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MORNING IN THE BURNED HOUSE
In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.
The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.
Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,
their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,
every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,
the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.
I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.
I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything
in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,
including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,
bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts
and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.
~ Margaret Atwood
[from Morning in the Burned House, Houghton Mifflin Co. (1995)]
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FIVE STORIES THAT TEACH YOU PHILOSOPHY
Writers have been incorporating philosophical ideas into stories since ancient Greece.
Many novels manage to incorporate or center around philosophical ideas and still be extremely readable.
These five stories offer readers insights into real philosophical problems and the struggles of the human condition.
Philosophy is a rewarding discipline to study. Actually reading philosophy? That can sometimes be a slog through scholastic drudgery. Some of Immanuel Kant’s works could be prescribed as a cure for insomnia, and Georg Hegel’s writing is so arcane that Bertrand Russell argued he deliberately obscured his meaning to hide the absurdity of his ideas.
If you want to dive into some philosophy but aren’t in the mood for its heavier tomes, you can find many excellent fiction stories that explore philosophical ideas in accessible and enjoyable ways. Here, we’ll explore five such stories, investigating ideas from alienation to metaphysics.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)
Ursula K. Le Guin was an American novelist who wrote primarily in the science fiction and fantasy genres. She is well known for the Earthsea series and the Hainish Cycle of novels. Her stories explore themes such as feminism, religion, political philosophy, and gender performativity. Never afraid to take a bold stance, she wrote of an anarchist utopia and a post-gender society while still finding the time to co-invent the solarpunk aesthetic. If you haven’t read her, you should. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story focusing entirely on a philosophical issue. Specifically, it presents a full-throated argument against utilitarianism.
The story begins in Omelas, a fantastically splendid city, on the summer solstice. It’s a day of joyous celebration, though it’s not much different from any other in the blissful utopia. Despite all the happiness, Omelas houses a dark secret — one its citizens only learn of when they come of age and which is the price the city must pay for its unrivaled splendor.
We won’t spoil the secret here except to say it involves the immense suffering of an innocent person. The last part of the story questions whether this tradeoff is acceptable, focusing on those who don’t believe it is: the ones who walk away.
The story is a rebuttal of utilitarianism, an ethical philosophy that encourages people to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In its classical form, as advanced by Jeremy Bentham, any form of pleasure is equal to any other (the same is true of pain). Sounds reasonable, but the outlook can lead to some uncomfortable thought experiments. For instance, would you kill one person and harvest their organs if it meant saving five people’s lives? Utilitarianism suggests you should do so since five lives are worth more than one. It’s simple math.
What about Omelas? The story’s narrator is unsure of the morality of what goes on. They do comment on the incredible sight of those who object. Is utopia worth the price? Can mass happiness outweigh pointless misery? Ask the ones who walk away.
As “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story — despite having once been published as a standalone book — you can read it in an evening
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1791)
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.
Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, is an 18th-century novel. It is considered one of the great classic Chinese novels, alongside Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Featuring dozens of major characters and hundreds of minor ones, Dream of the Red Chamber is justly praised for the psychological depth of its cast and the natural way they interact with each other and their world.
Written as the High Qing Era drew to a close, it depicts a sentient stone left out of heaven that learns about the world as it is carried by a Buddhist monk and Taoist priest. This frames an episodic dive into the lives of two great aristocratic houses in an unnamed Chinese capital. Typically described as a romance, much of the novel follows a love triangle, though it is also held in regard for its depiction of life during the Qing dynasty.
But while the novel enjoys great attention for its depiction of Chinese life at the time, it makes space to explore philosophical ideas across its hundreds of pages. The presence of a Buddhist and a Taoist at the beginning is no accident. An important theme in the story is the general decline of the Aristocratic Jia (賈) family from the heights of opulence to poverty and obscurity.
Both Buddhism and Taoism, two of the three great Chinese religions, encourage followers to look beyond the material. This point arises often in the story. The Jia family, whose surname is a homophone for “family” but which uses a character shared with “to do business,” frequently finds its members consumed by material and earthly matters.
In both religions, the source of suffering is the split between what we have and desire. In Buddhism, desire (better translated as “craving”) for material objects and certain mental states is one of the root causes of suffering. The Eightfold Path of Buddhism seeks to provide a way to extinguish craving and, with it, suffering. In Taoism, detachment from desire is encouraged alongside Wu wei, effortless action in line with the Tao. While less clear-cut regarding ethical advice, it still suggests more reflection and less chasing of wealth.
If the Jia family had followed this advice — or rather, if more of them had — things might have turned out better for everyone. Of course, they might never have had a chance living in a dynasty whose name is a homophone for “情,” (desire, affection, emotions, and sentiments).
Due to the age of the text, many early English translations are freely available.
Candide: Or, Optimism by Voltaire (1759)
If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others?
François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment philosopher. His vast bibliography includes numerous letters, pamphlets, plays, and novels. One of the funniest is certainly Candide: or, the Optimist. Imagine if the Monty Python trope were one French guy writing in the 18th century, and you’ll have a sense of Voltaire’s humor.
The story follows the life of Candide, the illegitimate son of a Germanic Baron who is said to have a simple mind and a face to match. His father’s castle hosts a professor of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology” who supports the Leibnizian notion that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.
” The remainder of the episodic novel details the misadventures of the cast as they endure proof after proof that this cannot possibly be the best world. The cavalcade of misfortune includes an unexpected run-in with the Portuguese Inquisition, a wretched stint in South America, plagues, war, slavery, natural disaster, a stop-off in England, and other nightmares. By the end, the title character is utterly disillusioned and content to “cultivate their garden.”
If it isn’t apparent, Candide is a dress-down of Leibniz’s optimism. Leibniz, a German polymath of the late 17th century, argued that because God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, He would create the ideal world — after all, He would know if there was a better option and would have the motivation and capacity to create that one instead. This optimism disgusted Voltaire, as it trivialized the immense suffering in the world as the least amount logically possible.
Indeed, as the novel goes on, Leibniz is not only directly referenced but blasted for being full of it. Many of the evils experienced in the book were very real, including the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that killed 50,000 people.
Several public domain translations are available, and Leonard Bernstein also composed an opera adaptation.
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o’clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.”
Franz Kafka was a Jewish Austrian-Czech author writing in Prague at the turn of the 20th century. While working at several dull white-collar jobs, he began writing as a hobby. His novels and short stories explore themes of alienation, absurdity, guilt, and the madness of modern bureaucracy. While we’ll focus on The Trial here, much of what follows also applies to the rest of his bibliography.
The Trial follows Joseph K, a man who is arrested one morning for reasons never made clear to him. His attempts to follow the byzantine rules of the legal system alternatively benefit or harm his case with little rhyme or reason. He is told to attend court sessions without being told when or where and blamed for being late. His relationships with his family, his lovers, and his coworkers are all affected by his case in ways that confuse everyone involved. All the while, the strange world around him rolls on.
Kafka’s works have been favorites of philosophers, particularly since his post-war popularity boom. Simone de Beauvoir references him directly in The Second Sex. His treatment of alienation has been the subject of great debate, particularly among Marxists.
Fittingly, there is a film version by Orson Wells that may or may not have a copyright. It masterfully combines the themes of the novel with additional subtext concerning repressed sexuality. We could tell you exactly where to find a copy of the book or the film, but to help you understand what it feels like to be a character in a Kafka novel, we won’t.
Solaris by Stanisław Lem (1961)
Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.
Stanisław Lem was a 20th-century Polish author. In the 1970s, he was one of the world’s most widely read science fiction authors, but he also found time to write philosophical essays. His novels address serious philosophical issues, too, including problems of mind, communication, and the human condition in a vast cosmos. Solaris is his best-known work.
The 1961 novel follows a group of astronauts trying to communicate with the planet Solaris. The planet appears to be entirely covered in a living plasma. Yet, despite a century of trying, researchers still don’t know if the life form is sentient and, if so, whether it can be communicated with or has any genuine interest in talking.
The novel begins when a new scientist, Kris Kelvin, arrives at the space station orbiting the planet, only to find one other scientist dead and the other two acting strangely. The arrival of something that looks and acts like Kelvin’s late girlfriend complicates matters. Eventually, it becomes clear that the planet is trying to communicate with them by creating images from the scientists’ minds, but whether the planet understands what it is doing and what it might be trying to say is unresolved.
Setting aside the familiar trope of trying to understand aliens, the problem of other minds — that is, the issue of whether there are other minds and how somebody could know that — is a sticky one in philosophy. Rene Descartes asked it back in the 17th century. If we still have trouble determining if other human beings have minds (or if they only act like they do), how could we determine if alien lifeforms have them?
Lem addresses this problem head-on. The alien doesn’t look like it’s alive, doesn’t think in a way humans can comprehend, and may or may not be aware of the effects its actions have on the human characters. The story’s point is that we can’t know what’s on its mind, even if it has one. The implications of this for humanity, science, and the universe are considered in the story. In fact, Solaris is so alien that, despite being the title character, most book reviews don’t list it as one.
