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THE JAGUAR
the ghost of a jaguar walks through the fence
the jaguar is our freedom
a friend gave me a precious thing
a little fragment of the Berlin wall
but this wall they are building
straight across my heartland
with our flag draped across it
is the coffin of my country
hands reach through the gaps
to clasp, until the gaps are sealed
and even music
cannot get through
only the ghosts
of all we have betrayed
this is the wall of lamentation
the grave of the jaguar
~ Ursula K. Le Guin
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“It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
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GERMAN AND ENGLISH
Look at the German words Wasser, Apfel, and Vater, and you instantly recognize water, apple, and father. Yet to the ear, the two languages sound completely alien.
Both are members of the West Germanic language family, meaning their core vocabularies—words for basic survival, family members, and nature—evolved from the exact same Proto-Germanic root words over two millennia ago.
However, the two languages sound and look drastically different today due to centuries of geographic isolation and historical collisions. The divergence began in earnest around the 5th century when Germanic tribes like the Angles and Saxons migrated across the North Sea to the British Isles.
Once separated by water, the languages embarked on different evolutionary paths. In central and southern Germany, a massive linguistic event called the High German Consonant Shift occurred between the 3rd and 9th centuries. German speakers began altering their consonants: the "p" sound turned into "pf" or "f" (apple became Apfel, pepper became Pfeffer), and the "t" sound shifted to "s" or "z" (water became Wasser, ten became zehn). Because the Anglo-Saxons were already isolated on the British Isles, English entirely missed this phonetic revolution.
English then underwent its own radical transformations, largely driven by foreign invasion. In 1066, the Norman Conquest brought French-speaking rulers to England. Over the next few centuries, English absorbed roughly 10,000 Norman French and Latin words, creating a hybrid vocabulary that diluted its purely Germanic sound. Spelling conventions also shifted as French scribes recorded English words, introducing combinations like "qu" instead of the Old English "cw."
Later, between the 15th and 18th centuries, English underwent the Great Vowel Shift. English speakers drastically changed how they pronounced long vowels, moving the phonetic location of these sounds higher up in the mouth. This phenomenon fundamentally changed English pronunciation and severed the link between how English words were spelled and how they sounded.
Ultimately, German remained largely continental and relatively conservative in its core Germanic structure and spelling systems. English, meanwhile, became an island language heavily remodeled by French administration, Latin influence, and its own unique internal sound shifts. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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NUREMBERG AND THE LAUGHING NAZIS 
A man named Gustave Gilbert was the court psychologist and wrote everything what was going on. He wrote that they just tried to show fake bravery. Göring was well aware that he was going to hanged. He decided to make the courtroom a theater performance. Every time the American lawyers made a minor mistake, Göring laughed out loud to embarrass them and showed that he did not care.
There was a time court showed an old Nazi propaganda movie from 1939. It showed Hitler laughing at US President Roosevelt, and the Nazis laughed back then. When Göring was watching this years later in court, he laughed again because he enjoyed remembering his old power.
The prisoners also laughed at mistakes in language. The court used new headphones for live translation and the Americans continued to mess up the pronunciation of long German words. The Nazis laughed at these bad accents and laughed to feel smart. Göring joked quietly to show himself tough when court showed terrible footages and videos of the camps.
But the joking did not last long. When the Allies presented thousands of official papers that confirmed their crimes, their smiles completely disappeared . It left behind a very frightening silence. ~ Jack Williams, Quora
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The Nato crisis exposed the real source of Trump’s power. It comes from his willingness to violate all norms, rules and laws – and leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces. ~ Robert Reich
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MOSCOW’S OIL REFINERY IS ON FIRE AGAIN; THIS TIME IT MIGHT BE AN INSIDE JOB.
Black smoke rising over Russia's capital. Oil tanks ablaze. And this time — something is different.
Russian Telegram channels and Twitter are not blaming Ukrainian drones.
They are blaming saboteurs.
And here is why that matters more than people realize.
Ukraine has a history of working with domestic Russian rebel groups — people inside Russia who hate Putin and his regime. Anti-Kremlin insurgents. Disgruntled Russians. Sometimes just ordinary people Ukraine pays to carry out one act of sabotage.
We have seen it before:
Railroad lines blown up inside Russia
Bridges destroyed deep in Russian territory
52 Russian helicopters destroyed at a repair base by a single saboteur with explosives
And now — Moscow's own oil refinery. Possibly from the inside.
Whether this was a drone or a saboteur — the result is the same.
More Russian fuel burning.
And Russia desperately needs that fuel right now. Petrol rationing in 55 regions. Queues stretching miles. Drivers abandoning cars on highways.
This refinery had a capacity of 10.5 million tons per year. One of Moscow's most important facilities.
Ukraine already hit it weeks ago — damage so severe the refinery was closed until 2027.
Now it is burning again. Before they even finished repairing the last strike.
Russia cannot repair fast enough. Cannot protect fast enough. Cannot stop what is coming.
Whether it is drones from Ukraine or saboteurs from within — Russia is burning from both outside and inside.
Putin is losing control of his own country. ~ Natasha Kovalenko, Quora
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RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND THE DRONE WARFARE
Starlink enabled the breakthrough drone campaign
Ukraine’s breakthrough came earlier this year when SpaceX cut off Russian forces’ unauthorized access to Starlink satellite services, disrupting Russia’s drone operations and communications.
That gave Ukraine an advantage, allowing upgraded drones to evade detection, resist jamming and strike more accurately while Russia raced to adapt.
“The blocking of Starlink for Russian forces was one of the most significant battlefield developments of the year,” said Rob Lee, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program.
The success of Ukraine’s mid-range campaign is a consequence of that shift.
“What’s changed is that now eight out of every 10 sorties are successful,” said Pharaon. Just a few months ago, the success rate was the reverse, he said.
K-2 flies the Dart, one of the cheaper models in Ukraine’s expanding fleet of midrange drones. Built from polystyrene, wood and 3D-printed parts, the Dart primarily targets Russian logistics convoys. Larger drones, such as the Hornet, carry heavier payloads to strike bridges and other infrastructure.
Before launch, crews inspect the batteries, cameras, flight controllers and the most critical component, the Starlink satellite communications system that keeps the drone connected throughout the mission.
From the assembly point, the drones are transported to concealed launch sites near the front line. There, a soldier with the call sign Buckwheat moves between aircraft, ensuring each Starlink terminal is connected before the drones are catapulted into the sky.
“It’s gotten a little quieter now. You can tell the pressure from the enemy has eased,” he said.
Russia, caught by surprise, is playing catch-up.
Russian forces were caught off guard when the campaign intensified three months ago. Now they have started deploying mobile fire groups and other countermeasures to intercept the drones. But the campaign’s speed, scale and element of surprise have so far kept Ukraine a step ahead.
Russia’s Achilles’ heel is coordination between units, Bendett said. Some sectors of the front may identify the threat, but unless that information is quickly shared with neighboring units, Russia will struggle to intercept the drones.
Ukraine’s campaign focuses on the highways linking occupied Mariupol, Berdyansk, Melitopol and the Crimean Peninsula, the main arteries supplying Russian forces fighting in southern and eastern Ukraine. Commanders say sustained attacks have forced Russia onto slower, less efficient resupply routes.
Ukrainian military intelligence says the drones have made sections of the land corridor linking Russia to Crimea too dangerous, slowing the movement of fuel, ammunition and reinforcements.
To defend against the drone campaign, Russia is “significantly increasing the number of their mobile anti-aircraft units and fixed machine-gun positions, and are deploying more interceptor crews near major cities,” Pharaon said.
Drone pilots now plot routes around known mobile fire group positions. Through the camera, they can sometimes spot the flashes of anti-aircraft fire as the drone slips past.
Russia is deploying electronic warfare systems against Starlink after testing it since 2024, Lee said. So far, however, their effectiveness has been limited.
“I think they have some success, but we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.
Alan Fitzgerald:
I love the smell of burning oil refineries in the morning.
Geoffrey:
Which is why I have been saying for a long time — build on those Russian patriots who detest Putin. They are the Russian resistance good guys. Just like anti-Trumpers in USA there are anti-Putiners in Russia.
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UKRAINIAN WIDOWS
“I died along with him in Huliaipole.’ This is how Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva, a Ukrainian widow, describes the day her husband was killed on the battlefield. ‘At first, you don’t understand anything – just an abyss, no time, no space, nothing at all. There is just some kind of existence,’ explained another war widow, Oleksandra Kolestyk.
I first heard these words as figures of speech, the language of grief stretching beyond the limits of ordinary expression. Little did I know how thoroughly the widows’ voices would change this perception, how their words would tear me apart, turn my world upside down and undermine everything I thought I knew about myself, society and existence.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I have been speaking with Ukrainian widows and collecting their testimonies. It was an attempt to be of some use: to listen and bear witness to stories of loss, suffering and the trauma of war. Looking back now, I see the fiction I was living inside. I imagined myself as someone who helps, the one who does the decent thing. It is still uncomfortable to recognize how naive that posture was. Without admitting it to myself, I had placed myself in the larger position, the one who remains intact while others speak from devastation.
As I stayed with the widows and their stories, that imagined position began to loosen, then collapse. The contrast between us reversed itself: my attempt to help shrank to something pitiful, while the widows turned out to be immense, larger than the world I had brought with me. The place from which I had been listening gave way beneath me. I was no longer the one who understood, who accompanied, who could offer anything. I became small in the face of what they carried – the knowledge that death is inseparable from love, that love risks literal dying, that trauma does not distort reality but exposes it. To hear them is to be dismantled by what they know.
Partly as a result of my own depression and partly because I’m a philosopher, I already understood our society as therapeutic; it operates by stigmatizing and diminishing the negative aspects of existence while normalizing the positive and imposing it as the only legitimate state of being. This commonsense, thoroughly psychologized outlook casts trauma or depression as deviations from how we are meant to be – happy and positive, radiating wellbeing.
Even compassion becomes problematic in this context since it arrives not as genuine recognition but as a gentle pressure to return to the norm – the sympathetic hand on the shoulder that already contains, within it, the assumption that you will recover, that you should recover, that the goal is recovery.
Widows and others who carry the trauma of lost love appear, within this framework, as psychologically damaged, in need of diagnosis and compassion to help them return to the norm. Meanwhile, those on the other side of trauma take it upon themselves to bring them back. As one widow put it: ‘Everyone expresses condolences – but no one wants to simply listen.’
