Cahors in France, Valentré Bridge built in the 14th century on the River Lot. (My thanks to Violeta)
*
HOW TO JUMP FROM A MOVING TRAIN
Backwards. If you jump forward,
you’ll be sucked down under the wheels.
Backwards, blindly, rolled into a ball,
hands cradling the back of your neck.
Note the terrain where you’ll be thrust
away from the speeding locomotive.
On a soft meadow, you might get up;
on hard gravel, bones will break.
I’m doomed to carry these instructions
in the fragile planet of my skull.
Sometimes, after meeting someone new,
I suddenly think, “She could hide me.”
Why did I shudder when a Buddhist monk
said, “There’s no doubt: in your past life,
you died at Auschwitz.” Now I know
it’s enough to be a child of survivors,
to whose cunning and blind luck I owe
my life — but an old movie is bleeding
through, of jumping backwards, away
from the death camp transport —
half-broken, crawling on sharp gravel until
the trees, a house, a stream — until
warm clothes, warm food, the cool wind
of the springtime of my birth. Forward.
~ Oriana (title poem of my most recent chapbook)
*
WOMEN WRITERS WHO INFLUENCED JANE AUSTEN
I was on a house call in Georgetown, invited to browse the personal book collection of a woman who used to be a professional rare book dealer like me. I spent the afternoon combing through her library. As the wind grazed the branches outside, the light within the room shifted, sparkling across the antique rug, the gently worn furniture, and the bookcases. Every shelf had been filled with books that quietly spoke to her discernment. Instead of a flashy modern edition of Pride and Prejudice, this woman had a rather ugly one, bound in drab brown paper boards resembling dilapidated cardboard. It also bore an unusual revised title, Elizabeth Bennet; or, Pride and Prejudice.
Despite its humble appearance, I knew the book was incredibly rare. It was the first edition of Pride and Prejudice published in the United States, from 1832.
The phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia (1782). Frances Burney, it turns out, had been one of Austen’s favorite authors. She wrote courtship novels very like Austen’s, focused on young heroines navigating the difficulties of finding love. Or rather, Austen wrote books very like hers: Burney was one of the most successful novelists of Austen’s lifetime. I’d had no idea. Me, a reader and re-reader of Austen’s work over decades. I had overlooked this important English author, one with deep significance to another I admired. In spite of my supposed professional curiosity, I realized I had missed something. And it stung.
Why hadn’t I noticed these authors before? I had researched the rise of the English novel for my job (and, who am I kidding, because I enjoyed it). The authors whom Austen referenced in her work had barely entered that discourse. Baffled, I headed to my bookshelf and pulled off a 2005 book on the English novel written for students “by one of the world’s leading literary theorists,” as the back panel assured me. I opened the first page.
The period when Austen did most of her formative reading “was one of the most fertile, diverse, and adventurous periods of novel-writing in English history,” the author asserted—for one more paragraph, before moving straight to Austen and Walter Scott. The previous chapter had examined Laurence Sterne. I stared at the ceiling and did the math. Tristram Shandy’s last volume was published in 1767. Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, came in 1811. Forty-four years. Simply skipped.
Austen read William Shakespeare, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson, all authors I had read. She also read Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah Moore, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth, all authors I hadn’t. They were part of Austen’s bookshelf, but they had disappeared entirely from mine—and largely from that Leading Literary Theorist’s bookshelf as well. It was unsettling to realize I had read so many of the men on Austen’s bookshelf, but none of the women. Critical authorities like this one had provided the foundation for my understanding the past. But something was wrong. There was a crack in the foundation. I began to feel unsteady.
The feeling was all the more unsettling because this type of knowledge is central to what I do as a rare book dealer. “It is my business to know what other people do not know,” as the ever-quotable Sherlock Holmes says. For instance: the first edition in English of Grimm’s fairy tales contains a typo on the title page because the British printers forgot an umlaut on a German word; an adventure novel in Spanish called El Anacronópete (1887) describes a time machine eight years before the book most believe was the first to do so, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine; publisher Frederick Warne’s edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) isn’t the true first edition, but was preceded in 1901 by a run of a few hundred copies that Beatrix Potter printed privately as gifts for friends. Literary trivia is my joy and my currency.
Besides the ability to quote the Great Detective in nearly any situation, I can also tell you how many steps led to his flat in 221B; I can recite Sappho in Greek and Horace in Latin; I have participated in public readings of Ulysses; and I have seriously considered getting a tattoo of a Catullus verse. Yet I had completely missed some of Austen’s major predecessors. I’ve read swaths of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary—pages upon pages of eighteenth-century lexical entries—but I assumed these women writers from the same period weren’t worth my time.
The game was afoot (and no, I won’t stop quoting Holmes). When I investigated further, I learned that Austen had done all this reading during the first time in English history when more women published novels than men. Yet in my own reading, I had skipped them so entirely that it seemed almost intentional.
And it was: the critics who shaped our modern idea of the novel in English so frequently dismissed women writers that the systematic excising has a name. It’s called the Great Forgetting. Only Austen survived that period, becoming “the first great women writer in English”—even though there is a passage in one of her own novels that explicitly celebrated the work of women writers who had come before her. Austen gave me a hint of my mistake in Northanger Abbey, as well as how I might correct it:
‘while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.”
Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name.”
In this passage, Austen had already recognized a mechanism of the Great Forgetting: “a thousand pens” talk of works like Milton’s Paradise Lost, while embarrassed to admit to reading novels. Austen felt no such shame. Novels display “some of the greatest powers of the mind,” she argued. And then she gave examples. Cecilia (1782) was Frances Burney’s second novel; Camilla (1796) was her third. Belinda (1801) was the second novel of another woman writer, Maria Edgeworth.
*
To call Austen “the first great women writer in English,” really, is to call her the first British woman accepted in the Western canon. The canon is famous; it is useful. It offers a list of authors and titles that are recommended as classics by literary authorities like the author of that 2005 book on the English novel.
You probably caught how loaded that sentence was; every part of it leads to more questions. Now you’re thinking like a rare book dealer. What is a classic? Who gets to be a literary authority? How do these authorities determine the list? Why do we need a list of recommended books at all?
The last question is easy enough to answer: Lists are useful because we cannot read every book. Because we cannot read every book, we must be selective. Because we must be selective, we must make judgments about which books to try before we read them. Because we must make judgments before reading, who better to trust for recommendations than professionals, like teachers and literary critics and other scholars, whose job it is to read and analyze many books? These professionals recommend books that are valuable to read far beyond their initial publication—what we call “classics.” But professionals have individual tastes, too, so a consensus of professionals is surely best. That consensus of classics, when approached as a list, is what we call the canon. The entire idea of a canon is practical.
Because I accepted all of that, I regularly purchased and read books like that 2005 survey of the English novel. I had also read Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), perhaps the single most influential study of the eighteenth-century English novel, the era when Frances Burney published and when Austen was doing most of her formative reading. Yet it was these very literary authorities who had led me astray: they either dismissed or outright ignored these authors Austen had held so dear. The idea of a canon may be practical, but I had been relying upon it too much.
I kept investigating, and soon learned that other scholars had been noticing these clues in Austen’s writings. Decades before the copy of Evelina became a jenga piece on my desk, feminist critics had been working to recover the stories of these women. Some would eventually become my guides. Yet even as scholars write new biographies of these women and their books are studied in university classes on the eighteenth-century English novel, their contributions are often left out of the venues that reach the widest range of people: popular books, introductory survey courses of English literature and high school curricula, film and television adaptations of literary classics, and more.
Once I became aware of these gaps, I began to see them everywhere. As of this writing, the “genre and style” section of Jane Austen’s Wikipedia page notes Austen’s debt to Richardson and Johnson, while Burney isn’t mentioned at all. Most people don’t know. I didn’t know either.
I felt the weight of my mistake. I spent years wishing that Austen had authored more books. It didn’t even occur to me that there were women writers whom Austen had used as models—and whose books I could read, too.
Scholars have often used Austen as a gateway to study earlier writers, but my initial explorations into these books were discouraging. It felt as if every time I turned a corner, I ran into a dead end. First, I turned to one of the pioneering academic monographs on the subject, Frank W. Bradbrook’s Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (1966), which included an entire chapter about “The Feminist Tradition” in the English novel that influenced Austen. I thought that title boded well. I was wrong. It immediately introduced the tradition as “not particularly distinguished.”
He categorically dismissed the novelists whom Austen had praised in her own works, such as Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth: “Jane Austen turns inferior work by her predecessors and contemporaries to positive and constructive uses.” According to an authority like Bradbrook, this quest of mine had already been investigated and resolved: we call Jane Austen the first great woman writer in English…because she was.
But Austen herself had provided evidence contradicting that conclusion. Were these authorities suggesting that some of the favorite books of one of the greatest authors of all time were trash? Would an author of that caliber really have had such terrible taste?
Part of the issue, I soon grasped, was that I was using the same methods to investigate these women as had originally caused the gap in my reading. I was relying upon grand narratives covering hundreds of years in a single book. My instinct was to trust the authorities who wrote these books because the canon had served me well in the past: I had enjoyed most of the “classics” that I had read (yes, even Ulysses).
But the Great Forgetting lurked in these broad surveys. My investigation had turned into a labyrinth, and I was lost. I needed a different approach. It hadn’t been reading about important novels that led me to take interest in Frances Burney, after all. It was book collecting. I had come across that 1903 copy of Evelina entirely by chance. I needed to stop thinking like a twentieth-century student and start thinking like a twenty-first-century book collector.