This book was translated into English recently enough to still be under copyright. We recommend trying the 2011 translation, as did Lem’s family. There are also two film versions (the 1972 one is better), a television play, several stage productions, and four operas based on the novel.
In 2019, Poland named the star BD+14 4559 “Solaris” in honor of the novel. No word from it yet.
https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/5-stories-that-teach-you-philosophy/
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WHERE DID EARTH’S WATER COME FROM?
Here's a conundrum that has captivated scientists: when Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, our planet was essentially a ball of molten rock. Any water that might have been present during the planet's formation would surely have boiled away immediately. Yet today, water covers about 70% of Earth's surface.
So where did all this water come from? And more intriguingly, when did it arrive? The early earth was not a water-friendly place — a hellscape of molten rock, volcanic eruptions and constant bombardments from comets and asteroids, with high levels of solar radiation. These conditions would have evaporated the water. And according to Professor Richard Greenwood at Open University, our earth’s molten iron core would have been a ball of rust if there had been water in the proto-earth mix.
At the Natural History Museum in London, Professor Sara Russell has been comparing the isotopic "fingerprint" of Earth's water with water found in the asteroid Bennu, captured and brought back by the recent Osiris Rex NASA mission. It’s a good match for earth’s water, but could it really be the answer to our question?
https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct6ssw
For more, I went to AI:
~ Earth's water most likely originated from a combination of sources, including icy planetesimals that accreted with the planet during its formation, and the impact of water-rich asteroids and comets. Additionally, interactions between hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans during Earth's early stages may have also contributed to the planet's water supply.
Leading theories:
Icy Planetesimals:
As the Earth formed, it accumulated material from the protoplanetary disk, including icy planetesimals. These icy bodies contained water ice, which became part of the Earth's building blocks.
Asteroids and Comet Impacts
Later in Earth's history, impacts from asteroids and comets, particularly those originating from the outer solar system, delivered significant amounts of water to the planet.
Mantle Degassing:
Water molecules can also be created within the Earth through chemical reactions involving hydrogen and oxygen in the mantle. This process, known as mantle degassing, releases water into the atmosphere and oceans
Like the meteorites, rocks in the mantle also contain a lot of oxygen bound up with minerals, which can be liberated under certain circumstances, and combine with the hydrogen to form actual water — H20.
This happens in magma, molten rock containing dissolved water that rises from the mantle to the surface in volcanoes.
As the pressure falls, the water vaporizes and explodes into the atmosphere as steam, and later condenses, falling back to Earth to fill our rivers and oceans.
Much of what comes out of volcanoes is water vapor
Early Earth Atmosphere:
Recent research suggests that interactions between hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans during Earth's early stages may have also contributed to water formation
While the exact proportions contributed by each source are still being researched, it's likely that a combination of these processes led to Earth's abundant water supply.
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HENRYK GRYNBERG: ANTI-ZIONISM IS ANTI-SEMITISM
THEW NEW YORK TIMES REFUSED TO PRINT A REBUTTAL by Vlad Khaykin’s (EVP of Social Impact and Partnerships, North America) to Masha Gessen’s misleading opinion about antisemitism entitled "We Need a New Understanding of Antisemitism.” Here are excerpts from his response:
~ We need a new understanding of antisemitism, but we need one grounded in the blood-streaked experience of Jews who have borne the consequences of antisemitism parading as anti-Zionism. What does it mean, after all, to define antisemitism as "animus against Jews as Jews," as Gessen suggests? Most modern antisemites see Jews as orchestrating the world's woes—a malignant cabal behind all manner of ills. They hate the villainous caricatures they've constructed of Jews.
Since October 7, Jewish students have barricaded themselves in campus halls while mobs outside bellow for intifada—a call to violence. Synagogues and Jewish businesses have been defaced with "Death to Israel" graffiti. Rallies bristle with placards likening Zionists to Nazis and chants to "gas the Jews." Holocaust survivors are spat on in the street [and mistreated by institutions – HG].
Henryk Grynberg
Gessen even casts doubt on the antisemitic motivation behind recent murders of Jews, speculating—without a shred of evidence—that the killer of two young Jews in DC targeted them solely as Israeli embassy employees, not as Jews exiting a Jewish event at a Jewish Museum. Her fellow travelers keep asking if anti-Zionism is really antisemitism while Jews who speak up are derided for "pulling the antisemitism card" — a claim that Jews cynically deploy accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism. The slur is as old as antisemitism. It invokes centuries-old characterizations of Jews as deceivers and manipulators.
Gessen also props up this strawman: that Jews conflate every criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Let it be repeated once more: denying Israel's very right to exist—the essential creed of anti-Zionism—is most certainly antisemitism. It denies Jews the only reliable means of refuge, rescue, and self-defense in a world beset by genocidal antisemitism. Anti-Zionism metastasizes into anti-Jewish violence and purges wherever it takes hold.
Gessen invokes Stalin to argue against recognizing anti-Zionism as antisemitism, when it was Stalin's own regime that created the very template recasting Jewish national aspirations as imperialism, portraying Zionists as global conspirators, denying Jewish peoplehood. The USSR enshrined conspiratorial, demonological anti-Zionism as state dogma, exported worldwide like ideological contraband. Moscow even assembled the Anti-Zionist Committee staffed with decorated Jewish veterans and literary figures, to lend a kosher seal to this antisemitic propaganda.
These Soviet ideas seeded themselves in Western intellectual circles, where they continue to echo today on college campuses, in activist slogans, and in popular discourse. Gessen, a Jew who fled the Soviet Union, has admirably made a career unmasking Putin's despotism and yet is blind to how the very methods they rightly condemn in Putin's Russia were perfected by the Soviet anti-Zionist machine of which Putin himself was once an eager apparatchik.
Ask the vanished Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus. Jews of every background—Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Bukharian, and beyond—have borne the brunt of anti-Zionism's violent consequences. Before 1948, Baghdad was over a quarter Jewish—today, the community is a ghost. Egypt's 75,000 Jews have dwindled to a handful of souls. The same macabre story unfolds wherever anti-Zionism has triumphed, from Poland to Syria to Tunisia to the Soviet Union: harassment, dispossession, and sanctioned terror. So yes, we do need a new understanding of antisemitism — one that recognizes anti-Zionism as the engine of discrimination, disenfranchisement, dispossession, displacement, and violence against Jews it has always been, including today.
And the encouraging news, inconvenient though it may be for Gessen, is that according to recent American Jewish Committee survey 85% of American Jews believe saying "Israel has no right to exist" is antisemitic and 85% of Americans concur. Millions of Jews have lived the grim reality of anti-Zionism in practice. (Facebook, July 9, 2025)
Masha Gessen
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BYE-BYE OLIGARCH
Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoyt has been found shot dead by “suicide” in the Moscow region at his home in Odintsovo, Mordor.
Unclear if his dismissal was related.
Guess what? No windows, no novichok. This time.
Tragic. What a shame. Oh well, anyway, never mind.
~ Frances Neil, Quora
Oriana:
Apparently Putin has ordered a new wave of purges. Indeed, there’s something rotten in the state of Russia, and has been since the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
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AN APARTMENT WHOSE TENANT FEELS VERY LUCKY TO HAVE IT
An apartment in St Petersburg
This is an 8-square meter apartment in St Petersburg, second largest city in Russia and home to the ever expanding headquarters of bankrupt Gazprom, gas giant dubbed “national treasure.” It features everything a typical multi-children family practicing conservative values needs: shower, microwave, toilet, shower, bed.
In the meantime, a thousand soldiers die and get wounded in the steppes of Ukraine every day to expand territory of Russia to build more super-tiny apartments within 0.00001% of its territory.
Question: If you were a natural resources rich region within Russia would you care to break away from the greedy and inept central authorities who can’t even satisfy minimum requirement of providing citizens with dignified housing?
Back to St Petersburg, there’s yet another day of complete and full collapse in the Pulkovo Airport. Operation “carpet” was announced when inbound drones were detected.
Hundreds of flights have been canceled, millions in losses for the airlines only for the next day to repeat the whole disaster once again just because the tsar wants to play war games.
Several airports have been shut down in the south completely paralyzing transportation, with trains getting regularly derailed. The two lane expressways without guardrails and lighting is the only mode of transportation left in Russia.
Geniuses in the parliament has come up with language requirements for labor migrants from central Asian countries.
The migrants now cannot pass mandatory exams to register for seasonal work and decided to go en masse to the United Emirates where they are required to work rather than speak Arabic to the employers.
Consequently, there is no one to harvest apples and berries in Russia. Raspberries and strawberry harvest is not being picked, and farms in the absence of labor force can only “harvest it little by little for retail deliveries” due to a labor shortage.
Government statistics agency has classified demographics data as of spring. Nobody knows how many children are born every year. Most likely very few as nobody wants to live in the ever expanding country without housing, without airports, without labor force and without money. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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STILL ABOUT THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
A Cold War exhibit in Culver City, California, featuring many shoddy artifacts produced by Soviet and Eastern European consumer manufacturing sectors.