Instead, what arrives are well-worn scripts to get over it: ‘You still have your life ahead of you,’
‘You’ll meet someone else,’ ‘Stop grieving, life goes on.’ Alongside these responses, there is also a turning away. As Vatsenko-Bondareva puts it: ‘Society tries not to see us, as if afraid of being infected by our pain.’
We remain largely immune to their desperation because, when trauma speaks, when depression talks, we assume that’s not the real, happy you. You are presumed to be exaggerating, misreporting your own experience. Even when we do listen in therapeutic settings, the aim is to target the inadequacy, the disturbance that must eventually disappear: the insanity, the excessive horror that must be spoken out until it fades away, like a devil expelled from the body, with the holy water of therapy driving it out.
But what if we allowed the voice of trauma to disclose what it alone can? If the traumatized are seen to report the truth, then the therapeutic apparatus, with its classifications and its protocols of healing, becomes not the path to clarity but the thing that obscures it. The whole order of truth and distortion reverses.
Once the widow is placed at the center of the picture, she is no longer a deviation from how a human life should unfold. She becomes someone who reveals the hidden structure of existence itself. From that point onward, the world appears altered: less protected, less coherent, and much darker than before.
My encounters with Ukrainian widows revealed what I had previously dismissed as rhetorical: the possibility of dying while still alive. A human being can remain standing, breathing, speaking, while something essential in them has already perished. What remains in place of the intact self moving forward through grief is a body surviving the destruction of the person who once inhabited it.
Vatsenko-Bondareva’s statement about her own death on the day her husband was killed echoes through many widows’ testimonies. Again and again, one hears the same formulation: ‘I died that day.’ And yet the statement continues to resist comprehension as a factual claim.
If taken literally, it unsettles a long philosophical understanding that the self endures for as long as biological life continues. It may suffer damage, even severe damage, yet the core of the person remains somewhere underneath the distortions. The self is assumed to be coherent, its life capable of being told as a continuous story. This assumes that we remain, in some essential sense, the same person over time: that our past memories, present awareness and imagined future belong to a single, unbroken narrative. Even when damaged, the true self is seen as fundamentally indestructible and waiting to be restored.
Yet this is not what the widows describe. When someone declares their own death while still alive, the possibility emerges that the self itself may be mortal. A person can remain biologically alive while the one who lived that life is already gone.
The widows speak of death while standing before us alive, breathing, capable of recounting the event. The testimony itself seems to contradict the assertion of death it describes. Yet the insistence of the claim gives it a disturbing weight. This strange coexistence destabilizes the conventional meaning of both life and death.
What if life and death are not opposing states, where one replaces the other, but conditions that can inhabit each other? Death may occur within life. Living would then mean undergoing death while still alive, carrying it within existence rather than escaping it. It is from within this that the widows speak. One of them described her entire existence as chornyi bil – a black pain.
Others speak of continuing to live through death itself.
Much of what we take for granted about grief, trauma and identity come through psychoanalysis, which asks how the mind absorbs loss, conflict and change. Sigmund Freud believed that, underneath trauma, one could discover a self capable of repair.
But the French philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that trauma sometimes undoes the self altogether. She calls this destructive plasticity: a form of change that does not merely reshape a person’s identity, but destroys it and forces something new to emerge in its place. What appears on the other side is a different self, formed in rupture. In Ontology of the Accident (2009), Malabou names those shaped by such ruptures the ‘living dead’. The widows named themselves that first.
The widows reveal something about the rest of us, too. We are each, in a sense, already among the living dead. Life does not move toward death as toward a distant event; it unfolds through it. Death does not arrive one day; it takes place in stages, threaded through the whole of existence. It marks both the direction in which we move and the condition under which everything we have remains exposed to loss.
What emerges just as strikingly is the entanglement of love and death. In Rivne, the young widow Maryana Yupatkina continues to go on dates with her partner. She walks to the central square, to the memorial where his portrait stands among others. She brings two coffees. One for herself, and one for Nazar, who was killed at 23. They last saw each other there, in that same city center, drinking coffee together. Nothing in this gesture suggests that their relationship has ended. It has just shifted into another form that includes death within it. If anything, his absence seems to hold him there even more insistently. He can no longer leave, no longer be lost in any ordinary way.
Love persists as memory and as ritual: an appointment that death has interrupted without cancelling. The same persistence appears in smaller, almost absurdly ordinary moments. Olga Slyshyk describes standing in her kitchen, unable to open a tin can, crying out in frustration: ‘Misha, I’m not even able to do this’ – and then, suddenly, it opens. The dead beloved remains woven into the practical texture of life, invoked not only in mourning rituals but in the most banal emergencies of domestic existence.
And sometimes love projects itself beyond death in the other direction too, as a command handed down by the dying to the living: ‘Please promise me that no matter what happens to me, you will be happy.’ Even here, at the edge of catastrophe, love persists, and in persisting, it constitutes the life that remains.
This is why the death these widows describe cannot be understood as a purely private event, something sealed within the boundaries of one individual psyche. It unfolds in the space between two lives. The bond itself – the attachment, the shared routines, the mutual orientation through which each life took shape – becomes the site of destruction. The husband dies, and the world that joined them dies with him. In this sense, it can feel to widows as though their husbands have taken a part of them into death as well.
The self appears here as fragile and relational, formed through bonds with others. A life does not unfold in isolation, however much our cultural imagination prefers to picture it that way. Love therefore carries a radical risk. To attach oneself to another is to entrust one’s life to that connection.
This dismantles another fantasy, shared by Western philosophy and common sense, of an individual who is autonomous at her core, separate from others. Relationships may wound or damage, yet the inner self is assumed to remain intact somewhere beneath the surface, available to be restored.
Yet the widows stand as living evidence against the taken-for-granted solidity of the autonomous self. ‘Plans, ideas – everything was shared. And then – suddenly! – there is no person. So what is the point of anything?’ one widow asks. Such words reveal how deeply we live and die through each other. The radical idea is that the self does not precede its bonds but emerges from them. Interconnection forms the ground from which the self takes shape, while autonomy appears as a later mask that conceals this dependency.
Here we arrive at one final element of the widows’ impact – an understanding of trauma as a form of initiation rather than a distortion of reality. If we truly listen to widows, without reducing their words to symptoms, attending to what they say rather than to what we think must be corrected, trauma becomes a form of disclosure, revealing the inevitability of loss and the extent to which one life depends on another, so closely that it becomes unbearable. In this sense, trauma exposes what ordinarily remains concealed.
Oksana Borkun describes this transformation: ‘When this happens, the picture deepens, and you gain another experience of truth … You begin to see and feel much more. This opens a different path in life toward understanding the whole world.’ What comes into view here exceeds any one life and any personal tragedy; it opens onto a tragedy of the world, in which loss is built into existence. ‘I found myself filled with immense compassion in the wake of the loss,’ Borkun adds. It draws one into proximity to suffering beyond one’s own loss, a closeness to the tragedy of existence itself, compassion for the world.
When describing the very moment when the news of death arrived, widows often speak of the ground disappearing beneath them, what Olexandra Kolestyk called an abyss. No description seems capable of matching the event itself. Language falters here, yet the testimonies return again and again to the same sense of collapse of the world that once held together meaning.
While such statements are easily heard as exaggerations, this way of hearing them may itself be a way of dismissing what they describe. It took many testimonies before I began to hear them differently.
I now understand the moment of trauma as a glimpse into the underside of reality from which ordinary existence is normally protected. In this sense, trauma can be thought of as an initiation, though not in the mystical sense of access to a hidden truth or privileged knowledge of reality. It is, rather, the opposite of such knowledge: an initiation into the point at which words lose their hold and meaning collapses.
To love is already to accept the possibility of losing. Marriage rituals capture this truth more clearly than philosophical theory often does. In the traditional wedding vow, two people symbolically hand their lives to one another. The gesture contains an implicit acknowledgment that love exposes each life to the mortality of the other.
The common advice that one should eventually overcome loss and move forward assumes that the self survives intact beneath the devastation. What widows embody instead is the possibility, even the certainty, that something may truly die with the beloved. Love, in this sense, involves the risk of dying several times across a lifetime. To love someone is to entrust part of one’s life to their mortality.
One widow said that what supports her existence after her husband’s death is living in a way that wouldn’t shame her in his eyes, nor faced with what his death stands for: ‘The best thing is to do good. So that when you wake up in the morning, you are not ashamed to look into your own eyes, or at your husband’s photograph on the wall.’ The dead remain, as memory, as a wound, and in the way life is carried on.
Still, we often protect ourselves by treating such grief as a private tragedy and nothing more. Even when we recognize that the survivor of trauma has been profoundly altered, the experience remains contained within the boundaries of that individual tragedy. Listening to the widows, a catastrophe that first appears singular opens outward, no longer confined to the one who bears it.
The loss of a beloved spreads beyond the life in which it occurs, touching something shared, something that runs through all lives. It exposes the condition under which existence unfolds. We have each other only temporarily, and each day brings us closer to losing one another. Loss is the underlying condition of connection, always lurking beneath every moment. It is what makes us precious to one another, what makes love possible at all.
We tend to imagine eternity in terms of bliss, while pain is treated as temporary. If taken seriously, the widows’ testimonies suggest a different experience of time, one in which pain persists, as if it were what touches eternity. Many insist that it will never disappear. ‘Time does not heal,’ Daria Mazur says. ‘You just get used to it. You accept it. You learn to live with it. And that pain just becomes a part of you.’
Another widow puts the same truth more bluntly: ‘This pain will never go away.’ These words do not describe grief as something to overcome. They describe it as something to be incorporated and carried. This suggests a different relation to pain than the therapeutic impulse to reduce or eliminate it. Pain becomes what one learns to live with, wearing the heart thin, extending it until it can carry its weight.
Taken together, the widows’ testimonies open onto death and loss as conditions of human life. To live is to move toward death, to love is to move toward loss. This is the underlying reality of both life and attachment, not an unfortunate outcome from which one might be spared.
The widows, therefore, glimpse something the rest of us remain protected from: the vulnerability of existence and the inevitability of loss. They have encountered what awaits everyone. Those who have not yet undergone such loss remain protected by the illusions that make ordinary life possible. Their turn has not yet come. The widows’ sacred knowledge therefore circulates through the world, waiting for the moment when each life, in its own time, will come to recognize it.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-ukrainian-war-widows-know-about-love-and-loss?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ed9c3eb172-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_05_15_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-838110632
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HAS THERE EVER BEEN A PERIOD WITHOUT A WAR?
