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WHAT OUR DEAD DO
Jan came this morning
—I dreamt of my father
he says
he was riding in an oak coffin
I walked next to the hearse
and father turned to me:
you dressed me nicely
and the funeral is very beautiful
at this time of year so many flowers
it must have cost a lot
don’t worry about it father
—I say—let people see
we loved you
so we spared nothing
six men in black livery
walk nicely at our sides
father thought for a while
and said—the key to the desk
is in the silver inkwell
there is still some money
in the second drawer on the left
with this money—I say—
we will buy you a gravestone
a large one of black marble
it isn’t necessary—says father—
better give it to the poor
six men in black livery
walk nicely at our sides
they carry burning lanterns
again he seemed to be thinking
—take care of the flowers in the garden
cover them for the winter
I don’t want them to be wasted
you are the oldest—he says—
from a little felt bag behind the painting
take out the cuff links with real pearls
let them bring you luck
my mother gave them to me
when I finished high school
then he didn’t say anything
he must have entered a deeper sleep
this is how our dead
look after us
they warn us through dreams
bring back lost money
hunt for jobs
whisper the numbers of lottery tickets
or when they can’t do this
knock with their fingers on the windows
and out of gratitude
we imagine immortality for them
snug as the burrow of a mouse.
~ Zbigniew Herbert, posted by George Szirtes
Oriana:
I’m glad to have been spared a dream of that sort. When my mother was in a coma, dying in my house, I had a dream in which I heard her voice, clear and vigorous, asking me, “Which mountain do you want to climb?” This was a wonderful summary of how my Leo mother viewed life. In literal terms, she celebrated her birthday by climbing Mt. Whitney every August 4th. But she knew I’d have to find my own mountain to climb, and was curious which field of endeavor I’d choose. Hiding money in velvet owls or hollow statues of the saints was not her style. Her kingdom was of the mind — limitless, not in the least like the burrow of a mouse.
This is not meant as a critique of Herbert’s poem, which seems vividly realistic. Herbert knew well that most communists were in fact crypto-capitalists who’d never read Das Capital but quickly learned how to accumulate and maximize their own. But the poem isn’t about that, unless seen from a narrow historical perspective. No, the poem is universal -- human, all too human. I agree with a rich friend I once had, who, dealing with her children, said, “I’m sorry, but money IS love.” So is food and so is taking the same evening walk for the thousandth time. So is one’s own bed and one’s twenty-year-old blanket. So is one’s favorite favorite plant in the backyard’s attempt at a Garden of Eden, even if every other species name is “vulgaris” (e.g. Syringa vulgaris, the common lilac).
“You need to write for the vulgaris,” was the only writing advice my mother ever gave me. Not the black marble of the Black Christ in the Royal Wawel cathedral giving me a sign, but the creak of the floor, or a passerby making a strange squeaky sound to let me know I forgot to turn off the light in the garage. Such is the fabric of life, with all its wealth of wrinkles.
Queen Jadwiga's Black Christ, who supposedly nodded his head to give her an [unwelcome— what else could she expect from the Crucified?] answer.
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JRR TOLKIEN
In 1968, the BBC broadcast extracts from JRR Tolkien's last ever recorded interview, 31 years after The Hobbit was published. In 2019, the full video was unearthed from the archive.
JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit begins with Gandalf the wizard visiting Bilbo, the titular hobbit, and persuading him to go on a dangerous quest. But would the British author himself have accepted the challenge?
"If a wizard had come to me as a small boy, the situation would be totally different than that in The Hobbit," Tolkien revealed in a rare interview, filmed by the BBC in 1968. "I should have found some excuse for not going… I had no desire whatever to place myself in an awkward position just for the sake of adventure."
Besides, he added, "I'd been very well brought up to avoid conversations with dubious old gentlemen."
Yet this admission was never broadcast. Only a few extracts from the interview made it onto television in 1968, while most of it was stored deep in the BBC archive until it was unearthed for a radio program in 2019. The previously unseen and unheard footage features startling moments of candor from the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and reveals Tolkien's thoughts on key characters in his bestselling books.
'I think the most tragic point in the whole story is how the good often does evil’
The Hobbit was first published on 21 September 1937, and the calendar week around then has since been designated "Tolkien Week" in celebration. In the 1968 interview, Tolkien told the BBC about a hiking trip in Switzerland in 1911, when he was just 19, that inspired his much-loved epic.
Tolkien also discussed the invented languages in his fantasy novels. He traced them back to the time when he was studying classics at the University of Oxford, and he was distracted by an unusual hobby – learning Finnish. "Its formation, its sound texture is very remarkable," he said. "It actually makes me quite intoxicated. I just went away and learnt this when I should have been doing other things, and people couldn't make out why my essays on Greek drama were getting worse and worse."
The tragedy of Gollum
That passion made its way into the language of Middle-earth, he said. "It started out by being extremely Finnish… It's, as you might say, on a Finnish basis, with a certain amount of Greek thrown in and other languages I've learned since."
Tolkien's love of languages started at an early age and continued after he returned from fighting in World War One and took a job as an assistant at the Oxford English Dictionary. "I was employed to do etymologies, and I ran into quite a lot of very interesting etymologies in that time," he said in 1968. "Winter, walrus, wampum, various things of that kind. It was through having to do an etymology of wampum that I first made any acquaintance with the Algonquin languages of Eastern America. So it's a wonderful place, a dictionary."
Perhaps the most insightful revelation in the interview came when Tolkien was discussing Gollum, the spiteful troglodyte played by Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson's films of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The author described the character as "an example of corruption", and lit up when asked about a key scene in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is with the novel's hero, Frodo, and almost reforms.
"The incident he's talking about is when Gollum is actually beginning to change back to Sméagol [his earlier, less monstrous self]," said Stuart Lee, a Professor of English at the University of Oxford, in a 2019 radio program about the lost Tolkien recordings. "He's winning the battle – the good side is winning through and he tries to stroke Frodo, who's asleep." But then Frodo's best friend Sam intervenes…
"People have often asked me what moves me most," said Tolkien. "I think the most tragic point in the whole story is the terrible irony that good often does evil. The most tragic moment is when Sam in his protectiveness says, 'Take your hands off.' And therefore defeats Gollum's repentance. Because that seems to be very true to life.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260918-the-most-tragic-moment-in-the-lord-of-the-rings
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own." ~ Marcus Aurelius
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OLD ENGLISH
Old English was very different from contemporary English on every aspect of their structures and core.
The grammar was much more complex than in the case of modern English. It resembled more the structures of contemporary Germanic languages like German, Icelandic and Faroese since that it had a system of declensions for grammatical cases and grammatical gender distinction in nouns and adjectives (three grammatical genders to be exact).
Old English vocabulary was mostly of Germanic origin and the percentage of foreign loanwords was low, while modern English has vocabulary of mostly foreign origin and the percentage of Germanic vocabulary is between the 26 to 33 percent of the total. It's estimated that around between the 80 to 85 percent of the Old English vocabulary didn't survive to modern English.
The spelling of Old English was very phonetic, unlike in the case of other English and it included letters that they're no longer present in modern English like: Ash, Wynn, Eth and Thorn, that they were disappearing gradually during Middle English era.
Old English phonology was very distinct in comparison to modern English, since that it had several sounds that they're no longer present in English since that they have disappeared many centuries ago.
~ Lady in a Castle, Quora
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WORKING CLASS SPEECH IN MIDDLE AGES
Ancient peasants had no "indoor voice." To them, modern curse words were everyday talk, direct eye contact was dangerously insolent, and distance was measured "as far as a man can yell."