*
I did track down the evidence I had been seeking. It was not what I had assumed before: that these women weren’t remembered because they weren’t interesting enough, or their works weren’t good enough. I did not find a group of hacks whose devices and themes existed only to reach full perfection in Austen’s use of them. Instead, I found the turning points. I traced moments when these women were attacked, elided, demeaned, and displaced from the canon. In some cases, I also saw moments when they made their way back to the canon, championed by a particular critic or given new life with a popular reprint. Each book in my collection was a clue as to how all this happened, and why.
This is the story of how I collected books by, and books about, eight women writers whose works Jane Austen read, but who no longer have the widespread readership they once enjoyed. I read and studied their works, drawing on biography, literary criticism, literary history, and, of course, the skills of my trade in rare books. Over time, my book collection became a eulogy to these writers’ legacies—and an argument for their popular reassessment.
I have wondered over the years whether my project would have appealed to Austen. I’m confident she would have been horrified to hear today’s popular opinion of Frances Burney or Maria Edgeworth—when they are remembered at all. As repayment for what she had given me, I hoped I could offer Austen this in return: a collection that reunites the novels she read, and a book honoring her own favorite authors. I took my Sherlockian skills from the rare book trade and turned them to this investigation. I wanted to know who these women were, what they wrote, and why they were no longer part of the canon. I would read their books and I would collect copies that appealed to me for their historical interest. I would fill Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.
This is the story of how I collected books by, and books about, eight women writers whose works Jane Austen read, but who no longer have the widespread readership they once enjoyed. I read and studied their works, drawing on biography, literary criticism, literary history, and, of course, the skills of my trade in rare books. Over time, my book collection became a eulogy to these writers’ legacies—and an argument for their popular reassessment.
I took my Sherlockian skills from the rare book trade and turned them to this investigation. I wanted to know who these women were, what they wrote, and why they were no longer part of the canon. I would read their books and I would collect copies that appealed to me for their historical interest. I would fill Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.
https://lithub.com/jane-austens-forgotten-contemporaries-unearthing-a-legacy-of-systematic-literary-erasure/
“Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgement, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.” ~ Frances Burney, Evelina
*
MISHA YOSSEL ON THE BIBAS TRAGEDY
People who kidnap an infant and toddler in their mother's arms, drag them away from their home and their country, hold them against their will, then either kill or fail to protect them from being killed, and then, more than a year later, proudly parade around the coffins with their bodies, plus the body of another hostage, a peaceful and universally beloved 85-year-old man, to the accompaniment of triumphant militaristic music and ecstatic crowds' lusty cheering, before reluctantly returning those dead bodies of two little boys, their mother and that old man to the country they were stolen from -- those people, they... There are no words. This is just unbearable.
Oriana:
And later the news that the woman’s body was not that of Shiri Bibas. Her body arrived separately.
An autopsy showed that the children were apparently strangled with bare hands.
*
There are times when it's hard not to give in to despair.
Just breathe. ~ Misha Iossel
*
*
THE NINETEEN NINETIES IN RUSSIA
Elena Gold: I lived through 1990s in Russia. The empty shelves that many remember actually began earlier — at the end of 1980s.
Soviet food store 1990sIn 1989, the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan.
And that’s when the organized crime began mushrooming in Russia — the gangs of 1990s consisted mostly of Afghan “internationalists” who realized that no one needed them.
Thinking of that: where do you think will 600,000 of Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine go, when Putin signs a ceasefire?
The guys who are used to guns and killing, know how to use killer drones and explosives, who are used to earning 5–10 times more than the average wage in their depressed home towns?
The crime wave of 1990s will look like a daytime walk across the Red Square.
The new “internationalists” from Ukraine will be more numerous and more disgruntled.
Scary times are ahead for Russians. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Peter Tajthy:
Even in the 70s (I was first in the Soviet Union in 1976 — and only in Moscow and Leningrad, which were supposed to be the “Potemkin” cities) the situation was not much better.
Except that there were some basics readily available.
The choice, however, was very narrow (and the quality of the food simply terrible).
*
Trump loves Putin with unconditional love anyway. He loves dictators and
tyrants. He's jealous of them. And Putin is his main passion among
them. The first love is not forgotten. He wants to be like Putin. He is
tearfully saddened that America is unwilling to allow him to become
American Putin. When he opens his mouth to say something about Ukraine,
for example -- the words coming out of his mouth belong to Putin. ~ Misha Iossel
*
WILL RUSSIA EVER RUN OUT OF TANKS, TROOPS, ETC?
Let’s just focus on two of the things “run out of tanks” could mean. One is literally sending their last tank to battle and losing it, being left with zero operational vehicles. That won’t happen. Russia will conserve their tanks once they get below a certain number and only use them sparingly, if at all. Their yearly production is 200–250 vehicles, so they have a few new ones delivered every week, one every workday or so. Hitting a straight zero with that is not really possible.
However by another measure you could say they’ve ran out of tanks when the shortage of armor seriously impacts their operations and they begin to resort to inadequately supported infantry attacks for the lack of armor. Russians have been fighting like that since last summer and by possibly since the summer of 2023. It only took a year to become really visible.
Russians use considerably less armor nowadays and this costs them many more lives than they otherwise would have been lost. When Russian losses hit over 1000 men/day in June of 2024 it was a shock. Now, in February 2025, they’ve fallen nearly 50% from their November peak and Russians now lose “just” 1200 men/day and we all see how exhaustion must be setting in, because the intensity of fighting is falling.
This is how “running out of tanks” looks like in a war. It’s not that they’re completely out of all operational vehicles, but they have to make compromises in their operations that cost them dearly. These compromises will only grow as the war progresses.
Most if not all tanks left in the storage depots are beyond economical repair, meaning they cost more to make operational than a new vehicle with the same capabilities would cost to build. These too win run out probably by the end of the year, leaving only hulks beyond repair and suitable only for spare parts.
Russia will still have tanks to fight with even then. They’ll just have to make even more compromises and lose even more men to achieve basically anything. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Simon:
Agreed. They are becoming “heavily supply constrained” already, which is essentially what “running out” really means in the context of not having anywhere near enough production to keep up with demand.
Torben Sanders:
The Nazis didnt run out of soldiers in 1945. They ran out of trained, experienced men placed the right places and logistics to back them up.
John Doyle:
It’s not so much they have run out of tanks as they have run out of trained crews to operate them. You can build all the tanks you want but if you don’t have trained crews to operate them it doesn’t matter…
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“WE ARE ABANDONED” – Russian Soldier Describes Kursk Encirclement
FEB 22, 2025 — In Kursk, Russian soldiers have shared footage of their battered positions after enduring four days of relentless Ukrainian drone strikes.
Russian soldier near Kursk
The footage confirms heavy Russian casualties and the destruction of their armored vehicles, highlighting Ukraine’s battlefield superiority.
At the same time, harrowing reports reveal that wounded Russian soldiers are being forced back into combat despite severe injuries. Footage analyzed by Ukrainian sources shows soldiers using crutches and crawling across battlefields.
Ukraine has also dealt a blow to Moscow’s reliance on foreign aid, successfully destroying a North Korean self propelled artillery unit in Luhansk. This confirms that North Korean weaponry is actively supporting Russian forces, yet it has done little to change the tide of battle.
Ukrainian forces have launched successful counterattacks in Kotelna, using superior logistics and heavy equipment to repel Russian advances. Ukrainian forces continue to erode Russian positions in recent days , forcing Moscow’s troops into a defensive stance.
Military analysts predict that Russia’s offensive capabilities in some key regions are on the verge of collapse.
(Video) “We Are Living in Horror” – Russian Soldier Describes Four Day Siege in Kursk
~ Foxmeiser, Quora
*
ALEXANDER III, THE FATHER OF LAST TZAR, NICHOLAS II
Alexander III of Russia ruled from 1881 to 1894. In personal life he was reported to be a good family man, and his physical strength and imposing build were famous, but his stubbornness, anti-intellectualism and inability to adjust to the modern world turned out to be quite bad for himself and his family. As a monarch Alexander III promoted archaic obscurantist ideas such as absolutist despotism and antisemitism, worked to decrease the availability of public education and stifled all dissent with brute force.
On his deathbed the emperor demanded from his son and heir, future Emperor Nicholas II, to preserve absolute monarchy in Russia at any cost. This demand, which Nicholas would attempt to fulfill throughout his reign, was a chief factor leading to the Revolution of 1917 and overthrow of the Russian monarchy..jpg)
Oriana:
I feel sorry for the poor Tzarina. On top of having this Fleishberg-type husband, she had to keep unnaturally slender through tight corseting.
*
WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE USED ELECTRIC CARS BATTERIES
The world will have to work out what to do with millions of disused car batteries
"The rate at which we're growing the industry is absolutely scary," says Paul Anderson from University of Birmingham.
He's talking about the market for electric cars in Europe.
"It's something that's never really been done before at that rate of growth for a completely new product," says Dr Anderson, who is also the co-director of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials.
While electric vehicles (EVs) may not emit any carbon dioxide during their working lives, he's concerned about what happens when they run out of road — in particular what happens to the batteries.
"In 10 to 15 years when there are large numbers coming to the end of their life, it's going to be very important that we have a recycling industry," he points out.
While most EV components are much the same as those of conventional cars, the big difference is the battery. While traditional lead-acid batteries are widely recycled, the same can't be said for the lithium-ion versions used in electric cars.
EV batteries are larger and heavier than those in regular cars and are made up of several hundred individual lithium-ion cells, all of which need dismantling. They contain hazardous materials, and have an inconvenient tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly.