While war was rare or nonexistent when the majority of humans were hunter-gatherers, the rest of human history has had countless wars. Here, we see U.S. soldiers wading ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on June 6, 1944 to fight the Germans during World War II.
With violent conflicts happening across the world right now, war feels like a permanent condition. But have humans ever lived without war?
The answer depends on how you define "war." If war means a fight between two governments, then yes, there have been peaceful periods "because for nearly 99% of human history, there were no governments," said Ian Morris, a historian at Stanford University and author of "War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
Violence, on the other hand, has always been with us. If the question becomes "Have people ever lived without violence?" then "the answer is pretty clearly no — people have always fought and killed each other," Morris told Live Science in an email.
THE THEORY OF A PEACEFUL PREHISTORY
According to a review of studies published in 2022, war was rare or nonexistent in early human history when people lived as nomadic hunter gatherers. Peter Stearns, a professor emeritus of history at George Mason University and author of "Peace in World History" (Routledge, 2014), agrees with this idea. There was "little or no war in hunting and gathering [cultures] before the rise of agriculture," he told Live Science in an email.
This idea is based on archaeological records. Researchers examining ancient human bones from around the world have looked for skeletal evidence of war injuries, for instance of multiple individuals with unhealed wounds from stabbing, slicing and blunt force trauma who were buried in mass graves. However, they found little evidence of war injuries before 8000 B.C. After that, when humans began transitioning from nomadic life to permanent settlements, such injuries appeared widely.
This doesn't mean that lethal violence was absent in prehistoric societies. Researchers in Kenya found 27 skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago at the archaeological site of Nataruk; these skeletons show signs of violent death, which some anthropologists interpret as evidence of intergroup violence among early hunter-gatherers. And at Jebel Sahaba, a prehistoric cemetery in Sudan, archaeologists unearthed 13,000-year-old remains bearing signs of intergroup attacks.
But these cases of interpersonal violence don't count as war, because of how researchers usually define it. "Researchers who focus on war as a specific category of violence usually define it by saying it has to be violence organized by a government or else collective violence that kills more than a certain number of people," Morris said. "Prehistoric societies rarely had formal governments and hunter-gatherer bands rarely had more than a few dozen members, so if you define war as a conflict run by a government or one that kills >100 people, then by definition there can't have been wars in [early] prehistory.”
David Christian, a historian and professor emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Australia, echoed this idea. "For much of human history communities were so small that it is not clear if we can equate violence with war," he told Live Science in an email. "I guess we can say that humans have always been capable of violence and as communities got larger that violence began to take on forms that we might want to describe as ‘war.'"
War killed about 231 million people in the 20th century, which includes the roughly 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died at the Battle of Berlin in World War II and who are honored at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park (pictured above) in Germany.
Peace between rival powers
Once large kingdoms and empires appeared, war became very common. A doctoral thesis written by Jared Morgan McKinney, now an assistant professor of international security studies at Air War College in Alabama, focused on periods of peace between major powers. He concluded that war was basically the norm throughout history and that famous "peaceful" eras, like the Pax Romana (Roman Peace), usually just meant one powerful group had beaten everyone else into submission.
But there were exceptions. "Wars are expensive and risky," said Peter Frankopan, a professor of global history at the University of Oxford. "So in many periods in history, stability and peace have been achieved by rivals, adversaries and neighbors being able to match each other's capabilities.”
McKinney's thesis identified several periods when rival powers managed to avoid war.
From around 1400 to 1200 B.C., the big powers of the ancient Middle East — mainly Egypt and the Hittite Empire, an ancient civilization in modern-day Turkey — went through two unusually long stretches without major wars. Peace was possible because the "Great Kings" recognized one another as equals and settled their territorial and political differences through formal treaties rather than war.
For most of their history, Rome and Persia were at war. Then, from roughly A.D. 387 to around 501, the two superpowers mostly stopped fighting. Historians call this the "Long Fifth Century" and have put forward many explanations for this period of peace, including that both sides faced serious outside threats that made fighting less affordable and that the two sides developed a language of "brotherhood" that acknowledged each other as equals rather than enemies, McKinney wrote in his thesis.
Between roughly A.D. 1000 and 1200, the rich Song dynasty in China secured peace with its militant northern neighbors — the Liao and the Jin — by paying them regularly to keep the peace. Although these monetary gifts (or bribes) looked like weakness, the payments were tiny compared with what China was earning through trade, according to McKinney.
Another example, according to Morris, is the "long peace" between China, Korea and Japan between about 1600 and 1850. While European states spent those centuries competing for power and territory through war, the East Asian states lived in relative peace. "In Europe, we've tended to be a lot more aggressive and competitive — which gives the impression that war is a 'natural state' of being," Frankopan said.
A notable period of relative peace in North America was the Long Peace among the Iroquois nations, McKinney told Live Science in an email. For roughly three centuries, from about 1450 to 1777, five (and later six) Native American nations who had previously engaged in violent and costly conflict forged a peaceful relationship known as the "Haudenosaunee Confederacy" or "League of Five Nations."
In South America, McKinney pointed to the South American Long Peace. This refers to the absence of major interstate wars between sovereign nations in South America ever since 1935.
"War is 'normal' in history," McKinney said. But, as these examples show, "patterns have exceptions."
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/has-there-ever-been-a-period-in-human-history-without-war?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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'SOLO AGERS' ARE A GROWING GROUP. CHANGES THAT WOULD HELP THEM COULD HELP EVERYONE
Ailene Gerhardt hears a lot of stories. It's all part of her job. She's a patient advocate, helping people navigate their care and the complexities of the healthcare system. During the last several years she's heard from more and more people getting older without adult children, a spouse, or both. But the healthcare system remains stuck in the past, she says, assuming older people have family to support them, when that's often not the case.
Gerhardt started and runs a network called Navigating Solo, which offers support and community to this group of older adults, often referred to as "solo agers."
"Instead of looking at the concept of solo aging as something that's a crisis to be solved — it's not a crisis to be solved," she says. "It's a reality to be supported."
That reality is growing as Baby Boomers and Gen Xers age. According to a 2023 AARP report, one in ten adults over age 50 lives alone and doesn't have a partner or children. Different lifestyles and changing societal attitudes suggest these numbers will grow in the future. Plenty of people are single by choice.
More inclusive systems
Gerhardt says right now, solo agers are expected to take the lead in planning for their housing, finances, and transportation to appointments, often by hiring professionals to help them. But rather than feeling like the odd ones out in systems that cater to couples and families, she says, why can't the systems themselves be more inclusive of solo agers?
To take one example: instead of assuming every patient has someone who can pick them up from a medical appointment after being under anesthesia — and drive them home — she'd like the onus to be on hospitals and medical offices to arrange transport and an escort. She says she has heard from people who have canceled a procedure because their ride backed out at the last minute.
"In both my solo aging advocacy hat and my healthcare advocate [hat], like, that is just infuriating," she says, "that people do not have the support they need to maintain their health in a productive way.”
But Gerhardt says this isn't an intractable problem. "Let's look at designing the system, or re-designing the system, so that anyone and everyone can have strong support. Quite honestly that benefits everyone," she says, citing curb cuts as a good example of this. Disability rights advocates fought for years to have towns and cities install curb cuts — a slope from the sidewalk to the street that lets a wheelchair user cross the road easily and safely. But curb cuts quickly became popular with people pushing strollers, bikers, and anyone else seeking an easier way into the street.
Building services for the future
Sara Zeff Geber has been writing and speaking about solo aging for more than 10 years, including giving talks to lawyers and financial planners, "to bring awareness to the fact that not everybody is a couple and not everybody has that proverbial adult daughter to help them."
She believes she was the first person to use the term "solo aging," seeing it as a lot more positive than the previous description: "elder orphans."
Ideas about relationships and parenthood are less rigid than they used to be. Given this, she says, "Whatever foundation we build now" for solo agers, "is going to be hugely important for generations that follow."
Jason Resendez hopes those generations will have more government support than the current crop of older adults. He is CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving. He says there is growing recognition that many people are aging by themselves. That said, federal funding cuts are coming to home-based services for older adults, and to Medicaid, he says, "which makes it a lot harder to age in place when you don't have a family caregiver to absorb the elimination of those social service supports."
On the whole, Resendez says, U.S. society is still hooked on the idea of "individual ruggedness." But as he looks to the future, "More and more people will be aging, more and more people will be aging alone," and the social safety net will come under a lot of strain. "I think it's when we are at that boiling point, that maybe we'll have policymakers finally recognize, 'Hey, this isn't just an individual responsibility.'"
Creating the resource he will need
Carl Smigielski was a family caregiver to his husband, Moshe, a Vietnam veteran who died in 2019 after living with Alzheimer's for several years.
But Smigielski doesn't expect to have a caregiver of his own. He's 61, lives alone in Richmond, R. I., and believes it'll stay that way. "Right now it wouldn't align with me to have another intimate relationship so I was pretty clear," he says. "You're going to be doing this alone."
But he's gotten involved with a nonprofit organization that has long recognized solo agers. It's called the Villages (not to be confused with the large retirement communities in central Florida.) The Village Movement consists of hyperlocal groups that are mostly run by volunteers.
The Villages started 25 years ago with one village in Boston. There's now a network of them dotted across the U.S. Their aim is to help people live independently by offering a combination of practical and social support, such as rides to appointments, help moving furniture or changing lightbulbs, friendly check-ins for those who want them, and social events.
Members join to tap the network's resources. Volunteers make it happen. While not designed specifically for solo agers, Barbara Hughes-Sullivan, executive director of the Village to Village Network, says "anywhere from 30 to 60%" of village members are in that demographic, depending on the individual village.
Smigielski is both a member and a volunteer. He is helping to start a new village in his rural part of Rhode Island. "I wanted to retire to something," says the longtime software engineer. "I didn't want to retire to boredom … and I really have met the kindest people."
He's spending part of this day at a community center to explain the village concept to a group of older adults over lunch, including his mother, Jacqueline. She is 87, a widow, and eager to volunteer. Afterwards he heads back to the home he used to share with his husband. After speaking in front of the group, he needs to decompress in the quiet of the house and yard.
Smigielski says he's not an obvious candidate for a network like this. He enjoys his own company, and doesn't expect to need help changing lightbulbs for decades. But after years of caregiving, followed by the Covid years, he realized something.
"The social support, regardless of how able we are, that's intrinsic to us," he says. "I went through my battles of thinking I was an exception to that rule, I could be the human who didn't need social connection – because I don't need a lot of it, but I need it.”
