Saturday, June 27, 2020

EVEN WILD ANIMALS ARE BECOMING OBESE; BLOOD TYPE AND DISEASE RISK; WHAT YOU SEEK WILL COME IN ANOTHER FORM; COLD SORES AND ALZHEIMER’S; VIRUS THEORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA; HOW FORESTS GENERATE RAIN AND WIND


Dali: Marilyn-Mao, 1972, self-portrait with photomontage by Philippe Halsman.
 
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EMPIRE OF DREAMS


On the first page of my dreambook


It’s always evening

In an occupied country.

Hour before the curfew.

A small provincial city.

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner


Where I shouldn’t be.

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

~ Charles Simic


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Simic’s Serbian name is Dušan (Doo-shahn — “soulful.” In Slavic languages, “dusha” means soul)


from Wiki: “Dušan Simić was born in Belgrade. In his early childhood, during World War II, he and his family were forced to evacuate their home several times to escape indiscriminate bombing of Belgrade. Growing up as a child in war-torn Europe shaped much of his world-view, Simic states. In an interview from the Cortland Review he said, "Being one of the millions of displaced persons made an impression on me. In addition to my own little story of bad luck, I heard plenty of others. I'm still amazed by all the vileness and stupidity I witnessed in my life."


Simic immigrated to the United States with his brother and mother in order to join his father in 1954 when he was sixteen. He grew up in Chicago."


Oriana:

Our early years may have a strange persistence in our dreams. In my current life, I'm always home; in my dreams, I'm never home. In dreams I've lost my home and my way back to it, repeating my leaving Poland and becoming a stranger in a strange land.

For Simic, it’s “always an evening / in an occupied country. / Hour before the curfew.” He’s split in two: a successful American poet and college professor by day, and, in his dreams, the scared child in an occupied country.” I know something of that . . . the fear, the trauma of losing “home” in the deepest sense — the loss of the familiar.

I keenly remember Simic’s remark about a book on world history — “Could there be a more obscene text?”

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(a shameless digression: This morning I had a dream about being on a dusky-looking college campus somewhere in Anaheim [known for Disneyland, not academic institutions]. My intention is to enroll in a Ph.D. program, and I've come to check out the library — since I must like the library if I am to enroll. In my hand I'm holding a book, “The Goddesses in Homer” — and I'm looking forward to reading it. The heaven of intellectual stimulation awaits! I wake up happy.)

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“I feel like I’ve swallowed a cloudy sky.” ~ Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
 
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WORDSWORTH AS THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

~ “Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in his poem on the death of fellow poet W. B. Yeats. He was wrong. Sometimes poetry can change the world.

William Wordsworth was not merely the most admired English poet of the 19th century: his poetry made many things happen. Locally, the ecology and economy of the vale of Grasmere, and the wider Lake District, were changed as a result of his canonization. Nationally, he made new claims for the power of poetry that shaped the minds of the most influential thinkers in Victorian Britain. Globally, his influence extended to John Muir’s passion for the preservation of Yosemite.

Auden did not in fact believe that poetry makes nothing happen. Poets often disagree with themselves, which is one of the things that makes them poets. Having said that poetry makes nothing happen, he went on, later in the same poem, to describe poetry as “A way of happening, a mouth.”

Wordsworth’s poetry was a way of happening because of the new way in which he sought, as Keats put it, to “think into the human heart” by means of an unprecedented examination of the development of his own mind and his sense of belonging in the world. He became the mouth of his generation for what Keats called “the true voice of feeling.”

In Victorian England, and simultaneously in the young United States of America, Wordsworth came to be regarded as a central figure in the revolutionary shift in cultural attitudes that would eventually be called the Romantic movement. He and his fellow poets and philosophers changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about the purpose of poetry, and especially about our connection to our surroundings.

Hazlitt believed that Wordsworth and Coleridge embodied the spirit of the age. Their imaginative cross-fertilization made them into, to adapt a phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, a composite “representative man.” Among the “great men” of his own time, Emerson regarded Napoleon as the archetypal “man of the world,” the “representative of the popular external life and aims of the 19th century,” and Goethe as the philosopher of the “multiplicity” of its inner life.

Yet Emerson’s own capacious mind and his vision for American literature were shaped less by Goethe than by the poetry of Wordsworth and the ideas of Coleridge. The composite Wordsworthian–Coleridgean identity began to fracture on that morning of Saturday, December 27th, 1806 when Coleridge saw, or thought he saw, Wordsworth in bed with Sara Hutchinson.


It broke down almost irretrievably after Basil Montagu passed on the gossip about Wordsworth finding Coleridge impossible to live with because of the alcohol and the opium. Though Coleridge would be generous in writing of Wordsworth’s gifts in Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth would mourn Coleridge’s passing in the “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,” it would never be glad confident morning again.

As he settled into fame and a gentleman’s life at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s genius deserted him. Yet as his mortal powers waned, he began to achieve immortality: his spirit lived on by means of his inspiration upon the next generation of readers and writers, then far beyond. To use another phrase of W. H. Auden’s in his elegy on the death of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth became his admirers.

Radical Wordsworth endured through the 19th century in the poetry of Keats and Shelley, John Clare and Felicia Hemans (and, by negative influence, Byron); in the art of Benjamin Robert Haydon and the prose of Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; in the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and George Eliot; in the deeds of Canon Rawnsley, Stopford Brooke and Beatrix Potter; and, across the Atlantic, in the visions of Emerson, Thoreau and John Muir.

Radical Wordsworth survives today whenever a person walks for pleasure and takes spiritual refreshment in the mountains or when a heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky or a tuft of primroses in flower.

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Thirty years after Wordsworth’s death, and twenty after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Matthew Arnold recognized which way the wind had blown. Introducing an anthology of The English Poets, he argued, under the deep influence of Wordsworth, that the future spirit of humankind would depend on poetry. Religion had relied on supposed fact; the science of Lyell, Darwin and others had disproved those facts.

The only part of religion to endure would be “its unconscious poetry.” More and more, society would “have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us”: “Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” Even science itself would appear incomplete without it, “For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry ‘the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science’; and what is a countenance without its expression?”

Arnold’s prose then takes off from another phrase in the preface to Lyrical Ballads: 


'Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge?

The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize “the breath and finer spirit of knowledge” offered to us by poetry . . . the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.'

Out of Wordsworth comes a manifesto for the enduring value of poetry beyond even that of religion, philosophy and science. There was an unprecedented market for biography in the Victorian era. A notably popular series of literary lives, published by Macmillan under the editorship of the prolific journalist- politician-bookman John Morley, was called “English Men of Letters.”

The volume on Wordsworth was published in 1881, the year after Arnold’s essay on the importance of poetry. It made the startling claim that “the maxims of Wordsworth’s form of natural religion were uttered before Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity were uttered before Christ”:

The essential spirit of the Lines near Tintern Abbey was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men—indifferent, it may be, to literary or poetical effects, as such — he has shown by the subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer — an opening, if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.