"Currently, globally, it's very hard to get detailed figures for what percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, but the value everyone quotes is about 5%," says Dr Anderson. “In some parts of the world it's considerably less.”
Proposals from the European Union would see EV suppliers responsible for making sure that their products aren't simply dumped at the end of their life, and manufacturers are already starting to step up to the mark.
Nissan, for example, is now reusing old batteries from its Leaf cars in the automated guided vehicles that deliver parts to workers in its factories.
Volkswagen is doing the same, but has also recently opened its first recycling plant, in Salzgitter, Germany, and plans to recycle up to 3,600 battery systems per year during the pilot phase.
"As a result of the recycling process, many different materials are recovered. As a first step we focus on cathode metals like cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese," says Thomas Tiedje, head of planning for recycling at Volkswagen Group Components.
"Dismantled parts of the battery systems such as aluminium and copper are given into established recycling streams."
Renault, meanwhile, is now recycling all its electric car batteries — although as things stand, that only amounts to a couple of hundred a year. It does this through a consortium with French waste management company Veolia and Belgian chemical firm Solvay.
"We are aiming at being able to address 25% of the recycling market. We want to maintain this level of coverage, and of course this would cover by far the needs of Renault," says Jean-Philippe Hermine, Renault's VP for strategic environmental planning.
"It's a very open project - it's not to recycle only Renault batteries but all batteries, and also including production waste from the battery manufacturing plants.”
Dismantling the battery into its parts is time-consuming
The issue is also receiving attention from scientific bodies such as the Faraday Institution, whose ReLiB project aims to optimize the recycling of EV batteries and make it as streamlined as possible.
"We imagine a more efficient, more cost-effective industry in future, instead of going through some of the processes that are available - and can be scaled up now — but are not terribly efficient," says Dr Anderson, who is principal investigator for the project.
For example, much of the substance of a battery is reduced during the recycling process to what is called black mass - a mixture of lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel — which needs further, energy-intensive processing to recover the materials in a usable form.
Manually dismantling fuel cells allows for more of these materials to be efficiently recovered, but brings problems of its own.
"In some markets, such as China, health and safety regulation and environmental regulation is much more lax, and working conditions wouldn't be accepted in a Western context," says Gavin Harper, Faraday Institution research fellow.
"Also, because labor is more expensive, the whole economics of it make it difficult to make it a good proposition in the UK."
The answer, he says, is automation and robotics: "If you can automate that, we can pull some of the danger out of it and make it more economically efficient."
And there are indeed powerful economic arguments for improving the recyclability of EV batteries — not least, the fact that many of the elements used are hard to come by in Europe and the UK.
"You've got the waste management problem on the one hand, but then on the flip side of that you've also got a great opportunity because obviously the UK doesn't have indigenous supplies of many factory materials," says Dr Harper.
“There's a bit of lithium in Cornwall, but by and large we've got challenges in terms of sourcing the factory materials that we need.”
From a manufacturer's point of view, therefore, recycling old batteries is the safest way to ensure a ready supply of new ones.
"We need to secure — as a manufacturer, as Europeans — the sourcing of these materials that are strategic for mobility and for the industry," says Mr Hermine.
“We don't have access to these materials outside of this recycling field — the end-of-life battery is the urban mining of Europe.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/electric-cars-what-will-happen-to-all-the-dead-batteries?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
THE MIGRATION OF A FEMALE FALCON FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO FINLAND
A female falcon was equipped with a satellite tracking system in South Africa before migrating to Finland. Image shows tracker data. In just 42 days, she flew over 10,000 km, at an incredible average of 230km/day and nearly in a straight line.
Note that the falcon avoiding flying over the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea — presumably because she wouldn’t be able to drink fresh water.
*
THE GIANT “HEADS” ON EASTER ISLAND
Archaeologists have long suspected that some of the "heads" on Easter Island had a buried body. At the same time, the "giant heads," several meters high, were thought to be an exception. In fact, if these heads had an underlying body, they would have had to be real stone giants, at least 20 meters tall, to meet the proportions.
...
Recent excavations have shown that the "giant heads" on Easter Island are actually buried "stone giants" whose heads emerged from the earth.. How did statues weighing several tons end up almost 20 meters deep? If they did it on purpose, how did they manage to do it without breaking them? Easter Island is little more than a small island. Where did they get the manpower to bury dozens and dozens of "stone giants" in the middle of the Ocean? Unanswered questions.
Easter Island head and torso
...
The Egyptians were able to do similar things, but they had the manpower of an empire at their disposal. What labor force did the islanders of tiny Easter Island have at their disposal? The same thing happened in Nan Madol. A mysterious people built a metropolis on a small island in the middle of the Ocean. Of course, it is possible to do that. But provided you have the manpower of an empire. But what manpower was available on a totally isolated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
*
The same thing happened on the border between Turkey and Syria. An entire megalithic complex was completely buried, no one knows by whom, no one knows why. This site has been called "Göbekli Tepe," meaning "the belly hill." But under that hill is one of the deepest mysteries of humankind. Recent studies with georadars have revealed that there are dozens of sites similar to Göbekli Tepe "buried" many meters deep. Was it a civilization unknown to us that later disappeared due to a natural cataclysm? Or what?
...
Several scientific articles appearing in the famous scientific journal Nature tell us that over 10,000 years ago a series of comets passed through Earth's atmosphere, shattering into thousands of pieces. The Earth was hit by a veritable bombardment of fragments that struck at least four continents. Nothing was ever the same again. There was a real "Apocalypse" in prehistory, which wiped out an unknown number of "homo sapiens." Do the ruins of Easter Island correspond to those of Göbekli Tepe?
...
The article continues in the book HOMO RELOADED - The hidden history of the last 75,000 years.
https://www.facebook.com/
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WHY MEETING ANOTHER’S GAZE IS SO POWERFUL
The reaction when two people lock eyes in a crowded room is a staple of romantic cinema. But the complex, unconscious reactions that take place are anything but make believe.
You’ve doubtless had the experience when, across a noisy, crowded room, you lock gazes with another person. It’s almost like a scene out of the movies – the rest of the world fades to grey while you and that other soul are momentarily connected in the mutual knowledge that they are looking at you and you at them.
Of course, eye contact is not always so exciting – it’s a natural part of most casual conversations, after all – but it is nearly always important. We make assumptions about people’s personalities based on how much they meet our eyes or look away when we are talking to them. And when we pass strangers in the street or some other public place, we can be left feeling rejected if they don’t make eye contact.
This much we already know from our everyday experiences. But psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying eye contact for decades and their intriguing findings reveal much more about its power, including what our eyes give away and how eye contact changes what we think about the other person looking back at us.
For instance, a recurring finding is that gazing eyes grab and hold our attention, making us less aware of what else is going on around us (that ‘fading to grey’ that I mentioned earlier). Also, meeting someone’s gaze almost immediately engages a raft of brain processes, as we make sense of the fact that we are dealing with the mind of another person who is currently looking at us. In consequence, we become more conscious of that other person’s agency, that they have a mind and perspective of their own – and, in turn, this makes us more self-conscious.
You may have noticed these effects particularly strongly if you’ve ever held the intense gaze of a monkey or ape at a zoo: it is almost impossible not to be overcome by the profound sensation that they are a conscious being judging and scrutinizing you. In fact, even looking at a portrait painting that appears to be making eye contact has been shown to trigger a swathe of brain activity related to social cognition – that is, in regions involved in thinking about ourselves and others.
Not surprisingly, the drama of realizing we are the object of another mind is highly distracting. Consider a study by Japanese researchers. Volunteers looked at a video of a face while simultaneously completing a word challenge that involved coming up with verbs to match various nouns (to take an easy example, if they heard the noun ‘milk”, a suitable response would be “drink”). Crucially, the volunteers struggled much more at the word challenge (but only for the trickier nouns) when the face in the video appeared to be making eye contact with them. The researchers think this effect occurred because eye contact – even with a stranger in a video – is so intense that it drains our cognitive reserves.
Similar research has found that meeting the direct gaze of another also interferes with our working memory (our ability to hold and use information in mind over short periods of time), our imagination, and our mental control, in the sense of our ability to suppress irrelevant information. You may have experienced these effects first hand, perhaps without realizing, whenever you have broken eye contact with another person so as to better concentrate on what you are saying or thinking about. Some psychologists even recommend looking away as a strategy to help young children answer questions.
As well as sending our brains into social overdrive, research also shows that eye contact shapes our perception of the other person who meets our gaze. For instance, we generally perceive people who make more eye contact to be more intelligent, more conscientious and sincere (in Western cultures, at least), and we become more inclined to believe what they say.
Of course, too much eye contact can also make us uncomfortable – and people who stare without letting go can come across as creepy. In one study conducted at a science museum, psychologists tried to establish the preferred length of eye contact. They concluded that, on average, it is three seconds long (and no one preferred gazes that lasted longer than nine seconds).
Another documented effect of mutual gaze may help explain why that moment of eye contact across a room can sometimes feel so compelling. A recent study found that mutual gaze leads to a kind of partial melding of the self and other: we rate strangers with whom we’ve made eye contact as more similar to us, in terms of their personality and appearance. Perhaps, in the right context, when everyone else is busy talking to other people, this effect adds to the sense that you and the person looking back at you are sharing a special moment.
The chemistry of eye contact doesn’t end there. Should you choose to move closer, you and your gaze partner will find that eye contact also joins you to each other in another way, in a process known as “pupil mimicry” or “pupil contagion” – this describes how your pupils and the other person’s dilate and constrict in synchrony. This has been interpreted as a form of subconscious social mimicry, a kind of ocular dance, and that would be the more romantic take.