For now, he still has his mom to drive him to medical procedures where he needs help getting home afterwards. But eventually he expects to tap the network he's helping create to sustain him as he gets older.
Carl Smigielski and his mother, Jacqueline, outside the Richmond Community Center in Richmond, R. I. Each is part of the other's support system.
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SOME SEE THE BEGINNING OF AGRICULTURE AS A DISASTER FOR HUMANITY
For over 90% of human history, people lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, enjoying varied diets, ample leisure time, and robust health.
Around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the Earth’s climate stabilized. Certain regions, like the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, became lush. Wild grains, nuts, and game were so abundant that nomadic bands no longer needed to constantly move to find food.
Cultures like the Natufians settled into permanent villages to take advantage of this bounty.
Once they settled, a subtle but permanent demographic shift occurred.
Nomadic women space their children out by about four years because they cannot carry multiple infants while migrating.
Sedentary women did not face this limitation, and birth rates spiked. As these permanent villages grew, the local wild food supply could no longer support the ballooning population. To stave off starvation, people began deliberately planting the seeds of the wild wheat and barley they had been gathering.
By the time humans became dependent on farming, they had fallen into what anthropologists call the "agricultural trap." The population was now too large to revert to hunting and gathering.
Anthropologist Jared Diamond coined the "worst mistake" description because, for the average person living through this transition, quality of life plummeted. Hunter-gatherer diets were diverse and rich in nutrients; early farmers relied heavily on a few starchy crops, leading to malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, and widespread tooth decay.
Skeletal evidence shows that early agriculturalists were significantly shorter and suffered from bone lesions caused by physical stress and disease. Living in dense, permanent settlements in close proximity to domesticated animals birthed the first major infectious diseases, including smallpox, measles, and influenza.
Agriculture also introduced stark social inequality. Wild game cannot be easily hoarded, but grain can be stored in silos, protected by walls, and controlled by elites. This laid the foundation for taxation, standing armies, and organized warfare.
The shift to agriculture traded the health and leisure of the individual for the survival and expansion of the species. An individual hunter-gatherer lived a healthier, arguably freer life than an early peasant farmer. Yet, by generating caloric surpluses, agriculture allowed for the specialization of labor, eventually producing writing, mathematics, and the technological advancements of the modern world. ~ SepiaGlyph, Quota
Steve Dutch
On the periphery of settled Society there were doubtless groups of people who could actually remember the transition. I have often wondered if the myths like the Garden of Eden or Pandora's Box reflect knowledge of the trade-offs.
Tony Finn
An archeologist suggested the frontier between mesolithic hunter gatherers and neolithic farmers may not have been that obvious. A neolithic farmer supplementing his crops by hunting would be difficult to separate from his mesolithic hunter gatherer tending groves of hazel shrubs.
Brian Adler
I wonder how nomadic women managed to plan their pregnancies to suit their migration practices.
Also, from an evolutionary standpoint, it seems like the sedentary, close-knit lifestyles of the farming communities would cause survival rates in these villages, due to disease, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies and tooth decay, etc., to fall, disadvantaging farmers, versus the hunter-gatherers. I wonder why the farming lifestyle and communities thrived.
Kevin Wade
Some of it was the hunters’ success; the big animals were killed and eaten. Many became extinct. Thus, farming communities had less chance of having their fields trampled and stripped.
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LESS THAN 40% OF U.S. HOUSEHOLDS CAN AFFORD A STARTER HOME, STUDY FINDS
Buying a first home remains out of reach for many Americans, with fewer than 4 in 10 non-homeowner households able to afford a typical starter home, a new LendingTree analysis found.
A typical starter home costs $200,000, with LendingTree defining entry-level homes as owner-occupied properties valued at the 25th percentile of the housing market. The analysis found that only 38% of households that don't already own a home could afford one.
Starter homes tend to be smaller and require more repairs or updates than higher-priced homes, but they often provide buyers with their first opportunity to build equity. Without access to entry-level homes, some Americans may be missing out on what is considered to be one of the biggest wealth-building opportunities.
Another recent study found that 242 cities across the U.S. now have starter homes that cost at least $1 million. The number of cities where entry-level properties cost at least seven figures has tripled since 2020, Zillow said earlier this month.
Incomes falling short
Non-homeowners need to earn just over $62,000 to afford a starter home. Still, their median salary is $55,000, leaving an income gap of more than $7,000, or about 13%, according to LendingTree's analysis.
Overcoming that deficit can be difficult to impossible, according to LendingTree chief consumer finance analyst Matt Schulz.
"It's safe to say that most people don't get raises of $7,099 each year," he said in a statement.
"That means that bridging that gap might require a side hustle, a second job or other sacrifices. That's tough, however, especially with how many other demands people already have on their time."
The gap is even larger in some states. In California, for example, the median non-homeowner household earns $72,900, or $67,776 less than the $140,676 needed to afford the average $482,000 starter home, according to LendingTree.
"For so many, it feels completely out of reach," Schulz said. "It's a shame because homeownership can be a powerful wealth-building tool and a real stabilizing force for families. However, the numbers involved are so daunting that many people don't see a realistic way to get into the market."
Where starter homes are more affordable
In Rhode Island, the nation's least affordable state for prospective starter-home buyers, just 16.5% of households can afford an entry-level home. Utah and Hawaii ranked second and third.
Southern states, by contrast, offer a more affordable path to home ownership for households that rank it as a top priority.
In Mississippi, nearly 62% can afford a starter home, followed by West Virginia (58%), Arkansas (54%) and Alabama (54%).
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/articles/think-7-figures-enough-americas-170500320.html
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MEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO . . .
R:
The birth rate will drop more. No nest to raise the next generation. Rome had a similar fate.
Kentucky:
Go the the southeast houses start for less than a brand new suv.
Snwbm:
I bought my first house by working 2 side jobs. $7,000 extra a year to get to a mortgage isn't difficult.
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“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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CHIMP CIVIL WAR
A community of more than 200 chimpanzees in Uganda are embroiled in a lethal conflict researchers are calling a rare “civil war.” The large community of chimps is made up of two social groups called the Central and Western clusters. The splinter between the groups began in 2015, when a group of chimps from the Western cluster approached a group of Central chimps, quieted, and then ran away as the Central chimps chased after them. In the years since then, the two groups split apart geographically and socially, and have protected their borders with deadly force. More than 24 chimps have been killed since the outbreak of fighting.
This is the first time a fracture like this has been observed in chimps without any human influence. Researchers suspect it may have happened because of a breakdown in social relationships due to the strain of the group size, competition and changes in which individuals were alpha males.
Researchers are now looking into similarities between why chimps and humans break out into violent conflict. To protect peace, it’s not just about understanding other groups but also about nurturing friendships that connect them, says Aaron Sandel, a primatologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQhVNQgfnVDBknlhdtDDdLqwFlh
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THE HUMAN BODY DETERIORATES WITHOUT GRAVITY
Space messes with astronauts' brains – and that might be a big challenge for missions beyond the Moon.
With four billion or so years of evolution behind us, humans are well suited to life at normal gravity. Imagine then, the fears at the dawn of the space age over what would happen when we first left the Earth and experienced weightlessness. Would our blood congeal? Our bones crumble? Our brains explode in microgravity?
By the late 1950s, a series of flights with mice, spiders and eventually, dogs proved that animals could indeed survive in space. And when it later came to humans, we have shown that we can not only survive, but thrive.
"There is an adaptation that, in many ways, feels like a transformation," European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut Luca Parmitano told me in 2019, during training for his second long-duration mission to the International Space Station (ISS). "After a few weeks your body is different to what it was on the ground – you see and you feel your body change, your legs get skinnier and your face gets round."
A former Italian Airforce test pilot, Parmitano has recently been selected for his third space mission as one of the four crew members of Artemis III. Due to launch in 2027, this challenging flight in Earth orbit will test lunar landers and spacesuits for a return to the Moon. It's little surprise Parmitano was chosen – when you talk to him, you get the impression that he's found that spaceflight comes naturally.
Astronaut Luca Parmitano says he could physically feel his body change as he spent weeks in space
"One of the reasons the human race is so successful on Earth is our capability to adapt," he said. "But to see in the arc of a few weeks [in space] physical changes happening, it really blew me away how different I felt and how much more comfortable my new body just fit the environment that I was in.”
The rigors of spaceflight on the human body – from muscles to bones to blocked sinuses – are well-documented in the 70-odd years since humanity first blasted into orbit. Less well-known is the effects zero-gravity has on our brains.
In space, our bodies no longer need to overcome the force of gravity with every action or movement. As a result, the bones that support our weight and the muscles that we use to lift, carry, walk and run begin to waste away. After just a few days in space, bones lose calcium and muscles start to deteriorate, which includes changes to the heart. The reason astronauts also tend to have puffy faces is a result of liquids no longer being constrained by gravity and pooling in the upper body.
This would all be fine if astronauts spent the rest of their lives in space, but if they ever want to return to Earth in good physical shape, they need to follow a rigorous exercise regime.
Typically, this includes two hours a day in the ISS gym and, even then, after just six months in space they are carried out of their returning spacecraft and placed on stretchers. It can take up to four years for their bones to return to normal.
Much less understood, however, is what has been going on in astronauts' brains. And that could be a problem.
"The brain is probably the most important of our organs," says Esa flight surgeon Alessandro Alcibiade. "If you don't bring an effective brain to space and a working brain to space that will be all worthless."
Research on the effects of spaceflight on the brain has been limited to experiments on just a few astronauts during long-duration missions. Scott Kelly, for instance, spent a year on the ISS while his astronaut twin brother, Mark, remained on Earth. In the resulting study, researchers found Scott's cognitive abilities were largely unchanged during the mission compared to Mark, but decreased for about six months after he landed.
Now, new research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology by scientists at Birkbeck, University of London in the UK – and shared exclusively with the BBC – has pulled together results from 15 brain imaging studies involving some 377 participants. These included astronauts as well as volunteers in spaceflight simulations on Earth, such as bedrest studies.
By combining all these sets of data, the Birkbeck team believes they have identified changes that take place in the brain when its exposed to microgravity.
"It's a beautiful neuroplasticity – we found that there are both structural and functional alterations in the brain," says lead author Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Birkbeck, Univeristy of London. "We have identified a cluster of brain areas that undergo changes when gravity isn't there.”
So just as the body changes in space, the research shows the brain also adjusts physically to the absence of gravity, rewiring itself for the novel environment.