Thirty years after his death, the poet from an obscure nook of northern England, who in the first half of his life was mercilessly derided by the critics, was being compared to Jesus Christ.”

https://lithub.com/on-the-radical-afterlives-of-william-wordsworth/?fbclid=IwAR3p-Fm_gV3NpryKyoKGs0RbhkVn3HYCihIn5YOZxVMjB81TW2MefgEJArs


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“WHATEVER IT IS YOU'RE SEEKING
WON'T COME IN THE FORM YOU'RE EXPECTING.” ~ Haruki Murakami


~ if it comes at all. It seems that nothing in life happens the way we were expecting it to happen. I guess it’s like a writer preparing an elaborate plot of a novel, and then the “characters become alive and take over — start saying and doing things not in the original plan.” And that’s just a novel — and all we need to know is that writing comes from the unconscious — of course we don’t control it! Life comes from everywhere (including “out of the blue”), wild, unpredictable, wonderfully or shockingly surprising. 

“When the student is ready, the teacher will come” — never happened to me — unless I start thinking in terms of a “different form.” Then the encounter with the poetry of Rilke could be said to have been that teacher. Otherwise, waiting for a mentor has been in the same category as “one day my Prince will come.”

And now I'm dealing with the knee replacement surgery not having turned out to be the way I expected. This is not minor, since it’s about the ability to walk and the long-awaited freedom from chronic pain — and that “last dance” that life was supposed to become. A beautiful waltz, a soulful tango through the streets of old Europe (ah, my travel plans! so many stairways and bridges!). 


So, it won’t be a dance — or else it will be something I recognize as a dance only later a different kind of dance. The strangeness of it all. At least I finally know better than to try to predict. But the brain never rests, and parallel lives happen inside our head like parallel universes.

So, this constant annihilation of the imagined future . . . with something entirely different emerging instead. This should make Buddhists of us all, free of expectations, living in the present . . . I wonder if we ever achieve such purity. 

 
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The first half of life is particularly charged with “waiting for life to happen.” Rilke has an unusual poem called “Remembrance.” The first stanza describes this waiting:

 
And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, the unique and uncommon,
the awakening of sleeping stones —
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

 
And then the speaker learns that the “one thing” has already happened — but it was several things — love, travel, work — life itself has happened while we were ostensibly living it, but in some depths still waiting for our “real life.” 


Haruki Murakami with his cat, Kafka

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“We don't want to live a frivolous life, we don't want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn't necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, 
that gravity, that weight.” ~ Leonard Cohen


Oriana:


It’s an interesting insight — we don't want a frivolous life; we want seriousness. Seriousness nourishes us — a dedication to a cause, just the right amount of idealism (extreme idealism tends to end in catastrophic evil).

And perhaps the most interesting thing that Cohen is saying here is that “seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it.” It’s profoundly satisfying.

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“It seems to me now that the plain state of being 
human is dramatic enough for anyone; 
you don't need to be a heroin addict 
or a performance poet to experience extremity. 
You just have to love someone.” ~ Nick Hornby

Oriana:


Yes, that's guaranteed unpredictability. "Now the storm begins." 

Or at least that is so with new love. Long-term love is closer to contentment and tenderness.
Calla lilies; Robert Mapplethorpe

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A CONTROVERSIAL RUSSIAN THEORY CLAIMS FORESTS DON’T JUST MAKE RAIN—THEY MAKE WIND

 
~ It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.

With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Nastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, who died last year, say they are its beating heart, too.

Forests are complex self-sustaining rainmaking systems, and the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth,” Makarieva says. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea—forests as rainmakers—originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial.

If correct, the idea could help explain why, despite their distance from the oceans, the remote interiors of forested continents receive as much rain as the coasts—and why the interiors of unforested continents tend to be arid. It also implies that forests from the Russian taiga to the Amazon rainforest don’t just grow where the weather is right. They also make the weather. “All I have learned so far suggests to me that the biotic pump is correct,” says Douglas Sheil, a forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. With the future of the world’s forests in doubt, “Even if we thought the theory had only a small chance of being true, it would be profoundly important to know one way or the other.”

Many meteorology textbooks still teach a caricature of the water cycle, with ocean evaporation responsible for most of the atmospheric moisture that condenses in clouds and falls as rain. The picture ignores the role of vegetation and, in particular, trees, which act like giant water fountains. Their roots capture water from the soil for photosynthesis, and microscopic pores in leaves release unused water as vapor into the air. The process, the arboreal equivalent of sweating, is known as transpiration. In this way, a single mature tree can release hundreds of liters of water a day. With its foliage offering abundant surface area for the exchange, a forest can often deliver more moisture to the air than evaporation from a water body of the same size.

The biotic pump theory suggests forests not only make rain, but also wind. When water vapor over coastal forests condenses, it lowers air pressures, creating winds that draw in moist ocean air. Cycles of transpiration and condensation can set up winds that deliver rains thousands of kilometers inland.

The importance of this recycled moisture for nourishing rains was largely disregarded until 1979, when Brazilian meteorologist Eneas Salati reported studies of the isotopic composition of rainwater sampled from the Amazon Basin. Water recycled by transpiration contains more molecules with the heavy oxygen-18 isotope than water evaporated from the ocean. Salati used this fact to show that half of the rainfall over the Amazon came from the transpiration of the forest itself.


By this time, meteorologists were tracking an atmospheric jet above the forest, at a height of about 1.5 kilometers. Known as the South American Low-Level Jet, the winds blow east to west across the Amazon, about as fast as a racing bike, before the Andes Mountains divert them south. Salati and others surmised the jet carried much of the transpired moisture, and dubbed it a “flying river.” The Amazon flying river is now reckoned to carry as much water as the giant terrestrial river below it, says Antonio Nobre, a climate researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.


For some years, flying rivers were thought to be limited to the Amazon. In the 1990s, Hubert Savenije, a hydrologist at the Delft University of Technology, began to study moisture recycling in West Africa. Using a hydrological model based on weather data, he found that, as one moved inland from the coast, the proportion of the rainfall that came from forests grew, reaching 90% in the interior. The finding helped explain why the interior Sahel region became dryer as coastal forests disappeared over the past half-century.

Globally, 40% of all precipitation comes from the land rather than the ocean. Often it is more. The Amazon’s flying river provides 70% of the rain falling in the Río de la Plata Basin, which stretches across southeastern South America. Van der Ent was most surprised to find that China gets 80% of its water from the west, mostly Atlantic moisture recycled by the boreal forests of Scandinavia and Russia. The journey involves several stages—cycles of transpiration followed by downwind rain and subsequent transpiration—and takes 6 months or more. “It contradicted previous knowledge that you learn in high school,” he says. “China is next to an ocean, the Pacific, yet most of its rainfall is moisture recycled from land far to the west.”

Even those who doubt the theory agree that forest loss can have far-reaching climatic consequences. Many scientists have argued that deforestation thousands of years ago was to blame for desertification in the Australian Outback and West Africa. The fear is that future deforestation could dry up other regions, for example, tipping parts of the Amazon rainforest to savanna. Agricultural regions of China, the African Sahel, and the Argentine Pampas are also at risk, says Patrick Keys, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.

In 2018, Keys and his colleagues used a model, similar to van der Ent’s, to track the sources of rainfall for 29 global megacities. He found that 19 were highly dependent on distant forests for much of their water supply, including Karachi, Pakistan; Wuhan and Shanghai, China; and New Delhi and Kolkata, India. “Even small changes in precipitation arising from upwind land-use change could have big impacts on the fragility of urban water supplies,” he says.