But there’s been some skepticism about this, with researchers saying the phenomenon is merely a response to variations in the brightness of the other person’s eyes (up close, when the other person’s pupils dilate, this increases the darkness of the scene, thus causing your pupils to dilate too).
That is not to say that pupil dilation has no psychological meaning. In fact, going back at least to the 1960s, psychologists have studied the way that our pupils dilate when we are more aroused or stimulated (in a physiological sense), whether by intellectual, emotional, aesthetic or sexual interest. This has led to debate about whether faces with more dilated pupils (sometimes taken as a sign of sexual interest) are perceived by onlookers to be more attractive. At least some studies, some decades old and others more recent, suggest they are, and we also know that our brains automatically process the dilation of other people’s pupils.
Either way, centuries prior to this research, folk wisdom certainly considered dilated pupils to be attractive. At various times in history women have even used a plant extract to deliberately dilate their pupils as a way to make themselves more attractive (hence the colloquial name for the plant: ‘belladonna’).
But when you look another person deep in the eye, do not think it is just their pupils sending you a message. Other recent research suggests that we can read complex emotions from the eye muscles – that is, whether a person is narrowing or opening their eyes wide. So, for instance, when an emotion such as disgust causes us to narrow our eyes, this ‘eye expression’ – like a facial expression – also signals our disgust to others.
Yet another important eye feature are limbal rings: the dark circles that surround your irises. Evidence suggests that these limbal rings are more often visible in younger, healthier people, and that onlookers know this on some level, such that heterosexual women looking for a short-term fling judge men with more visible limbal rings to be more healthy and desirable.
All these studies suggest there is more than a grain of truth to the old adage about the eyes being a window to the soul. In fact, there is something incredibly powerful about gazing deeply into another person’s eyes. They say that our eyes are the only part of our brain that is directly exposed to the world.
When you look another person in the eye, then, just think: it is perhaps the closest you will come to ‘touching brains’ – or touching souls if you like to be more poetic about these things. Given this intense intimacy, perhaps it is little wonder that if you dim the lights and hold the gaze of another person for 10 minutes non-stop, you will find strange things start to happen, stranger perhaps than you’ve ever experienced before.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-meeting-another-s-gaze-is-so-powerful?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HAPPY PEOPLE ACCOMPLISH MORE
It's easy to think of happiness as a result, but happiness is also a driver.
One example: While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst, or a lifetime, or things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people accomplish more.
Easier said than done though, right?
Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper.
1. Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough
Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:
The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent.
You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.
We've explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.
A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they saw no physical changes:
Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 × 40 minutes exercising and 6 × 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before.
Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.
2. Sleep More: You'll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions
We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.
In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:
Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like "cancer." But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like "sunshine" or "basket."
The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.
Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions.
Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.
Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire work day.
Researchers found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods.
And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.
3. Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can't Buy You Happiness
Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying.
If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.
Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we feel.
I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.
George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, "What have you learned from the Grant Study men?" Vaillant's response: "That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people."
He shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic on how men's social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:
Men's relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.
In fact, a study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics states than your relationships are worth more than $100,000:
Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness.
I think that last line is especially fascinating: Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as we would if we increased the strength of our social relationships.
The Terman study, covered in The Longevity Project, found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:
We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest.
Surprise: our prediction was wrong... Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age.
4. Get Outside More: Happiness is Maximized at 57°
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:
Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory...
This is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.
A UK study from the University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier. Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments.
The American Meteorological Society published research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees (13.9°C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.
The connection between productivity and temperature is another topic we've talked about more here. It's fascinating what a small change in temperature can do.
5. Help Others: 100 Hours a Year is the Magic Number
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.
If we go back to Shawn Achor's book again, he says this about helping others:
...when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities--such as concerts and group dinners out--brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called "prosocial spending," also boosts happiness.
The Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that explored this very topic:
Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future.
So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our time on other people?
A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g. sports clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction.
In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives: "scientists have found that performing an act of kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested."
6. Practice Smiling: Reduce Pain, Improve Mood, Think Better
Smiling can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:
A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts--such as a tropical vacation or a child's recital--improve their mood and withdraw less.
Of course it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye sockets. (You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a huge difference in a fake smile and a genuine smile.)
According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:
Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al. (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees.
A smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:
Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition).
7. Plan a Trip: It Helps Even if You Don't Actually Take One
As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation:
In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people.
Shawn Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:
One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.
If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar--even if it's a month or a year down the road. Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.
8. Meditate: Rewire Your Brain for Happiness
Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also useful for improving your happiness:
In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.
Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down, it's been often proven to be the single most effective way to live a happier life. According to Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term:
Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And, research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness.
The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through mediation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however we feel and think today isn't permanent.
9. Move Closer to Work: A Short Commute is Worth More Than a Big House
Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.
According to The Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:
... while many voluntary conditions don't affect our happiness in the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it's not.
Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, "Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day."
We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don't work:
Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute.
10. Practice Gratitude: Increase Happiness and Satisfaction
This is a seemingly simple strategy but I've personally found it to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.
In an experiment where participants took note of things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just from this simple practice:
The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the three studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.
The Journal of Happiness studies published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect our levels of happiness:
Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three letters of gratitude over a 3 week period. Results indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants' happiness and life satisfaction while decreasing depressive symptoms.
Quick Final Fact: Getting Older Will Actually Make You Happier
As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally grow happier. There's still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have a few ideas:
Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less.
Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods—for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other studies finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and focus their goals on greater well being.
So if you thought getting old will make you miserable, it's likely you'll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.
How cool is that?
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/10-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-incredibly-happy
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HOW SOME PEOPLE STAY HAPPY IN SPITE OF BAD CIRCUMSTANCES
Bad things happen both personally and professionally. Relationships end. Significant others get sick or die. Promotions are given to someone else. Clients leave. Companies go through rounds of layoffs.
In the face of these setbacks, some people seem to fall apart, while others find ways to move forward and continue to get things done. Are there things you can do to be resilient?
The answer to this question is yes—to a point.
First, bear in mind that resilience does not mean ignoring the negative feelings that come along with a tough time. Significant personal or professional losses will lead to feelings of sadness and disappointment. It is natural to grieve about these losses and it is important to give yourself some time and space to do so. You are not obliged to go through all five stages of grief, but you shouldn’t feel guilty if you do experience sadness or anger before you come to accept what has happened.
Second, people seem to have a happiness set point. Generally speaking in the weeks and months after a significant positive or negative life event, you tend to return to roughly the level of happiness you had before that event. That doesn’t mean that events can’t have a long-term influence on how happy you are, just that the best predictor of how happy you will be several months after a big positive or negative event is how happy you were before it.
Third, there are times when negative feelings are the best way forward from a negative event. In particular, stress and anxiety are the natural reaction to a threat in the environment. If there really is a calamity out there that you are trying to ward off, anxiety might be the right response.
One thing that happens when you are anxious is that you tend to ruminate over the cause of the anxiety. Rumination is a repeated cycle of thoughts. If there is a potential threat, then thinking it through carefully may allow you to develop a plan to move forward that will help you to handle the situation. It may not be enjoyable to experience this level of stress, but it still may be useful.
That said, there are several things you can do to help cope with the bad times.
Understand What You Can Control and What You Can’t
The first is to be clear about what factors are under your control. Quite a bit of work shows that when times are bad, people are more resilient when they focus on things they can do to move forward rather than focusing on the ways that circumstances have conspired to put them in a bind. Focus on actions you can take that will make your situation better. As you engage in those actions, you will find that you feel better about your work and will also be more productive.
Surround Yourself With People Even If You Don’t Feel Like It
Next, engage with other people. When you are sad or stressed, you often don’t want to be around others. But there are several advantages to social engagement. When you talk about what is making you sad or anxious, you often find that other people have had similar experiences that they can share. Sadness can make you feel as though your own situation is unique, so knowing you are not the only one going through something can be valuable. In addition, social connection is motivating and can help you to focus on tasks that need to be done.
Look For An Easy Win
When you experience a loss in one aspect of your life, it can make you focus on the negatives across all of the facets of your existence. That is not a good time to embark on a long project that may not succeed. Instead, find something in your work life that you can complete quickly and successfully. That way, you can remind yourself that a significant setback is not a sign that you are cursed.
Give Everyone the Benefit of the Doubt
Finally, go out of your way to give a positive interpretation of the actions of others. When you are angry about something at work, you tend to find reasons why other people are an obstacle to your success. This is particularly true when you are passed over for something you wanted. Recognize that most people you work with are potential allies. Just because someone was not able to give you something you wanted does not mean that everyone is out to get you.
When you think negative thoughts about other people, you can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your negative thoughts will influence the interpretation you give to their actions that can cause you to interact with them anger or mistrust. They will notice your attitude and treat you accordingly. Similarly, when you interpret the actions of other people positively, you are more likely to create good interactions with others.
These strategies will help you to minimize the influence of bad events on your life. They will also help you feel better, because each success you have will boost your attitude toward the future.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/secrets-of-people-who-stay-happy-in-the-worst-circumstances?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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WITTGENSTEIN AND ZHUANGZI: AGAINST THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF LANGUAGE
Wittgenstein’s career was uniquely divided between the metaphysical views he expounded in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and their repudiation in the ground-breaking ideas published posthumously in Philosophical Investigations (1953). In his early period, Wittgenstein believed that a study of the relationships between propositions (i.e., words) and the world would solve all philosophical problems. His view can be summed up as “every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the world. It is the object for which the word stands” and “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
This is the standard correspondence theory of language, based on Aristotle’s assertion that “to “know a thing is to name it.” In Philosophical Investigations, however, the later Wittgenstein no longer believes that language mirrors the structure of reality. Instead he argues that the meaning of words is best understood through their use in what he calls a “language game.”