There is some irony bound up in this fact, because Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, perceived his paramount concern as preserving “socialism in one country” rather than the Soviet Union functioning solely as a springboard of global revolution.
Indeed, this even involved Stalin's working with Western powers, notably the largest and most powerful industrial country in the world, the United States, to ensure the survival of the Soviet experiment.
To add a further layer of irony to all of this, Stalin formulated the view that socialism would succeed in the Soviet Union only by summoning the resolve to subject every aspect of the economy to central planning, essentially constructing the socialist economy on the basis of a blueprint.
There would be no more temporizing with capitalism — no more reliance on free markets to preserve a minimal standard of living and to bolster Soviet morale in the midst of building a socialist society. The country would embark on a full-throttled advance to socialism, which would require the brutal suppression of dissent and the deliberate starving out of the farming sector to create an economy of scale to ensure the rapid industrialization of urban centers.
Remarkably, this approach was extolled by many western intellectuals who had visited the Soviet Union in the 1930's and who believed that they were witnessing the implementation of a model that could be emulated by developing nations throughout the world.
The Soviet contribution to Allied victory in World War II only served to enhance Stalin's reputation and that of his model, at least, among some Western intellectuals and developing world revolutionaries. They perceived Soviet-style central planning as a means of rapid industrialization and a basis for building a solid, durable sense of national identity.
Stalin's cowed and considerably siloed post-war successors embraced the goal of exporting their model to other countries, partly with the intention of enhancing Soviet prestige vis-à-vis the West, particularly in the United States, in the midst of the Cold War. In a real sense, this undertaking was not all that different from manic Soviet efforts to build a nuclear arms complex and to send manned capsules into orbit.
All of it was part of in the developing world.an effort to present the Soviet Union not just as a military superpower but also as a rising economic behemoth whose central planning model would overtake the West, while winning over adherents
Yet, this post-war strategy would never have passed muster under Stalin. Out of a sense of desperation, he improvised a brutal system of command and control to preserve socialism in its cradle. What emerged out of this was a power well equipped to preserve the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. Aside from that, though, it remained a Third World nation.
Stalin was far better apprized of the West's power and resilience, likely far less confident of the Soviet model’s applicability to developing world conditions.
From the beginning, the Soviet central planning model was beset with all manner of inefficiency, and by the 1980's this was becoming increasingly apparent to Western observers. This was not only apparent in the Soviet Union but also in the Soviet Eastern European countries on which the Soviet Union imposed its economic model after the Second World War War. Many political elites in those countries had effectively thrown in the towel and continued to cooperate with the Soviet Union only out of necessity.
For late baby boomers such as me, the collapse of the Soviet Union really was a spectacle. Throughout our childhoods, we operated on the premise that the Soviet Union really was capable of overtaking the United States on the basis of global economic competition, particularly through exporting its central planning model to the developing world.
The collapse of the United States’ effort in Vietnam in 1975 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 only reinforced these fears.
In the end, though, the Soviet Union and its central planning model was exposed for what it was: a rather cleverly contrived ruse — rusting, obsolete industrial machinery disguised by several layers of paint. ~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
Jackie M:
I remember left wing commentators in the late 70’s and early 80’s saying events made it clear the USSR was rapidly catching up to, and would soon surpass, the West, and we needed to accommodate (appease) the Soviets while we were still on a sort of equal playing field.
Ten years later, these same commentators were pointing out what a house of cards the USSR turned out to be, and what a waste of resources it had been engaging them in an arms race.
The fact that the house of cards was exposed BECAUSE the West, under Reagan and Thatcher, said, “You want an arms race? Fine, let’s race”, never seemed to sink in.
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GUEST, HOST, GHOST by Timothy Snyder
It had rained. As the September day evened into night the surface of the cobblestones glistened with the remnant sunlight. I had been working in hotel rooms and bomb shelters and was glad for the downhill walk, but glad also that it was short: curfew brings a second nightfall, manmade by the proximate authorities who want to keep you alive, and by the distant ones who want you dead.
I rang the bell at the unmarked door, and creaking floorboards invited me into a home. My hostess's work is to explain war, and I had met her once before; and I have seen her since that evening, on an island in the Baltic Sea. There she was wearing a necklace with hammerlets of Thor, as people did in eastern Europe a thousand years ago: "it makes me feel stronger."
Ours is not a hospitality culture, and I feel awkwardly in debt to friends who have made me feel at home in other countries, who exemplify internalized generosity regardless of the external situation. During this war, when Ukrainian friends have come to visit, they invariably bring a gift for my children: something they took trouble with, carried with them on the long overnight train ride to Poland (no flights in Ukraine, remember), and then on whatever other journeys brought them into my house.
I will call him Serhyi, since that was his name. He had been on active duty since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. He had been in the Donetsk airport and in Debaltsevo, two of the most desperate battles of that initial stage of the war. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, he had led special operations, including rescue missions. My host asked him to answer my questions. Serhyi spoke matter-of-factly, in an even tone, about acts of stunning physical courage, about the center of the largest war the world has seen since 1945. He was modest. He was doing the things he had to do, and that night one of those things was to talk to me.
Serhyi was killed a week ago, reportedly by a Russian missile strike. Russia's war on Ukraine is based on the lie that Ukrainians are not a people. And so much of it is fought from a distance, by missiles launched from a position of malevolent safety. As a soldier Serhyi had the courage to put his own life at risk in the closest of quarters. It is terrible that this war must be fought at all. It is terrible that he and so many others have been killed. But there is a special evil in the ballistic complicity of distance from death and lying about life.
Serhyi was married and had children. He had comrades and friends. This is their loss. He had a country that he served. This is Ukraine's loss. In another sense, though, his death is a loss for those of us who do not notice. By resisting, Ukrainians have helped to make the world safer. They have held off a larger war in Europe. They have deterred China from adventures in the Pacific. They have made it less likely that other countries will develop nuclear weapons. They have defended what remains of a world order based upon law.
Honor is a mystery, touching on hospitality. Ukrainians have made a strange world more familiar, a threatening world less dangerous. They don't speak much about this, though, any more than a host or hostess demands a return invitation. The gift is there, for us to acknowledge. I fear that what we do is to take the efforts of others for granted. Or, worse, we acknowledge them only in scorn, in a dismissal of others' courage meant to make us feel less cowardly. Too often Americans want to be thanked for showing up, even when we do not, in fact, show up.
I don't mean to say that no American is doing anything in Ukraine. Americans have fought. Americans have reported. When I was at the front in Kharkiv oblast I saw an American flag left as a token of friendship; when I was in Kherson oblast visiting farms on de-occupied land I saw combine harvesters funded by American donors. Thousands of you have contributed to campaigns to fund drone detection, mine removal, and armored evacuation vehicles.
Americans have the power to ensure that Ukraine wins this war. The policies involved would incur no meaningful cost to us, would save hundreds of thousands of lives, and would be very much to our own benefit, on any account of our own security. Simple measures could ensure that the geopolitical generosity of Ukrainians, the security gains provided by their resistance, could endure. This would be sensible, and it would be honorable. But it takes some courage to acknowledge the greater courage of others. To help others we must acknowledge that they have helped us, and it is there, on that slippery surface of reciprocity, that we fall down.
I left that dinner party just at curfew, hurrying back uphill on cobblestones, now dark as well as wet. This was an earlier stage in the war, when Americans were doing less than we should, but far more than we are doing now. The stakes of the war have not changed: they have only grown greater. Its character remains the same: Russia can only win if we allow it to win. Now Russian leaders see us now as the people who are doing so.
Russia bears the blame for this war, the premise of which is the denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and nationhood. As we join in that dismissal, however, we begin to share that responsibility. When we do not acknowledge the courage of the living and the dead, we wrong others, and put ourselves in danger, and not just in the physical sense. The underlying hazard is moral: the virtue we ignore in others we cannot embody ourselves.
Guest, host, ghost. It is too easy, more than three years into this terrible war, to call to mind dinner parties, academic conferences, weddings, where memory folds and unfolds to admit a shadow, because someone who was there, and who should still be with us, has been killed. A poet I read, I will call him Maksym because that was his name, is his name, will always have been his name, said that "when they ask me what war is, I will answer: names." Death is a mystery, touching on hospitality, and on honor.
~ Timothy Snyder from "Thinking about..." <snyder@substack.com>
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WHY MEMENTO MORI IS THE ULTIMATE LIFE HACK
A mid-flight scare reveals how embracing death can bring purpose and meaning to everyday life.
Confronting our mortality can help clarify what truly matters beyond superficial achievements.
Memento mori, a reminder that you will die, can motivate us to live more fully.
A memento mori practice can include writing your eulogy, imagining your 90-year-old self’s best life, and considering life from a cosmic perspective.
~ The plane lurched violently upward.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re making an emergency climb due to traffic in our flight path.” In other words: There’s a plane where it’s not supposed to be, so we’re getting the hell out of here.
The captain’s voice was steady, but the g-forces pressing me into my seat and the fast climb told a different story. It was the kind of airplane experience where your mind races to conclusions you’d rather not reach.