Some modeling even suggests that by removing a moisture source, deforestation could alter weather patterns beyond the paths of flying rivers. Just as El Niño, a shift in currents and winds in the tropical Pacific Ocean, is known to influence weather in faraway places through “teleconnections,” so, too, could Amazon deforestation diminish rainfall in the U.S. Midwest and snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, says Roni Avissar, a climatologist at the University of Miami who has modeled such teleconnections. Far-fetched? “Not at all,” he says. “We know El Niño can do this, because unlike deforestation, it recurs and we can see the pattern. Both are caused by small changes in temperature and moisture that project into the atmosphere.”
 

Two years ago, at a meeting of the United Nations Forum on Forests, a high-level policy group on which all governments sit, David Ellison, a land researcher at the University of Bern, presented a case in point: a study showing that as much as 40% of the total rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, the main source of the Nile, is provided by moisture recycled from the forests of the Congo Basin. Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are negotiating a long-overdue deal on sharing the waters of the Nile. But such an agreement would be worthless if deforestation in the Congo Basin, far from those three nations, dries up the moisture source, Ellison suggested. “Interactions between forests and water have been almost entirely ignored in the management of global freshwater resources.”

The biotic pump would raise the stakes even further, with its suggestion that forest loss alters not just moisture sources, but also wind patterns. The theory, if correct, would have “crucial implications for planetary air circulation patterns,” Ellison warns, especially those that take moist air inland to continental interiors.


Even if Makarieva’s ideas are fringy in the West, they are taking root in Russia. Last year, the government began a public dialogue to revise its forestry laws. Aside from strictly protected areas, Russian forests are open to commercial exploitation, but the government and the Federal Forestry Agency are considering a new designation of “climate protection forests.” “Some representatives of our forest department got impressed by the biotic pump and want to introduce a new category,” she says. The idea has the backing of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Being part of a consensus rather than the perennial outsider marks a change, Makarieva says.


This summer, the coronavirus lockdown put the kibosh on her annual trip to the northern forests. Back in St. Petersburg, she has settled down to respond to yet another round of objections to her work from anonymous peer reviewers. She insists the pump theory will ultimately prevail. “There is a natural inertia in science,” she says. With a dark Russian humor, she invokes the words of the legendary German physicist Max Planck, who is said to have once remarked that science “advances one funeral at a time.” ~


https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/controversial-russian-theory-claims-forests-don-t-just-make-rain-they-make-wind



My thanks to Mary for having sent me this article.

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"All the armies in the world can't stop an idea whose time has come." ~ Victor Hugo 

 
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ASIMOV ON HUMANISM
 
~ “David Frost said, “Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?”
And I said, “Whose?”

He said, a little impatiently, “Come, come, Dr. Asimov, you know very well whose. Do you believe in the Western God, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition?”

Still playing for time, I said, “I haven’t given it much thought.”

Frost said, “I can’t believe that, Dr. Asimov.” He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”

(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me
. . .

I certainly don’t believe in the mythologies of our society, in Heaven and Hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I’ve thought of myself as an “atheist,” but that simply described what I didn’t believe in, not what I did.

Gradually, though, I became aware that there was a movement called “humanism,” which used that name because, to put it most simply, Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.

There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven. And what if I’m mistaken? The question was asked of Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and outspoken atheist. “What if you died,” he was asked, “and found yourself face to face with God? What then?”

And the doughty old champion said, “I would say, ‘Lord, you should have given us more evidence.’” ~

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/13/isaac-asimov-religion-science-humanism/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=bufferdcc89&utm_medium=twitter

 
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THE OBESITY ERA — IS IT SOMETHING OUT THERE IN THE ENVIRONMENT?

~ For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organization predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What’s more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy.

THE TRADITIONAL EXPLANATION: LACK OF SELF-DISCIPLINE
 

Moral panic about the depravity of the heavy has seeped into many aspects of life, confusing even the erudite. Earlier this month, for example, the American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller expressed the zeitgeist in this tweet: ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.’

So we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice. It is undoubtedly true that societies are spending vast amounts of time and money on this idea. It is also true that the masters of the universe in business and government seem attracted to it, perhaps because stern self-discipline is how many of them attained their status. What we don’t know is whether the theory is actually correct.

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends [do not agree]. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain. As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’ 


OBESOGENS: THE CHEMICALS THAT ALTER METABOLISM


Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me. 


It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. The trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species. 

 
Many other aspects of the worldwide weight gain are also difficult to square with the ‘it’s-just-thermodynamics’ model. In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too. In a study published in the Social Science and Medicine journal last year, Wells and his co-authors found that, in a sample that spanned 68 nations, for every two obese men there were three obese women. Moreover, the researchers found that higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation. Why, if body weight is a matter of individual decisions about what to eat, should it be affected by differences in wealth or by relations between the sexes?

A number of researchers have come to believe, as Wells himself wrote earlier this year in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that ‘all calories are not equal’. The problem with diets that are heavy in meat, fat or sugar is not solely that they pack a lot of calories into food; it is that they alter the biochemistry of fat storage and fat expenditure, tilting the body’s system in favor of fat storage. Wells notes, for example, that sugar, trans-fats and alcohol have all been linked to changes in ‘insulin signaling’, which affects how the body processes carbohydrates. This might sound like a merely technical distinction. In fact, it’s a paradigm shift: if the problem isn’t the number of calories but rather biochemical influences on the body’s fat-making and fat-storage processes, then sheer quantity of food or drink are not the all-controlling determinants of weight gain. If candy’s chemistry tilts you toward fat, then the fact that you eat it at all may be as important as the amount of it you consume.

More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat. What other factors might be at work? Viruses, bacteria and industrial chemicals have all entered the sights of obesity research. So have such aspects of modern life as electric light, heat and air conditioning. All of these have been proposed, with some evidence, as direct causes of weight gain: the line of reasoning is not that stress causes you to eat more, but rather that it causes you to gain weight by directly altering the activities of your cells. If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.

We are, of course, surrounded by industrial chemicals. According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals. And a recent study by Leonardo Trasande and colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine with a sample size of 2,838 American children and teens found that, for the majority, those with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were five times more likely to be obese than were those with the lowest levels.

It’s also possible that chemical disrupters could affect people’s body chemistry on longer timescales — starting, for instance, before their birth. Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing fetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord. As David J P Barker, professor of clinical epidemiology of the University of Southampton, noted some 20 years ago, where mothers have gone hungry, their offspring are at a greater risk of obesity. The prenatal environment, Barker argued, tunes the children’s metabolism for a life of scarcity, preparing them to store fat whenever they can, to get them through periods of want. If those spells of scarcity never materialize, the child’s proneness to fat storage ceases to be an advantage. The 40,000 babies gestated during Holland’s ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945 grew up to have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart trouble than their compatriots who developed without the influence of war-induced starvation.

Just to double down on the complexity of the question, a number of researchers also think that industrial compounds might be affecting these signals. For example, Bruce Blumberg, professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, has found that pregnant mice exposed to organotins (tin-based chemical compounds that are used in a wide variety of industries) will have heavier offspring than mice in the same lab who were not so exposed. In other words, the chemicals might be changing the signal that the developing fetus uses to set its metabolism. More disturbingly, there is evidence that this ‘fetal programming’ could last more than one generation. A good predictor of your birth weight, for instance, is your mother’s weight at her birth.

THE “THERMONEUTRAL ZONE”


Lurking behind these prime suspects, there are the fugitive possibilities — what David Allison and another band of co-authors recently called the ‘roads less travelled’ of obesity research. For example, consider the increased control civilization gives people over the temperature of their surroundings. There is a ‘thermoneutral zone’ in which a human body can maintain its normal internal temperature without expending energy. Outside this zone, when it’s hot enough to make you sweat or cold enough to make you shiver, the body has to expend energy to maintain homeostasis. Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less. A restaurant on a warm day whose air conditioning breaks down will see a sharp decline in sales (yes, someone did a study). Perhaps we are getting fatter in part because our heaters and air conditioners are keeping us in the thermoneutral zone. 


