*
ODE TO PIGEONS AND SPARROWS
Pigeons and sparrows,
companions of my fate:
survivors, unsentimental immigrants.
It’s those others, with pretty plumes,
bird-watchers’ darlings,
that end up in cats’ mouths.
I too wanted bright feathers,
an operatic singing voice —
cried because I was only me —
while sparrows danced mazurkas
around my despair, snatching a fast crumb,
and pigeons nesting in the crooks of rain pipes
cooed a lullaby.
I have never been alone.
I had pigeons
waddling through my life,
fat and lazy and yet,
like a corps de ballet,
all at once clattering up;
pigeons like a gray rainbow
shimmering around
the memory of the pigeon
that used to sleep
on my windowsill — an impudent
round of an eye
that stared into mine,
then closed again into sleep.
And sparrows in white winter Warsaw
chattering after a snow storm.
In California they’d settle in the crown
of the braided giant fig tree in the yard —
a cloud of chirping so loud
even the cats had to run.
This is a self-help
poem for myself,
to remind me
of what I’ve always had.
Day after day,
those wings.
~ Oriana
*
LADY MACBETH: A MISUNDERSTOOD VILLAIN?
Seductress. Manipulator. Madwoman. The Fourth Witch. These are just a few of the more hostile descriptors that Lady Macbeth has been saddled with ever since The Tragedie of Macbeth (the full title of the Scottish play) was first performed 416 years ago. As a schoolgirl studying William Shakespeare's timeless tale of ambition, morality, betrayal and murder, my first impression was that she was all of the above: a straightforward, out-and-out villain. A wife who, after learning of a witches' prophecy declaring her Scottish general husband would become king, persuades him to commit regicide, take power and subsequently ignites a bloody civil war? Lady M is certainly no angel.
In act five, scene seven of the play, Macbeth's rival for the throne Malcolm declares her a "fiend-like queen," and that label has stuck. The fact that men played female roles in Shakespeare's day likely only compounded this unflattering caricature, but even after women were welcomed on stage, a narrow portrayal of the character has continued. "My experience of Lady Macbeth in the theater, to begin with, was quite difficult," Erica Whyman, Deputy Artistic Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company tells BBC Culture. "She's cast in the popular imagination as the instrument of evil and that then latches onto stereotypes of women through the ages. It's a caricature of a woman who seeks power through her husband; when you combine that with the idea that she goes mad, you have this toxic combination.”
It's this two-dimensional representation that Oscar-nominated actor Ruth Negga is hoping to combat when she takes on the role opposite Daniel Craig in Sam Gold's Broadway production this spring. "I'm very interested in discussing what I think is the long-standing demonization [of Lady Macbeth]," she tells BBC Culture. "[The play is] a complex excavation of this relationship and desire, fate and power, but it feels like we've just plastered it with misogyny. The problem isn't the play, it's the interpretation."
Joel Coen is the most recent filmmaker to have a go at bringing the play to the screen. Released on Apple TV+ on Friday, The Tragedy of Macbeth is a faithful adaptation which keeps the original Shakespearean dialogue, though presents the story in black-and-white using a stylized German expressionist-brutalist aesthetic, with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand playing the tragic couple. As Lady M, McDormand commands the screen with matriarchal authority. There's nothing hysterical or overtly 'evil' about her performance; rather she plays the character as someone who is determined that their murderous actions are for the good of her hard-working husband, until the guilt becomes too much to bear.
Contemporary feminist readings and criticism have similarly reappraised Lady Macbeth as a far more sympathetic figure than the one that has been traditionally depicted. She might not have been historically perceived as a tragic hero like her husband – and Shakespeare didn't give her as much stage time either – but the play's title speaks to more than just his devastating fall from grace. It speaks to hers too. With this in mind, films and theatre productions have increasingly offered a deeper engagement with her, and with Shakespeare's progressive ideas about gender, motherhood and the patriarchy that are as relevant today as they were back then. "He would not have recognised what we mean by women's rights or what we mean by equality but what he did was treat every human being in his plays as though they had something to say that we should listen to," says Whyman.