Whether looking at the Vulgar Latin of ancient Roman plebs or the vernaculars of medieval Europe, peasant language was fiercely hyper-local. Without standardized schooling or mass media, dialects drifted rapidly from one valley to the next. A 14th-century peasant in rural France might be completely unable to understand the speech of another agricultural worker living just thirty miles away. Because travel was rare and usually limited to local market towns, there was little pressure to flatten these dialects into a unified tongue.
Pre-modern peasant society was entirely public. Peasants spent their days working in open fields, calling over livestock, or drinking in noisy taverns. To communicate across these distances, or to bridge the gap with peddlers who spoke different regional dialects, heavy gesticulation and whole-body physical cues were vital.
Furthermore, communication was strictly hierarchical. When speaking to a social superior—a lord, a magistrate, or an estate manager—a peasant was expected to doff their cap, bow their head, and keep their eyes lowered to signal submission.
One of the most jarring adjustments for a modern observer would be the complete lack of abstract measurements. A peasant did not schedule a meeting at a specific hour. They told you to meet them "when the sun clears the oak tree" or "at the ringing of the Vespers bell." Distance was not communicated in exact miles, but in experiential effort like "a morning's walk" or "three fields over." They communicated entirely in sensory realities tied to the rhythms of nature, the weather, and the church.
Even their profanity would feel completely inverted to modern sensibilities. Scatological words—the bodily functions that make up our modern curse words—were inoffensive vocabulary for agricultural workers who spent their lives handling animal manure. What truly shocked and offended them was blasphemy. Swearing by "God's blood," "Christ's nails," or "God's bones" was considered horrifying, and in many jurisdictions, it was a legally punishable offense. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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"AS A MUSLIM, DO YOU THINK ISLAM IS DISAPPEARING FROM THE WORLD?"
YES. Islam is dying and at a very fast rate compared to other religions. But it is very important to understand the key factors behind it.
Muslims are now doing a detailed study on hadiths and are aware of dark side of Prophet Muhammad (may piss be upon him)
High failure margin of muslims. More than 50 Islamic countries cannot win a FIFA world cup. Less than 5% Olympic medal winners are muslims. All islamic countries are weakest in Science and Technology.
56 islamic countries cannot defeat a small Israel.
Muslims are being attacked snd destroyed in their own countries — Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Iran.
Prophet Muhammad's own country Saudi Arabia does not give citizenship to non-Arab muslims. Followers of islam are not accepted by birthplace of Islam. ~ Nirav Parikh. Quora
Nikolai Kolya:
The one abrahamic religion that did not see an enlightenment and now it's a totalitarian death cult. There will be a time when this no longer serves humanity (which it already doesn’t) and it will fade into obscurity as I'm sure the same will happen to the enlightened religions (Christianity, Judaism, etc). These institutions are all messed up in one way or another and we are moving past them the further we make progress.
Tray:
I’ve been a Muslem now for 35 years. I’ve never seen Islam practiced except during Salaat [the five daily prayers], Outside of Salaat, it’s anything goes. The “religious” point out the overt things like hypersexuality and hedonism, but conveniently dismiss other aspects like consuming the wealth and property of others unjustly, extravagance disguised as necessity, and displays of false pride disguised as righteousness.
Lee Majors:
Islam, much like Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism and the rest are slowly dying out, and the reason for this is because of progress.
Islam, like all other religions, is a construct of man. Like other, older religions, it was designed with a solitary purpose — to control.
A few millennia back (way before Islam), people had no explanation for events such as celestial eclipses, earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes, floods, blights and plagues etc. There was no proper science back then, so in order to explain the above, a creator was created. It was the only explanation that fit. There had to be a reason, and that reason became an almighty being causing these catastrophes. As time wore on, new religions were formed, new gods were created, and machiavellian tactics were employed by those in power to control the weak.
However, in the last couple of centuries or so, science has become the driving force for explaining the unexplained. No longer were people mystified by natural events and catastrophes; scientists could explain them and provide proof to substantiate their explanations.
Our understanding of the world and cosmos around us has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, which has given rise to the technological age. God is no longer the answer for enlightened folk — science is. And the reason I have said all that is because it provides the foundation for me to answer your question.
Information and answers to burning questions are now readily available at the click of a mouse button. As such, people of faith are now questioning the validity of their religion and god. We’re in the 21st and religious dogma, much of it written or based upon scripture from well over 2000 years ago, has zero relevance in today’s enlightened world. It’s utter bunkum written at a time and for a time when people knew no better.
It simply does not work now, and I see that every day in my Muslim half of the family and in other religions.
Churches are now dead on Sundays. Attendance is falling through the floor as people don't want to know.
The younger generations of Muslims in my family are not interested in Islam. Having been brought up with it, they’re respectful of it, obviously, but they’re as far from devout as you can get without being an atheist. They don’t pray, the boys don’t go to the mosque and the girls only wear traditional garb for the elders.
Once those elders are gone, I’d wager the traditions will follow and that will accelerate with each successive generation.
You cannot halt progress and by extension, the education of people and given another century or so, I wouldn't be at all surprised if all religions, outside of the hardcore strongholds, have all but disappeared.
Jack Bauer:
Apparently slowly but yes. There are a number of books and studies on the subject as well as some statements of concern from some notable Imams. although the general propaganda is that Islam is a fast growing religion because of birthrates of Islamic population, polygamy, etc., the actual demographics of Islamic countries are aging rapidly.
In addition, Islam tends not to to survive in countries that allow freedom of religion and literacy and rights for women. Islam does best when it is forced upon people by the power of law, i.e. it requires tyranny. And the problem with tyranny is that one of its side effects is that economies don’t thrive under tyrannical systems.
So over time while the civilized world moves forward economically, the Islamic world tends to stand still at best. While high oil prices helped for a few decades to stave off the decline of Islamic economies, those days are over and the Islamic countries, being largely run by despots, don’t have attractive economic prospects. For more information on the decline of Islam consider: How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) — David Goldman
There are any number of Muslim sources discussing the decline of Islam. It’s a subject of recurring concern to Imams around the world — too many to list here but it is a real concern.
Alex Vims:
Maybe in next 10 years if the 3rd world war happens.
Or in next 50 to 70 years when all illiterate Muslims become literate and logical enough to stop believing in nonsense.
If this happens in next 20 years okay. Otherwise I see a mega world war going to happen with huge blood bath which will ultimately remove Islam from the Earth.
Peter Ned:
Richard Dawkins once pointed the scary fact that all the muslims together have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.
How many people move from non-muslim to muslim countries? If we don’t take into account the rare cases of mixed marriages, exactly zero. How many move (or rather, run) in the opposite direction? Millions.
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WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEARDS?
Women don’t necessarily think men with beards are more attractive
Charles Darwin—a man who is usually pictured sporting sideburns or a massive beard—famously suggested that male facial hair is like a peacock’s tail, “an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex.”
As brilliant a scientist as he was, Darwin may not have been entirely right.
Do beards and mustaches make men more attractive?
In a study published in 2012, researchers asked women from two very different ethnic groups, Europeans from New Zealand and Polynesians from Samoa, to rate the attractiveness of the same male faces with and without a beard. In both places, women did not rate bearded faces as more attractive than clean-shaven ones, challenging Darwin’s idea that beards evolved because of female preference.
Researchers have done multiple other studies on the sexual attractiveness of male facial hair, and the results are too mixed for researchers to draw a clear conclusion. Some women prefer clean-shaven faces; others prefer stubble or a beard. If the purpose of a beard was truly related to sexual attraction, researchers would expect to find a clearer result, which suggests that beards may have evolved for a different reason.
Beards help with status among other men
While facial hair did not make men appear more physically attractive to women in the New Zealand-Samoa study, it did have other effects. Across both cultures, both women and men judged men with beards to be older and of a higher social status than the same men when clean-shaven. They also rated bearded men with an angry facial expression as significantly more aggressive than the same men when angry but clean-shaven.