"We see changes in the parts of the brain that control movement, balance and body awareness," says Silvia Seghezzi, the paper's co-author. "We also saw alterations in the operculum – this is where all these signals meet up and can be processed in a multisensory manner."
This means that the brain has evolved to sense gravity.
"We don't perceive gravity in the same way that we perceive change in color, in light, in temperature, in sounds," says Ferrè. "But gravity is a constant feature of the environment that our brain is receiving and processing."
"If you want to be a bit nerdy, you can think about gravity as the first signal that the developing fetus receives – so our brain is built on gravity detection," she says.
Ferrè uses the example of picking up a cup of coffee. We do it effortlessly, she explains, because our brain automatically compensates for Earth's gravity and moves our muscles accordingly.
On the face of it, this is good news for astronauts. In fact, if human brains didn't adapt in space, astronauts would encounter all sorts of difficulties, including a good deal of coffee-related injuries. The challenge comes, however, over how quickly this neurological rewiring takes place.
"Look at the Apollo astronauts walking on the lunar surface. The footage shows how incredibly bad they were at keeping the right posture, and that's not only because the suits were very heavy, it's because all their balance and locomotion was altered by the lack of terrestrial gravity," says Ferrè. "It doesn't mean that the brain cannot recalibrate, but it takes time and resource."
For the past 50 years since the end of the Apollo program, none of this has really been an issue. Astronauts arrive on the ISS and are a bit clumsy for a while, bumping into the walls or moving things around with too much force, but then they adapt. When crew return to Earth, they are helped from the capsule, looked after and rehabilitated back to life in normal gravity. But what about future long-duration missions to the Moon or Mars, that Nasa and China have in their sights. For these, astronauts will need to transition between gravity and no gravity.
On a Mars mission, for instance, after eight months or so in space, the crew will be so well adapted to microgravity that even climbing out of their spacecraft in Martian gravity (roughly one-third of the Earth's) could present a challenge. While their muscles and bones will have be kept in shape by daily exercise, the brain that controls them may not be. The shift in gravity could be disorientating and dangerous. Without real-time communications with Earth, they will need their wits about them for the landing.
"You can have an amazing rocket, but if you're not able to pilot it, if you are not able to make the right decisions because of these sensory motor alterations, there might be trouble," says Ferrè. "We need to make sure that humans are supported and potentially facilitate the process of adaptation.”
The science fiction solution to this (see, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Martian) has usually been to build a spacecraft that incorporates a centrifuge or giant wheel to simulate microgravity.
"That would be the best solution. It would counteract bone and muscle loss and help with brain conditioning," agrees Esa's Alcibiade. "Why don't we do that? Because it will cost a lot – it all comes down to mass and mass is money when we talk space."
Ferrè agrees and is developing new techniques of using small electrical currents to stimulate the key areas of the brain that sense gravity hoping to improve flexibility.
She is confident that scientists will find a way to overcome the effects of changes in gravity but is keen to stress the positives of her initial research findings – not just for astronauts but for all mankind.
"Space flight is challenging," she says. "But it can also be a very good window for understanding our brain in a way that we cannot do here on Earth."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260707-what-happens-to-your-brain-in-space
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EXPERTS WARN OF A STEEP US POPULATION DECLINE
Even before the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Trump has broad power to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants living legally in the U.S. under temporary protected status, David Bier feared the U.S. was slipping toward a demographic cliff.
"We're destined to be there, in short order, there's no question," Bier said. "We're already seeing a situation where most counties in the United States had more deaths than births."
An expert on population and immigration at the libertarian Cato Institute, Bier believes the U.S. is beginning to look more like China, Italy and South Korea. Those nations face rapid aging and population decline.
U.S. birthrates have been declining for decades. There are far too few children born each year to maintain a stable population.
Until last year, high rates of foreign immigration largely offset that trend. But for the first time since the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the U.S. now faces record low birthrates and low numbers of migrants at the same time.
"Our higher birthrates of a century ago are not coming back. There's no way to have a sustainable fiscal and economic situation that doesn't involve immigration," Bier said.
Trump's legal fight to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians and others living in the U.S. legally is only one part of a wider administration effort to squeeze immigration.
The Supreme Court also ruled this week that the administration has authority to block most asylum seekers from entering the country. Federal agents have also conducted raids in cities across the U.S., to accelerate deportations.
Last month, Trump issued an executive order that could make it harder for many migrants living in the U.S. without full legal status to use banking and financial services.
Many immigration opponents see these changes as progress. In a statement following this week's Supreme Court decisions. A spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform said Trump should have full authority to direct who enters the U.S.
"Our immigration laws are written to be pro-enforcement, not anti-enforcement," said FAIR's Christopher Hajec.
But according to Cato's Bier, Trump's policies are already reshaping the demographics of communities, meaning there are fewer workers, consumers, taxpayers, and children in schools.
"If you're not allowing immigration, you're going to have [an aging and] a declining population and that creates all kinds of problems," Bier said. Economists say that without migrants, the number of young workers paying into Social Security will fall more rapidly; schools in many areas will close; and the number of young families having children will decline.
Census data already shows big changes to U.S. population
The immigration decline under Trump is dramatic. In 2024, roughly 2.7 million foreign migrants entered the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. This year, census experts predict that number could drop as low as 300,000. Some demographers believe the U.S. may be reaching a point where more migrants are leaving than entering.
Impacts of this massive shift on America's wider population are already emerging. Studies by the Census Bureau, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Federal Reserve all point to a more rapidly aging national population under Trump.
Population growth in the U.S. fell by half in 2025 from the previous year, with five states losing population. Census data shows the total number of young Americans, those under age 25, is already falling nationwide.
William Frey, a demographer at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, described last week's Supreme Court rulings as "alarming." He believes without robust foreign immigration, more states will quickly see their populations stagnate or decline.
"Not just in big immigration states, but in places that have relatively small numbers of immigrants, you know, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska — those states require immigrants to get any population growth," Frey said.
Even before Trump's policies curbed immigration, the U.S. population was expected to decline later this century. Experts say low immigration rates will cause that downward trend to happen much sooner.
According to Frey, the U.S. has time to reverse course. But he believes the Trump administration is committed to lowering both legal and illegal immigration over the long term, a policy he described as dangerous.
"This is as clear as the nose on your face," he said. "You've got to have this growth in the younger population if you're going to survive. Immigration is a key part of that going forward.”
"America's doors are closed"
The Trump administration sees this very differently, describing foreign migrants not as people who sustain state populations and economies, but as a social burden and a threat."
"America's doors are closed fully to asylum seekers," Stephen Miller, one of Trump's top White House policy advisors, said on Thursday.
Speaking with reporters, Miller described the Supreme Court rulings as a victory and said ending birthright citizenship for the children of migrants born in the U.S. is the next step.
"This country doesn't have a future if we don't end birthright citizenship," Miller said. Justices are expected to rule on birthright citizenship as early as next week.
This kind of opposition to both legal and illegal immigration is now widespread among conservatives, said Cato's David Bier, who worked as a Republican congressional staffer on immigration policy.
He told NPR that when he talks to conservatives about the economic and demographic risks of closing the country's doors to migrants, many answer with a cultural argument. "[They] would rather have a declining population of 'true Americans' than have an economy kept afloat by people who don't share [their] values," Bier said.
But if extremely low or zero-level immigration does become the new normal for the U.S., experts say it would swiftly remake the fabric of the country. The Census Bureau estimates that without robust migration in the coming years, total population loss by the end of this century could exceed 107 million people.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-scotus-immigration-trump
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A ‘CIVIL WAR” BETWEEN TWO GROUPS OF CHIMPANZEES IN UGANDA
Wild chimpanzees in Uganda are fighting a rare "civil war," which seems to have begun when a huge community divided, leading to sustained and deadly conflict between animals that had previously been allies and friends.
Conflicts between different groups of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are relatively common as they compete for key resources, like fruit trees, water supplies and trees that provide suitable nesting material. However, conflicts within previously unified communities are much rarer.
About 50 years ago, primatologist Jane Goodall reported a suspected fission event in a chimpanzee community in Gombe, Tanzania, in which a larger group split into factions; males of one new faction killed an adult female and all six males in the other group over four years.
But observations of the behavior were limited, and it was considered an anomaly.
Now, Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues have described another, much bigger, lethal conflict between the members of the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The work was published in the journal Science.
The chimpanzees there have been studied for about 30 years, providing extensive data on their interrelatedness and behavior. Although they were all part of a big group, they tended to form temporary "parties" that changed throughout the day as individuals moved about their territory.
But between 1998 and 2014, some of these groups became more regular cliques, such as three adult males that were consistently together.
Researchers revealed that from about 2015, the huge Ngogo community — which then numbered about 200 chimps — ruptured into two distinct clusters that lived and reproduced separately. The core of one of the groups was the clique of three adult males.
At this stage, there were still ties between many individuals in the two groups, and they still cooperated and bonded, but by 2018, the last social ties disintegrated and aggression grew during border patrols of their separate territories.
Before the civil war, chimpanzees of different social groups would interact.
"After they split into two groups, chimps from one group began attacking and killing those from the other group and that turned into an escalated period of lethal violence," Sandel told Live Science.
DEADLY RAIDS
Raids resulted in multiple killings of adult males and, beginning in 2021, the researchers also regularly observed infanticide. The true death toll of what the researchers term a civil war is likely to have been higher, because many other individuals disappeared without clear cause, Sandel added.
"I'm sort of nervous about calling it civil war," he said. "Civil war means something very specific when we talk about humans, and chimps don't have nations and things like that, but there's an important conceptual point when thinking about war against strangers versus civil war. These are chimps that know each other."
James Brooks, an evolutionary anthropologist at the German Primate Center in Göttingen who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science that he agrees this conflict isn't the same as a human civil war, but said the term helps people to understand the general idea.
It's still not clear why the division in the community led to such aggressive conflict, but Sandel suggested various factors that could have destabilized social ties. These include the unusually large group size, competition over food and reproduction, the deaths of five adult males and one adult female in 2014, a change from one alpha male to another in 2015 and a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimpanzees in 2017.
Brooks suggested the group's size could have been a factor. "Maybe they were no longer facing such an abundance of resources and became too large a group to maintain cohesion," he said.
Zoologist Liran Samuni, also at the German Primate Center and co-director of the Taï Chimpanzee Project, who wasn't part of this study, said that the Ngogo community is one of the more aggressive ones that researchers know.