The range of Lady Macbeths
One of the earliest portrayals of Lady Macbeth that broke the mould was delivered by Welsh actor Sarah Siddons in 1785 at London's Drury Lane Theatre. In an essay she wrote entitled Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Siddons viewed her as "fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile," which is why in her reading, Macbeth was susceptible to his wife's suggestion. "Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honorable as Macbeth," she writes. Her depiction was "tragedy personified," as critic William Hazlitt put it, and starkly contrasted with fellow 18th-Century star Hannah Pritchard's earlier turn which clung to the "savage, demoniac" tradition. Siddons' influence would be felt a century later, in 1888, when stage star Ellen Terry, inspired by an imperative in Siddons' essay to "not hold by the 'fiend' reading of the character," took to the stage at London's Lyceum Theatre. As described by Michael Holroyd in his biography, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families, Terry wrote on the flyleaves of her copy of the play that Lady Macbeth was "full of womanliness" and "capable of affection," adding: "she loves her husband… and is half the time afraid whilst urging Macbeth not to be afraid as she loves a man.”
He loves her right back; Shakespeare is always intentional with the words he uses, so when Macbeth calls her his "dearest partner of greatness", it indicates their marriage is bonded by both love, ambition and equality – he calls her his "partner", after all. In Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film Throne of Blood, which transposes the story of Macbeth to 16th-Century Japan, Lady Asaji's (Isuzu Yamada) love for her husband Lord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) manifests as paranoia. She argues that news of the witches' prophecy would get back to their Great Lord which would paint them as a potential threat to the throne. "This is a wicked world," she says calmly. "To save yourself you often first must kill."
Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth also shows a more affectionate relationship between its lead pair. Both in their sixties, the actors are older than your typical Macbeths, but that helps emphasize that the couple's lasting union is one built on years of trust and mutual support. In Lady Macbeth's opening scene, McDormand delivers the line, "Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness," with the casualness of a wife who knows her husband better than he knows himself – but her love is most ardent. A warm smile spreads across her sleeping face as she senses the morning arrival of her husband. When Macbeth then whispers "my dearest love", the words are tenderly caressing and the two lovingly embrace. Her expression is a far-cry from the grimace she wore the night before when commanding "spirits" to change her very nature as the couple plot to murder the doomed King Duncan. "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts," she utters, looking to the sky and briefly to the bed upon which she sits. "Unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood; stop up the access and passage to remorse That no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose."
Judi Dench performs this powerful act one speech far more dynamically in the filmed 1979 version of Trevor Nunn's legendary Royal Shakespeare Company production, in which she starred opposite Ian McKellen. Dropping to her knees with her hand outstretched, she begs for the constraints of her gender to be removed then suddenly jumps up with a squeak as though the spirits had answered her call. Returning to the floor, she completes her whispering invocation in climactic fashion: "That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry 'Hold. Hold!'"
Though painstakingly delivered, Dench's version reinforces the sorceress-like stereotype of Lady Macbeth, as though she has conjured these spirits to help do her work. By contrast, McDormand's resolute poise and level intonation avoids making the supernatural metaphor appear so literal and refutes any interpretation she could be the Fourth Witch using dark magic to manipulate her husband.
Performed in this manner, the speech simply reinforces Lady Macbeth's commitment to Macbeth's desire to rule. It also lays bare the gender politics within the play's society. Femininity is seen as a weakness, masculinity is associated with cold ambition, and Lady Macbeth recognizes too much of the former in both herself and her husband. "'Unsex me here,' is this idea that her sex is not useful to her at this moment," says Whyman. "'Stop up the passage to remorse' is a peculiarly evocative image for a woman; to use this idea of not being an open vessel and instead be strong, closed and steely. She's got a conscience and is aware of the emotional and moral cost but thinks it's worth putting that to one side. That's always a terrible idea.'"
The notion that if femininity is removed from this world, bad things happen, is something that Whyman identifies as a recurring theme in the English playwright's work. "The feminine to Shakespeare means an understanding of compassion, and understanding that we need to live in a community and family, rather than each individual's ambition leading us towards the definition of success," she says. "He's constantly guarding against or warning us against eliminating the feminine – if Macbeth was allowed to be feminine, he wouldn't have killed."