“Facial hair probably functions to make men look more intimidating by exaggerating the apparent size of the lower face and jaw. Beards may still play a role in modern male-to-male competition. A study looking at British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 found that beards tend to become more fashionable when the ratio of single men to women is higher, in other words, when more men are competing for fewer women.
“Facial hair probably functions to make men look more intimidating by exaggerating the apparent size of the lower face and jaw and signaling sexual maturity and the strength and formidability that come with that,” Dr. David Puts, a professor of anthropology and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, tells Popular Science.
So it’s likely that beards evolved to help men win social status among other men, which helped our male ancestors attract mates and have more children, says Puts.
Beards can be armor during fights
When he wasn’t pondering the purpose of facial hair in men, Darwin spent some time thinking about male neck hair in species like lions, elk, and lynx. He proposed that it evolved mainly as physical protection to guard the vulnerable neck area during aggressive fights with rivals.
Could the same be true of beards in humans? To test this, a group of researchers developed a model that behaves in the same way as a human face. “We [couldn’t] exactly go around punching men with and without beards and measuring our results,” one of the researchers explained in a lecture.
To model the jawbone, they used a fiber epoxy composite that has the same physical strength and toughness as bone, and they used both shaven sheepskin and unshaven woolly sheepskin to simulate bare and bearded skin. Then they dropped weights on the models and measured the force of the impact.
The impact force was 16 percent greater on the shaved skin model compared with the unshaven model, suggesting that human beards may function as a kind of armor for the face, providing a small amount of protection against jaw fractures.
The idea that beards serve as a kind of protective pillow makes sense when you think about the potential effect of a strike to the face.
“As you can imagine, a jaw fracture in the evolutionary past, without the possibility of feeding through a straw for several weeks, would have been catastrophic,” Puts says. To this day, physical assault with a fist or blunt object is a leading cause of jaw fractures globally, second only to car accidents, Puts adds, with males having many more jaw fractures than females across societies, despite having thicker jawbones.
But a 2018 study using data from Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) mixed martial arts found that beards do not reduce knockouts or increase actual fighting ability. And some scientists argue that beards can actually be a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat because opponents can grab onto them. [That was supposedly why Alexander the Great decreed no beards for his soldiers.]
WWE wrestler Braun Strowman’s (left) and heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury’s beards might help protect them from breaking their jaws.
Bottom line
“Beards probably function mainly in winning status among males,” Puts concludes. For now, the beards-as-armor hypothesis remains up for debate.
“It is also possible that facial hair functions in part to attract females, but compared to the large and consistent effect on perceptions of dominance, the effect of facial hair on attractiveness to women is smaller and less consistent across societies and over time,” Puts says.
So, if you think bearded men look better than their clean-shaven counterparts, remember—all that just comes down to your own personal preference.
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-men-have-beards/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
I detest beards and other facial hair. Well, a some men look OK with a short jaw-hugging beard, but on the whole to me bearded men look close to ridiculous (the longer the beard, the more archaic and grotesque) — especially if they also shave their heads.
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THE “BLACK IRISH” DID NOT COME FROM SPAIN
While the British Isles are famed for pale skin and light hair, a massive portion of Ireland's population has dark hair and olive skin—a phenotype historically dubbed the "Black Irish.”
Antarctic explorer Tom Crean, born in County Kerry in 1877, stands aboard the Endurance in 1914. His dark hair and features are characteristic of the historical Black Irish phenotype.
This distinct appearance has sparked centuries of speculation about its origins. For generations, a popular piece of folklore explained this dark Mediterranean appearance by pointing to the Spanish Armada. In 1588, dozens of Spanish galleons wrecked off the rocky west coast of Ireland after a failed invasion of England. According to the legend, shipwrecked Spanish sailors washed ashore, settled down, and passed on their dark hair and eyes to the local population.
It is a great story, but genetic and historical evidence sinks it completely. Of the thousands of sailors who wrecked on the Irish coast, the vast majority drowned. Those who made it to the beaches were usually killed by local chieftains, captured by English forces, or smuggled out to Scotland to find passage back to Spain. The handful who managed to stay and intermarry could never have significantly altered the genetic makeup of an entire island.
To find the real source of dark hair in Ireland, the timeline goes thousands of years further back. The original hunter-gatherers who settled the British Isles after the last Ice Age had dark skin and dark hair. Later, around 4000 BC, Neolithic farmers migrated from Anatolia up the Atlantic coast—through modern-day Spain and France—into Ireland. They brought farming, but they also brought a genetic profile that included dark hair and eyes.
So why is this dark-haired phenotype more heavily associated with Ireland than with England? The answer lies in geography and later migrations. Centuries later, waves of Germanic Anglo-Saxons and Norse Vikings swept into the British Isles, bringing the genetics for blond hair and fair skin. However, these groups primarily colonized the eastern and central parts of Britain. Ireland, sitting on the extreme western edge of Europe, remained largely isolated from the heaviest Anglo-Saxon settlements. As a result, the ancient genetic signature of those early Mediterranean and Atlantic coast migrants survived much more strongly in Ireland, leaving a legacy of dark hair that predates any Spanish galleon by millennia. ~ Nova Prism, Quora
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DETECTING NEUTRINOS WITH ICECUBE
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Francis Halzen for his pioneering work on high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Halzen is a Belgian-born physicist, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.
Neutrinos are the least understood of the 17 fundamental particles known to exist. They nearly always move through matter as if it isn’t there. So massive detectors are required to capture and study their exceedingly rare collisions with atoms.
How it works: IceCube is the world’s largest neutrino detector. Engineers built it by using hot water jets to bore giant, milelong holes vertically into the ice and then lowered strings hooked up with thousands of cameras down into the holes. When a high-energy neutrino is produced by a distant black hole and then comes streaming through Earth, it’ll very rarely hit an ice molecule and produce a flash of light that the cameras can detect.
Why it matters: IceCube gave humankind a fresh glimpse of the cosmos when it came online in 2010. Unlike most telescopes across the globe that gather starlight, this unique observatory sees the universe via ghostly messengers called neutrinos. Combining the two has improved our understanding of some of the most distant and violent physical processes in the cosmos.
From the archive: Halzen wrote about the IceCube experiment for Scientific American in 2015, a few years after the project had successfully detected two neutrinos carrying more than 1,000 times the energy of the most energetic neutrino ever produced by an accelerator on Earth.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQhWnrzVJMrsSgZrlSrpXPbqLCS
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WHY MARX’S PREDICTIONS FAILED TO COME TRUE
Karl Marx predicted his communist revolution would spontaneously erupt in advanced industrial powerhouses. Instead, it was forced onto a peasant empire where the working class barely existed.
To bridge this gap between theory and reality, Vladimir Lenin adapted Marx’s ideas, creating Marxism-Leninism. Since the workers were not ready to spontaneously revolt, Lenin argued that a "vanguard party" of professional revolutionaries was needed to seize power and guide the masses toward socialism.
This vanguard structure created the system's first flaw: the destruction of political freedom. Lenin’s party operated under "democratic centralism," which meant that once the top leadership made a decision, unquestioning obedience was mandatory. Instead of creating a "dictatorship of the proletariat," the vanguard party established a dictatorship over the proletariat. Once a small elite took absolute power on behalf of the workers, they refused to relinquish it.
The second flaw was the hubris of central planning. Marxism offered almost no instructions on how a communist economy should function. The Soviet solution was Gosplan, a central bureaucracy tasked with setting quotas and prices for millions of goods without market signals. This triggered the economic calculation problem. Without supply, demand, or price mechanisms to indicate what people actually needed, planners flew blind. They ordered surpluses of heavy industrial goods like steel and tractors, while suffering shortages of basic consumer necessities like bread, shoes, and toilet paper.