"The Kibale National Park is considered quite a rich environment, with the chimps living at high densities and for long life spans. But even before this split, this was one of the chimpanzee communities that was most violent in terms of encroaching on neighbors," she told Live Science.
Between 1998 and 2008, the Ngogo chimps killed at least 21 chimpanzees from neighboring groups, and expanded into their territory, resulting in population growth.
The civil war is still ongoing, Sandel said. The research paper covers data collected up to 2024, but he says further attacks have happened in 2025 and 2026.
He said the work shows that even without ethnicity, religion or political ideologies, social networks can divide, leading to collective violence.
Given that chimps are one of humans' closest two relatives, the finding reiterates how group divisions can present a danger to human societies, Brooks said, but he adds that it doesn't mean conflict is biologically determined. He pointed to bonobos (Pan paniscus) — our other closest relatives — which form stable and distinct groups. They are also aggressive, but unlike chimpanzees, they don't engage in such lethal group conflicts but form tolerant, cooperative associations, so such conflicts aren't evolutionarily determined.
"Our evolutionary past does not determine our future," he said.
https://www.livescience.com/animals/primates/chimpanzees-in-uganda-are-locked-in-a-deadly-civil-war-after-their-group-split-apart-and-scientists-dont-know-why
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SCOTTISH COAST THAT CHANGED SCIENCE
The one-mile coastal walk, launched to mark the 300th anniversary of James Hutton's birth, leads visitors across the Berwickshire cliffs to the outcrop where the Scottish geologist found the evidence that Earth was vastly older than anyone had imagined.
I am standing on the grassy cliffs above Siccar Point, a rocky outcrop on Scotland's east coast, looking out over the steel blue of the North Sea from the final viewpoint of the new Deep Time Trail. This gentle one-hour return walk leads to the site of one of the most important discoveries in scientific history – a place that transformed our understanding of Earth.
The route has been created to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of James Hutton, the founding father of geology, who was born in nearby Edinburgh in 1726. Long before Hutton set eyes on Siccar Point in 1788, he developed his radical theory that the Earth's surface was formed by cycles of erosion and renewal. But it was this rock formation – known as Hutton's Unconformity – that provided the evidence he needed to convince the world.
At Siccar Point, ancient rock standing upright are capped by much younger, horizontal layers of sandstone, revealing a vast gap in Earth's history that couldn't be explained by 18th-Century ideas. This immense span of geological time is now known as "deep time" – the concept at the heart of the new trail.
"Hutton discovered geological time," said Professor Mark Wilkinson, president of the Edinburgh Geological Society. By doing so, he laid a canvas for future scientific revelations.
“You can't have evolution if you haven't got a lot of time. Hutton gave us that time.”
Walking through deep time
Starting near Pease Bay, the Deep Time Trail follows the cliffs past stones engraved with Hutton's writing and interpretation panels that link out to expert audio commentary. So, as you walk, the story of the Scotsman unfolds.
The first voice I hear on the audio narrations is Dr Elsa Panciroli, a scientist, author and former chair of the Scottish Geology Trust, welcoming me to the trail, and introducing Hutton and Siccar Point. "Geology can be challenging," she later tells me. "A lot of it takes place underground, on scales beyond our comprehension. So having a person to hook the story to, like Hutton, is really useful."
As I continue, I pass St Helen's Kirk, a red sandstone church that was already in ruins when Hutton visited 238 years ago. The kirk is surrounded by dykes (impressive stone walls) made of greywacke – a hard, dark-colored variety of sandstone that also run up the coastline.
I make an exception to my usual no-phone rule while walking, as scanning the QR codes along the route unlocks a fascinating audio companion. As I stroll, I listen to stories about Hutton the polymath: farmer, chemist, naturalist. A figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he established a social club with the economist Adam Smith and chemist Joseph Black, who discovered carbon dioxide. It was a time, the narration says, when "all sorts of new and intellectual ideas were being discussed" in Edinburgh.
Walking on, a craggy dyke guides me to a bench with idyllic views. The scenery on Scotland's east coast is softer than that of the west, which is sculpted by the full force of the Atlantic.
Looking along the coastline, rolling green hills and farmland descend to Borderland cliffs, which tip over and plummet to golden beaches and secluded coves. "In nature there is wisdom, system and consistency," reads a quote by Hutton, engraved in a brick and embedded in the wall.
Hutton took an observation-led approach to his research, something that was uncommon at the time. He turned his two nearby farms – between which the 51km James Hutton Cycle Trail now runs – into working laboratories and observed how soil washed away and renewed in gradual cycles.
He also traveled around Scotland gathering rock samples. On the Isle of Arran and in nearby Jedburgh, Hutton found other notable unconformities, but Siccar Point would be his prize example.
Hiking to Siccar Point
On the sunny June day of my visit, Siccar Point is backdropped by a blaze of sun-splashed blue, stretching into the horizon. Skylarks and swifts call over the lapping waves. Standing at the clifftop, I have the feeling of reaching a threshold: where water meets rock, and rock meets human comprehension. The stylish semicircular viewing point at the trail's end, which looks down on the rocks and explains how they changed the world, is built from the same stone and stacked to mirror the famous outcrop below.
When Hutton came here in 1788, he arrived by boat with friends Sir James Hall of Dunglass and John Playfair. It's easy to imagine them sailing along the coast, notebooks in hand, scanning the site. Hutton believed he'd find an unconformity here, washed clear by the sea, and was ecstatic with the result. After they docked, he explained the significance to his friends while scrambling around the rocks. Playfair later wrote that "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time".
When I look down from the viewpoint, it's clear that the famous outcrop is made from two types of rock. The dark greywacke stands almost vertical, sticking out of the ocean like defensive spears, while the red sandstone lies flat on top like a stack of pancakes.
Hutton realized that for those darker rocks to have formed in horizontal layers, then tilted upwards, eroded away and buried beneath the younger sandstone, immense spans of time must have passed. So Earth, he concluded, couldn't possibly have been created in 4004BC, as was the Biblical view at the time. Rather, it must be unfathomably older.
In fact, we now know the greywacke rocks formed 435 million years ago on the floor of an ancient ocean. As tectonic plates slowly collided and that ocean disappeared, they were – as Hutton theorized – squeezed upwards into a mountain range. What remains are the eroded remnants of that range. The sandstone on top formed another 65 million years later when what is now Scotland sat south of the Equator.
The next interpretation board is in a quiet spot, looking out over boulder-strewn shorelines beyond Siccar Point that twist out of sight to the south. A QR code on the board links out to art about Siccar Point. "Sharp grey ribs rise up through horizontal bands of red sand," sings folk artist Karine Polwart. "A lost seabed lifted to the stars."
Bringing geology to everyone
One aim of The Deep Time Trail is to make Siccar Point more accessible to the public. Despite being an international pilgrimage site for geologists, it's still off most tourists' radars – even in Scotland.
"I went to high school in Eyemouth, which is literally just down the coast, but I didn't know about Siccar Point until I was at university," says Dr Katie Strang, geology curator at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. "Hopefully this will lead to engagement with people who might not have thought about walking a geology trail. It's a beautiful part of the coast.”
Hutton had already identified unconformities on the Isle of Arran and Jedburgh, but Siccar Point became the clearest evidence for his theory of deep time
Looking out over Siccar Point, I feel a sense of immensity, standing on the stub of an ancient mountain range, on rocks hundreds of millions of years old. It's easy to understand why this landscape inspired one of science's greatest leaps. As Hutton concluded in his Theory of the Earth, there was "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260703-walk-the-scottish-coast-that-changed-science
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FAST WALKERS IN THEIR EIGHTIES CUT THEIR RISK OF COGNITIVE DECLINE
Study found that people in their 80s and older who walked faster than their peers were less likely to develop cognitive decline.
Crossword puzzles and brain teasers have long been touted as ways to keep the mind sharp. But a new study points to another strategy that may matter just as much: staying fast on your feet.
Researchers have found that people in their 80s who maintain an exceptionally quick walking pace, dubbed "super movers," are also far more likely to stay mentally sharp compared to their slower-moving peers of the same age.
"A super mover is someone who is older than age 80 and performing much better than their peers," says Dr. Sofiya Milman of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, one of the study's authors.
Milman and her collaborators analyzed data from nearly 4,000 older adults enrolled in a long-term aging study. Participants had taken a timed walking test, and the fastest 9% — who had a gait speed at least 1.5 standard deviations above the average of their same-age peers — qualified as super movers. Those individuals were also markedly less likely to experience cognitive decline.
"The biggest takeaway was that super movers are about 50% less likely to develop cognitive decline than their peers who are not super movers, which is very impressive," Milman says. The results are published in the medical journal Neurology.
The muscle health connection
Walking well requires balance, coordination and strength, all of which depend on healthy muscle, says Bonnie Tsui, a science writer and author of On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters.
"I think that the finding isn't surprising because we know that muscle health is very much correlated with cognitive health, especially as we age," Tsui says. "Exercise makes your muscles grow, but it also makes your brain grow."
Prior research has linked regular exercise to greater volume in the hippocampus, the brain's hub for memory and navigation. The new study found that super movers tended to preserve hippocampal volume as they aged.
Tsui says the benefits trace back to what happens inside contracting muscles during exercise.
"Muscle is an endocrine tissue, which means when we move, our muscles release signaling molecules that affect other body systems, including boosting brain cell growth and regulating metabolism," she says. "So muscle health is cognitive health."
Among those signaling molecules is a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which helps regulate glucose and plays an important role in the survival and maintenance of neurons, helping support memory and cognitive function.
A body's network at work
Dr. Amit Saini, a geriatrician with Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, says walking, and maintaining the ability to walk well, is a marker of good health because it draws on so many of the body's systems at once. He says walking supports cardiovascular health and lung health.
"As you walk, your heart is beating faster, and when the heart is beating faster, not only is it pumping the blood into the muscle, blood is being pumped to the brain, also into the nerve, and to your other systems," Saini says. "Your lungs are also breathing at a little faster rate, which again is keeping them lighter and healthier."
One of the study's more surprising findings: Some super movers showed brain plaques and tangles, which are abnormal proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease and dementia, despite having no symptoms. Researchers say that suggests movement and all the benefits of staying active may help the brain stay resilient even as it undergoes age-related changes.
Genetics and lifestyle are also important
Genetics likely play a role in who becomes a super mover. A recent study found that genetics accounts for about 50% of a human lifespan, and Milman says among super agers, people who are thriving in their 80s and beyond, the role of genetics may be even greater.