What are Lady Macbeth's motives?
Another reading of Lady Macbeth's motivations is that of a childless woman seeking glorious purpose: if she cannot secure Macbeth's legacy with an heir, she can through the throne. The primary role for a woman was bearing children, and the child mortality rate in Shakespeare's time was around one in three, so it's unsurprising he heavily implied the couple lost a child. "I have given suck and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me," says Lady Macbeth in act one scene seven.
When that death occurred is unclear, but filmmaker Justin Kurzel made the event literal in the opening of his 2015 adaptation, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, with a scene where the anguished Macbeths attend the funeral of their toddler. The fog of grief clouds their battlement and their judgement, something Kurosawa also suggested in Throne of Blood by having Lady Asiji give birth to a stillborn child which influences Wasizu's decision to assassinate both his best friend Miki and his son who "one day shall rule Spider's Web Castle."
“Macbeth’s in his prime, is at the top of his game, whereas Lady Macbeth is perceived as past hers. 400 years later, there's still a bit of that – we start to find women invisible.” – Erica Whyman
But in Kurzel's film, he emphasizes the theme of a mother's loss, in particular, to the point of turning Lady Macbeth's climactic sleepwalking scene in act five into a heart-breaking church confessional in which she speaks to a vision of her dead son. More overstated direction could have led to this moment merely affirming the perception of Lady Macbeth as a mad woman but instead Cotillard's delivery of her lines is restrained, showing that subconsciously or not, the passage to remorse has flooded open. She keenly feels the guilt for her wicked deeds but the ghostly presence of her child in this scene suggests she is also pained by her earlier declaration that she would have killed him to achieve their goal: "Have pluckd my nipple from his boneless gums and dashd the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.”
Both in Coen's film and the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2018 production, starring Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack as the Macbeths, their loss appears less recent and Lady Macbeth is far past the point where she could conceive – which makes her appear more disposable within the world of the play as Macbeth begins to distance himself from his wife. "This brilliant, intelligent, quick-thinking, courageous woman is confined to a ceremonial role that comes through very strongly when it's an older couple," says Whyman. "Macbeth's in his prime, is at the top of his game, [whereas Lady Macbeth is perceived as past hers]. 400 years later, there's still a bit of that – we start to find women invisible. We don't notice their sexual charms so much and don't see them as sexual beings."
By contrast, younger casting often goes hand in hand with an amping up of the passionate sexuality and desire in the Macbeths' relationship – but done right, that doesn't mean Lady Macbeth has to occupy the wicked seductress stereotype. In Kurzel's film, the Macbeths enjoy a sensual sex scene in which Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to carry out their treacherous plan. Had attention not been paid to her role as a mother, a partner and her mental health as a whole, Cotillard's iteration might have fit that reductive characterization. Whyman points to Saoirse Ronan's performance in the recent production at London's Almeida theater as another fine example of a younger take on Lady Macbeth: "It was full of life and sexuality. I found it very moving because theirs was a love affair that was so damaged by violence. There's one decision, whatever the chain of events, that destroys that forever.”
That fateful choice, in Lady Macbeth's case, may be best understood as that of a woman navigating a strongly patriarchal world. If women had ambitions in early modern England, they mostly had to accomplish them through men, and there's a strong sense that Lady Macbeth missed an opportunity to achieve greatness both because of her sex and her husband – Macbeth might have status on the battlefield but has less so in court. Her questioning of his manly courage ("Art thou afeard?") cannot simply be viewed as emasculation but an indication that she could have married a man with more political power.
"There is a really interesting theme that there's a different tragedy for Lady Macbeth when she's [played] older – she could have easily been queen," Whyman says. "[Shakespare is] consistently curious about what it is to be a female leader and he keeps putting these guys up with deep flaws, and then suggesting there's a woman close to them who could have done it better. Of course, he was also living through a time where the idea of a queen was very potent." Whyman points to Hermione in The Winter's Tale as another of Shakespeare's women who suffers at the hands of a weak-minded husband. The virtuous Queen of Sicily is falsely accused of infidelity by King Leontes and is forced to stand trial: "Queen Hermione is treated appallingly [but] she would have led the country brilliantly."