Third, the system misjudged human psychology. It relied on the emergence of a "New Soviet Man"—an altruistic worker who labored for the collective good without the need for personal profit. In reality, removing economic incentives and the threat of financial failure stifled productivity and innovation. A popular Soviet joke captured the resulting apathy: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
Because Marxist-Leninist ideology was treated as infallible science, systemic failures could never be blamed on the theory itself. When agricultural collectivization caused famines, or when factories missed quotas, the vanguard party blamed "saboteurs" and "counter-revolutionaries." Enforcing an unworkable economic model on an unwilling population required totalitarian control, secret police, and prison camps.
Lenin's statue in East Berlin, removed in 1992. Unfortunately in Russia, Lenin and Stalin are still revered as "strong leaders" by a significant portion of the population. Schoolchildren are not being taught that these were mass murderers.
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WHY HUMANS DON’T HAVE TAILS
Many of the animals we know and love today have tails, from the littlest kitten to the largest whale. These tails vary widely by anatomy and purpose—from the grippy tails of opossums to the balancing tails of kangaroos to the swimming tails of fish. Others tell us how an animal is feeling, like a happy puppy with a wiggly butt.
Having a tail that extends beyond the anal opening is a requirement of membership in the phylum Chordata, where humans and all other vertebrates reside. But humans don’t really have a “tail” in the same way most creatures do, at least past eight weeks in the womb. Neither do our closest primate relatives.
For humans, the story of losing our tails goes way back in the evolutionary timeline. “The reason that humans don’t have tails is that our ancestors didn’t have tails,” says Carol Ward, a distinguished professor in the integrative anatomy program at the University of Missouri. But how we lost tails is a story that goes back at least 20 million years into human—and ape—geneological history.
One tail of a mystery
In the heart of the Miocene, land-dwelling animals were starting to look more and more like the fauna of today. During this era, which lasted from around 23 million years ago to five million years ago, the first dog-bears appeared, primitive giraffes frolicked through Eurasia, and dog-sized three-toed horse ancestors lived in Florida.
Humans, on the other hand, weren’t exactly humans yet. Human evolution is a story of divergence that goes back to the Miocene when African apes split off from orangutans. Recent research estimates that the last common ancestor between humans, chimps, and bonobos split off around five to six million years ago, and evidence for early members of the Homo genus didn’t appear in the fossil record until around 2.8 million years ago.
The trouble here is that these evolutionary cousins of ours are also tailless. So to find a tailed relative, we have to go back even further. Around 25 to 30 million years ago. Once that split happened, many species of tailless apes started popping up in the millions of years that followed. This makes it pretty much impossible to determine which exact tailless species would go on to evolve into us, says Ward.
The fossil record only offers us limited glimpses of what was happening, but even those snippets are enlightening. One such glimpse is the Ekembo, a genus with specimens dating back 17 to 20 million years ago that have been found in Kenya. Fossils of one species in this genus, the Ekembo heseloni, offer up a pretty good look at the relationship between apes and tails at the time, says Ward. These guys probably looked like chimps with legs and arms of the same length, adds Ward, and fossil evidence suggests that these creatures climbed on tree branches on all fours and kept the long, bendy lower backs that modern apes eventually lost. But what they were missing was the key components necessary for a tail.
When it comes to pinpointing when ape tails disappeared, we have to look to the sacrum fossil, the bony structure at the base of our lumbar vertebrae. Sacrum fossils for say, cats and other tailed mammals, lead into a bunch of tail vertebrae. For apes and humans, the sacrum ends with just a small tip.
“We have that small tippy point for Ekembo heseloni,” Ward says, “We know that sacrum could not have supported a tail, and that animal didn’t have one.”
But Ekembo isn’t the only example of a tailless primate from around this time. Another Miocene-era ape dubbed Nacholapithecus appears in Kenya’s fossil record about 15 million years ago. Fossils of these creatures’ sacrums demonstrate that they too wouldn’t have been able to support a tail, adds Ward.
While it’s not clear which exact ape goes on to become a hominin millions of years down the line, the evidence shows that apes had evolved to be tailless in this time period. And if our ancient ape ancestors didn’t have tails, hominids—and, in turn, humans—won’t either.
Why hominin (and ape) tails disappeared
So we know pretty certainly that the “human” tail went the way of the dinosaurs long before humans were a twinkle in evolution’s eye. But why? There are a bunch of theories, but it may have to do with movement and motion, Ward suggests.
Even though we, and our tailless brethren like gorillas, chimps, and gibbons, are related to these 20-million-year-old apes in some capacity, they likely looked very different from their modern counterparts.
“Modern chimps and gorillas have really long forelimbs, really long hands and fingers, short hind limbs, and a bunch of other features for hanging below branches,” says Ward. “But millions of years ago, that wasn’t the case. [Early apes] had arms and legs that are about the same length, so we’re pretty sure they walked on all fours.”
These strategies are intertwined with taillessness. While many animals use their tails to help maintain balance while in motion, they are especially useful if that movement is swift—think a running cheetah or a swinging monkey.
Miocene apes were eating fruit out of trees, explains Ward. Getting to the good stuff on the edge of a fruit tree branch requires supporting their weight on multiple branches, moving slowly and carefully so as to not lose balance.
For our slow-moving ape ancestors, a tail may have been a waste of energy to grow, or a potential liability waiting to be yanked by a predator. “They were climbing, but they were doing it deliberately,” Ward says. “The tail just didn’t offer an advantage.”
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-humans-dont-have-tails/
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THE ATTEMPT TO RAISE A SUPER-DOG
In 1940s Maine, a group of scientists built the School for Dogs, a massive facility to breed a "super-dog". Things didn't go as planned.
Humans have been a little bit obsessed with dogs for millennia. In the late 1940s, though, an enormous experiment took that obsession to a level never seen before or since.
The findings would help close one of the darkest chapters in scientific history.
Unfolding at a giant, specially built facility on a farm in Maine, US, it involved studying more than 500 puppies – cocker spaniels, beagles, Shetland sheep dogs, basenjis and wire‐haired fox terriers – over 13 years.
From birth, each puppy's development was recorded in exhaustive detail: its first startle response, its first attempt at consuming solid food, its first playfight with a sibling, its first tail wag. At five weeks old, the puppies began a battery of tests assessing everything from intelligence and dominance to emotional reactivity and aptitude for training.
"When a litter of pups was born, I knew exactly where I would be for each day of the next 12 months," wrote one of the lead investigators, John Fuller, in 1985.
The researchers set out to answer a host of questions. Are some dog breeds smarter than others? Do different breeds have different personalities? How important is canine parenting? If you disrupt a puppy's normal development, what happens? And might it be possible to breed a hyper-intelligent "super dog"?
From decoding doggie genetics to discovering the best way to socialize puppies, the findings from this mega experiment would change our understanding of dogs forever – as well as landing a final blow against eugenics.
A canine megaproject
World War Two had just ended, and a golden age for science in the US was beginning, with sizable chunks of money funneled into research. Scientists were free to think big, and large wads of cash were signed over without too many questions.
The School for Dogs study, as it was affectionately nicknamed, was one of the beneficiaries, awarded funding of $632,000 (£465,000), or close to $9m (£7m) now – an unimaginable sum for an equivalent project today.
By this time, eugenics – the idea that selective breeding could achieve genetic superiority in humans – was discredited and considered inappropriate and unethical for mainstream study due to its role in Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust and the post-war focus on human rights. However, several prominent academics remained in thrall to the eugenicist agenda. They were still convinced that genetics was the main driver of behavior, and that careful breeding could result in a supposedly better kind of human.