The term “language-game” refers to a context involving interacting actors, where “words” are either “created,” or altered by the “rule” of a particular “game” dictated by what their actions are meant to accomplish. In other words, “words” do not arise from a platonic contemplation on “what is” (“being,” the “on” of “ontology”). They arise from human interaction, in which specific actions require a new level of communication. This is how human language was born in the Paleolithic. This is still how new words are added to dictionaries every year.
Zhuangzi: For a Wisdom of Uncertainty
In his deconstructive analysis of the Zhuangzi, Wang Youru writes: “Zhuangzi refutes the correspondence theory of language. He refuses to surrender himself to the descriptive, cognitive or referential use of language … to overcome the direct mode of linguistic discourse, and best serve the primary purpose of his soteriological or therapeutic practice” (Wang 2003).
Though this theory was argued for in China by the members of the School of Names, these disappeared with the onset of the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.E.), and their ideas never became mainstream in traditional China. As a Daoist, Zhuangzi did not share them. For the followers of the Dao, there is no “ideal” static order embodied in words. The ten thousand things arise for us, as it were, from the Dao, shaped by the interaction of yin and yang, as first described in the Shijing (The Book of Odes), one of the Five Classics, said to have been composed between the eleventh and seventh centuries BCE and compiled by Confucius.
Yin and yang act in a way comparable to the polarity of the positive and negative ends of a magnet to guide us on the Path to follow in order to lead lives conducive to the health of the natural world as well as the physical and mental health of the individual. For the individual, however, a practice of self-cultivation is necessary to align oneself with the ever-changing web of interconnected relationships that we call reality. This alignment is not, as in the case of metaphysics, a matter of words and knowledge. It is a matter of behavior and actions.
Knowledge can only follow the actual change in one’s behavior in accordance with the “intimations” of the Dao. The role of the sage, according to Zhuangzi, is to guide students of the Way in the practice of self-cultivation to enable them to align with the Dao, and for this he has to use words “creatively.”
Crisis of Meaning in the West
It took Western philosophy two thousand years to move away from the correspondence theory of language. Wittgenstein’s contemporary philosopher Martin Heidegger also came to conclusions that, from another angle, undermine the metaphysical foundations of Western culture. The postmodern movement that followed went even further when it asserted that there is no “truth,” adding that what is presented as “knowledge” is merely a “narrative,” a “story.” So far, however, this has done little more than trigger a “crisis of meaning” among intellectuals, while apparently enabling some to feel free to use blatant “lies” to bolster their quest for power.
What the postmodern thinkers have forgotten to mention is that a self-cultivation practice is required to allow us to align experientially with reality “before naming.” Without such a lived realization, few people in the West can even comprehend what it means to abandon the quest for certainty. And after centuries of scientific and technological research seeking certainty, who will dare to suggest that we should now seek a wisdom of uncertainty?
https://buddhism-thewayofemptiness.blog.nomagic.uk/zhuangzi-and-wittgenstein-against-the-correspondence-theory-of-language/
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THE UNIVERSE’S “MISSING PLANETS”: SUPER-EARTHS AND SUB-NEPTUNES
Astronomers may be ready to explain our universe's lack of exoplanets twice the radius of Earth.
An illustration shows a super-Earth exoplanet having its water evaporated while approaching its parent star.
Scientists have found some planets may migrate toward the hearts of their planetary systems early on in their lives, possibly explaining the lack of planets we see that are around twice the width of Earth.
Over the years, scientists have managed to observe many exoplanets that are either smaller or larger than Earth, but planets precisely between 1.6 and 2.2 times the size of our world are relatively scarce. In particular, exoplanets defined as super-Earths or mini-Neptunes appear to be missing in space. They're classified as such if they're slightly larger than twice the size of our planet, but still smaller than the ice giant Neptune [made of frozen methane, water, and ammonia]
The absence of these planets has thus become known as the "radius valley" or "radius gap," and has troubled scientists for a long time.
"Six years ago, a reanalysis of data from the Kepler space telescope revealed a shortage of exoplanets with sizes around two Earth radii," Remo Burn, an exoplanet expert at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement.
Scientists have known for many years that planets could either move toward or away from their parent stars after formation, but what wasn't previously known was just how effective this migration would be in creating the radius valley.
The most common explanation for the valley, Burn says, has to do with stars irradiating the planets that closely surround them, stripping the atmospheres of those worlds and causing them to shrink. This theory on its own, however, wasn't satisfactory for him. "This explanation neglects the influence of planetary migration," he explained.
Thus, Burn led a team of researchers that set out to investigate whether planetary migration could supplement the standard explanation and further explain the reason so few super-Earths and mini-Neptunes are seen orbiting close to their stars.
Super-Earths shrink while sub-Neptunes grow
Because the two planets that occupy the radius gap, super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, are both absent from the solar system, scientists can't quite study either up close. However, researchers are fairly sure that super-Earths are rocky or terrestrial planets, while the characteristics of mini-Neptunes are much less certain.
What scientists also agree on is that mini-Neptunes, also known as sub-Neptunes, should have atmospheres that extend far beyond those of rocky planets.
Burn and the team wanted to know if this fact could play a role in creating the radius valley, and if the very existence of that valley could suggest very different formations and evolutions for super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.
Performing a re-analysis of a simulation the team ran in 2020, Burn and colleagues factored in processes in the gas and dust disks surrounding young stars that give rise to new planets, the emergence of atmospheres, and the migration of planets.
Crucial to the simulation and to developing a potential solution for the radius valley — that also factors in planetary migration — was understanding how water acts over a wide range of pressures and temperatures. That's because these parameters allow for a more realistic calculation of sub-Neptunes’ behavior.
"It's remarkable how, as in this case, physical properties on molecular levels influence large-scale astronomical processes such as the formation of planetary atmospheres," team member and MPIA Director, Thomas Henning, said in the statement.
The team found that moving toward a parent star had drastically different effects on both super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.
Mini-Neptunes are born away from their parent stars in the icy outer regions of their systems. While some of these planets remain in this place of birth, receiving low doses of radiation from their star, mini-Neptunes that do migrate inwards toward their star would have their icy material thawed, the team realized.
This would create a thick water atmosphere around these exoplanets, thus increasing their radii and shifting their widths beyond planets in the radius gap. This is possible because current observations of worlds outside the solar system can't differentiate between an exoplanet's atmosphere and solid parts when calculating width. This effect, the scientists therefore estimate, causes a peak in exoplanets 2.4 times the size of Earth.
On the other hand, super-Earths that either migrate toward their host star or are born very close would have their atmospheres stripped by the intense radiation of their stars. That'd force the worlds to lose their atmosphere and become smaller. This effect, the team says, would create a bare rocky core and cause a peak in exoplanet sizes at only 1.4 times the width of Earth.
Put simply, that means as mini-Neptunes are moving out of the radius valley one way, super-Earths are evacuating it via the opposite exit. And both mechanisms result in a dearth of planets around twice the width of Earth.
The team's simulations used to potentially unravel this mystery could also have an impact in other areas of exoplanet science.
"If we were to expand our results to cooler regions, where water is liquid, this might suggest the existence of water worlds with deep oceans," Christoph Mordasin, team member and head of the Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences at the University of Bern, said in the statement. "Such planets could potentially host life and would be relatively straightforward targets for searching for biomarkers thanks to their size."
The team's research was published Feb. 9, 2025 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
https://www.space.com/mystery-missing-super-earths-mini-neptunes-solved
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WHY THE CLASSICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST FREE WILL IS A FAILURE
Despite bold philosophical and scientific claims, there’s still no good reason to doubt the existence of free will.
In the last several years, a number of prominent scientists have claimed that we have good scientific reason to believe that there’s no such thing as free will — that free will is an illusion. If this were true, it would be less than splendid. And it would be surprising, too, because it really seems like we have free will. It seems that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make.
We need to look very closely at the arguments that these scientists are putting forward to determine whether they really give us good reason to abandon our belief in free will. But before we do that, it would behoove us to have a look at a much older argument against free will — an argument that’s been around for centuries.
Iif determinism is true, then it was already settled before you were born that you were going to order chocolate ice cream when you got to the front of the line. And, of course, the same can be said about all of our decisions, and it seems to follow from this that human beings do not have free will.
Let’s call this the classical argument against free will. It proceeds by assuming that determinism is true and arguing from there that we don’t have free will.
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There’s a big problem with the classical argument against free will. It just assumes that determinism is true. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. But it’s actually not a commonsense truism. One of the main lessons of 20th-century physics is that we can’t know by common sense, or by intuition, that determinism is true. Determinism is a controversial hypothesis about the workings of the physical world. We could only know that it’s true by doing some high-level physics. Moreover — and this is another lesson of 20th-century physics — as of right now, we don’t have any good evidence for determinism. In other words, our best physical theories don’t answer the question of whether determinism is true.
During the reign of classical physics (or Newtonian physics), it was widely believed that determinism was true. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists started to discover some problems with Newton’s theory, and it was eventually replaced with a new theory — quantum mechanics. (Actually, it was replaced by two new theories, namely, quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But relativity theory isn’t relevant to the topic of free will.)
Quantum mechanics has several strange and interesting features, but the one that’s relevant to free will is that this new theory contains laws that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. We can understand what this means very easily. Roughly speaking, deterministic laws of nature look like this:
If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then you will get outcome O.