As turbulence shook the cabin, I noticed something strange happening in my body. While others gripped armrests and exchanged terrified glances, I found myself focusing on my breath to see how low I could bring my heart rate. Like a psychopath.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four.
Facing the possibility of death, I needed to know: Am I ready?
My grandfather used to say, “Make sure to have your bags packed.” Not to literally have your luggage by the door, but to be ready to leave life without regrets, unfinished business, and words left unsaid.
As Flight 447 to Orlando climbed through that storm, I did my check: Am I good with all my people?
The answer surprised me. Despite all my achievement-chasing and productivity-hacking, despite the endless striving I’ve documented in these pages…I was good. I’d added warmth, humor, and joy to the lives I’d touched. My relationships were in a good spot. The world was, perhaps, a slightly brighter place for my existence.
It honestly wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it was a grounding one. A few minutes later, the plane leveled off. Thirty minutes later, we were safely on the ground in Orlando.
But something had shifted. The rest of that trip felt clearer, less anxious, and more grounded. The obnoxious emails waiting in my inbox had lost their sting. The “urgent” meeting that wasn’t really urgent revealed itself to be something not worth spending any additional energy on.
Death, it turns out, is an excellent BS detector, and we could be thinking about it way more often in our daily lives.
The ancient practice modern high-achievers need most
Memento mori, which literally means “remember you will die,” sounds like the kind of thing that would send modern optimizers running for longevity protocols (such as infrared light, collagen, and definitely some kind of algae) and the promise of immortality. But as Tim Ferriss observed:
“I think about death all the time and it’s not a morbid, sullen exercise for me … I find it to be, and this might sound strange, but greatly encouraging because it drives a sense of urgency, or at least time sensitivity, to a lot of my decisions.”
He goes on to describe looking at stars and contemplating that the light hitting your eye might be from a star that no longer exists. That realization isn’t an excuse for nihilism; it instead provides perspective, clarifies, and empowers. Suddenly, that workplace drama or Twitter beef reveals itself as the cosmic irrelevance it always was. “It’s all dust,” Ferriss said. “Nobody gives a fuck.”
Ryan Holiday put it even more directly in his exploration of Stoic practices: “Meditating on your mortality is only depressing if you miss the point. It is in fact a tool to create priority and meaning.”
The ancients knew this. Emperor Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
But here’s what Ferriss, Holiday, and the Stoics are really pointing to, and what that moment on Flight 447 made visceral for me: Death isn’t the enemy. It’s the life coach you desperately need but never, ever, ever wanted to hire.
Befriending your mortality
Ernst Becker won a Pulitzer for The Denial of Death by arguing that human civilization is essentially an elaborate defense mechanism against our awareness of our own mortality. We build monuments, chase achievements, create legacies to somehow convince ourselves we’ll find a way to overcome the one thing guaranteed by our biology.
This denial drives what Becker calls our “immortality projects,” the ways we try to ensure that our existence will echo beyond our inevitable end.
For me, it was the 4.0 GPA, the PhD, the six-figure consulting gig. For you, it might be the IPO, the bestseller, the perfect family photo that gets 500 likes. We’re all running toward some imagined future, achievement, or trophy that grants us immunity from dying. We’re scrambling to find the thing, and we’re scrambling to get the thing, and we’re scrambling to hold onto it forever.
We don’t have to do that. This shift from seeing death as the enemy to recognizing it as a clarifying force has been gradual for me: years of Stoic practice, meditation, and simply observing life unfold around me. People in my life dying, some way too soon. People diagnosed with long-term illnesses. These are consistent, regular reminders that life is a finite, non-renewable resource.
The irony is that befriending death doesn’t make life feel shorter or scarier. It makes it feel more vivid, more precious, more worth living authentically rather than performatively.
When you truly internalize that you could leave life right now — not as some abstract philosophy but as lived reality — several things happen:
Your real values emerge from the noise. Suddenly, being seen as successful matters less than actually connecting with people you love.
Fake urgencies reveal themselves. That ASAP email? Unless someone’s actually dying, it can wait.
Your tolerance for BS approaches zero. Life’s too short for meetings that should have been emails or relationships that drain more than they give.
What actually matters becomes blindingly clear. Hint: It’s usually much simpler than your brain wants to believe.
The "90-year-old" test
Here’s an exercise I give to every coaching client as we start our work together. It never fails to cut through the complexity we create around our lives:
Close your eyes. Fast-forward to age 90. It’s a Tuesday, and you’re sitting on a porch (because apparently all 90-year-olds have moved south and have porches in our imagination). What’s true about the best version of this moment?
When I do this exercise, the picture that emerges is remarkably simple:
I’m healthy enough to move around and be active.
I’m surrounded by people and family I love.
I’m still sharp enough to write, teach, and serve others.
That’s it. That’s the whole list.
Notice what’s not there? The size of my bank account. The prestige of my job title, the number of LinkedIn followers, whether I ever gave a TED talk. None of it makes the cut when you’re staring down the barrel of your own mortality.
This isn’t about having low ambitions — it’s about having accurate ambitions. When you know how your story ends, you can work backward to figure out what actually matters now.
The 90-year-old test is where I start my values work because it’s the only perspective that can’t be fooled by short-term thinking or social pressure. Your 90-year-old self doesn’t care about inbox zero or Q3 targets. They care about whether you were present for the people who mattered. They care about doing work you find meaningful. And they care about not dying with a life unlived.
Practical memento mori
Here are a few more concrete practices that bring death’s clarity into daily life:
Write your own eulogy. Many people have heard of this, but I recommend writing two versions: Write the eulogy for if you died today, and then write the one for if you lived a life aligned with what truly matters to you. The gap between them is the work for you to do and the places for you to focus.
The deathbed story filter. Before any major decision, ask: “On my deathbed, will I regret not doing this, or will I regret the things I sacrificed to do it? What’s the story I wish to be able to tell about this when I’m dying?” This question has helped me see through superficial achievement traps and, on the other side, has helped me choose the short-term painful thing that benefits me in the long term.
Study the stars and get outside. Adapting Ferriss’s advice, go outside at night and look up. Find a star. Consider that its light traveled years to reach you, meaning the star itself might already be gone. Find ways to be in grand scenes in nature. Find places that bring you awe. Let that cosmic perspective shrink your problems to their actual size.
Here’s what nobody tells you about memento mori: It’s the ultimate productivity system. Not productivity in the mercenary sense of cramming more into less time. But productivity in the truest sense: producing what matters, eliminating what doesn’t.
When you truly grasp your mortality:
You stop procrastinating essential conversations.
You quit optimizing systems that optimize nothing meaningful.
You delegate or delete those many trivial tasks to focus on the vital few.
You stop trading time for money once you have “enough.”
You start creating things that might outlive you in valuable ways.
After that flight to Orlando, I noticed immediate changes. Emails that would have sent me into an hour-long response spiral got two sentences or silence. Arguments that would have escalated got met with a, “You might be right” or “This isn’t worth our energy.”
I began to understand what Becker was really saying: We’re all going to die, and no amount of achievement can change that. Instead of this being depressing, I found it liberating.
But the biggest shift? I started prioritizing shared meals with loved ones as if they were board meetings with God because, from the perspective of mortality, they basically are.
When you stop trying to outrun death through achievement, you can start using your limited time to contribute something meaningful. The question shifts from “How can I matter forever?” (an absurd exercise likely to lead to shallow, inauthentic answers) to “How can I matter right now?” (a powerful question for finding compassionate action to make the world a little bit better around you, in this moment).
Admittedly, this embrace feels weird. But death is the feature of our existence that makes life meaningful. Without scarcity, there’s no value. Without endings, there’s no urgency to begin. And without mortality, there’s no reason to choose what matters over what’s merely urgent.
So I’ll ask you what I asked myself on that turbulent flight: Are you ready? Are you good with your people? Have you said what needs saying, done what needs doing, loved who needs loving?If not, what are you waiting for?
Death is waiting to help you figure out what actually matters. All you have to do is listen.
https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/memento-mori-life-hack/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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STOIC MAXIMS
1. Don’t fear death—fear never truly living at all.
2. Imagine your life has already ended. What remains is a bonus—make it count.
3. You control your thoughts, not the world around you. That’s where your real power lies.
4. Most of what we hear is just opinion. Most of what we see is shaped by perception—not absolute truth.
5. Obstacles aren’t roadblocks—they’re part of the path. What’s in the way is the way.
6. Don’t debate what it means to be a good person—just be one.
7. Live like time is short—because it is. Death is close, so while you’re alive, live with virtue.
8. Your thoughts shape your reality. Guard them well, because your happiness depends on them.
9. Stop longing for what you lack. Instead, recognize and appreciate the best of what you already have.
10.
If something outside of you causes distress, it's your interpretation
that creates the pain—change your perspective, and you change your
experience.
11. True revenge is refusing to become like those who wrong you.
12. Hold yourself to a high standard, but be compassionate with others.
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WILL NINETY BECOME THE NEW SIXTY?
Immortality: Trust us, you wouldn’t like it.