Among them was Alan Gregg, then director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Science and in charge of allocating the organizations' private philanthropic funds. Gregg was interested in modernizing psychiatry and understanding the root causes of undesirable behaviors. "Delinquents, the criminal insane, the emotionally unstable, the psychopathic personalities," could all be explained, he believed, by bad genes. (In reality, how much our personalities and actions are determined by our genetics is far more complicated than this.)
What he viewed as wasted expenditure on education was of particular concern to Gregg. A better understanding of genetics would force a realization that man has "as much to gain intellectually by wise matings as by $800,000 high schools", he wrote in a 1945 letter. (The Rockefeller Foundation did not reply to the BBC's request for a comment for this piece.)
At that time, most genetics studies were carried out on fruit flies or rats, but Gregg alighted upon a new idea. What if researchers tried to breed an extremely smart dog – a creature that couldn't fail to capture the public imagination – to support his idea that intelligence was overwhelmingly hereditary? Alan Gregg was prepared to stump up the cash for this hypothetical "super dog".
The quest for a 'super-dog'
Dogs have long posed an interesting question for geneticists: how can different breeds vary so much in appearance? Can a Great Dane and a Pomeranian really hail from the same species?
Their overwhelming diversity was one reason that dogs were thought to be an ideal genetic test subject: a creature so diverse in appearance must surely exhibit a wide range of cognitive abilities and personality traits too.
Fuller, a physiologist, and John Paul Scott, an animal behavior geneticist who led the project, were also captivated by this problem. The dog study's findings, however, soon diverged from the aims of its benefactor.
The Rockefeller Foundation had hoped certain breeds would exhibit greater cognitive capacities. Accordingly, the dogs were subjected to a range of intelligence tests – such as maze tests where they had to locate food within a labyrinthine structure – and learning tests, where they were presented with the same problem repeatedly to see if their performance improved.
Instead, it emerged that while certain breeds performed better on some tests, none exhibited a greater aptitude across all of them.
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that no breed could be said to be "more intelligent" than another. Temperamentally, there seemed to be some differences between breeds. Fox terriers exhibited a greater capacity for violence (they were, after all, bred to be hunting dogs), though this was greatly mediated by context. "The same breed might be fearful in one situation and confident in another," Scott and Fuller wrote in 1965. "Basenjis were fearful of strange situations but not at all fearful of other dogs."
Overall, Scott and Fuller proposed that their results offered a rebuke to the eugenicists and their notions of super-dogs created through superior breeding. The finding had important implications for humans too. "As far back as the Greeks… people have dreamed of godlike or heroic figures who combined the physical strength of a gorilla with the intelligence of an Einstein, the musical gifts of Beethoven with the beauty of a Greek God," they wrote.
The evidence from their study revealed why this was impossible. In a social animal, different traits are distributed across the population by design.
Take a trait like boldness. While courage in some dogs (and humans) might help see off danger, a more timid dog might help raise the alarm in the first place. A successful social group needs all bases covered.
"The super-man is not to be found as an individual but as a well-developed human society," concluded Scott and Fuller.
Dog attachment styles
Eventually, more than spawning a plucky super dog, Scott and Fuller became interested in how a puppy's early experiences shaped the adult dog it grew into. At the time, Freud's theories of childhood development were hugely popular, while John Bowlby was working on his influential ideas about attachment styles, suggesting that the care-giving a child receives influences their future emotional life.
Scott and Fuller began to think about attachment in the case of the dogs under their care. What would happen if puppies were reared in isolation? How would this impact their development? For this new experiment – which would never fly among researchers today – puppies were raised alone in large outdoor fields, with eight-foot-high fences around them through which food and water was delivered, so that they never saw human beings or other dogs.
By varying the length of time that the puppies spent alone, Scott and Fuller discovered that there seemed to be a "critical period" from four to 12 weeks of age: if an otherwise isolated pup interacted with a person or dog during this time, they could be socialized normally.
However, "if you don't allow them to form attachments at this time, then you can never get a very satisfactory dog", Scott told oral archivist Susan Mehrtens in 1986. "Without any contact with people… they became, by the time of 14 or 15 weeks of age, just like little wild animals."
A vast experiment
Even today, researchers remain dazzled by the scale and ambition of Scott and Fuller's efforts. "This lasted years, it involved hundreds of dogs," says Clive Wynne, director of the Canine Science Colaboratory at Arizona State University. "They had acres of facilities, they had dozens of staff. It's what we call 'big science'."
Researchers still credit Scott and Fuller for laying the groundwork for canine science. "The work was enormously influential in helping establish dogs as a serious subject for cognitive and behavioral science," says Vanessa Woods, director of the Duke University Puppy Kindergarten in North Carolina, US. "It helped pave the way for the field as it exists today."
Some of Scott and Fuller's experiments wouldn't fly today, though, says Wynne. Raising puppies in complete isolation would probably be considered too cruel to repeat – especially since the resulting "wild" and untameable puppies were ultimately euthanised. "Nowadays, if you're going to study people's dogs, you better not do anything to their dog that you wouldn't do to their child," he says.
In terms of scale alone, we are unlikely to see a rival to the School for Dogs any time soon. "The modern way of doing this is, we don't buy the dogs, we just borrow people's pets," says Wynne.
Still, some larger projects do exist. The Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University, for example, tested and trained 101 puppies to see whether they could predict which puppies would make it as guide dogs. "No one was ambitious or foolish enough to do the Scott and Fuller until we came along," says Woods with a laugh.
So far, her work has identified traits important to success like self-control, memory and how well the pups read social cues. But she agrees with Scott and Fullers' assertion there is no breed that is definitively "smarter" than another. "That finding has really held up."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261001-the-forgotten-1940s-experiment-that-tried-and-failed-to-create-a-super-dog
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NEW WRINKLES IN THE FABRIC OF THE OCEAN FLOOR
An overlooked seafloor feature may have a key role in the formation of new ocean crust
Deborah Smith first heard the strange rumbling from the seafloor in 2001 and was eager to get to the bottom of it.
The ocean commotion was detected by underwater hydrophones near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of the 40,000-mile undersea volcanic mountain chain that winds around the globe. Scientists have come to expect shakes, rattles, and rolls along mid-ocean ridges, where Earth’s tectonic plates are spreading apart and magma from deep within the planet rises and erupts at the surface. But the seismic activity Smith detected was coming from an area 35 miles away from the ridge—a western front that should have been all quiet.
“We had no idea why it was there, and that’s what we were looking to solve,” said Smith, a geophysicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). In 2005, she successfully petitioned the National Science Foundation to extend a research cruise going near the region for another eight days, so she could investigate and map the curious “noisy” area near latitude 13°N, roughly 1,500 miles east of the Caribbean island of Barbados.
Looking to solve one puzzle, however, Smith may have serendipitously found clues that shed light on an even larger mystery: how the ocean’s crust forms and evolves to shape the face of our planet.
It turns out that a quirky seafloor feature, which scientists once considered rare, may be rather common and play a key role in the evolution of Earth’s surface. The discovery, reported last summer in the journal Nature by Smith, Johnson Cann of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and Javier Escartín of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, has sparked widespread interest.
Fast- and slow-spreading ridges
Scientists began to grasp how Earth forms new crust by analyzing maps of ridges in the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans. The relatively simple and uniform appearances of the Pacific ridges made them easier to figure out. Beneath the ridge lies a chamber of magma—rocks melted by heat from Earth’s interior. (If the seafloor were a thin bar of chocolate, the magma chamber would be an underlying pool of hot fudge.) As Earth’s tectonic plates spread apart at the Pacific Ocean ridges, the magma oozes upward, spills over at the surface, and flows laterally on both sides of the ridge, until it is re-solidified by cold seawater to create a veneer of new ocean crust.