DISRUPTION OF THE LIGHT CYCLE


And what about light? A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark. This effect might be due to the constant light robbing the rodents of their natural cues about when to eat. Wild mice eat at night, but night-deprived mice might have been eating during the day, at the ‘wrong’ time physiologically. It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep. 


ADENOVIRUS-36 AND OBESITY-CAUSING GUT BACTERIA


There is also the possibility that obesity could quite literally be contagious. A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys. Of course, it would be unethical to test for this effect on humans, but it is now known that antibodies to the virus are found in a much higher percentage of obese people than in people of normal weight. A research review by Tomohide Yamada and colleagues at the University of Tokyo in Japan, published last year in the journal PLoS One, found that people who had been infected with Ad-36 had significantly higher BMI than those who hadn’t. 


As with viruses, so with bacteria. Experiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too. And a study in humans by Ruchi Mathur and colleagues at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism earlier this year, found that those who were overweight were more likely than others to have elevated populations of a gut microorganisms called Methanobrevibacter smithii. The researchers speculated that these organisms might in fact be especially good at digesting food, yielding up more nutrients and thus contributing to weight gain. 


The researcher who first posited a viral connection in 1992 — he had noticed that the chickens in India that were dead of an adenovirus infection were plump instead of gaunt — was Nikhil Dhurandhar, now a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Louisiana. He has proposed a catchy term for the spread of excess weight via bugs and viruses: ‘infectobesity’. 


**
WE SIMPLY DON’T KNOW WHICH FACTOR IS MOST IMPORTANT

Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways. History is not kind to authorities whose mistaken dogmas cause unnecessary suffering and pointless effort, while ignoring the real causes of trouble. And the history of the obesity era has yet to be written. ~


https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong

an obese marmoset
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WHY IT WAS EASIER TO BE SKINNY IN THE 1980S
A study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.
 
~ A 2016 study published in the journal Obesity Research and Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans between 1971 and 2008 and the physical activity data of 14,419 people between 1988 and 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI.

They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans. 


“Our study results suggest that if you are 25, you’d have to eat even less and exercise more than those older, to prevent gaining weight,” Jennifer Kuk, a professor of kinesiology and health science at Toronto’s York University, said in a statement. “However, it also indicates there may be other specific changes contributing to the rise in obesity beyond just diet and exercise.” 


Just what those other changes might be, though, are still a matter of hypothesis. In an interview, Kuk proffered three different factors that might be making harder for adults today to stay thin. 


First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight. 


Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain.
 

Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time. Kuk believes the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role. 

 
 “There's a huge weight bias against people with obesity,” she said. “They're judged as lazy and self-indulgent. That's really not the case. If our research is correct, you need to eat even less and exercise even more” just to be same weight as your parents were at your age. ~

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s?utm_source=pocket-newtab


Oriana:

The importance of microbiome in regulating weight was revealed when fecal transplants came into use. A fecal transplant basically transfers the donor’s microbiome to the recipient. It turned out that a fecal transplant from an overweight person would make the recipient start gaining excess weight. 


If you ever need a fecal transplant (which is a treatment of last resort), make sure that the donor is slender and in good physical and mental health. (Do schizophrenics have a different microbiome? Of course they do.)


Seriously, is there something you can do to improve your microbiome? Yes: avoid sugar and eat fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi. Consume plenty of fiber to keep your gut microbes well-fed. Be good to your bacteria, and they'll be good to you.

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BLOOD TYPE AND DISEASE RISK

Heart Attack and Heart Disease

 
It may seem obvious that your blood type is related to your heart, since your heart pumps blood to the rest of your body. But your blood type can actually put you at a higher risk for conditions such as heart attack and heart disease. This is because of a gene called the ABO gene — a gene that’s present in people with A, B, or AB blood types. The only blood type that doesn’t have this gene is Type O.

If you have the ABO gene and you live in an area with high pollution levels, you may be at a greater risk of heart attack than those who don’t have the gene.


Dr. Guggenheim said, “The ABO gene can also increase your risk of coronary artery disease (CAD). CAD develops when the arteries that supply blood to and from your heart harden and narrow — which can cause a heart attack if they become blocked.

Brain Function and Memory Loss

 
The ABO gene is connected with brain function and memory loss. People who have blood types A, B, and AB are up to 82 percent more likely to develop cognition and memory problems — which can lead to dementia — compared to those with Type O.

One possible reason for this memory loss is the fact that blood type can lead to things like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. These conditions can cause cognitive impairment and dementia.

Blood type has been connected with stroke, too, which can occur when the blood flow to the brain is disrupted.

Cancers

 
There are plenty of factors that have been connected with a higher risk of cancer, and it can sometimes be hard to know which ones to look into more seriously than others. However, people with Type A blood have been found to have a higher risk of stomach cancer specifically, compared to those with other blood types.

The ABO gene may play a role with a heightened cancer risk, as well. This gene has been connected to other cancers, including lung, breast, colorectal, prostate, liver, and cervical cancers.
This correlation has been studied for more than 60 years, and while research continues to show a correlation, there is no definitive explanation as to why the ABO gene may put you at a higher risk for some cancers.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/health-and-wellness/2019/april/blood-types

Oriana:

If you are type O, congratulations! that’s the blood type associated with the lowest risk of heart disease. Type O has the lowest levels of proteins associated with clotting. Type B and AB show the highest risk.

Type O also has the lowest risk of dementia, while type AB has the highest risk (but type AB is rare — only 4% of people have it).

If you are type A, B, or AB, you have a higher risk for pancreatic cancer, which is a truly infernal kind of cancer. (As for stomach cancer, it’s now rare in the Western countries.)

People who are type A tend to have high levels of cortisol, which is not good.

When it comes to covid-19 the O blood type wins again, having the lowest risk of infection in general.

It’s important to remember that the risk for any disease is multi-factorial. Smoking and obesity, a diet high in junk food and carcinogenic processed meat or meat cooked at high temperature, and the amount of exercise are typically better predictors than blood type alone. Still, if you have type O blood, I imagine you’re jubilant after reading this article — and positive emotions are certainly linked to better health.



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COLD SORES AND ALZHEIMER’S: HERPES VIRUS ASSOCIATED WITH DEMENTIA RISK

~ The virus implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1), is better known for causing cold sores. It infects most people in infancy and then remains dormant in the peripheral nervous system (the part of the nervous system that isn’t the brain and the spinal cord). Occasionally, if a person is stressed, the virus becomes activated and, in some people, it causes cold sores.

We discovered in 1991 that in many elderly people HSV1 is also present in the brain. And in 1997 we showed that it confers a strong risk of Alzheimer’s disease when present in the brain of people who have a specific gene known as APOE4.


The virus can become active in the brain, perhaps repeatedly, and this probably causes cumulative damage. The likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease is 12 times greater for APOE4 carriers who have HSV1 in the brain than for those with neither factor.


Later, we and others found that HSV1 infection of cell cultures causes beta-amyloid and abnormal tau proteins to accumulate. An accumulation of these proteins in the brain is characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.