Yet the authors emphasize that lifestyle habits, including decisions people make every day about what to eat, prioritizing sleep, taking time to de-stress and gather with friends and family, all matter. In fact, research shows that nearly half of all dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors.
People have agency over improving their odds of healthy aging, and one way to gauge your personal risks, and take steps to decrease your risk, is to assess your Brain Care Score. This is a free, online tool developed by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital to calculate your risks and take steps, through changes to daily habits, that can help decrease the risk of stroke, dementia, heart disease and cancer.
"Fast walking is a marker that the brain and body are aging well," says Joe Verghese, a researcher and one of the study authors. "But also it's possible that people who walk faster might, by engaging in these activities, also protect their brain health through a variety of mechanisms by reducing inflammation, improving cardiovascular health, and promoting brain growth in areas that are essential to maintain cognitive function as you get older."
Verghese says the findings carry a message for people of all ages and fitness levels.
"One of the main messages is, you know, keep mobile," he says. "Exercise regularly and, you know, that might put you on the pathway to being a super mover as you age."
Whether it's walking, swimming or cycling, researchers say the form of movement matters less than the consistency. It's a habit that could pay off for both muscle and memory over the long run.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5877419/walk-pace-gait-brain-cognitive-health
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WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE MOSQUITO MAGNETS
Put four people in the same place and one can attract about 90% of the bites – Heather Ferguson
No matter where in the world I go on summer holiday, one thing is certain: I will inevitably be bitten by mosquitoes. Massive, itchy welts that plague me for weeks.
Meanwhile, others who are with me don't suffer at all. Not a single bite. And those that are bitten, are often left with just a tiny red dot. My friends have long joked that my blood must be "alluringly sweet".
It turns out they may be right. Our bodies exude numerous biological markers – including breath and body odor – which determine an individual's susceptibility to bites. For some people, those markers are irresistibly strong.
Here are three ways the bloodsuckers may track you down.
Carbon dioxide signals you're ripe to bite
Only female mosquitoes bite humans. They're drawn to our blood for the protein it provides for their egg development. They use visual and olfactory cues (sight and smell) to identify their targets from around 10 meters (33ft). Among these are the plumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) that we expel in our breath and skin.
Human breath sends out a CO2 signal to mosquitoes which activates "host-seeking behavior" in their olfactory organs. Adult humans are thus more alluring than children as they produce more CO2.
But it means mosquitoes are drawn to non-human CO2 sources too, making dry ice and bottled CO2 useful tools for mosquito traps.
Studies show that mosquitoes are also drawn to heat and moisture (and that CO2 enhances this attraction to warmth).
Pregnant women are therefore twice as attractive to mosquitoes compared to non-pregnant women. This is because pregnancy increases metabolic demand and breathing volume, which results in greater heat and CO2 being exhaled.
"You've got a little furnace inside you; you're hotter," says Steve Lindsay, a professor of public health entomology at Durham University in the UK.
People who are exercising may be temporarily more attractive to mosquitoes, especially during and just after exertion, due to the increased metabolic demand which increases CO2 production and leaves them warmer and sweatier. Larger-bodied people, who typically produce more heat and exhale more CO2, may also attract mosquitoes.
Skin gives off a smell of success
As mosquitoes close in (and are less than 10m or 33ft away), they identify victims via a cascade of cues, including skin and breath odors.
"It's smell, essentially," says Lindsay, that determines who a mosquito bites. "Small, highly volatile chemicals make the difference. Mosquitoes live in a chemical world."
Together with other scientists, Lindsay has debunked the myth that people with "sweet blood" are more prone to being bitten and found instead that mosquitoes are drawn to our unique "skin scent". The skin microbiome can break down carbohydrates, fatty acids, and peptides on the skin into volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which easily evaporate into the air and mosquitoes can differentiate. There are over 500 VOCs in our skin.
Mosquitoes are already attracted to ammonia and lactic acid on our skin and the presence of the carboxylic acids makes this attraction even stronger.
Researchers at the Rockefeller University in the US analyzed the skin odor of 64 people who wore nylon sleeves for six hours. The mosquitoes could choose between the nylon samples – which acted like a "scent collection device" – and revealed a clear preference for the scent of individuals with higher carboxylic acids.
The researchers computed an attractiveness score for each person and found that the highest score was 100 times higher than the lowest. These differences remained consistent for years, regardless of lifestyle changes. "Your relative attractiveness (to mosquitoes) is largely fixed," says Lindsay.
What can you do to prevent mosquito bites?
There is "minimal or unclear" evidence that eating garlic or taking vitamin B supplements can help repel mosquitoes, says Heather Ferguson, a professor of medical entomology at Glasgow University in Scotland. She recommends that people use a proven repellent such as Deet, picaridin, or PMD, and cover up with insecticide-treated long sleeves and trousers. Coverage matters, as bites cluster on exposed extremities. Protection fades with sweat and time, so reapplication is important.
The skin microbiome can also impact how alluring we are to mosquitoes. Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands found that people who were highly attractive to malaria mosquitoes had a different bacterial community on their skin – more abundant, but less diverse – than those who were less attractive. This may be because skin bacteria play an important role in the production of human body odor, and without bacteria, human sweat is odorless to the human nose.
Studies on twins showed identical twins drew mosquitoes equally, while non-identical twins differed, suggesting that odor affecting "bite-ability" can be inherited.
Not all bites are equal
People can react in very different ways to mosquito bites. A genome-wide association study found a strong genetic link between our immune system's genes, and their influence on how our bodies react to mosquito bites. Interestingly, those genetic regions also overlapped with those associated with allergies.
Additionally, a predisposition to bigger, more intense reactions to bites (size and itchiness) may drive your perception of being a mosquito magnet. "Some people think they're bitten more because they react more," Ferguson says, "Some people may get bitten often but barely react."
And while some of us may be a biologically easier target, no one is entirely safe from a mosquito's radar. As Ferguson says: "even if you believe you don't get bitten, you should still protect yourself."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260708-why-do-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-than-others
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CREATIVITY AND LONGEVITY
On a rocky slope in the White Mountains of California lives the oldest non-clonal tree in the world—a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that (as of 2026) has been alive for 5,076 years. Ask most people to name the oldest animal ever recorded, and they might suggest a tortoise (194 years old) or a bowhead whale (~200 years old). Remarkably, the oldest recorded animal is a Quahog clam (nicknamed “Ming”) harvested off the coast of Iceland in 2007. A count of its growth rings revealed that this individual lived for 507 years. And, on August 4, 1997, Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, passed away, having lived for a total of 122 years, 164 days—the oldest authenticated human being on record.
As humans, we want to live long lives. Consequently, we invest in creams and lotions that make us appear younger, prescriptions and potions that ease our aches and pains, and practices and procedures “guaranteed” to ward off the physical and mental inevitabilities of our senior years. Which raises an interesting question (at least as far as this column is concerned): Is there a link between our embrace of a creative lifestyle and our personal longevity? Let’s take a look.
What the Research Says on Creativity and Aging
An article by Hara Estroff Marano in the June 2026 issue of Psychology Today notes that “creative pursuits have their strongest effects on the parts of the brain that are the most vulnerable to aging.” Marano cites a large international study (1,473 participants) demonstrating that “creative activities across all domains boost brain connectivity (plasticity), strengthen neural connectivity, efficiency of information processing, and integration of information transfer throughout the brain.” The ultimate conclusion noted that creativity (when practiced regularly) “offsets the effects of aging on brain operation.”
A 2026 study sought to determine whether creativity acts as a protective factor in helping older adults maintain more flexible semantic networks. The researchers compared 77 older adults (M = 77.8 years) with 81 younger adults (M = 20.3 years) using four verbal production tasks. The results revealed three key findings: 1) Aging is associated with less creative performance, 2) Older adults typically have more rigid semantic networks, and 3) Creativity appears to be a buffer against this decline.
The authors concluded that creativity often functions as a kind of cognitive resource that assists us in preserving semantic memory throughout our lives. The results also indicated that regular creative activities promote healthy cognitive aging, maintain mental flexibility (particularly in our senior years), and support overall brain flexibility: all factors necessary for cognitive vitality and a healthier life span.
A 2023 review of several studies published in the Journal of Population Aging argued that creativity should be considered as a core factor in successful aging frameworks. The authors noted that regular creative activities, such as drawing, problem-solving, playing a musical instrument, puzzles, and the like, are all linked to psychological health and, ultimately, a healthy progression through old age.
They were careful, however, to point out that creativity, in and of itself, does not extend one’s lifespan directly. However, there is a strong connection between creativity and protective psychosocial factors such as purpose, well-being, social engagement, and meaning in life—all of which contribute to longer life expectancy.
The bottom line: creativity offers healthy aging benefits rather than a direct biological lifespan extension.
Many experts suggest that creativity enhances cognitive and psychosocial elements known to positively influence our lives. As such, creative activities incorporated into our daily regimen are a form of neuro-protection—not necessarily to extend our lives, but rather to make our senior years more enjoyable and productive.
A sustained combination of creative activities like these reduces our stress, stimulates our thinking, engages us socially, and gives us a renewed sense of purpose. They are not a “magic potion” for living longer; rather, they are associated with proven elements of a healthy and vibrant lifestyle throughout our years.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creative-insights/202606/the-connection-between-creativity-and-longevity
However, later research did find that besides “adding life to our years,” creative work can indeed add years to our life.
A study from University College London found that participating in arts, like painting or going to the theater, can help slow biological aging.
If you want to stack the odds in favor of living a long life, you've likely already heard the advice to eat well and exercise, over and over again.
So, here's a new idea: Ignite your creative expression and participate more in the arts. A new study finds this may help boost longevity by slowing down your rate of aging.
If you're a painter or pianist, maybe you've noticed how making art or music can lower your stress level. Creative expression can have a profound effect on our biology. Researchers at University College London had a hunch the benefits went beyond this.
They analyzed survey data and blood samples from about 3,500 adults who were part of a long-term study in the United Kingdom, including some who were very involved in the arts, as well as others who had very little engagement with the arts. Then, they used epigenetic clocks to assess participants' rate of aging.
"We found in this study that 'arts engagement' was related to 4% slower aging rates, meaning people were about a year younger, biologically, if they were regularly engaged in the arts," researcher Daisy Fancourt explains. "This is actually the same reduction in biological aging that we saw for physical activity," she says.
The participants had answered a range of questions, on everything from their exercise habits to questions about more than 40 different arts activities.