It’s a comforting message, in a sour-grapes sort of way. It sounds wise and mature, suggesting that we put aside childish dreams and accept once and for all that there can be no vital Veg-O-Matic that slices mortality and dices infirmity. Gerontologists like it, being particularly eager to put on a respectable front and escape the whiff of snake oil that clings to the field of life extension.
Rembrandt: Old Man
In 1946 the newly founded Gerontological Society of America cited, in the first article of the first issue of its Journal of Gerontology, the need to concern ourselves to add “not more years to life, but more life to years.” The dictum was famously sharpened 15 years later by Robert Kennedy when he told the delegates at the first White House Conference on Aging “We have added years to life; it is time to think about how we add life to years.”
Political theorist and futurist Francis Fukuyama was particularly eloquent but hardly alone when he warned two decades ago that if we maintain our obsession with extending life at all costs, society may “increasingly come to resemble a giant nursing home.”
Around the same time noted aging researchers S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes wrote in ominous tones that we were treading into the realm of “manufactured survival time,” warning that “this success has been accompanied by a rise in frailty and disability in the general population. This is a consequence that neither the medical community nor society was prepared for.”
A celebrated article by epidemiologist E.M. Gruenberg in 1977 bemoaned the “failures of success”: “at the same time that persons suffering from chronic diseases are getting an extension of life, they are also getting an extension of disease and disability.”
This message is particularly dire if lifespans rise over extended periods of time—which they have done. In 1936 Louis Dublin, the chief actuary of Metropolitan Life teamed up with the esteemed mathematical demographer Alfred Lotka, to calculate the maximum life expectancy theoretically possible. They came up with a limit of 69.93 years. This limit was exceeded by women in Iceland five years later, by American women in 1949, and by American men in 1979.
Life expectancies have been increasing at a steady rate of 3 months per year for the past 175 years, and on average, expert calculations of the maximum possible human lifespan have been exceeded an average of five years after being made. In some cases, they had already been overtaken by events somewhere in the world at the time they were issued.
But what if long lifespans don’t necessarily mean more years of disability? At the turn of the present century George C. Williams, celebrated evolutionary theorist of aging, attacked what he termed the “Tithonus error.” Tithonus, son of a nymph, lover of a goddess, was granted the boon of eternal life. But the further gift of eternal youth was unattainable. Frail, bent, and suffering he shriveled at last into a cricket. Williams’ argument was almost a trivial one, from the perspective of evolutionary biology: The very aged are rare, hence there is unlikely to have been any evolutionary pressure to shape the timing of the end of life, in the way that the timing of early development has been shaped. What we see as the “natural lifespan” is simply a balance between the wear of daily life and the limited ability of repair mechanisms to undo it fully.
Shifting the balance, either by increasing the rate or efficiency of repair, or by reducing the rate of damage, must surely stretch out the whole process. Actually, it should do even better than that: The end stage, where most of our suffering is found, ought to be the least susceptible to extension, since it requires maintaining the function of an organism that is failing on multiple levels. This is consistent with the observation that, while mortality rates have been falling at all ages, the pace of progress has been slowest at advanced ages. Youth, according to this argument, should take up a greater portion of our lifespan over time. In 1980 the medical researcher James Fries called this process “compression of morbidity.”
The morbidity-compression concept—simultaneously a description, a prediction, and a target for future health policy—received a tremendous boost in the mid 1980s when the economic historian Robert Fogel discovered that a tremendous amount of it had already taken place without anyone having noticed. When he started examining the medical records of Union Army Civil War volunteers and veterans he found a staggering level of what we would now consider to be age-related degenerative disease—arthritis, heart disease, cancer—at ages when it would now be exceedingly rare. Of the recruits under age 20, nearly all volunteers, who were examined for service in the Union Army in 1861, 16 percent were rejected on medical grounds. This rose to nearly a quarter of those aged 20 to 25, and nearly half of those in their 30s.
By comparison, the generation of American men who fought in World War II and are now in their 90s lived, on average, about eight years longer than their great grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, once they reached adulthood. Those among the 19th-century men who did survive into what we now call middle age also spent more of their years suffering chronic, debilitating illnesses. Specifically, the average age of onset of arthritis was 64.7 years for the WWII veterans, but only 53.7 years for the Civil War veterans. Heart disease started nearly 10 years later, and chronic respiratory disease more than 11 years.
Comparing the Union Army results with late 20th-century health surveys has led to estimates of disability-rate declines of 0.6 percent per year, accelerating to 1.7 percent per year in the 1980s and 1990s.2 These trends have continued into the 21st century, at least according to some measures. According to the 1985 United States Health Interview Survey 23 percent of Americans aged 50 to 64 reported limitations on daily activities due to chronic illness; in 2014, this was down to 16 percent. At ages 65 and higher, the percentages were 39 percent and 33 percent.
A study by University of Southern California gerontologist Eileen Crimmins and her colleagues looked at the change in disability-free life expectancy—the average number of years that we would expect someone to live free of major limitations due to long-term illness. From 1970 to 2010 American males gained about 7.7 years of life expectancy at birth, of which nearly half (3.2) could be expected to be disability free. Perhaps more immediately relevant, Americans aged 65 saw their remaining life expectancy increase from 15 to 19 years, with 2.5 of the 4 extra years being disability-free. (This averages the results for men and women; women gained fewer years overall than men, but the relative gains between disability-free and disabled years are similar.)
The largest increase in healthy years after age 65 came in the last decade. Americans in 2010 could expect to live 80 percent of their lives without major disability, including well over half of their years after age 65.
Perhaps most striking, a new study has discovered that over the past two decades the incidence of new dementia cases has dropped by 20 percent. Men in the United Kingdom develop dementia today at the same rate as men five years younger in the 1990s; for women the improvements have been more modest.
Imagine, now, that the trend of the last century continues another hundred years: Our 50-year-old great-grandchildren may have an average of 50 years left to live, the same span as a 30-year-old today can expect. It is not implausible that they will be similarly spry and untouched by disability. Will they really think of themselves as young, in the same way that a 30-year-old today does? Will youth extended still be youth?
It is not as absurd as it may seem. When the U.S. National Institutes of Health first founded its Aging Unit—later the National Institute on Aging—in 1940, it announced the goal of research in “the problems of aging,” particularly “the period between 40 and 60 years of age.”
On the other hand, the story of morbidity compression could be about to change. That’s because the big drivers of compression have already acted. Medical technology will continue to advance, but, for all its marvels, it has played a smaller role in compression than basic improvements in nutrition and hygiene. It turns out that much of what might have been considered normal age-related decline is strongly accelerated by disease and malnutrition early in life, even before birth. Babies of malnourished mothers, even those who received adequate nutrition after birth, are found decades later to have substantially elevated incidences of coronary heart disease, stroke, and hypertension. Survivors of childhood smallpox and whooping cough have generally higher levels of mortality in old age. (Oriana: So much for the idea that "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger")
It seems clear that the wealthy part of the world has achieved the peak of benefits to be gained from increased nutrition and basic hygiene—if we have not actually gone far past on both scores. The nexus between improved nutrition and improved adult and late-life health was marked, in the past, by increasing height: Final adult height summarizes the whole record of childhood health nutrition, and the past two centuries of increased lifespans consistently tracked increases in average height.
These increases have plateaued, by and large, in Japan and Western Europe, though some laggards—in particular the U.S., which used to have one of the tallest populations in the world—clearly have some space to catch up.
The massive benefits from vaccination, the elimination of leaded gasoline, and reduction of smoking are still making their way through the aging population, of course, and will likely be stretching our healthy lifespans for some time to come. Tremendous progress could still be achieved by spreading the healthful environments of wealthy countries to the rest of the world, and the healthful lifestyles of the wealthy within those countries to the rest of the population.
But beyond these effects, and especially for Western countries, morbidity compression will not be what it once was. Perhaps the most optimistic scenario for the near future of healthy aging may be what demographer Kenneth Manton has called “dynamic equilibrium.” Manton suggested that disease would not be prevented or delayed, but managed and arrested at an early stage, so that an increasing portion of the population would be living with mild disease, while fewer would suffer severe disability.
An illustration of this may be found in a recent study of the timing of disability by health economists David Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh, and Mary Beth Landrum. By their measure, expected disability-free years after age 65 expanded from 8.8 to 10.4 and disabled years actually contracted, from 8.5 to 7.8, between 1992 and 2004—with the disabled years increasingly concentrated in the period immediately preceding death. The picture looked slightly different, though, when framed in terms of “disease-free” years. Disease-free life expectancy after age 65 barely increased, from 8.0 to 8.6, while years with disease increased from 9.5 to 9.7. More disease, then, but less disability.
Diabetes was transformed early in the 20th century from a killer to a manageable chronic disease; AIDS went this way in the early 21st century. The biggest killer of all in the developed world, cardiovascular disease, may also be making this transition. Eileen Crimmins, who has generally been cautious about claims of morbidity compression, has pointed out that most of the decline in CVD mortality in the 1950s and 1960s came from disease-preventing lifestyle changes, while the hardly less remarkable reductions over the last few decades—up to 70 percent reductions in mortality in western Europe and the U.S.—were largely due to medical treatment and disease management.