We believe that HSV1 is a major contributory factor for Alzheimer’s disease and that it enters the brains of elderly people as their immune system declines with age. It then establishes a latent (dormant) infection, from which it is reactivated by events such as stress, a reduced immune system and brain inflammation induced by infection by other microbes.


Reactivation leads to direct viral damage in infected cells and to viral-induced inflammation. We suggest that repeated activation causes cumulative damage, leading eventually to Alzheimer’s disease in people with the APOE4 gene.


Presumably, in APOE4 carriers, Alzheimer’s disease develops in the brain because of greater HSV1-induced formation of toxic products, or less repair of damage.


In an earlier study, we found that the anti-herpes antiviral drug, acyclovir, blocks HSV1 DNA replication, and reduces levels of beta-amyloid and tau caused by HSV1 infection of cell cultures.


It’s important to note that all studies, including our own, only show an association between the herpes virus and Alzheimer’s – they don’t prove that the virus is an actual cause. Probably the only way to prove that a microbe is a cause of a disease is to show that an occurrence of the disease is greatly reduced either by targeting the microbe with a specific anti-microbial agent or by specific vaccination against the microbe.


Excitingly, successful prevention of Alzheimer’s disease by use of specific anti-herpes agents has now been demonstrated in a large-scale population study in Taiwan. Hopefully, information in other countries, if available, will yield similar results. ~


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181022-there-is-mounting-evidence-that-herpes-leads-to-alzheimers


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VIRUS THEORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

~ Schizophrenia is a severely debilitating mental illness with no known cause or cure, although there is a strong genetic correlation. Interestingly, there is additionally a significant relationship between season of birth and the development of schizophrenia, as individuals born during late winter and spring have a significantly increased risk for developing schizophrenia. One hypothesis to explain this phenomenon is that this is due to prenatal viral infection, which is more likely to occur in the winter months. It is hypothesized that viral infections occurring during the third trimester of pregnancy result in the increased risk for developing schizophrenia.  However, there is currently debate as to how this happens— is it due to a direct viral infection of the fetus, or due to maternal cytokines in response to infection?”

A study by Faterni et al (2012) found that the placenta may be a site of pathology in viral infections.  Using pregnant mice infected with a sublethal dose of influenza on the seventh day of pregnancy (E7), they found that viral infection resulted in many histological abnormalities in the placentae.  These abnormalities included an absence of the labyrinth zone, the region of the maternal placenta in which nutrients and oxygen are exchanged between the maternal and fetal blood, the presence of thrombi, and an increased number of inflammatory cells. 

The deletion of a labyrinth zone could result in a reduction of oxygen delivered to the developing fetus and result in neural abnormalities, which may be ultimately caused by an inflammatory immune response.

Importantly, H1N1 viral genes were not detected in either the placenta or brains of offspring whose mothers were infected, suggesting that the virus did not cross the placenta to directly infect the offspring. This consequently implicates that the changes found in gene expression as well as the structural abnormalities of the placenta were most likely due to the production of maternal or fetal cytokines, most likely due to an increase in inflammatory cells in infected placenta. ~

https://pages.vassar.edu/viva/?p=918

~ The results of the study by Brown et al revealed a dramatic 7-fold increase in the risk of schizophrenia among the offspring of women who were exposed to influenza during their first trimester of pregnancy. Further analysis suggested a 3-fold increase of risk in women who were exposed to influenza from the midpoints of their first and second trimesters. ~

(Brown AS, Begg MD, Gravenstein S,  et al.  Serologic evidence of prenatal influenza in the etiology of schizophrenia.  Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2004;61(8):774-78015289276)

HERPES AND SCHIZOPHRENIA?

 
~ [A recent] study evaluated pregnant women between 1959 and 1966 and identified 27 surviving offspring who were later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Analysis of stored blood samples showed an association between high levels of maternal antibody to HSV-2 and subsequent development of adult psychosis. No association was found between HSV-1 infection and psychosis. There is also evidence that human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) may play a role in schizophrenia, as antibodies to these agents have been found at a greater frequency in the sera of affected individuals compared with controls. This is supported by the presence of reverse transcriptase, a retroviral marker, at levels four times higher in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of people with recent onset schizophrenia compared with controls, and by its elevated presence in long-term schizophrenic patients. ~

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15319094/


Note: HSV-1 is the virus that causes cold sores. HSV-2 is the genital herpes. HSV-1 can cause genital herpes, but most cases are due to HSV-2.

Oriana:

It’s possible that the kind of virus doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the pregnant woman experienced an infection and acute inflammation.

Schizophrenia remains a mystery, and no one claims that viral infection during pregnancy directly causes schizophrenia in the offspring; case solved. But we can’t exclude the possibility that a virus may be involved in at least some cases of schizophrenia. 


*
ending on beauty:

 
time makes pebbles of us all, 

smooth and rounded to perfection

though we once were hard-edged, 
angry chunks of rock

~ Magdalena Paśnikowska








Saturday, June 20, 2020

IQ VS PERSONALITY: WHICH DETERMINES SUCCESS? THE MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN; GARDENING AND LONGEVITY; GUT BACTERIA AND MOOD; FACE MASKS MOST EFFECTIVE; AKHMATOVA AND HOPE; PLANKTON: THE ENABLER OF LIFE

Diego Rivera: Calla Lilies

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Everything’s plundered, sold, betrayed,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with newborn galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

~ Anna Akhmatova, tr Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward
 
I think the best comment on this poem is this statement:

“Probably of all our feelings the only one that is not truly ours is hope. Hope belongs to life, it is life itself defending itself.” ~ Julio Cortazar


Akhmatova by Yuri Annenkov, 1921  

*
 “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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MARGUERITE YOURCENAR’S MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN

~ Memoirs of Hadrian begins in illness and distance, and with a letter. “My dear Mark,” the dying emperor writes from his villa at Tibur to his eventual heir, the adolescent he blesses as Aurelius. “I have formed a project for telling you about my life [. . .] to know myself better before I die.”


In the novel—Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterpiece—Hadrian’s rise from provincial Spain to the throne of Caesar is almost an afterthought. Instead, these Memoirs linger over Hadrian’s meditations on the nature of power and its proper use in affairs of state or friendship or love. Such rigorous examination of facts—especially the troublesome fact of the self—serves the real 21st century as well as the imagined 2nd. The emperor still speaks to us, however that “us” may change.


So I returned to Hadrian’s vision of a Rome made global through its citizens’ exchange of goods and ideas rather than its legions’ conquests. A peace between Rome and Parthia reopens trade routes all the way to India: “The circulation of gold and the passage of ideas (as subtle as that of vital air in the arteries) were beginning again within the world’s great body: earth’s pulse began to beat once more.”


Despising sectarian bigotry, he dreams of a Jerusalem—and a world—where “several races and several beliefs could live in peace [. . .].” In other words, he wishes, as anyone does, for the impossible. Still he applies all his power to the realization of such an ideal. In adopting Marcus, he reflects: “I may be giving mankind the only chance it will ever have [. . .] to see a philosopher pure of heart ruling over his fellow men.” I winced at all these lines; they stung far more today than when I first read them.

The novel’s most compelling events are those in which the emperor’s powers falter—in illness or age, or in love. When Antinous, the love of Hadrian’s saeculum aurum dies suddenly, at twenty, the emperor and all his lavished titles become “only a man with greying hair sobbing on the deck of a boat.”