The slower rate of aging held up for both the "doers" of the arts — people who dance, sing or make art — as well as those who take art in by going to concerts, the theater or museums. The findings are published in the journal Innovation in Aging.
"Honestly, it really surprises me," says Steven Horvath, a geneticist and biostatistician at UCLA. He developed the Horvath aging clock, a tool researchers use to assess a person's biological age based on specific chemical changes to their DNA over time.
Measuring the rate of aging
The authors of the new study used seven epigenetic clocks, including a Horvath clock, each of which adds different layers of nuance in interpreting aging, morbidity and mortality risk. Prior studies have shown that healthy habits can slow epigenetic aging, and this new study adds a novel insight.
"I think this is a very rigorous study, and what is particularly new to me is that arts engagement may have comparable effects to physical activity," Horvath says.
Horvath explains a person's chronological age is their actual age in years based on the date on your birth certificate. But given that people don't age at the same rate, an epigenetic clock can gauge your rate of aging, or your "biological" age.
"Overall, I feel this study moves the epigenetic clock field to new frontiers," he says, toward evaluating the effects of leisure activities on aging.
How does an epigenetic clock work?
Epigenetic clocks are tests that analyze patterns of DNA methylation. As we get older, chemical tags called methyl groups latch onto our DNA. The pattern of these tags gives researchers an indicator of biological age.
"You can use methylation to measure time in all cells that contain DNA," explains Horvath.
Horvath spent years at UCLA studying how this molecular biomarker of aging works. In his research he documented how methylation changes one of the four letters of the DNA — namely the C, which stands for cytosine.
"Some of these changes protect us," he says, but others can lead to adverse consequences. He and his collaborators have identified locations in the DNA where the pattern of chemical modifications are most highly correlated with aging changes. They've found that the higher the proportion of methylated DNA in certain locations, the more accelerated a person's biological age.
"We spent over 10 years trying to understand what factors accelerate your epigenetic clock," Horvath says. They found that smoking, unhealthy eating, a sedentary lifestyle and "pretty much any lifestyle factor that is bad for you" accelerates the clock.
Conversely, a diet rich in micronutrients from fruits and vegetables, a healthy body weight and regular exercise all help slow methylation.
"A non-pharmacological intervention"
The University College London study suggests looking further at the health benefits of the arts.
The survey data included only a snapshot of participants' arts activity, as they were asked about which sorts of artistic hobbies and cultural events they had participated in over the last 12 months. "It's an intriguing observation, but it definitely needs to be replicated," Horvath says.
And many questions remain. For instance, whether a person who is not active in the arts now could take up a new music or art hobby in midlife and experience a slowdown in aging, and how frequently they would need to participate to move the needle.
Cardiologist Doug Vaughan of Northwestern University says creative activities can be an antidote to stress. When people reduce their long-term stress levels, he says, this may help tamp down inflammation, too, which is one mechanism by which the arts may be linked to a slower rate of aging.
"The arts, or being creative or enjoying the arts, is a non-pharmacological intervention," Vaughan says that people may enjoy. One of his new research projects will test the effects of a stress-reduction program on epigenetic age. "The biology is pretty clear," he says, pointing to the negative effects of chronic stress on health.
Vaughan says many of his patients tell him they are interested in finding ways to stay healthy that don't require a prescription. So he says when something can be fun and also good for our health, it's a win-win.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/12/nx-s1-5818172/study-arts-slow-biological-aging
From another source:
Do creative people live longer?
Yes!
A study by The Journal of Aging and Health showed that creative people deal better with stress. They often view difficulties as problem-solving challenges, and in searching their brain for answers, they develop stronger pathways between different areas of the brain. This increases “white matter” which supports the neurons and improves communication within the brain. Creative brains are often healthier in old age and improve with continued thought.
“Individuals high in creativity maintain the integrity of their neural networks even into old age” ~ Nicholas Turiano, University of Rochester Medical Center
The personality trait of openness increases the life-span of creative people
Openness is one of the five major personality traits. (The other four are extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.) Defined as the ability and willingness to accept novel ideas, openness also means having an agile mind that can leap from idea to idea, referred to as cognitive flexibility. Creativity requires the trait of openness.
Thinking creative thoughts, keeping pathways between different areas in the brain open, improves longevity.
https://www.literaturelust.com/post/a-stunning-theory-about-creative-life-that-will-make-you-happy
Choosing to “Write to Live”
I choose to follow my passion. I choose to write. I choose to use my creativity in a way that makes my life feel fulfilled, no matter how much money I make. I write to live, and until now, I never dreamed that doing what I love was actually adding hours to my life. Who knew that meandering down those crazy mind-paths in my head might be giving me an extra year or two?
Maybe I’ll have enough time after all, and I’ll keep scribbling away in my not-so-fairy-tale-like existence for eons. I’ll live happily ever after, dying at the age of 260 with a pen in my hand.
https://www.literaturelust.com/post/a-stunning-theory-about-creative-life-that-will-make-you-happy
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BENEFITS OF COTTAGE CHEESE
Long seen as a bland “diet food,” cottage cheese is gaining new popularity as a protein-packed, versatile addition to everyday meals and snacks.
From smoothies and breakfast bowls to dips and baked dishes, this flexible dairy favorite can be incorporated into breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and everything in between. Here’s a closer look at what makes it so good for you — and how to add more of it to your diet.
Health benefits of cottage cheese you should know about
Beyond its convenience and versatility, cottage cheese delivers a range of nutrients that support overall health. Here are six science-backed reasons to eat cottage cheese:
1. Provides a high-quality source of protein
Cottage cheese is packed with protein in a form that’s ready to eat. Unlike meat, no cooking or prep is needed, says Tara Schmidt, RDN, LD. “Even a half-cup serving of cottage cheese provides about 11 grams of protein, which is more than you’d typically get from a serving of other cheeses,” she says. Its protein is complete, containing all the essential amino acids your body needs. It also supplies calcium and other key nutrients found in dairy.
2. Supports healthy weight management
Although cottage cheese once was considered an old-fashioned “diet food,” it’s still a smart choice for weight management. Its high protein content helps you feel full longer, which can reduce overall calorie intake and support fat loss. The protein in cottage cheese digests more slowly than protein in other sources, helping you stay satisfied between meals. A high-protein eating plan can help preserve lean mass.
3. Helps manage blood sugar and diabetes risk
Cottage cheese is a protein-rich and relatively low-carbohydrate dairy option that can help support healthy blood sugar levels. Protein slows digestion, which may reduce spikes in blood sugar when eaten with carbohydrates, making cottage cheese a satisfying component of meals or snacks. Its relatively low-carbohydrate content means it generally causes smaller increases in blood sugar than many carb-heavy foods, supporting steady glucose levels throughout the day.
Eating dairy foods such as cottage cheese as part of a balanced, higher protein diet also has been linked in studies to a lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Including it in your diet can help manage blood sugar and may contribute to long-term metabolic health.
4. Supports pregnancy and maternal health
Cottage cheese provides several key nutrients — including high-quality protein, calcium, phosphorus and certain B vitamins — that play important roles during pregnancy. Protein supports maternal muscle maintenance and healthy growth, while calcium and phosphorus work together to build and maintain strong bones and teeth in both you and baby. These nutrients are part of what makes dairy foods a nutrient-dense choice in dietary guidelines, particularly for people with increased needs during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
“Dairy in general, including cottage cheese, is a great nutritional source for pregnant people,” says Schmidt. “Those nutrients are really important in pregnancy because you’re building a tiny, tiny skeleton.”
5. Promotes bone and dental health
Cottage cheese contains key nutrients, including calcium and phosphorus, that help keep bones and teeth strong. These minerals work together to build and maintain bone structure throughout life. Some varieties also are fortified with vitamin D, which helps your body absorb calcium more effectively. Getting enough of these nutrients is important at all ages. But it’s especially important as you get older, when bone loss can increase the risk of osteoporosis and fractures. Including calcium-rich foods such as cottage cheese as part of a balanced diet can help support long-term bone health and dental health.
6. May support gut health
Some cottage cheese products contain live and active cultures, similar to those found in yogurt. When that’s the case, cottage cheese may offer gut-health benefits beyond protein alone. “If you get a protein that has probiotics in it — those live cultures — now we can talk about gut health,” Schmidt says. “Just like yogurt.”
Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that help support a healthy gut microbiome, which plays a role in digestion, immune function and overall metabolic health. Although the probiotic sources of yogurt and kefir have been studied more, certain cultured cottage cheese products also can contribute — as long as the label lists “live and active cultures.”
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/nutrition-fitness/6-reasons-to-eat-cottage-cheese-and-6-easy-ways-to-get-more-in-your-diet/?mc_id=us&utm_source=pes&utm_medium=e&utm_content=engagementhw&utm_campaign=mayoclinic&geo=national&placementsite=enterprise&invsrc=patloy&cauid=188239
(my thanks to Kerry Keys)
Oriana:
Actually, cottage cheese is NOT a rich source of calcium. It might be called “moderately good.”
from the Internet:
A standard half-cup serving provides roughly 90 to 130 milligrams of calcium, fulfilling about 8% to 10% of your recommended daily value. For comparison, a half-cup serving of cottage cheese contains about 100 mg of calcium, while a standard cup of milk offers about 300 mg. A four-ounce serving of part-skim ricotta, which is creamy and delicious, contains 335 mg of calcium, and low-fat yogurt —310 mg.
Oriana:
Still, calcium content is not the only criterion by which to judge the nutritional value of a particular food. Cottage cheese provides protein and other benefits mentioned in the article above. A large container of cottage cheese is always to be found in my refrigerator, though for taste I vastly prefer mozzarella and various other kinds of cheese.
My favorite way to use cottage cheese if to mix it into scrambled eggs. The result: nutritious and tasty.
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ending on beauty:
LETTER TO WALT WHITMAN
Walt, what are you writing these days,
your lines stretching for light-years,
stucco’d with galaxies and quasars?
Let me confide in you: the battle
has not been won. They are still
forbidding your your poems:
the despisers of buttocks and breasts,
flatteners of bulges and clefts,
the censors of peaches —
our body in leaf, in bloom,
the amaryllis of desire
dewy in the arms of twilight —
Still gross, still hankering, still nude,
you thought we’d understand
after stopping one night with you.
But since we are all lined up for
the Brooklyn Ferry by any other name,
could you please arrange for everyone
a night that is total, liquescent,
murmuring and caressing —
just once before the swift flood-tide.
~ Oriana