Will the fit 90-year-olds of the future need to expend the strength they have maintained to lug around the contents of a large medicine cabinet to keep them going? A study found that while the fraction of elderly Americans (age 65 and over) who were taking five or more prescription medications had been increasing, it seems to have stabilized in recent years at just under 40 percent. Many of the most effective treatments for age-related conditions are set-it and forget-it—hip replacements, for instance, and cardiac pacemakers. Implantable drug pumps are already in use.
We long ago got used to thinking that a person can still be youthful and healthy even when needing spectacles to see clearly, or when their survival depends on an artificial supply of insulin. The spry 90-year-olds of the future may be no different, hearing through cochlear implants and running with leg and heart muscles rebuilt with stem-cell treatments. Whatever the future of aging is, there is no sign yet of any limit to our ability to expand each of the phases of our lives.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/will-90-become-the-new-60?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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YOU ARE WHAT YOUR ANCESTORS DIDN’T EAT
It’s not just the color of your eyes, or your gregarious manner that you may pass along to your kids and their kids. What you eat, or don’t eat, can get passed on to your offspring, too—and many generations into the future. But researchers are just beginning to understand how this works.
Descendants of people who faced famines—such as the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II or the Great Chinese Famine in the 1960s—have long been shown to carry higher rates of health conditions like obesity, diabetes, and even schizophrenia. “We know if the parents face starvation or undernutrition, or if they lack some basic nutrients, that can actually impact embryonic development,” says Giovane Tortelote, an assistant professor of pediatric nephrology at Tulane University School of Medicine.
But, he wondered, could undernutrition affect not just an embryo’s development, but also the expression of DNA in the offspring, so-called epigenetic changes that can be passed down? And if so, where in the DNA would this show up and how many generations would be affected, particularly when people were no longer under food stress?
Now new research authored by Tortelote shows that—in mice—a famine-mimicking diet can compromise the health and development of the kidneys of offspring over at least four generations. The research was published in the journal Heliyon.
It’s not the first effort to show that diet can have impacts on future generations. One study from 2016 demonstrated that when four generations of mice consume low-fiber diets it can cause almost irreversible negative changes to the gut microbiomes of the offspring. And another study found mothers who eat high-sugar, high-fat diets can predispose their offspring to insulin resistance and metabolic problems for at least three generations.
To conduct their research, Tortelote’s lab fed a group of mice a low-protein, high-carb diet—about a third of the protein lab mice normally get in their diet. Very low protein diets have been shown to have a similar physiological impact on the body as famine does. The researchers then studied the mice’s offspring over the next four generations, all of who received normal diets. What they found is that all four subsequent generations had lower birth weights and smaller, weaker kidneys, leading risk factors for chronic kidney disease and hypertension.
The mouse babies suffered low birth weights and compromised kidneys not only when both parents followed a low-protein diet prior to breeding and during gestation, but also when the father alone had a low-protein diet prior to breeding. In other words, a poor diet affected not just the gestation period but genetic inheritance from father to offspring. “That tells you that the uterine environment is important, but it’s also important what comes from the dad—this is not genetics, it’s epigenetics,” says Tortelote.
Tortelote estimates that it could take five or six generations of improved diet for the negative effects of malnutrition on the health of one’s descendants to subside, but determining this would require further research. His lab is also looking into the molecular mechanism by which the epigenetic changes get passed on, and trying to create a supplemental metabolite that could help reset gene expression in the offspring.
He wants to design solutions to lineages of nutritional stress, so that what one’s grandparents ate doesn’t define their health.
https://nautil.us/you-are-what-your-ancestors-didnt-eat-1176391/
Oriana:
I read that the old (non-compressed) pattern of morbidity still holds in the Afro-American community. Thus, diseases such as arthritis and diabetes, hypertension and various respiratory and cardiac disorders tend to emerge ten years earlier than in the white population. More stress and unhealthy diet may be two of the many factors underlying this phenomenon.
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SNOT PROTECTS US FROM DISEASES
Snot plays a powerful role in protecting us from disease – and its color alone can provide insights into what's going on in our bodies.
In Ancient Greece, snot was thought to be one of the four bodily fluids responsible for balancing human health and personality. The physician Hippocrates developed a theory stating that phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile were the four "humors". A person's balance of these humors could dictate their temperament; an excess of any of them could cause illness. For instance, phlegm was thought to be made in the brain and lungs, and during the cold and wet seasons, it could become too abundant and even cause epilepsy. Somebody with a phlegmatic personality would have a cold, damp and aloof character.
Of course, we now know that snot doesn't affect people's personalities or cause diseases – rather, it helps to protect us from them.
And though nobody likes a runny nose or flinging snot across the room in a sneeze, the mucus in our nasal passages is arguably one of the wonders of the human body. It protects us from intruders, and it has a unique composition that can reveal profound insights into what is going on inside us. Now scientists are hoping to hone the powers of snot to better diagnose and treat everything from Covid-19 to chronic lung conditions.
The gooey substance shields the insides of our nose, moisturizing the nasal passages, and trapping any bacteria, viruses, pollen, dirt, dust and pollution trying to get into our body through our airways. Aided by hundreds of tiny hairs, snot is a barrier between the outside world and our inner one.
The adult body produces over 100 milliters of snot over the course of a day but children tend to be much snottier than adults because their bodies are learning to deal with being exposed to all of the world's molecules for the first time, says Daniela Ferreira, a professor of respiratory infection and vaccinology from the University of Oxford in the UK.
With a simple glance, our snot's color and consistency can already help us glean a little bit about what's going on: snot can be like a visual thermometer. A runny schnozzle with clear mucus suggests the body is likely expelling something that's irritating its sinuses, like pollen or dust.
White mucus means a virus may have entered the premises, as the white is caused by the white blood cells called up to fight off intruders. When mucus turns denser and yellowish-green, it's just a lot of dead white blood cells accumulating after having gathered in great numbers and flushing out. If your snot is reddish or pink, it may be a little bloody: maybe you've blown your nose too much and irritated its insides.
But looking at snot is just the first step.
The snot microbiome
While the gut microbiome – the ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microorganisms that inhabit our bodies – is very much in the public consciousness, scientists think that the microbiome in our snot is equally important. In fact, scientists now believe that it's intricately linked to human health and the proper functioning of the immune system.
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Snot Negatives
Technically, Hippocrates wasn't all wrong when he theorized that mucus makes people sick. Mucus is a protective barrier for the nose, but it does help bacteria and viruses spread when the nose gets runny, says Ferreira. We wipe our faces, we touch things, we sneeze and inadvertently fling snot across to the other side of the room. When we're infected with a respiratory pathogen, snot is hijacked as a vehicle for bacteria and viruses to multiply and travel around in, so that we spread them to as many people as we possibly can. So really, it helps us make other people sick.
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Everybody has a unique snot microbiome. It is affected by sex, age, location, diet – and even whether you vape. The microbiome's makeup is what helps it fend off intruders, and some of these interactions are subtle. Research from 2024, for instance, found that whether potentially harmful Staphylococcus bacteria survive in the nose and infect a person, causing fever and pus-filled boils, depends on how the snot microbiome's bacteria hold onto iron.
Ferreira is working to figure out exactly what a healthy snot microbiome looks like so that it can be put in an everyday nasal spray to boost snot health, like taking probiotics for gut health. "Imagine if you could alter what we have in our nose with lots of very good-guy species that stay there and colonize, and do not allow for the bad guys to come in and cause us to get sick," says Ferreira.
Ferreira's colleagues have selected the bacteria they think make up the perfect schnozzle microbiome, and they're testing them to see if these bacteria can take over people's airways and last long enough to impact and improve their health.
Since the snot's microbiome is so tightly linked with the immune system, says Ferreira, they are also studying it to fine-tune how to boost the immune system and even make it more receptive to vaccines. Research suggests that how a body reacts to a vaccine is altered by the type of microbiome a person has. Studies on the Covid-19 vaccine, for example, suggest it affected the snot's microbiome, and in turn, the microbiome affected how efficient the vaccine was.
"The Covid-19 vaccines were great at stopping us from getting sick, but we continued to transmit the virus," says Ferreira. "We could actually develop much better vaccines [so] the next generation people don't even get sick, whether that is Covid-19 or flu or any other respiratory viruses – and it's all there in that snot immunity."
While Ferreira's work pinpointing the exact formula for the perfect snot microbiome might take a couple of years, in Sweden, scientists have had a head start by transplanting healthy people's snot into those who are sick with a chronically blocked nose and hay fever, everyday symptoms of rhinosinusitis.
The researchers asked 22 adults to shoot themselves up the nose with a syringe full of snot from healthy friends and partners each day for five days. They discovered that symptoms like cough and facial pain, for instance, dropped by almost 40% for up to three months in at least 16 of the patients.
"That was great news to us, and no one reported any negative side effects," says Anders Martensson, a senior consultant in otorhinolaryngology and head and neck surgery from Helsingborg Hospital in Sweden, who led the study. These trials were inspired by work done in other laboratories about gut microbiomes, with fecal transplants, he says.