Even in the midst of love, Hadrian is alone; his constant solitude is the price of his imperium. His companions of mind console him, his remembered and imagined travels. “There are places where one has chosen to live,” Yourcenar writes in her notes, “invisible abodes [. . .] quite outside the current of time. I have lived in Tibur, and shall die there, perhaps, as Hadrian did on Achilles’ Isle.” Lately I have lived most in Tibur too, at a villa I imagine only as Yourcenar imagined it.


The book ends as with the end of illness, the ultimate distance of death. Soon what Hadrian writes of his beloved Antinous will be true of him as well: “Centuries yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by [. . .] that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been” (210-11). The fact of having been is little consolation, but precious little.


Life is atrocious, we know. What meaning and wisdom and joy we can muster from it is all the more precious for its evanescence, or for our own. This is not news. In his own golden age, Hadrian has the words humanitas, libertas, felicitas struck onto coin, as if to etch them in metal meant to keep them. Yourcenar herself inscribed these words for autograph-seekers bearing copies of her book.


Before his death, Hadrian chooses the word patientia for the motto embossed on new minted currency, a reminder that despite his agony and grief, “there is still much to be done.” Patientia, that ancestor from which descend our English words passion and patience. We need much of each just now, and to remember that their Latin root is suffering, as Marguerite Yourcenar and her Hadrian so well understood. ~

https://lithub.com/passion-and-patience-on-the-timeless-virtues-of-marguerite-yourcenars-hadrian/?fbclid=IwAR1ARb8LEMEvA1KVqy71GTS12GeT9swiovUt4FxxxzQAWqwXa6W4iDSIaTM


Hadrian: bronze head found in the Thames; the British Museum


*
“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” ~ Saul Bellow

Oriana:


But first, the reader (or viewer or listener) has to have achieved a state of attention rather than distraction. Or at least be prepared to pay attention, the way we get quiet after we enter a museum. 

*
IQ VERSUS PERSONALITY: WHAT DETERMINES SUCCESS?

~ How much is a child’s future success determined by innate intelligence? Economist James Heckman says it’s not what people think. He likes to ask educated non-scientists—especially politicians and policy makers—how much of the difference between people’s incomes can be tied to IQ. Most guess around 25 percent, even 50 percent, he says. But the data suggest a much smaller influence: about 1 or 2 percent. 


So if IQ is only a minor factor in success, what is it that separates the low earners from the high ones? Or, as the saying goes: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? 


Science doesn’t have a definitive answer, although luck certainly plays a role. But another key factor is personality, according to a paper Heckman co-authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He found financial success was correlated with conscientiousness, a personality trait marked by diligence, perseverance and self-discipline. 


To reach that conclusion, he and colleagues examined four different data sets, which, between them, included IQ scores, standardized test results, grades and personality assessments for thousands of people in the U.K., the U.S. and the Netherlands. Some of the data sets followed people over decades, tracking not just income but criminal records, body mass index and self-reported life satisfaction. 


The study found that grades and achievement-test results were markedly better predictors of adult success than raw IQ scores. That might seem surprising—after all, don’t they all measure the same thing? Not quite. Grades reflect not just intelligence but also what Heckman calls “non-cognitive skills,” such as perseverance, good study habits and the ability to collaborate—in other words, conscientiousness. To a lesser extent, the same is true of test scores. Personality counts. 


Heckman, who shared a Nobel Prize in 2000 and is founder of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Economics of Human Development, believes success hinges not just on innate ability but on skills that can be taught. His own research suggests childhood interventions can be helpful, and that conscientiousness is more malleable than IQ. Openness—a broad trait that includes curiosity—is also connected to test scores and grades. 


IQ still matters, of course. Someone with an IQ of 70 isn’t going to be able to do things that are easy for a person with an IQ of 190. But Heckman says many people fail to break into the job market because they lack skills that aren’t measured on intelligence tests. They don’t understand how to behave with courtesy in job interviews. They may show up late or fail to dress properly. Or on the job, they make it obvious they’ll do no more than the minimum, if that. 


John Eric Humphries, a co-author of the paper, says he hoped their work could help clarify the complicated, often misunderstood notion of ability. Even IQ tests, which were designed to assess innate problem-solving capabilities, appear to measure more than just smarts. In a 2011 study, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth found that IQ scores also reflected test-takers’ motivation and effort. Diligent, motivated kids will work harder to answer tough questions than equally intelligent but lazier ones. 


Teaching personality or character traits in school wouldn’t be easy. For one thing it’s not always clear whether more of a trait is always better. The higher the better for IQ, and perhaps for conscientiousness as well. But personality researchers have suggested the middle ground is best for other traits -- you don’t want to be so introverted that you can’t speak up, or so extroverted that you can’t shut up and listen. 


What does any of this have to do with economics? “Our ultimate goal is to improve human well-being,” Heckman says, and a major determinant of well-being comes down to skills. 


A newer study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior focused on the flip side of success: hardship. After following some 1,000 New Zealanders for more than 30 years, researchers concluded that tests of language, behavioral skills and cognitive abilities taken when children were just three years old could predict who was most likely to need welfare, commit crimes, or become chronically ill. 


The lead author of that paper, Duke University psychologist Terrie Moffitt, says she hopes the results would foster compassion and help, not stigma. Her results also suggested that helping people improve certain kinds of skills before they’re out of diapers would benefit everyone. 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/if-you-re-so-smart-why-aren-t-you-rich?utm_source=pocket-newtab 


*

PLANKTON: THE ENABLERS OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH


~ Plankton are responsible for 50% of earth’s oxygen. They are an essential part of the food chain. And billions of billions of ancient plankton have given their bodies to form the crude oil that powers modern society.

In the astonishing world of plankton, bright pink, micron-sized dinoflagellates looking like spaceships glide slowly over the surface of the sea; beautiful, flute-like tintinnids exchange genes temporarily with each other; and slender chaetognatha, or arrow worms, bristle with hairs and become cannibals as they gobble up their relatives.


These and a million other mostly microscopic planktonic species of viruses, microbes, larvae and eukaryotes are the largely invisible origins of life, the very bottom of the food chain and the enablers of all existence. Together, these tiny, single-cell life forms that drift on the upper layer of the oceans produce half our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather and serve as the base of the ocean food web.


Using different types of net [Tara Oceans Expeditions] collected and sequenced nearly a billion genetic barcodes and discovered, at depths of up to 1,000 meters, unknown worlds of viruses, bacteria, worms, gelatinous creatures and strange photosynthetic organisms. Many had never been seen before or even imagined and the Tara expeditions have transformed the study of our oceans.


Sardet’s book, called Plankton, merges science with art and illustrates what he calls “the irreplaceable beauty and diversity of planktonic life forms”, but it comes with a warning that the world’s oceans are being changed by climate change and acidification.

“Some data suggest phytoplankton have significantly declined in the world’s oceans over the past century,” he says. “On the other hand, some warm water predators such as jellyfish are thriving. Whether we are witnessing an actual global decline or massive changes in planktonic distribution will require more study. Certainly many species will be forced to adapt.


“We have modified the ecosystems by diminishing the big predators. No one knows if what man has done is reversible. We are closer to the start than to the end of what there is to know.” ~


http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/06/microscopic-magic-of-plankton


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CAN GARDENING HELP YOU LIVE TO ONE HUNDRED?
 
~ It is well-known that an outdoor lifestyle with moderate physical activity is linked to longer life, and gardening is an easy way to accomplish both. “If you garden, you’re getting some low-intensity physical activity most days, and you tend to work routinely,” says Buettner.