But quantum physics contains probabilistic laws that look like this:
If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then there are two different possible outcomes, namely, O1 and O2; moreover, there’s a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O1 and a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O2.
It’s important to notice what follows from this. Suppose that we take a physical system, put it into state S, and perform experiment E on it. Now suppose that when we perform this experiment, we get outcome O1. Finally, suppose we ask the following question: “Why did we get outcome O1 instead of O2?” The important point to notice is that quantum mechanics doesn’t answer this question. It doesn’t give us any explanation at all for why we got outcome O1 instead of O2. In other words, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it could be that nothing caused us to get result O1; it could be that this just happened.
Now, Einstein famously thought that this couldn’t be the whole story. You’ve probably heard that he once said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” What Einstein meant when he said this was that the fundamental laws of nature can’t be probabilistic. The fundamental laws, Einstein thought, have to tell us what will happen next, not what will probably happen, or what might happen.
So Einstein thought that there had to be a hidden layer of reality, below the quantum level, and that if we could find this hidden layer, we could get rid of the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics and replace them with deterministic laws, laws that tell us what will happen next, not just what will probably happen next. And, of course, if we could do this — if we could find this hidden layer of reality and these deterministic laws of nature — then we would be able to explain why we got outcome O1 instead of O2.
But a lot of other physicists — most notably, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr — disagreed with Einstein. They thought that the quantum layer of reality was the bottom layer. And they thought that the fundamental laws of nature — or at any rate, some of these laws — were probabilistic laws.
But if this is right, then at least some physical events aren’t deterministically caused by prior events. It means that some physical events just happen. For instance, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then nothing caused us to get outcome O1 instead of O2; there was no reason why this happened; it just did.
The debate between Einstein on the one hand and Heisenberg and Bohr on the other is crucially important to our discussion. Einstein is a determinist. If he’s right, then every physical event is predetermined — or in other words, completely caused by prior events. But if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then determinism is false. On their view, not every event is predetermined by the past and the laws of nature; some things just happen, for no reason at all. In other words, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then indeterminism is true.
And here’s the really important point for us. The debate between determinists like Einstein and indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr has never been settled. We don’t have any good evidence for either view. Quantum mechanics is still our best theory of the subatomic world, but we just don’t know whether there’s another layer of reality beneath the quantum layer.
And so we don’t know whether all physical events are completely caused by prior events. In other words, we don’t know whether determinism or indeterminism is true. Future physicists might be able to settle this question, but as of right now, we don’t know the answer.
But now notice that if we don’t know whether determinism is true or false, then this completely undermines the classical argument against free will. That argument just assumed that determinism is true. But we now know that there is no good reason to believe this. The question of whether determinism is true is an open question for physicists. So the classical argument against free will is a failure — it doesn’t give us any good reason to conclude that we don’t have free will.
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Despite the failure of the classical argument, the enemies of free will are undeterred. They still think there’s a powerful argument to be made against free will. In fact, they think there are two such arguments. Both of these arguments can be thought of as attempts to fix the classical argument, but they do this in completely different ways.
The first new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a scientific argument — starts with the observation that it doesn’t matter whether the full-blown hypothesis of determinism is true because it doesn’t matter whether all events are predetermined by prior events. All that matters is whether our decisions are predetermined by prior events.
The central claim of the first new-and-improved argument against free will is that we have good evidence (from studies performed by psychologists and neuroscientists) for thinking that, in fact, our decisions are predetermined by prior events.
The second new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a philosophical argument, not a scientific argument — relies on the claim that it doesn’t matter whether determinism is true because indeterminism is just as incompatible with free will as determinism is. The argument for this is based on the claim that if our decisions aren’t determined, then they aren’t caused by anything, which means that they occur randomly. And the central claim of the second new-and-improved argument against free will is that if our decisions occur randomly, then they just happen to us, and so they’re not the products of our free will.
My own view is that neither of these new-and-improved arguments succeeds in showing that we don’t have free will. But it takes a lot of work to undermine these two arguments. In order to undermine the scientific argument, we need to explain why the relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies don’t in fact show that we don’t have free will. And in order to undermine the philosophical argument, we need to explain how a decision could be the product of someone’s free will — how the outcome of the decision could be under the given person’s control — even if the decision wasn’t caused by anything.
So, yes, this would all take a lot of work. Maybe I should write a book about it.
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IS ISLAM BEGINNING TO DECLINE?
Few topics are as delicate as religion — especially in the Middle East.
Officially, Arab states have major Muslim populations, varying from around 60% in Lebanon to almost 100% in Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Since the countries' religious establishments also serve as government bodies, governments play a significant role in religious life, as they often control prayers, media or school curriculums.
However, several recently conducted and very comprehensive surveys in the Middle East and Iran, have come to similar conclusions: They all show an increase in secularization and growing calls for reforms in religious political institutions.
LEBANON
The conclusion after 25,000 interviews in Lebanon, by one of the largest pollsters in the region, the Arab Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, is "Personal piety has declined some 43% over the past decade, indicating less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious."
One Lebanese woman told DW [Deutsche Welle] of her experience growing up in a conservative household. "I come from a very religious family. My parents forced me to wear the veil when I was only 12 years old," said the 27-year-old, who does not want her name published out of fear of reprisal. "They constantly threatened me that if I remove my veil, I will burn in hell."
Only years later, at university, she met a group of friends who were atheists. "I gradually became convinced of their beliefs, so one day before going to uni, I decided to remove my veil and leave the house," she said.
"The hardest part was facing my family, deep down, I was ashamed that I put my parents down."
However, in Lebanon, it is almost impossible to not be officially linked to religion, as the civil registry includes the sectarian identity of every Lebanese citizen. Among the 18 options, "non-religious" is not listed.
IRAN
A recent survey among 40,000 interviewees by the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), which researched Iranians' attitudes toward religion, found that no less than 47% reported "having transitioned from being religious to non-religious.”
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, assistant professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University and co-author of the survey, sees this transition, as well as the quest for religious change, as a logical consequence of Iran's secularization. "The Iranian society has undergone huge transformations, such as the literacy rate has gone up spectacularly, the country has experienced massive urbanization, economic changes have affected traditional family structures, the internet penetration rate grew to be comparable with the European Union and fertility rates dropped," Tamimi Arab told DW.
Compared with Iran’s 99.5% Shiite census figure, GAMAAN found that 78% of the participants believed in God — but only 32% identified themselves as Shiite Muslims. Figures show that 9% identified as atheist, 8% as Zoroastrian, 7% as spiritual, 6% as agnostic, and 5% as Sunni Muslim. Around 22% identified with none of these religions.
"We see an increase in secularization and a diversity of faiths and beliefs," Tamimi Arab told DW. From his point of view, however, the most decisive factor is "the entanglement of state and religion, which has caused the population to resent institutional religion even as the overwhelming majority still believes in God."
A woman in Kuwait, who requested DW not publish her name due to safety concerns, also strictly differentiates between Islam as a religion and Islam as a system. "As a teenager, I didn’t find any proof of the government's claimed regulations in the Quran."
She recalls how, around 20 years ago, such thoughts had been mainly resented — but today the difference in the people’s attitude toward Islam can be felt everywhere. "Rejecting the submission to Islam as a system doesn’t mean rejecting Islam as a religion," she explained.
The rise of the 'nones'
The sociologist Ronald Inglehart, Lowenstein Professor of Political Science emeritus at the University of Michigan and author of the book Sudden Religious Decline, has analyzed surveys of more than 100 countries, carried out from 1981-2020. Inglehart has observed that rapid secularization is not unique to a single country in the Middle East. "The rise of the so-called 'nones,' who do not identify with a particular faith, has been noted in Muslim majority countries as different as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco," Tamimi Arab added.
The threat of changing attitudes
The more people differentiate between religion as a faith and religion as a system, the louder the calls for reforms. "The trend puts a dent in the efforts of Iran as well as its rivals, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, that are competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world," said James Dorsey, senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Dorsey, an expert on the region, highlights two contrasting examples. While the United Arab Emirates has lifted the bans on alcohol consumption and unmarried couples living together, Saudi Arabia has labeled having atheist thoughts as a form of terrorism.
As an example, Dorsey references Saudi dissident and activist Raif Badawi, who was convicted of apostasy, or insulting Islam. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis are obliged to adhere to Islam — and asserting that religion did not have the answers to all of life's questions.
https://www.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163
Oriana:
While only some wars can be called religious wars in the strict sense, once religion gets mixed up in the war (e.g. the American Civil War, with each side quoting the bible to support their cause), the war (now at least in part a Holy War) tends to become longer and more bloody. Religion seems to add fuel to the conflict.
The sooner a bloodthirsty religion like Islam declines, the better for a particular country and the world. Religiosity also tends to go hand in hand with greater poverty, less education, oppression of women, and overall backwardness.
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DAILY OMEGA-3 SUPPLEMENTS, VITAMIN D, AND EXERCISE MAY SLOW DOWN AGING
A new study suggests that omega-3 and vitamin D supplements, when combined with regular exercise, may help slow biological aging by several months over a 3-year period.
Researchers analyzed data from the DO-HEALTH trial, which tracked over 700 older adults and found that those who followed this regimen experienced measurable benefits at the molecular level.
The researchers said that even though the effects might seem small, they could still make a big difference for public health — helping to lower the risk of age-related health issues and improving the well-being of older adults.
According to new research, regularly taking omega-3 and vitamin D supplements can support health and mitigate aging-related issues.
