscles weaken, pelvic organs can drop and create a bulge into the vagina, a condition called pelvic organ prolapse. “Symptoms from a prolapse range from uncomfortable pelvic pressure to leakage of urine and problems having a bowel movement,” Ross explains.
Urinary incontinence is especially prevalent. “Loss of urine with coughing, sneezing, or laughing is common even after having one vaginal birth,” says Ross. While Kegel exercises and pelvic floor physical therapy can help manage these symptoms, some women experience permanent changes that require ongoing management.
https://www.popsci.com/science/how-pregnancy-changes-body/
Oriana:
It’s not all bad news. Parents, including adoptive parents, have a somewhat longer life expectancy than child-free persons. This is no doubt caused by many factors, one of which may be higher levels of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone.” Oxytocin is an anti-aging hormone.
*
FOOD THAT INCREASES DOPAMINE
Dopamine is a brain chemical and hormone linked with pleasure, but “it is more about motivation,” says Dr Darren O’Reilly, Chartered Psychologist and Clinical Director of AuDHD Psychiatry. “It’s what helps you start tasks, stay focused, and respond to reward”. It is also the primary neurotransmitter for sexual desire.
Not to be confused with its good friend serotonin which is linked to long-term contentment, dopamine is more about delivering short-term bursts of pleasure — such as a post-gym buzz or receiving a Tinder match from someone hot, to much more intense, addictive behavior like gambling or doing drugs.
Unfortunately, some of us struggle with dopamine regulation. Agonists — medications that mimic dopamine — can help, as does exercise, meditation, vitamin D exposure, dopamine décor, and more pertinently, food. Those living with ADHD are the most vulnerable to this. “ADHA isn’t just low dopamine, it’s how dopamine is regulated and how sensitive someone is to reward,” Dr O’Reilly explains. “Spikes and energy crashes are more prevalent, but can also be applied beyond ADHD too.” ADHD or not, our lifestyles and dietary choices can impact our mood more than we realize.
How does food boost dopamine production?
It takes a lot to keep our noggins ticking: our brains actually consume 20% of our daily calorie intake to carry out its various functions, including producing and regulating dopamine. So fueling it at regular intervals — and with the right foods — matters.
You can get dopamine-boosting nutrients from a large variety of food (we'll get into what those are later), but it's worth noting that these foods don’t directly give you a dopamine hit, but rather “give the brain raw materials it needs to produce it”.
This is why the concept of ‘dopamine foods’ is so misleading, in that no such things exists. The internet strikes again. Hira Malik, superintendent pharmacist at Oushk Pharmacy explains: “This oversimplifies how food, mood and cravings actually work. No single food will suddenly transform your mood, motivation or cravings. What matters more is the overall pattern of how someone eats, sleeps and manages stress.”
Dr O’Reilly agrees: “Most people don’t have a dopamine problem, they have a regulation problem. Diet affects the baseline rather than creating quick changes. If your diet is built around quick hits, you tend to get spikes and crashes, which makes focus and energy less stable. The issue isn’t a lack of dopamine, it’s how often we’re spiking it.”
Why eating patterns matter
Research shows that the brain’s reward system is most active in the morning and evening, meaning that motivation can wane in the afternoon. Anyone who has ever walked this planet is familiar with the 3pm crash that has you reaching for a chocolate bar. Dopamine is the chemical that gaslights you into this habit — because it lures you into something high reward, only to drop you into a deeper slump later. Much like my ex.
To avoid this spike/crash cycle and maintain balanced dopamine (the best kind), you need to armor your body against these cravings. Willpower alone won't do it, so you'll need to focus on meal choices and consistent timings. Under-eating, skipping meals or going for long periods without food are big no-nos if you want to live a life sans cravings. [Oriana: But the current trend is intermittent fasting; we seem to know more about animal nutrition than human nutrition.)
“Skipping meals or leaving long gaps between meals can lead to dips in blood sugar, lower energy and stronger cravings later in the day," says Malik. “If someone is sleeping poorly or living on highly processed foods, they may feel more drawn to quick energy and high-reward foods, even when they are trying to make healthier choices.”
While dopamine regulation is impacted more heavily by when you eat, rather than what, Malik advises veering away from highly processed and high sugar foods. “These can be very moreish as they are designed to be highly palatable and stimulate the brain’s reward pathways.” Building your diet around these quick dopamine hits will only result in crashes. “Comfort foods create a short-term reward response, but they don’t meaningfully improve dopamine long term,” adds Dr O'Reilly.
So, what are the best dopamine-boosting foods?
Protein-maxxers will be pleased to hear that their go-to (specifically protein high in tyrosine) is one of the most effective foods for increasing dopamine production, particularly when consumed alongside other micronutrients like iron, zinc, magnesium, B6 vitamins and folate. Malik elaborates on these supporting guys: “Key nutrients like iron and omega-3 fats play a role in helping the body use energy from food efficiently and supporting the normal function of the brain and nervous system. This can really influence how alert, focused and balanced we feel day to day.”
Complex carbs have their place too. “Oats, whole grains and pulses can help provide slower-release energy and can reduce the sharp dips in blood sugar that often lead to cravings,” Malik adds.
Here then, is our experts' definitive list of the very best foods for boosting dopamine production.
Protein-rich foods (oily-fish in particular): High in tyrosine and amino acids that enhance overall brain function and dopamine production
Yogurt and other fermented foods: Good source of tyrosine and reduces oxidative stress which can positively affect neurotransmitter function
Pumpkin seeds: Rich in tyrosine, magnesium and zinc — the latter being essential for regulating dopamine production
Lentils: High folate content, complex carbs and fibre which all help prevent blood sugar dips and energy lows that negatively impact dopamine levels
Bananas: Actually contain high levels of dopamine itself; also rich in vitamin B6 which helps convert tyrosine into dopamine and serotonin
Avocado: Source of tyrosine, composed of healthy fats that improve the delivery of nutrients to the brain; high in vitamin B6 and folate
Green tea: Its combination of L-Theanine (an amino acid) and caffeine helps stimulate focus; polyphenols increase dopamine availability in the brain
Dark chocolate (Hell yeah!): Rich is tyrosine and contains key chemicals known to induce relaxation and encourage dopamine to stay in brain for longer; contains cocoa flavanols which improve blood flow
Whilst incorporating these foods into your daily menu is a great jumping point, Malik makes one thing apparent: “It is not about perfection or chasing individual ‘superfoods’, but about building everyday routines that support your body consistently.”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/need-a-dopamine-hit-eat-more-of-these-healthy-foods-say-several-happy-experts?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
ending on beauty:
IN PASSING
How quickly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.
~ Lisel Mueller
No comments:
Post a Comment