Atlantic Ocean ridges, however, look more motley and complicated. Atlantic tectonic plates spread apart more slowly, and magma rises more sporadically. The hot magma sources beneath Atlantic ridges lie much farther from the surface, making the “chocolate bar” of overlying crust more like a thick brick. The crust is colder and more brittle, so when it is stretched by spreading tectonic plates, it forms cracks, or faults, extending from the surface downward. Slabs of crust above and below faults can slide along the fault surfaces and then topple like falling dominoes.
The details of how new crust forms at slow-spreading ridges remained enigmatic, which of course, only motivated geologists such as Brian Tucholke at WHOI to seek answers. On an expedition in the early 1990s, Tucholke found “strange, elongated features along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that stretched out perpendicular to the ridge,” he said. They were large, smooth domes up to 10 to 20 miles long that were lined with ridges like a corrugated tin roof.
“We didn’t really understand what they were, and we kind of ignored them,” Tucholke said—until 1996 when a team of British and American scientists mapped one of these “strange, elongated features” in detail.
The Atlantis Massif
The ’96 research team included Smith and Cann. Their target was the Atlantis Massif—a dome a few miles east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at 30°N that sticks up much higher than surrounding seafloor hills. It is 10 miles in diameter and rises 14,000 feet above the seafloor, about as tall as Mount Rainier in Washington state.
The scientists discovered that the Atlantis Massif was made of peridotite, a dense, greenish rock usually found many miles below ocean crust in a deeper layer of the Earth called the mantle. Nearby was clue No. 2: a fault slanting downward from the seafloor into the ocean crust.
“That’s when the light dawned,” Tucholke said. The scientists realized that the strange dome and the fault were linked.
The fault was a type known as a “detachment fault.” It was large and long, reaching down into the upper mantle. Over hundreds of thousands of years, as the tectonic plates pulled apart, a mammoth block of mantle rock was pulled up along the fault and toward the surface and eventually rolled over on the seafloor. The exhumed dome, called a core complex, was effectively woven into the fabric of “new” ocean crust. The “corrugations” on the dome—like fingernail scratches on a milk chocolate bar—formed as the blocks slid against overlying rock on their way up.
The effort to map the Atlantis Massif was a big leap forward for scientists studying slow-spreading ridges, Tucholke said. Still, core complexes and detachment faults were considered more like curious aberrations to Earth’s “normal” way of forming new crust.
That is, until Smith’s expedition in 2005.
A-ha!
Smith and colleagues pored over the geophysical data collected on the 2005 expedition, searching for clues—not to the formation of ocean crust, you’ll recall, but to the mysterious seismic activity detected west of the ridge. Smith’s moment of scientific serendipity arrived while she sat staring at the computer screen in her lab at WHOI.
In a kaleidoscope of multicolored seafloor map data from 13°N, a spectacular image soon came into view. What popped out the most were the grooves, or corrugations: They looked just like the ones on the Atlantis Massif farther north on the ridge, she said, which she and others had mapped 10 years earlier.
“That was the a-ha moment,” Smith said.
Then she realized she was looking not at just one core complex, but a series of core complexes at various stages in the sequence of their formation—from bumps that indicated the emergence of a core complex to the faded grooves of long-exhumed core complexes that had been eroded away over millions of years.
“We could really see active detachment faults in operation: how they start, how they grow, how they mature, and how they die. We could see all of that very nicely,” said Cann. “What was amazing was the absolute scale of things.”
One entire flank of the ridge about 60 miles long—about one and a half times the length of the Cape Cod shoreline—was covered with core complexes in different stages of development, from cradle to corpse, the farther you got from the ridge. Woods Hole geophysicist Hans Schouten calls the ridge flank “a graveyard of core complexes.”
A curiosity turn out to be commonplace
“These things form a huge part of the terrain out there,” Cann said. “Detachment faulting and core complex formation are an important part of the story of how Earth’s crust forms.”
“We used to think core complexes were unique,” Smith said. “Now our new look at the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge suggests detachment faulting may in fact be a fairly normal way to form the seafloor, and it may be a lot more common than we thought along slow-spreading ridges.”
Understanding of the geometry and nature of the faults that form core complexes is advancing in leaps and bounds, Smith said. She and Schouten were funded by the National Science Foundation in 2007 to continue their work in the region, and Smith and a team of colleagues just submitted another paper about the “graveyard.” They continue to unwrap the details of how core complexes form by re-examining old data and gathering new data.
Woods Hole colleagues Rob Reves-Sohn, Susan Humphris, and Pablo Canales, for example, recently analyzed data from a mineral-rich mound as big as the Roman Coliseum on the Atlantic seafloor, called the TAG hydrothermal field. It sits atop a detachment fault, which the scientists found veers steeply downward and penetrates deeply. The fault likely acts like a superhighway for hot, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids to circulate toward the surface and build mineral deposits, Reves-Sohn said. Those deposits can grow massive because detachment faults persist for hundreds of thousands of years, he said.
All the geological rage
It’s Poseidon’s version of an old tale: the weirdo no one cared much about in grade school turns into the college hunk. Once overlooked, core complexes are now attracting more and more attention, Escartín said, and scientists are also working on mechanisms to explain them. Nearly 50 core complexes have been found, because scientists are looking for them and now know what to look for, Tucholke said.
Unlike fast-spreading ridges, slow-spreading ridges (and the even more recently explored ultraslow-spreading ridges) lack a steady supply of magma.
Tucholke and his colleagues are working on what they call a “Goldilocks Hypothesis.”
Detachment faults along slow-spreading ridges need just the right amount of magma: not too little and not too much so rocks don’t crack when stretched to form faults, but just enough to induce sliding on the fault.
Core complexes also expose “tectonic windows” into Earth’s crust and mantle, Tucholke said. Instead of drilling though more than two miles of crust—something scientists have dreamed about since the 1960s— “core complexes effectively lay out a cross-section of slow-spreading crust on the seafloor,” he said. “And it’s not a fool’s errand to study them and drill in various places” to gain a window into crust-manufacturing processes at slow-spreading ridges, where more than half of Earth’s ocean crust is created.
The discovery has also jazzed up landlubber geologists, who have studied core complexes on land for decades to learn how Earth’s continental crust was made, Cann said. But while “continental core complexes are all old and eroded away,” Smith said, the seafloor offers young, pristine, more complete examples of the geological processes that also shaped the land beneath our feet.
An abiding mystery
And what about that strange deep-sea rumbling that led Smith and company to the graveyard-turned-gold mine of core complexes in the first place?
“The thing is, we’re still not able to say why that zone of seismicity is there, based on the data we have in hand,” Smith said. “We’ve never answered that question, and it’s something we need to think long and hard about.”
“So much of science is being in the right place at the right time,” Escartín said.
Brian Tucholke’s research has also been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Peridotitehttps://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/new-wrinkles-in-the-fabric-of-the-seafloor/
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ARTISTS GET THE DETAILS OF THE CRUCIFIXION WRONG
If you hang someone by nails driven through their palms, their flesh will simply tear through their fingers. Almost everything we picture about Roman crucifixion is historically wrong.
Here are the most common misconceptions about how this brutal execution method actually worked:
Nails went through the wrists, not the palms. Because the hands lack the skeletal structure to support the weight of a human body, Roman executioners instead drove the iron nails through the wrists (often between the radius and ulna) or lower forearms. The sturdy carpal bones and ligaments securely anchored the victim to the wood.