He says there is evidence that gardeners live longer and are less stressed. A variety of studies confirm this, pointing to both the physical and mental health benefits of gardening.


In recent Dutch study, researchers asked participants to complete a stressful task, then split them into two groups. One group read indoors and the other gardened outdoors for 30 minutes. The group that read reported that their mood “further deteriorated”, while the gardeners not only had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol afterwards, they also felt “fully restored” to a good mood.


Australian researchers following men and women in their 60s found that those who regularly gardened had a 36% lower risk of dementia than their non-gardening counterparts.


And preliminary studies among elderly people suffering from cognitive issues (such as dementia and Alzheimer’s) report benefits from garden settings and horticulture therapy. Sunlight and fresh air, for example, help agitated elders feel calmer, while the colors and textures of various plants and vegetables can improve visual and tactile ability.

Let nature nurture you


It’s not just about health effects, either: the social benefits of gardening can also increase longevity. Dr Bradley Willcox of the University of Hawaii studies centenarians in Okinawa, which has the world’s highest ratio of centenarians, at approximately 50 per 100,000 people. Many residents maintain small personal gardens well into old age.


He says that gardening helps with other essential, if somewhat more ephemeral, factors in increasing longevity. “In Okinawa, they say that anybody who grows old healthfully needs an ikigai, or reason for living. Gardening gives you that something to get up for every day.


On top of that, explains Willcox, Okinawans value the concept of yuimaru, or a high level of social connectedness. “Getting together at a local market, bringing your produce and sharing your latest creations from the garden is a big social activity,” he says. “That certainly helps people feel grounded and connected.”


A sense of connection to other people is important, but so too is the individual connection to nature. One Harvard University study showed that people who were surrounded by lush greenery lived longer, with a lower chance of developing cancer or respiratory illnesses.

 
Farming for a longer life?


If gardening is good, is farming even better? Many of the lifestyle factors associated with longevity – such as living in the country and getting lots of exercise – apply to farmers as well.


Some evidence suggests that farming is one of the healthiest occupations. One Australian study showed that farmers were a third less likely to suffer from a chronic illness, and 40% less likely to visit a GP than non-farm workers. Researchers from the US compared mortality rates among farmers against rates for the general population and found farmers less likely to die from cancer, heart diseases or diabetes. And studies in Sweden and France have also showed farmers are healthier than non-farmers.


Dr Masahiko Gemma of Waseda University in Tokyo studied self-employed farmers in the central province of Saitama, who were found to have a longer life expectancy that non-farmers and work later into life. Many of Gemma’s respondents were part-time farmers or retirees, and he describes many of their responsibilities as “similar to the work of maintaining a garden”.


“Small family farms are common in Japanese agriculture,” says Gemma, explaining that his survey did not include farmers working for large-scale corporate operations. He found that self-employed farmers enjoyed statistically significant and positive changes in psychological and physical conditions before and after engaging in light farming activities. “Our guess is that farming work contributes to the maintenance of good health and spirits,” he says. ~

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181210-gardening-could-be-the-hobby-that-helps-you-live-to-100?fbclid=IwAR2jZlxUkZN6IACL4D0ockNedyhTWqjsCnv3Uc8M8dNo83PQnIsQKmVQRJU&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com


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WHAT TO SAY IF CLOSE FAMILY WORRIES THAT YOU ARE GOING TO HELL


~ My mother said this to me and my reply was in this vein... What's lucky about your faith, mom, is that your god has promised you, -PROMISED- that there will be no suffering in Heaven. So you can be assured that if I go to hell and suffer the torment of fires for eternity, _you_won't_care_. God promised. It will either be as if I never existed and you will forget all about me OR perhaps you will find pleasure in my rightful torture. You can rest easy - it won't bother you a bit once you're in heaven. Says so right there in the book. So. Back to earth. How about that concert the kids sang in? Beautiful, wasn't it?


How did that work? Well, she has never asked me about it again. So I'd say it worked. ~


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I remember that it in Dante’s Inferno an angel or a saved soul can come down to hell on some errand, but is completely untouched by the suffering s/he sees. No distress at all.
By the way, I never had to deal with this. Those who appear to care for me don’t believe in hell, or else believe in god in some sense (e.g. as “the soul of the universe”), and assume that this god accepts everyone, and there is no reward or punishment in the afterlife.
Imagining a conversation with someone sophisticated I’d use the “state of mind” definition, and the non-existence of personal consciousness after death. But then the more sophisticated would not be talking about hell. 


Islamic hell, medieval Persian miniature. Muhammad on his visit in hell is being shown  “shameless women” who are being punished for having shown their hair to strangers.

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“WHEN A MAN SELLS HIS DAUGHTER AS A SLAVE,
 
she shall not be go out [be freed in the seventh year] as the male slaves do” ~ Exodus 21:7

I came across it and thought for the thousandth time how terrible it was to be a woman back then . . . and then immersed myself in other things. But the verse keeps haunting me. “When a man sells his daughter” — just that alone.

And there are parts of the world where this still goes on . . . and worse.

What pure luck, to have been born in the West this late in history.




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“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” ~ Frida Kahlo

 
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MOOD AND GUT BACTERIA

~ The study that ignited the whole concept [of bacteria affecting mood] took place at Kyushu University in Japan. 


The researchers showed that "germ-free" mice - those that never came into contact with microbes - pumped out twice the amount of stress hormone when distressed than normal mice. 


The animals were identical except for their microbes. It was a strong hint that the difference was a result of their micro-organisms. 


It was the first hint of microbial medicine in mental health.

The brain is the most complex object in the known universe so how could it be reacting to bacteria in the gut? 


One route is the vagus nerve; it's an information superhighway connecting the brain and the gut. 


Bacteria break down fiber in the diet into chemicals called short-chain fatty acids, which can have effects throughout the body.


The microbiome influences the immune system, which has also been implicated in brain disorders.


There is even emerging evidence that gut bugs could be using tiny strips of genetic code called microRNAs to alter how DNA works in nerve cells.


There is now a rich vein of research linking germ-free mice with changes in behavior and even the structure of the brain. 


At Cork University Hospital, Prof. Ted Dinan is trying to uncover what happens to the microbiome in his depressed patients. 


A good rule of thumb is a healthy microbiome is a diverse microbiome, containing a wide variety of different species living all over our bodies. 


Prof. Dinan says: "If you compare somebody who is clinically depressed with someone who is healthy, there is a narrowing in the diversity of the microbiota. 


"I'm not suggesting it is the sole cause of depression, but I do believe for many individuals it does play a role in the genesis of depression." 


And he argues some lifestyles that weaken our gut bacteria, such as a diet low in fiber, can make us more vulnerable. 


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You're more microbe than human - if you count all the cells in your body, only 43% are human.

The rest is our microbiome and includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and single-celled archaea.

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out at between two million and 20 million microbial genes,
 

The microbial genome known as the second genome and is linked to diseases including allergy, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's, whether cancer drugs work and even depression and autism.

It's an intriguing concept - that an imbalance in the gut microbiome could be involved in depression. 


So scientists at the APC Microbiome centre, at University College Cork, started transplanting the microbiome from depressed patients to animals. It's known in the biz as a trans-poo-sion. 