That first pilot program, however didn't gather much data about how these people's snot microbiomes changed and what happened to the specific bacteria in their nose, whether they increased, decreased, and so forth.
Jennifer Mulligan, an otolaryngologist at the University of Florida, uses snot to study people with chronic rhinosinusitis and nasal polyps – a condition that affects about 5 to 12% of the global population. In the first years of her career, she needed to surgically extract nose tissue from rhinosinusitis patients, but that was invasive and limiting. Now, her research has shown that snot can be an accurate proxy to more closely examine what's happening inside the body when someone develops rhinosinusitis. "We're using it to whittle down who are really the guilty culprits here, who's really driving this condition?" says Mulligan, adding that every patient has a slightly different profile for what's causing their rhinosinusitis.
Similarly, while treatment before was mostly trial and error – varying greatly from patient to patient, and sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars for treatments lasting months – Mulligan suggests a snot analysis can quickly help identify the right treatment or surgery needed.
Several clinical trials for Mulligan's technique are underway worldwide. Emerging health-teach companies, such as Diag-Nose, launched by engineers at Stanford University, are developing snot-analyzing AI systems and patenting devices for nasal microsampling: in 2025, they launched the first FDA-approved nasal microsampling device – a sampling device that collects precise volumes of nasal fluid – to reduce research variability by standardizing sampling methods.
"We have learned so much that we could have never learned with just tissue biopsies. It's completely changed what we know about the disease, and it's going to change the way patients are diagnosed in the future and how they receive treatment," says Mulligan.
Mulligan uses the same snot tools to study what causes people to lose their sense of smell, too. Her team has already found that a vitamin-D nasal spray could potentially help restore a sense of smell in people who have lost it due to inflammation from smoking.
Mulligan's
team have found that a vitamin D nasal spray could help restore a sense
of smell in people who have lost it due to smoking
Plus, Mulligan says, what happens in the lungs happens in the nose and vice versa. So these diagnostic tools and therapies can be used for lung diseases too. New research suggests that by simply analyzing how much of the IL-26 protein is present in a patient's snot, doctors can tell whether somebody is more or less susceptible to developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – a common smoker's disease, and the fourth most widespread cause of death in the world. With snot analyses, patients can be diagnosed early and treated rapidly.
Similarly, research teams around the world are developing analogous tools and methods to use snot to detect asthma, lung cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. Snot can also be used to measure radiation exposure and several recent studies suggest that the gooey nasal fluid can pinpoint how much somebody is exposed to pollution, such as heavy metals and microparticles in the air.
"Snot is the future of personalized medicine. I wholeheartedly believe that," says Mulligan.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250708-what-your-snot-can-reveal-about-your-health?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20250709&at_send_id=4403036&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20250708-what-your-snot-can-reveal-about-your-health&at_bbc_team=crm
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FALSE PROPHECIES IN THE BIBLE
Isaiah 19 contains a number of false prophecies about Egypt, including a complete drying up of the Nile and even the surrounding seas, Egyptians speaking a Canaanite tongue and living in fear of tiny Judah, etc. None of which ever happened.
Jeremiah issued a similar false prophecy about Nebuchadnezzar, saying the god-favored Neb would defeat Egypt and leave Noph (Memphis) a desolate, uninhabited waste. That, too, never happened. (Jeremiah 46:19)
Ezekiel prophesied that the Assyrian exiles would return to Israel to form a united kingdom with Judea, but the Assyrian exiles were assimilated and the ten tribes of Northern Israel are lost forever (Ezekiel 37:15-28)
Joshua 3:10 prophesied that god will “without fail” drive out the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and the Jebusites. But the bible admits this didn’t happen. (Joshua 16:53, Judges 1:21, Judges 3:5, 1 Kings 9:20-21, etc.)
And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. (Judges 3:5)
The bible is full of genocides commanded by Yahweh and his prophets. But alas, one god-ordered genocide was stymied by a more powerful, indignant god. The prophet Elisha authorized this genocide, saying, “This is but a light thing in the sight of the Lord: he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand.” However, the Moabite king Mesha offered his eldest son to Chemosh, and Chemosh proved to be the stronger god with “great indignation.” The Israelites were forced to retreat and returned to Israel. (2 Kings 3:1-27)
Jehovah was proved a false prophet because he promised Canaan to Abraham and his descendants but never was able to deliver it. In an amusing Bible verse, an all-powerful “god” was on the side of the tribe of Judah (the tribe of David, Solomon and later Jesus), but this god-favored tribe was unable to drive out pagan tribes because they had iron chariots!
“The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.” (Judges 1:19 NIV)
We see the same thing happen in Judges chapter 15. Here Jehovah gave the tribe of Judah an allotment of territories that included Jerusalem. At that time the great god-favored heroes Joshua and Caleb were leading the Israelites. But despite being favored by an all-powerful “god” they were unable to defeat the Jebusites in order to take the Bible’s most important city.
“Judah could not dislodge the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem; to this day the Jebusites live there with the people of Judah.” (Joshua 15:63)
And the Bible doesn’t even blame this failure of “god” and his great heroes on iron chariots! Apparently the Jebusites were limited to ordinary swords and spears. Or perhaps sticks and stones.
The Bible said an heir of David would always sit on the throne of Israel and would continually rule there. The prophet Jeremiah said, “For this is what the LORD says: ‘David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of Israel.’” (Jeremiah 33:17). That prophecy failed soon after David’s death, as ten of the twelve tribes of Israel were lost and Israel ceased to exist as a nation.
Another Bible writer then hedged his bets drastically by saying David would always have an heir continually on the throne of the tiny province of Judea (2 Kings 8:19). But that prophecy also failed. The New Testament confirms both prophecies failed, since King Herod was an Idumaean. And for long periods of time there was no King of Israel or Judea, as at present.
The Bible also said Levites would always offer sacrifices to their “god” continually: “Neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.” (Jeremiah 33:18) But the Jerusalem temple was destroyed twice and for long periods of time (including the present) no sacrifices were offered because the temple did not exist.
Jeremiah by Michelangelo
The author of Jeremiah said the two prophecies above were irrevocable: “Thus saith the Lord; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers.” (Jeremiah 33:20-21) But it was all bluster and both prophecies came to a hill of beans.
Ezekiel also prophesied that the Nile would dry up. (Ezekiel 30:12)
Isaiah 19:18 says Egypt would speak the Canaanite tongue, which never happened and it is now an extinct language spoken by no one.
Isaiah 19:21 says Egypt would convert to Judaism and make sacrifices to Yahweh, which never happened. Now even religious Jews no longer sacrifice to Yahweh.
Isaiah 17:1 prophesied that Damascus would be a heap of ruins and no longer a city thereafter. Never happened.
Isaiah 13:19-22 and Jeremiah 51:24-64 both prophesied the complete and permanent destruction of Babylon, which would become a desolate waste and would never again be inhabited. Never happened.
In Isaiah 7:1-7 god himself tells King Ahaz of Judah that he will not be harmed by his enemies. But Ahaz’s enemies did harm him, as 2 Chronicles 28:1-8 confirms.
Ezekiel predicted that his hero Nebuchadnezzar would sack and destroy Tyre, which would never be rebuilt. (Ezekiel 26:1-21)
Ezekiel went on for three colorful chapters about all the terrible punishments the “Sovereign Lord” would inflict on Tyre. (Ezekiel chapters 26-28)
But Ezekiel later admitted that his prophecy had failed utterly, on the pages of the Bible (Ezekiel 29:18).
Undeterred by his error, for which the bible says he should have been put to death, Ezekiel then immediately predicted that his hero Nebuchadnezzar would sack Egypt and leave it an uninhabited wasteland for 40 years. (Ezekiel 29:9-13). Once again Ezekiel went on and on about all the terrible punishments the “Sovereign Lord” would inflict on Egypt, this time for five colorful chapters. (Ezekiel chapters 29-33)
That prophecy also failed miserably.
The bible confirms that Ezekiel's prophecies about Tyre were false, since according to the New Testament both Jesus and Paul visited Tyre. Egypt has never been an uninhabited wasteland for even a second in recorded history, much less at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar for 40 years.
FALSE PROPHECIES OF JESUS
Jesus was far from infallible according to the Bible, but his other mistakes pale in comparison to the catastrophes above.