Victims did not carry the entire cross. The image of a condemned person dragging a complete Latin cross is a later invention. A full wooden cross built to support a human would weigh upwards of 300 pounds (135 kg)—far too heavy for someone who had just survived a severe Roman scourging. Instead, victims carried only the crossbeam (patibulum), weighing around 75 to 100 pounds. The upright posts (stipes) were usually permanent fixtures left in the ground at designated execution sites.
They were crucified close to the ground. While Renaissance art depicts victims soaring dramatically above the crowds, the Romans typically crucified people just a foot or two off the dirt. This made it much easier for soldiers to hoist the crossbeam into place without ladders, and it deliberately left the victim vulnerable to wild dogs and other scavenging animals.
The crosses were often T-shaped. The iconic Latin cross (†), or crux immissa, was rarely used. Executioners frequently used the crux commissa, a T-shaped structure where the crossbeam was simply slotted onto the top of the upright post.
Modesty was entirely absent. Victims were never provided loincloths. Roman crucifixion was designed as the ultimate public degradation, and stripping the condemned completely naked was a crucial part of the humiliation.
Death was caused by suffocation, not blood loss. The nails themselves were rarely fatal. When suspended by the arms, the weight of the body pulls the chest cavity into a permanent state of inhalation. To exhale, victims had to push up on the nail piercing their feet or ankles, scraping their backs against the rough wood. Eventually, exhaustion would set in, preventing them from lifting themselves to breathe, leading to slow asphyxiation or heart failure. Breaking a victim's legs removed their ability to push up for air, immediately hastening death. ~ Quora
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MAY OWEN, THE WOMAN WHO DISCOVERED WHY PATIENTS DEVELOPED PROBLEMS AFTER SURGERY
Patients were coming through surgery clean and then going wrong weeks later, and nobody could say why. The operations had gone well. The wounds had closed. Then came the pain, the scarring, the strange masses of tissue surgeons kept finding when they had to go back in, and there was no name for any of it.
The person who worked out the answer was a farm girl from Falls County. May Owen came up hard, worked her way through school, and settled in Fort Worth as a pathologist, which is to say she spent her days with the tissue after the surgeon set down the scalpel. And she kept noticing the same thing turning up in samples that had no business looking alike.
She traced it to the talcum powder inside the surgeons' gloves. The powder that made a pair of gloves easy to pull on was coming off inside patients, and the body was reacting to it, walling it away, building scar tissue and adhesions around it. Her research on it came out in 1936. The problem was never the surgery. It was the glove.
She spent the rest of a very long career in Fort Worth and became the first woman to preside over the Texas Society of Pathologists, then the Tarrant County Medical Society, then the entire Texas Medical Association. She was still working as a pathologist when she died at ninety-six.
It took the medical world decades to fully act on what she found, which is the ordinary fate of an inconvenient discovery. She found it anyway, in a lab in Fort Worth, because she was the one paying attention to the part everybody else considered routine.
Owen published her findings in 1936; talc was banned as a surgical glove lubricant in 1947.
~ Chen Brown, Quora
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CAN AGING BE TREATED LIKE A DISEASE?
As research into longevity advances, scientists are finding new ways to test a once-speculative idea: that aging itself could become a target of medicine.
Researchers are investigating whether, instead of doctors waiting for age-related diseases to appear, it could be possible to measure and influence the biological changes that happen as we age.
The goal would be to intervene in the biological processes of aging before they contribute to disease, so that people would not just live longer, but also have more years of good health, known as health span.
“Aging has biology. This biology drives diseases,” Nir Barzilai, director of the institute for aging research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, told CNN.
Instead of waiting for diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer to emerge and treating them separately, he argues that medicine could eventually target biological processes associated with aging that contribute to multiple conditions at once.
Daniel Belsky, associate professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, said the hypothesis has not been tested in humans.
“We don’t know yet whether we can really do this. But we do have an alignment of evidence to argue this is possible. And we now have a mobilization of resources to actually test it,” Belsky said.
Reading the body
Scientists are looking beyond chronological age — the number of years someone has lived — to biological measures that reflect how their body is aging. Their task is not simply to measure biological aging, but to identify measurable changes in the body that may reveal how it is unfolding.
One approach focuses on epigenetics — changes in the way genes are regulated without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Belsky said that by examining chemical tags known as methyl groups that are bonded to DNA, researchers “could track the passage of time in a human body.”
Belsky’s work also involves analyzing multiple types of biological data. His Finding Aging Biomarkers by Searching Existing Trials (FAST) project is collecting what researchers call multi-omic data — combining different layers of information about the body — including proteins, metabolites and epigenetic marks on white blood cells. The aim is to identify biological indicators that respond to different interventions and could eventually help researchers measure how those interventions affect the biology of aging.
But Belsky said the critical connection between manipulating those biomarkers and extending the healthy lifespan has not yet been established.
The difficulty is that the outcomes researchers want to measure can take decades to appear. Belsky said a trial designed to test whether an intervention taken at age 40 or 50 could prevent chronic disease might need to follow participants for two or three decades.
Researchers are therefore trying to determine whether biomarkers of aging can eventually be used to predict longer-term health outcomes. If a biomarker can be shown to reliably predict whether an intervention will prevent disease or extend a healthy lifespan, it could serve as a “surrogate endpoint” in clinical trials — a measurable sign that a meaningful health outcome is likely to follow.
Regulating longevity medicine
As the science grows, longevity clinics are starting to appear, where patients are offered conventional medical assessments combined with a much wider range of tests intended to build a detailed picture of an individual’s health.
In the US, Mayo Clinic launched its Healthy Longevity Clinic in 2023, and Singapore’s National University Health System has established a similar program, combining detailed assessment with personalized lifestyle or medical interventions.
But as longevity clinics start to become more common, some scientists have cautioned that the field needs better regulation.
In Abu Dhabi, the Department of Health has given longevity medicine a formal place within the healthcare system. In October 2024, it introduced a licensing framework for Healthy Longevity Medicine Centers, which it described as the first of its kind globally, creating a defined clinical category and setting the standards facilities must meet to operate within it.
It licensed the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi as the world’s first state-designated specialized Healthy Longevity Medicine Center. Allan Boston, the institute’s chief operating officer, believes that understanding aging at a cellular level could be revolutionary. “All your cells are aging constantly. In the past, we thought that was just an inevitable stage of life. It’s not inevitable. There are things we can now start to do about that. That changes the whole concept of medicine.”
“The more we understand that cellular level activity, the more we can design therapies, drugs, other immunotherapies, technologies that can alter that pathway, slow it down and even potentially reverse it,” he added.
But Belsky points out that when it comes to influencing the biology of aging, there are plenty of steps people can take that don’t require advanced medical innovations or visiting a specialist clinic.
“The thing we know works is available in some form to most of us,” Belsky said, pointing to things like sleep, exercise, community and diet.
“These are things where almost all of us can make progress,” he added. “We can add healthy years to our lifespan even without these new drugs.”
https://www.cnn.com/health/can-aging-be-treated-like-a-disease-longevity-medicine-spc
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THE “BLACK DEATH” — STILL WITH US?
The ancient word "plague" is back in the headlines.
A Russian researcher working in a lab studying the plague who died from pneumonia of an unknown origin last week.
Maynes reports that the employee was a 28-year-old woman who worked in a lab in Siberia, some 2,500 miles from Moscow. An investigation by Russia's consumer health watchdog concluded that no pathogens in her body were connected to her work with infectious disease.
But local media have raised concerns about the spread of pneumonic plague. It's one of the diseases studied at the lab in Siberia. It's airborne and can be fatal.