It showed that if you transfer the bacteria, you transfer the behavior too


Prof. John Cryan told the BBC: "We were very surprised that you could, by just taking microbiome samples, reproduce many of the features of a depressed individual in a rat."
This included anhedonia - the way depression can lead to people losing interest in what they normally find pleasurable. 


For the rats, that was sugary water they could not get enough of, yet "when they were given the microbiome from a depressed individual, they no longer cared", says Prof. Cryan. 


Similar evidence - linking the microbiome, the gut and the brain - is emerging in Parkinson's disease. 


It is clearly a brain disorder. Patients lose control over their muscles as brain cells die and it leads to a characteristic tremor. 


But Prof. Sarkis Mazmanian, a medical microbiologist from Caltech, is building the case that gut bacteria are involved. 


He has found "very powerful" differences between the microbiomes of people with Parkinson's and those without the disease. 


Studies in animals, genetically hardwired to develop Parkinson's, show gut bacteria were necessary for the disease to emerge. 


And when stool was transplanted from Parkinson's patients to those mice, they developed "much worse" symptoms than using feces sourced from a healthy individual. 


Prof. Mazmanian told the BBC: "The changes in the microbiome appear to be driving the motor symptoms, appear to be causal to the motor symptoms. 


"We're very excited about this because it allows us to target the microbiome as an avenue for new therapies." 


The evidence linking the microbiome and the brain is as fascinating as it is early.
But the pioneers of this field see an exciting prospect on the horizon - a whole new way of influencing our health and wellbeing. 


If microbes do influence our brains then maybe we can change our microbes for the better.
The microbiome - our second genome - is opening up an entirely new way of doing medicine and its role is being investigated in nearly every disease you can imagine including allergies, cancer and obesity. 


I've been struck by how malleable the second genome is and how that is in such stark contrast to our own DNA. 


The food we eat, the pets we have, the drugs we take, how we're born… all alter our microbial inhabitants


And if we're doing that unwittingly, imagine the potential of being able to change our microbiome for the better. 


Prof. Cryan said: “I predict in the next five years when you go to your doctor for your cholesterol testing etc, you'll also get your microbiome assessed. 


The microbiome is the fundamental future of personalized medicine.” 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-bacteria-are-changing-your-mood?utm_source=pocket-newtab


Mary:

From Hadrian to the microbiome the question seems to be — what is the self? Certainly more than our history, it must also be the process and development of thought, not only memory but how we frame and tell that story, our edits. Just as IQ is inadequate as predictor of success without including personality, motivation, background and family influence, most definitions of identity remain partial at best. Without considering all these, as well as habits and behavior, it would be a mystery why all Mensa members are not equally successful or even adequately so...and many are not.

The real stunner here is the connection between the microbiome and behavior, or what might be called personality. It is revolutionary to think that all those organisms that populate us, that we think of as present but "not me," are surprisingly very much part of the "me" we assume wholly our own. In some ways this is very disturbing, making us even more determined and less autonomous than we thought. The boundaries of identity expand and blur...eventually including questions like who's the boss...can the microbiome hijack us like some insect parasites, directing our behavior to serve ends not strictly our own? Fascinating and full of many possibilities for both medicine and psychology.

Oriana:

Well said. In an individualistic culture, it may be difficult to accept that anyone’s “self” is composed of lots of things not of our choosing. It’s bad enough that we have no control over our human genes, but now we find out we have to deal with some 20 million microbial genes!

However, we are not entirely powerless — we can eat a diet rich in fiber and fermented foods, and thus nourish the good bacteria. Still, we can’t quite reverse the diet we ate in childhood, or our mother’s prenatal diet. But to a limited extent, we can improve our microbiome and reap the rewards of better mood and more energy, as well as a better-regulated immune system, less inflammation (just lowering the inflammation lifts the mood), and various other benefits we are only beginning to explore).

I think of my good bacteria as my special pets, and I try to feed them well. Sauerkraut, kimchi, fiber-rich sweet potatoes — foods I didn’t use to eat, but now consume daily for the sake of my micro-darlings. And I can feel the benefits.



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FACIAL MASKS MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY TO STOP COVID INFECTION

~ A new study out in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that among all the strategies for reducing transmission, wearing face masks may be the central variable that determines the spread of the virus


“Our analysis reveals that the difference with and without mandated face covering represents the determinant in shaping the trends of the pandemic,” the team, from Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, California Institute of Technology, and the University of California San Diego, write in their new paper. 


They analyzed the various mitigation measures put in place in the three major centers of the outbreak—Wuhan, Italy, and New York City—from January 23 to May 9, 2020. The team also looked at the slopes of the curves representing the number of new cases, and how they changed after each measure was mandated. For instance, in NYC, the stay-at-home and social distancing orders didn’t do a lot: the curve really started to change after masks were mandatory. (See the figure below.) Compare that to the U.S. overall, which never put in place a face-covering policy. 


And in Wuhan, the response was not only swift, but multiple measures—namely, social distancing, lockdown, and face coverings—were put in place simultaneously. In the U.S., it was slower, and importantly, sequential, making it much less effective. “[T]he response to the pandemic was generally slow in the western world, and implementation of the intervention measures occurred only consecutively,” the authors write. “Clearly, the responsiveness of the mitigation measures governed the evolution, scope, and magnitude of the pandemic globally.”

The team also looked at how the virus, in droplets and aerosols, travels in the air; how fast it travels; the weather conditions in the respective geographic locations; the “dose” and effectiveness of how it infects the respiratory system; and other variables. "Our results clearly show that airborne transmission via respiratory aerosols represents the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19," said study author Renyi Zhang in a statement.

"Our study establishes very clearly that using a face mask is not only useful to prevent infected coughing droplets from reaching uninfected persons, but is also crucial for these uninfected persons to avoid breathing the minute atmospheric particles (aerosols) that infected people emit when talking and that can remain in the atmosphere tens of minutes and can travel tens of feet," said study author Mario Molina in a statement. 


Indeed, a study last month in the same journal showed that just talking loudly in a room released droplets that lingered in the air for eight to 14 minutes. The new study also echoes the update made by the CDC recently, stating that while transmission by infected surfaces (e.g., touching a doorknob that a sick person coughed on) was possible, it’s not the main route of infection—air is.


Interestingly, the team also calculated how many people were likely spared from infection by wearing face coverings. "By analyzing the pandemic trends without face-covering using the statistical method and by projecting the trend, we calculated that over 66,000 infections were prevented by using a face mask in little over a month in New York City,” said Zhang. In Italy the number was 78,000. “We conclude that wearing a face mask in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent inter-human transmission. This inexpensive practice, in conjunction with social distancing and other procedures, is the most likely opportunity to stop the COVID-19 pandemic."


As states continue to reopen and many see steady rises in infection rates, they should heed the message in the findings of studies like this one. 


Finally, the researchers make the important point that science must be the foundation upon which pandemic policy is based. It’s unfortunate that we live in a time where this point has to be made, and repeated, but here we are. They write that “sound science should be effectively communicated to policy makers and should constitute the prime foundation in decision-making amid this pandemic. Implementing policies without a scientific basis could lead to catastrophic consequences, particularly in light of attempts to reopen the economy in many countries.”


https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2020/06/13/face-masks-may-be-the-key-determinant-of-the-covid-19-curve-study-suggests/?fbclid=IwAR2CSXEcY6xmah5yoQluLCgVC4zOULVhx1zAjjqPd4BmRn7BtDX2PZsRiNM#1df2a8446497

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ending on beauty:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

~ Langston Hughes