Jesus said he would return during the lifetimes of his disciples. When
this didn’t happen and Christians started dying, the evangelist Paul
had to “talk down” his followers, as he did in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. I
will give Jesus’s prophecy: “Verily I say unto you, This generation
shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)
Here is that verse in context, explaining what was to be fulfilled while the generation listening to Jesus was alive: 29 Immediately
after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the
moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and
the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: 30 And then shall
appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the
tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in
the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 31 And he shall
send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather
together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the
other. 32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet
tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: 33 So
likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near,
even at the doors. 34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. (Matthew 24:29-34)
Elsewhere
Matthew makes it clear that “this generation” means the disciples
standing before Jesus: “27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of
his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man
according to his works. 28 Verily I say unto you, There be some
standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of
man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:27-28)
Luke agrees:
“But
I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not
taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:27)
“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.” (Luke 21:32)
Mark agrees:
“Verily
I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall
not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with
power.” (Mark 9:1)
“Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.” (Mark 13:30)
“And
ye [the people Jesus was talking to] shall see the Son of man sitting
on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Mark
14:62)
Revelation’s author was a false prophet because he
said "the time is at hand" and that the horrors he predicted would
"shortly come to pass" and that “every eye” of all people alive at the
time — including those who pierced and murdered Jesus — would see him
descend from the clouds. (Revelation 1:1-7, 22:10)
Nothing could be clearer, and it’s obvious the
earliest Christians were expecting Jesus to return during their
lifetimes, which is why Paul had to talk them down. And Paul echoed the
claim that some Christians living at that time (“we”) would still be
alive when Jesus returned. (1 Thessalonians 4:15, 1 Corinthians
15:51-52)
“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep [die] but we will all be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
Jesus prophesied that Judas Iscariot would sit on a throne, judging the 12 tribes of Israel. (Luke 22:30, Matthew 19:28) [Oriana: along with the other apostles, seated on 12 thrones]
In conclusion, the bible is full of false prophecies. ~ Michael R. Burch, Quora
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Randy Brooks:
Isaiah also prophesied that the Lord told him to go totally nude for 3 years as a sign to the leaders of Egypt and Ethiopia that the king of Assyria shall lead them away as prisoners in the buff. They didn't take him seriously. I can't imagine why. (Isa 20:2 thru 4)
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INTELLIGENCE CAN BE PREDICTED AS EARLY AS 7 MONTHS OF AGE
New parents are notorious for looking for early signs of their infant’s intelligence—a babbled first word, waving or blowing kisses, a spark of recognition when they see a familiar face. Most of the time it's just an attempt to prove their baby is just as special as their parents know they are—but it might actually be possible to predict a person's adult IQ in infancy.
A new study from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests your baby will show signs of intelligence just as early as new parents are convinced they can. In fact, researchers found that it may be possible to predict how well a person will perform on a cognitive test in their 30s as early as 7 months old.
So, how exactly can a baby’s brain reveal its future potential?
How a Decades Long Twin Study Researched Early IQ Prediction
To find out, University of Colorado Boulder researchers recruited 500 families with twins (both fraternal and identical). They followed participants at 7 and 9 months, then at age 1, and every year until age 17, continuing every five years into their 30s.
Analyzing the decades of data collected from their participants, the goal was to better understand how genes and environment interact to shape a child’s development.
By studying twins, researchers could determine the distinct roles that genes and shared environment play. Since identical twins share 100% of their genes while fraternal twins share only about 50% (like regular siblings), comparing their IQ similarities allowed researchers to infer how much of cognitive ability is due to genetics versus shared environmental factors.
Daniel Gustavson, PhD, an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author on the study, says a shared environment includes “all the aspects of their home, neighborhood, school environments.”
The study found that early on, the environment (before age 3) can have a measurable and lasting impact on a person's cognitive ability later in life, accounting for around 10% of individual differences in IQ, Dr. Gustavson notes.
To test infant cognition, researchers used seven measures, including the “novelty preference” task that assessed how long infants spend looking at a new toy versus a familiar one, vocalizations (babbling sounds made by the infant), visual expectation (tracking an object), tester ratings (attentiveness, activity, mood), and the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development.
While these specific infant tests (at 7 to 9 months) predicted only a small percentage of an adult’s IQ, the study found that by age 3, the yearly follow-ups could predict 20% of what Dr. Gustavson calls “across-person differences” in IQ. This prediction rapidly increased between ages 7 and 16, a period when he says genetics “really start to take hold.”
That Being Said, Your Child’s Level of Intelligence Is Not Fixed or Inevitable
Although the genes we inherit significantly contribute to our IQ, Dr. Gustavson wants parents to know that heritability doesn’t mean “we can’t change who we’re going to become.” There are always ways to intervene and learn new skills.
The study emphasizes that early environment matters, but it doesn't specify how parents can best nurture cognitive growth.
To bridge that gap, we spoke with Sara Douglas, PsyD, EdM, a psychologist specializing in neuropsychological evaluations, and pediatrician Heather Gosnell, MD, to offer helpful suggestions.
IQ is often viewed as a singular number, but Dr. Douglas says it’s essential to look at IQ as one’s capacity “within multiple traits and features.” Here are some simple strategies for holistically nurturing cognitive development in young kids.
Vary the experiences you offer your kids
Viewed this way, a stimulating environment can provide exposure that enhances these traits. Dr. Douglas suggests allowing an infant “to spend time feeling different textures, seeing different patterns, hearing different notes, [and] interacting with different people.”
She adds it’s a good idea to “provide different opportunities for novel experiences. If possible, provide different experiences in the different weeks of development, so young kids have the opportunity both to learn the first [skill], and expand their interest to the next.”
Make time for one-on-one interaction
Parent-child interaction is also key, says Dr. Gosnell, because “simple routines like reading, talking, and playing have a powerful impact on brain development and set the foundation for learning.”
She recommends reading 20 minutes a day to your infant and continuing this routine through childhood as it supports at-home brain development. You can also narrate your day to help build language skills. And if possible, avoid screen time before 18 months. Once introduced, she says to choose quality programming, watch together, and limit screen time to one hour a day.
Why Parents Shouldn’t Stress About Early Intelligence
Remember that this study does not indicate that intelligence is a binary. It’s not the case that either they show signs of intelligence early on and will grow up to be intelligent, or they don’t, and they won’t. Intelligence can develop over time, starting with parents who use some of the strategies outlined above.
And it doesn’t help to stress out over these milestones that will vary from child to child anyway.
“Don't worry if your baby isn't 'advanced' in every area or if they miss one milestone, as uneven development is completely typical,” says Dr. Gosnell.
Late talking and short attention spans are also not a cause for concern.
“Most late talkers catch up by age 4 to 7, especially when they understand well, are developing normally in other areas, and receive speech therapy if needed,” Gosnell states. “Toddlers naturally have very brief focus periods, which is normal and, on their own, don’t predict future attention problems.”
And remember—IQ and intelligence isn’t everything, and definitely does not indicate that your child will be a good person or a productive member of society.
“There are personality traits (like kindness, empathy, genuineness, being a good listener),” says Dr. Douglas, “that are not factored into intelligence testing that are, in many regards, more important than cognitive traits that are measured.”
https://www.parents.com/new-research-suggests-intelligence-can-be-predicted-as-early-as-7-months-old-11765799?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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PROTECTION FROM PFAS CHEMICALS
Scientists believe they have found a way to protect people from a toxic and long-lasting "forever chemical.”
Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals which can be found in items such as waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, lipsticks or food packaging.
They are used for their grease and water repellence, but do not degrade quickly in nature and have been linked to health issues such as higher risks of certain cancers.
A University of Cambridge study found a certain species of microbe found in the human gut could absorb various PFAS molecules and lessen its harmful effects.
SLOW POISON
There has been increasing concern about the environmental and health impacts of PFAS, which take thousands of years to break down in the environment.
Most people are exposed to the substances through water and food.
In some cases, the chemical is cleared out of the body through urine, but it could also stay in the body for years.
PFAS are so widespread that they are in all of us, said Dr Anna Lindell, a researcher at the University of Cambridge's MRC Toxicology Unit and first author of the study.
"PFAS were once considered safe, but it's now clear that they're not.
"It's taken a long time for PFAS to become noticed because at low levels they're not acutely toxic. But they're like a slow poison.”
Researcher and co-author, Dr Indra Roux, added as PFAS were already in the environment and in our bodies, we needed to mitigate their impact.
"We haven't found a way to destroy PFAS, but our findings open the possibility of developing ways to get them out of our bodies where they do the most harm.”
Researchers found certain species of human gut bacteria had a remarkably high capacity to soak up PFAS and store it in clumps inside their cells.
Dr Kiran Patil, the senior author of the report, said: "Due to aggregation of PFAS in these clumps, the bacteria themselves seem protected from the toxic effects.”
The scientists made their findings after nine of the bacterial species were introduced into the guts of mice to "humanize" the mouse microbiome.
The bacteria rapidly accumulated PFAS eaten by the mice — which were then excreted in feces.
It was the first evidence that the gut microbiome could be helpful in removing toxic PFAS chemicals from our body.
It has not yet been directly tested in humans.
The researchers planned to create probiotic dietary supplements to boost the levels of the helpful microbes in our gut, to protect against the toxic effects of PFAS.
Dr Lindell and Dr Patil co-founded a startup, Cambiotics, with entrepreneur Peter Holme Jensen to develop a probiotic dietary supplement to boost the levels of the helpful microbes and protect against the toxic effects of PFAS.
In the meantime, they say we should avoid PFAS-coated cooking pans. (Ceramic pans are OK)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yll0gx754o
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ending on beauty:
A QUIET JOY
I think words of longing: a landscape
I remember you waving your hand
and your face, as if enlarged
Once I committed a terrible wrong
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.
~ Yehuda Amichai