King James I might have been the British sovereign when Macbeth was published but his predecessor, Elizabeth I, was an obvious influence on Shakespeare. Upon her ascension to the throne, the monarch challenged gender roles; she refused to submit to marriage – arguing she was "already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England" – while clinging to her feminine identity in her aesthetic and various speeches, describing her subjects as her "children" for example. But she also displayed the royal traits (considered masculine because of the traditionally male hierarchy) of active agency and decision making, and was referred to using royal male descriptors, like "princely" and "Prince of Light", as well as being classified as "king" in Parliamentary statute for political purposes.
However, where Elizabeth I embraced political androgyny and reigned for 45 years, Lady Macbeth unsexes herself and loses her way. "She thinks the only way to get success is to follow a set of rules that are patriarchal," says Whyman. "She's not a kind of power-hungry man impersonator – she's wholly in her skin, but she does think the only way to have agency in the world is to do this terrible deed and she's quite wrong about that. If she held onto her morals, so her femininity in that sense, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Shakespeare was miles ahead when it came to female representation and Lady Macbeth is a character that has too frequently been painted in a two-dimensional light. Had she been afforded more scenes in the play, her motivations might not have appeared so ambiguous to narrow-minded viewers. As it is, Lady M exits the play after her sleepwalking scene and in act five scene seven is reported as dead, evidently by suicide if Malcolm's comment that she "by self and violent hands took off her life" is to be believed.
But Coen complicates things by adding a sequence involving Lady Macbeth and nobleman Ross (Alex Haskell) that suggests even more foul play might be involved. Did she throw herself down the stairs – either because the guilt was too much or as an act of atonement – or was she pushed by Ross as revenge for her husband's order to murder his cousin Lady MacDuff? That's up to the viewer to decide. What is clear is that Macbeth cares for his wife until the end and Coen presents this by having Washington's tragic hero looking down upon her lying at the bottom of the fateful staircase, staggering slightly as the pain washes over him. The one constant in this adaptation is their love for one another.
McDormand joins a welcome list of women bringing enough depth and layers to this formidable character to combat 400 years of gross misunderstandings that say more about those interpreters than the multifaceted literary figure Shakespeare created. Lady Macbeth is a timeless, tragic heroine who should be cherished not scorned. "It's unhelpful to portray her as wicked or to suggest that because she hasn't got a child she's, in some ways, hollow and barren and inevitably evil," says Whyman. "She’s not a villain; she’s complex, she's curious – we should admire her.”
Oriana:
I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that we should admire Lady Macbeth. But as a literary character she is indeed magnificent. The whole play is a masterpiece. Our admiration should go to its author — please pardon this obvious statement.
I did see the most recent movie adaptation, and the first word that comes to my mind is “minimalist.” Perhaps “minimalist-brutalist” is the best term. The use of shadows and crows — the castle seems infested with crows — is perhaps a bit heavy-handed, but that’s a minor complaint, insignificant when we feast on lines as great as "the milk of human kindness."
*
AT MOSCOW’S AIRPORTS (Misha Firer)
With each passing day I believe more and more that Russia is going to fall apart, at least economically, with some regions on the periphery drifting away.
Another day, another group of Russian tourists stuck in the terminal who couldn’t fly away.
Flying has become a Russian roulette: you go to an airport and you don’t know if your flight gonna be delayed, canceled, or you are the lucky one and you make it out. Flying has never been so exciting!
Moscow airports have been shut AGAIN as a precaution from drones that are flying in.
The previous Russian minister of transportation killed himself several days ago over the issue of shut airports. His death was in vain! His sacrifice to the cargo cult didn’t cause grounded airplanes to fly as he hoped it would.
Will the new minister of transportation also commit Harakiri, an honorable death to take the blame off from the emperor?
Because all the passengers sleeping in the terminals and airlines losing millions of rubles, this nightmare can stop any MOMENT. All Putin has to do is to call his troops out of the sovereign country of Ukraine.
What? Causing to suspend misery for millions, to give them a relief? This is UN-Russian and UN-patriotic.