In the study published in Nature, researchers reported that taking these supplements over 3 years slowed biological aging by 3 to 4 months, with even greater effects observed when combined with exercise.
They explained that biological aging happens at the molecular level, so even if two people are the same age, their bodies may age at different speeds depending on their overall health.
Although a reduction of a few months in biological aging may seem modest, the researchers said this could have meaningful public health benefits, including a lower prevalence of certain age-related conditions.
The researchers analyzed data from the DO-HEALTH trial, which examined the impact of supplements and exercise on older adults across five European countries between 2012 and 2014.
They reviewed information from over 700 participants aged 70 and older, who were assigned either a placebo or omega-3, vitamin D, and exercise alone or in combination.
All participants were based in Switzerland, and approximately half were in good health, without major chronic illnesses or disabilities.
Biological Aging Assessed via 4 Different Clocks
To assess biological aging, blood samples were collected at the beginning and end of the study and analyzed using four biological clocks.
First author Heike A. Bischoff-Ferrari, MD, MPH, DrPH from the University of Basel Department of Aging Medicine FELIX PLATTER, and the University of Zurich’s Department of Geriatrics and Aging Research, Switzerland, explained the key findings to Medical News Today.
“In our prior studies in the same trial (DO-HEALTH) of generally healthy adults age 70 and older, we found omega-3 lowered the rate of falls by 10% and reduced the rate of infections by up to 13%, while omega-3, vitamin D and exercise combined lowered the risk of pre-frailty by 39% and invasive cancer by 61%,” Bischoff-Ferrari told us.
“Our findings provide a strong signal that omega-3 supplementation (1 [gram per day] algae-based) slows biological aging in humans, and that the combination vitamin D and exercise may make this effect even stronger. Biological age was slowed by 3-4 months in 3 years.”
Changes in DNA Methylation Key to Measuring Aging
The researchers explained that these clocks measure biological aging by tracking changes in DNA methylation, specifically the addition and removal of methyl groups.
They also noted that using multiple DNA methylation clocks was a key strength of the study, as each clock captures different aspects of the aging process.
One of the biological clocks used in the study, PhenoAge, indicated that older adults who took 1 gram of polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids from algae, combined with vitamin D (2,000 international units per day) and 30 minutes of exercise three times a week, slowed biological aging by approximately 2.9 to 3.8 months over 3 years.
While omega-3 alone reduced biological aging in three of the epigenetic clocks analyzed, the combination of all three interventions had an even greater impact.
The researchers explained that these clocks measure biological aging by tracking changes in DNA methylation, specifically the addition and removal of methyl groups.
They also noted that using multiple DNA methylation clocks was a key strength of the study, as each clock captures different aspects of the aging process.
“Our findings provide a strong signal that omega-3 slows biological aging in humans, and that the combination vitamin D and exercise may make this effect event stronger. While the effects documented (3-4 months rejuvenation of biological age) appear small, if sustained, may have relevant effects on population health.”
Steve Horvath, PhD, another lead researcher involved, said that “the results in DO-HEALTH for the prevention of infections, falls, cancer and pre-frailty translated to slowing biological aging in the same trial.”
“This supports these three public health strategies as a combined solution at the public health level to extend health span in older adults. Further, these strategies are affordable and safe as shown in DO-HEALTH over a 3-year follow-up,” Horvath explained.
“As a next step,” he told us, “we plan to use DO-HEALTH as a validation platform for novel measures of biological aging and just built the global health span extension consortium to advance the concept of combining feasible life-style changes that play on different mechanistic pathways of biological aging and become powerful in combination.”
The researchers noted that although the treatments slowed down aging at the molecular level, there is no clear proof that this leads to a longer life or better health.
In addition, previous findings from the DO-HEALTH trial showed that omega-3 supplementation reduced the risk of falls by 10% and infections by up to 13% compared with those who did not take the supplement.
Further research has also suggested that a combination of omega-3, vitamin D, and exercise may lower the risk of cancer.
With this in mind, some experts have cautioned against drawing broad conclusions from the findings, as further research is needed.
Clifford Segil, DO, a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, not involved in this research, told MNT that “he likes to see studies which test combination vitamin therapies for health and in clinical practice vitamin D is often given with calcium.”
“I enjoyed seeing these researchers try to determine if Vitamin D with omega-3 improved biological age with exercise. I would have like to see the study broken into 3 parts which would have been biological age affects from Vitamin D and omega 3 supplementation. A second part confirming how much exercise decreased biological age with new next generation tests. And then a third part to confirm that both together worked better than alone.” Dr. Segil said.
What do these findings mean for patients? While further research is needed, tried and tested strategies can still be implemented.
“Everyone should consider exercising as we age as it will help us stay young,” Segil said. “I often tell my patients that ‘if you don’t use it, you will lose it’.”
However, “using the right combination of supplements may be helpful and someday the use of supplements may be evidence based,” the physician suggested.
Oriana:
There are only two supplements that I regard as absolutely necessary as we get older: CoQ10 (for energy production and lower blood pressure) and berberine (lowers blood sugar, optimizes the lipid profile (e.g. it lowers the low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol).
There are other supplements to be considered, e.g. lutein and zeaxantin for eye health, and mega doses of glucosamine [only mega-doses work for me] for joint health, small doses of lithium for brain health, or Vitamin K2 for bone and heart health, if I had to cut my supplements down to the absolute minimum, I'd choose CoQ10 and berberine. This article, however, makes me wonder if Omega-3's should also be added to the list of the absolute essentials, as well as Vitamin D.
Note that humans are already a surprisingly long-lived species, so tweaks such as adding Omega-3's can't be expected to have very powerful effects. However, if we successfully eliminated or minimized obesity, the way we largely eliminated smoking, we might end up with a healthier and longer-lived population. Big Food would put up a fight even more fierce than Big Tobacco did. Could a public information campaign against junk food ultimately be as successful as the anti-smoking campaign? All I know is that this "war on Twinkies" will be very hard to win.
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UNHEALTHY DIET MAY SPEED UP BIOLOGICAL AGING EVEN IN YOUNG ADULTS
A group of scientists recently investigated links between diet quality and biological aging.
To gauge biological age, they used cutting-edge “epigenetic clocks.”
They found that poorer diets, which include high amounts of fast food and processed meat but low amounts of fruit and vegetables, may contribute to accelerated biological aging, even in young adults.
The results of a new study involving 826 young adults suggest that diets high in fast food, processed red meat, and soda but low in fruits and vegetables may be linked to faster biological aging.
On the other hand, diets that include abundant fruits and vegetables and little processed red meat and sodas may be associated with slower biological aging, according to the study’s findings.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Biological vs chronological age
Chronological age is the one most of us are familiar with — it’s the number of years since you were born. Biological age, however, measures how well someone is aging.
There’s no single test to assess biological aging, but the two used in the current study are:
GrimAge: Estimates the difference between chronological and biological age to estimate the acceleration of aging and predict life span.
DunedinPACE: Provides the pace of aging by estimating how many biological years pass per year of chronological age.
Previous research has shown that both the acceleration and pace of biological aging might help predict health outcomes and mortality.
Both measures rely on so-called epigenetic clocks to estimate biological age by analyzing DNA methylation, which affects gene activity.
EPIGENETICS AND DNA METHYLATION
Our genetic code does not change throughout our lives. However, sections of DNA can get turned “off” or “on” for a short while or permanently. The code has not changed, but how the gene functions has changed.
These are called epigenetic changes, and they accumulate throughout an individual’s life due to many factors, including diet.
Methylation is the most common type of epigenetic change. Methylation generally switches genes “off.”
By closely examining the methylation in specific cells or tissues, epigenetic clocks can estimate biological age.
Investigating the impact of diet in young adults
It is now well-established that following a healthy diet reduces the risk of disease and death. These benefits are likely due to a wide range of mechanisms, one of which is epigenetics.
As it stands, we know little about this relationship. According to the authors of the new study, scientists have investigated diet and epigenetic markers of biological age but, to date, most have focused on middle-aged or older adults.
In contrast, the latest research focuses on young adults ages 21–25 – an important age group. Chronic diet-associated conditions, like type 2 diabetes or obesity, often take decades to develop, starting in young adulthood.
The authors write that diet quality generally decreases as people move from adolescence to young adulthood. “It is important for disease prevention to investigate the link between diet and health from an early age before clinical signs of age-related diseases appear,” they explain.
Overall, the authors explain their findings like this: “In general, diets emphasizing higher consumption of fruits and vegetables and lower intakes of meat, fast food, and sugar-sweetened beverages were associated with slower biological aging.”
On the other hand, “diets low in fruits and vegetables and high in meat, fast food, and sugar-sweetened beverages were linked to faster biological aging.”
Although the effects of these diets on health do not seem out of the ordinary, it seems surprising that increased biological aging was already measurable in people in their early 20s.
Medical News Today contacted one of the study’s authors, Suvi Ravi, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. We asked whether she felt the same way.
“Actually, I was not surprised,” she told us. “The findings are consistent with studies conducted in middle-aged and older populations, as well as with the few studies that have been carried out in younger individuals.”
“There was no reason to expect that our cohort would differ from these earlier observations despite their young age,” Ravi explained.
In additional analyses, the scientists added more variables, including body mass index (BMI), total energy intake, level of physical activity, alcohol intake, and smoking.
Once these factors were in place, the relationship between dietary patterns and biological aging was less clear. This hints that regular exercise, for instance, might partially compensate for a poorer diet.
MNT contacted Benjamin Reiner, PhD, a research assistant professor in the Translational Neuroscience Section of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Among other topics, he researches the genetics of diet and obesity.