Plague variations
The plague comes in several versions, depending on which body part the bacteria invade. When a flea bites a person, the individual typically develops what's called bubonic plague. In this case, the telltale sign is one or more swollen and painful lymph nodes, known as buboes. (The word "bubonic" comes from the Greek boubon, which means groin, because some people have swollen lymph nodes in their groin.) Doctors can diagnose the disease by taking a sample from the person's blood or lymph nodes and then submitting the sample to a lab for testing.
But when the bacteria spread to the lungs, this can cause what's called pneumonic plague. In this case, there's often no telltale sign of the plague, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This version is much more dangerous, says medical entomologist Adelaide Miarinjara at Emory University. "It transmits pretty easily between people because it spreads through droplets, almost like COVID spreads."
And people can die more quickly with pneumonic plague than other forms, she adds, because the disease progresses more rapidly. "The key here is early diagnosis. If people aren't expecting it or don't seek treatment, they can die."
Treatment involves antibiotics, often administered by IV infusion.
In 2017, Madagascar suffered a large outbreak of pneumonic plague when a person from a rural part of the country brought the disease to the coastal city of Toamasina. That city hadn't seen a case of the plague in nearly a century, says Miarinjara, who was in Madagascar at the time. "A person transmitted the disease on public transportation," she says.
The country recorded more than 2,400 suspected cases, including nearly 1,900 cases of pneumonic plague. One study estimated that about 25% of people with confirmed cases died in this outbreak.
The history of quarantine
As for the reports of Russian "contacts" of the lab worker under quarantine — that reflects a long-standing response to sicknesses like the plague.
The idea of isolating, or quarantining, sick people dates back at least 3,000 years. The Book of Leviticus in the Bible mentions how to isolate people with leprosy.
The word "quarantine" itself arose during the Black Death, when the city-state of Dubrovnik, now part of the country of Croatia, enacted what is likely the first state-imposed isolation.
At the time, Dubrovnik was a wealthy merchant city along the coast of the Adriatic Sea. City leaders wanted to keep the bubonic plague out. So they began to force visitors to wait for 40 days on a remote island outside the city before coming ashore.
They called the wait quarantino, from the Italian word for "40."
"The first quarantine was pretty much improvised," Ivana Marinavić, the head of educational programs at the Lazarettos of Dubrovnik, told NPR in 2021. The Lazarettos were the first buildings ever constructed for the sole purpose of quarantining.
If you broke the quarantine during the plague, the consequences were severe. "Torture, or cutting your nose or your ears off," Marinavić told NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/07/g-s1-146952/pneumonic-plague-russia-siberia-lab-death
(the Black Death was primarily an outbreak of bubonic plague, though it also involved pneumonic and septicemic forms)
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WHY A 10-MINUTE "VERY SLOW JOG" BOOSTS MOOD AND BRAIN POWER
A walking-pace jog improves prefrontal cortex function and boosts happiness
A brief 10-minute bout of very slow running significantly enhances positive mood and executive function.
The "head bobbing" unique to running may stimulate brain regions that release serotonin.
Unlike heel-strike walking, the airborne mechanics of a slow jog create distinct cognitive benefits.
Accumulating evidence suggests that hitting 10,000 steps a day isn't the only way to unlock the health benefits of daily movement. Three recent 2026 studies show that slightly increasing your gait speed or walking continuously for 13 to 36 minutes significantly lowers both mortality and dementia risk.
But if you're looking for an immediate mood boost and prefrontal cortex activation, you might want to change your biomechanics rather than your pace. Another new 2026 study found that keeping your speed exactly the same—but picking up your feet to break into a super-slow, 10-minute jog—rapidly increases happiness and enhances executive function.
The Neuroscience of a Super-Slow Jog
A wealth of science links cardiovascular exercise to better cognitive and mental health.
However, researchers are increasingly interested in the absolute minimum dose of exercise—in terms of intensity, duration, and frequency—required to trigger neurological benefits.
The latest (2026) "slow running benefits" study published in Imaging Neuroscience set out to find the minimum intensity threshold for running needed to improve mood and prefrontal cognition. Led by Hideaki Soya at the University of Tsukuba, researchers had 24 healthy adults complete a 10-minute "super-slow" running session on a treadmill.
For this study, the pace was dialed down to roughly 2.9 to 3.5 mph (a 17- to 21-minute-per-mile pace)—speeds you could easily maintain at a brisk walk, just below the 4.0 mph threshold where most people naturally transition from a walk to a jog.
Before and after the session, participants completed a Stroop task (a classic measure of executive function) and a mood questionnaire while wearing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) caps to monitor cortical blood flow.
The results were immediate and striking. Just 10 minutes of glacially slow running significantly reduced Stroop interference time and elicited left lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. Participants also reported feeling noticeably more cheerful.
The Biomechanics of Head Bobbing
If you can walk at the exact same speed, why does jogging trigger such a distinct neurological response? The answer lies in the unique biomechanics of how we move through space.
Technically, running differs from walking by being partially airborne. When you walk, one foot is always in contact with the earth. When you run—even at a snail's pace—both feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second. This bounces you through each stride, creating a rhythmic vertical oscillation.
Soya and his colleagues attached sensors to the participants' skulls to measure how much their bobbing heads rose and fell with each step. They discovered a significant positive correlation between the magnitude of this head acceleration and the participants' pleasant mood.
In animal models, this specific vertical bouncing activates neurons that release serotonin, a neurotransmitter heavily linked to mood regulation. Interestingly, head acceleration or "bobbing" is nominal during walking and virtually nonexistent when cycling.
Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Walking vs. Running
To fully appreciate why a slow jog feels so different to the brain, it helps to look at the evolutionary biomechanics of hominin bipedalism. A September 2026 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed the detailed 3D kinematics of how humans walk compared to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees.
The researchers found that human walking is defined by a consistent heel-strike, a trait chimpanzees rarely use. This evolutionary adaptation allows modern humans to save an estimated 26 to 41 percent of metabolic energy compared to walking on the ball of the foot. By rolling smoothly from the heel to the front of the foot, we evolved to walk vast distances with incredible metabolic efficiency, though it comes at the cost of higher impact forces on our joints.
But this metabolic efficiency is exactly why breaking into a jog changes the neurobiological equation. When you transition from an energy-saving heel-strike walk into a bouncy, airborne jog—often shifting toward a midfoot strike—you recruit different muscle groups and alter the mechanical stress on your body. The cerebellum's Purkinje cells must rapidly adjust their prediction models to maintain balance and coordinate the complex timing of landing and pushing off.
The slight increase in physiological demand, combined with the rhythmic vertical oscillation of your skull, sends a completely different sensory payload to your brain. You are no longer just transporting yourself efficiently; you're dynamically challenging your nervous system.
Putting This Research Into Practice
You don't need to be an elite ultra-endurance athlete or push your heart rate to the absolute limit to reap the cognitive rewards of running.
Peak Performance Primer: Just before a demanding mental task, presentation, test, or high-stakes call, try a 10-minute slow jog around the block or up and down a long hallway.
Keep It Conversational: Dial the intensity down to a pace where you can easily hold a conversation. The goal isn't cardiovascular exhaustion; it's rhythmic movement.
Focus on the Bounce: Allow your body to naturally oscillate up and down. You don't need a heavy, pounding stride. A light, springy, short-stepped jog is enough to trigger the head acceleration your brain thrives on.
If 10,000 steps or high-intensity intervals feel like too much of a hurdle today, give yourself permission to go slow. A 10-minute jog at a walking pace can instantly boost your mood and promote better prefrontal cortex function.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202609/why-a-10-minute-very-slow-jog-boosts-mood-and-brain-power
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Ending on beauty:
O SMALL SAD ECSTASY OF LOVE
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck — here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
~ Anne Carson (image: Mono Lake, California)
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