He told us that these results build on previous studies showing that “alterations in diet can alter epigenetic modifications of the genome, and subsequently alter gene expression.”
“The correlation between poor diet quality and advanced epigenetic aging agrees with the current understanding of the importance of dietary choices and these choices can have enduring effects,” Dr. Reiner said.
The trouble with new ‘epigenetic clocks’
Epigenetic clocks show great promise, but, as with any new technology, they may not be fully reliable yet.
We asked Reiner about some of the limitations of these tools. He explained that these clocks are “trained” on specific groups of people and that methylation patterns may differ by ethnic background.
He said that in this study, the researchers utilized the GrimAge epigenetic clock model, developed from data gathered in an American research study, to examine the effects of diet on epigenetic age in a Finnish population.
This could influence the results, and Reiner suggests “a replication study using an epigenetic model created around a population ethnically more similar to the Finnish population.”
On the question of limitations, Ravi told us that “while epigenetic clocks can provide useful estimates of biological age, their ability to predict individual aging trajectories or health outcomes remains relatively modest.”
“However, current epigenetic clocks are valuable tools for identifying biological aging, at least at the population level, and new clocks are continuously being developed to improve their accuracy,” he added.
Can improving diet reverse biological aging?
“Yes, I do believe so,” Ravi told us when we posed the question above, “and there is also evidence to support my thoughts. Some interventional studies have shown that diet modification can slow down epigenetic aging, at least in older individuals.”
MNT also asked Reiner whether adopting a healthier diet could slow biological aging. He believes this is “an important area of research” now that GLP-1 receptor weight loss drugs are becoming increasingly popular.
He explained that recent research in mice and human cells suggests that obesity may cause epigenetic changes in fat cells that remain even after weight loss and continue to influence metabolic processes.
“This suggests that obesity induces an ‘epigenetic memory’ and future research into the alteration of these persistent epigenetic changes will be important for developing next-generation obesity treatments,” he told us.
Moving forward
The current study provides fascinating insights into the links between epigenetics and diet. But we have much to learn.
“I am interested in examining how genetic risk factors, such as those related to obesity, are associated with various lifestyle factors, including nutrition,” Ravi explained when we asked about their next steps.
“Additionally, our research group is investigating how different environmental exposures are associated with biological aging,” he added.
The science of epigenetic clocks is still in its infancy, but it shows great promise. No doubt there will be fascinating insights to come.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/unhealthy-diet-may-speed-up-biological-aging-even-young-adults#Can-improving-diet-reverse-biological-aging
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BETA-BLOCKERS FOUND TO INHIBIT PROCESSES INVOLVED IN CANCER GROWTH AND COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT.
Beta-blocker drugs are commonly used in patients with hypertension, heart failure, previous heart attack, angina, abnormal heart rhythms, essential tremors, and migraine headaches.
These drugs get their name because they inhibit receptors on cells called beta-adrenergic receptors.
These receptors are activated by epinephrine and norepinephrine. When this happens, the heart beats faster and contracts with more force.
Blocking beta-adrenergic receptors causes the heart to beat more slowly and with less force, lowering blood pressure.
Intriguing research has shown that these drugs may have other effects.
The benefits include inhibiting processes that promote cancer growth and slowing the formation of beta-amyloid plaques seen in Alzheimer's.
Anti-Cancer Actions
Beta-adrenergic receptors are found primarily in the heart, but they are present throughout the body.
Research has shown that the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine can exert stimulatory effect on cancer and immune cells. Activation of beta-adrenergic signaling impairs anti-tumor immune responses.
These hormones (epinephrine and norepinephrine) can encourage cancer progression and metastasis by increasing tumor cell invasion, inflammation, and the formation of new blood and lymph vessels. By partially blocking beta-adrenergic receptors, beta-blockers may help slow the growth and spread of some cancers.
In preclinical studies, beta-blockers have demonstrated anti-cancer activity by blocking the immune-disrupting effects of stress. Epinephrine and norepinephrine both increase during stress, which can escalate the proliferation of cancer cells.
Studies in mouse models of pancreatic cancer have shown that blocking beta-adrenergic signaling can reverse the effects of chronic stress that promotes cancer progression.
IN SUMMARY: HYPERTENSION DRUGS MAY HELP FIGHT DEMENTIA AND CANCER
Beta-blockers are used to manage a range of cardiovascular diseases as well as other conditions.
Observational studies associate beta-blocker use with improved cognitive function.
Preclinical studies show that beta-blockers can reduce the growth and spread of some cancers. In population studies, they have reduced risk or slowed spread of liver, breast, ovarian, pancreatic, colon, and skin cancer.
Human Studies on Beta Blockers and Cancer
Beta-blockers are classified as either selective or non-selective.
Selective beta blockers block beta-adrenergic receptors found primarily in heart tissue.
Non-selective beta blockers block all types of beta-adrenergic receptors throughout the body. [PROPRANOLOL is a non-selective beta blocker]
Observational studies suggest that both types of beta-blockers may have benefits in fighting cancers, though in some cases non-selective beta-blockers appear to have a more significant effect.
Studies suggest benefits for beta-blocker usage in:
Liver Cancer
In a study of 2,104 patients with liver cancer, followed for nearly ten months, those taking the beta-blockers propranolol, labetalol, metoprolol, or carvedilol at the time of cancer diagnosis had a lower mortality rate than those not on beta-blockers. Another population study showed that patients suffering from metastatic liver cancer who had taken the non-selective beta blockers propranolol for more than one year had a 22% lower mortality risk than matched patients who were not taking it.
Breast Cancer
A meta-analysis of 13 pre-clinical and clinical studies found that use of selective or non-selective beta-blockers was significantly associated with longer recurrence-free survival time in women treated for early-stage breast cancer. In one study, breast cancer patients taking non-selective beta-blockers had a 66% reduced tumor proliferation rate compared to those not taking them.
Ovarian Cancer
In one population study, some women with ovarian cancer who took beta-blockers had an improved survival rate compared to women who were not taking them. The benefit was seen in women 60 and over who’d used beta blockers for a year or longer. Another study of older ovarian cancer patients found that those taking non-selective beta blocker had a 40% lower risk of dying from their cancer than women not taking these medications.
Pancreatic Cancer
In a large observational study, non-selective beta-blocker use for over 2 years was associated with reduced pancreatic cancer risk. Another study of 2,394 patients with pancreatic cancer showed that those taking metoprolol, atenolol, propranolol, or bisoprolol during the 90 day period before their cancer diagnosis had an improved survival rate compared to patients not on beta-blockers. Because neural beta-adrenergic signaling strongly impacts pancreatic cancer progression, hence beta-blockade can complement existing therapies for pancreatic cancer.
Colon Cancer
In a study of adults with colorectal cancer who were being treated with the monoclonal antibody bevacizumab at a university medical hospital, the patients who were also using beta-blockers had improvements in progression-free survival time and overall survival time compared to patients who were not taking beta-blockers.
Melanoma
One study found that adults with melanoma who were taking beta-blockers before their diagnosis had a lower chance of disease progression and melanoma-related death. And in a population study of 4,179 patients diagnosed with malignant melanoma, those given metoprolol, propranolol, or atenolol within 90 days of diagnosis had an increased survival rate compared to patients not taking beta-blockers
PROTECTING THE BRAIN
Hypertension in mid-life is known to increase the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. By lowering blood pressure, beta-blockers could help prevent this kind of cognitive decline.
Brain inflammation is another hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Beta-blockers reduce inflammatory cytokines in the brain, which may exert additional protective effects against Alzheimer’s.
Observational human studies have shown a clear link between use of beta-blockers and lower risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease:
In an observational study, hypertension and cognitive impairment were measured based on confusion or memory loss, problems making decisions, or supervision for participant’s safety. Researchers found 18% improvement in cognitive impairment between groups of individuals who used beta-blockers, or other antihypertensive medications, compared to those who did not use antihypertensive medications.
In another observational study in elderly men and women over 75 years with normal cognition, participants were taking different classes of antihypertensive medications. Researchers found that among the other antihypertensive drugs, beta blockers were associated with 42% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s dementia.
In a meta-analysis of six studies on dementia-free individuals, use of beta-blockers was associated with 25% reduced risk of dementia.
The Honolulu-Asia Aging Study is a prospective, community-based cohort study of Japanese American men in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2,197 such men, who entered the study at an average age of 77, and had hypertension but not dementia, beta-blocker use as a sole hypertension-lowering drug was associated with a 31% lower risk of developing cognitive impairment, compared to men who didn’t take anti-hypertensive medication. The clearest benefit was observed in men over age 75, those with diabetes, and those with a large difference between systolic and diastolic blood pressures.
A study published in 2023 examined data from 69,081 elderly men and women with hypertension. It found that the use of two beta-blockers that cross the blood-brain barrier, carvedilol and propranolol, was linked to lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, though not of other forms of dementia.
If you are currently taking beta-blockers or feel they may be of use, please discuss the information in this article with your physician.
Summary:
Medications called beta-blockers have been found in large observational studies to be significantly associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and inhibit processes that promote cancer growth.
In observational studies, people taking beta-blockers have reduced rates of cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and some cancers, as well as improved survival times for many forms of cancer.
https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2023/8/anti-cancer-effects-beta-blocker-drugs
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Ending on beauty:
I see the cones of volcanic mountains
and I think of all I have not said
about the words "to suffer" and "sufferance"
and how one can bear a lot
by training anger until it gets tired and gives up
~ Czeslaw Milosz, The Scattered Notebooks.jpg)
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