Passengers of cancelled flights are not allowed to leave the airport. People are standing without water and fresh air waiting for border guards. Some passengers are sick.
Mr. Akhmetov (son of Akhmet) charges passengers stuck in the Moscow airport terminals $7 for a bottle of water. The normal price is $1. Mr. Akhmetov sees thirsty kids and women about to pass out and there are ruble signs in his eyes.
Ironically, one of the shot down drones hit the hospitals of war veterans. It is, one may say, poetic justice in action. Karma laughing its socks off, and yet Russians stubbornly insist on suffering and causing others to feel miserable.
The Crimean Bridge is under attack again. There are 1,200 cars of tourists in a traffic jam heading to the Crimean Bridge. Their number is growing by the minute. The waiting time is about three hours.
In addition to the flight delays, train schedules are also disrupted.
Almost 150 trains have been delayed due to the crash of a drone. Passengers faced air conditioners do not work because Russian Railways is a state monopoly and they embezzle state funds like there’s no tomorrow.
Train schedule delays have already reached 15 hours, and travelers are now pitching tents in the railway stations and not just airport terminals.
*
These are kamikaze drones that middle school children and university students in Kazan region assemble to destroy Ukraine’s power stations and civil infrastructure.
They are directly related to suspended flights, trains, and Mr. Akhmatov making a fortune in a Moscow airport.
People and rainwater are clogging the passageways. They want to unleash the fury on the regime that has caused the collapse, boiling over, flooding. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Mixu:
Thats why Putin offers Russians traditional values. Traditionally peasants in the Middle Ages had nothing more to live for than a promise about heaven after death. Here is why Orthodox church is so important: your life might be shitty, but after death you can sit at same table with war criminal Putin and praise missiles called “Satan” with him.
After death you become important for great leader — but not in this life. At the same time Putin does anything to stay alive. Maybe he is not sure about his final destination? If he was sure, he would head straight to heaven like he preaches for others? Right?
J Lewis:
Putin will go to any lengths to keep the war going. Whatever it takes. After all his own life depends on the continuation of the war.
The next phase is a huge ramp up in Ukrainian drone strikes (like Russia has done) to be joined shortly by new long range missiles from Germany/US/UK/France and of course Ukraine's new home produced versions. Literally no military base, oil refinery or drone factory in the whole of Russia will be safe. Its size is its weakness.
Even so Putin will hang on until the bitter end and like all dictators before him, will meet a brutal end. Then, as Misha says, the Federation will collapse in on itself. But not now or this year or even likely next year.
Eventually Russia will grind to a halt “not with a bang but a whimper.”
*
MACRON’S DECISION TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE AS A STATE
~ It's a reward for terrorism.
Straight and simple.
Commit the worst terror attack since 9/11, be rewarded with diplomatic recognition (By the way, in relative population terms, October 7th is equivalent to 40,000 murdered Americans).
It is good old France returning to its Vichy doctorine: “We hug the Nazis and they spare us” (which didn't work).
Macron is an example of Western weakness against aggressors.
It’s people like him that make terrorism work.
Now, de facto it will change nothing, but it will prolong and extend the 78 year old policy of Palestinians: “We keep trying to destroy Israel and the useful idiots will support us.”
Macron is a disgrace.
No one here is surprised though. ~ Noam Kaiser, IDF major, Quora
*
TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, WINDMILLS
Trump revealed his priorities last night, when he told reporters that this island [Britain] was facing two great risks: immigration and windmills.
"You fly over and you see these windmills all over the place, ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds, and if they're stuck in the ocean, ruining your oceans… Stop the windmills, and also, I mean, there's a couple of things I could say, but on immigration, you'd better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore.”
Oriana:
Trump is such a one-man comedy show that it’s a surprise when he actually says something that makes sense. I don’t mean his obsession with windmills. It’s his warning about Islamic immigrants that is valid. Fortunately there are signs that Europe is waking up to the danger. It’s not just that Islam is not a religion of peace; as someone said (apologies for not remembering who), Islam is not even a religion. It’s a totalitarian ideology aimed at conquering the whole world. It must be opposed and contained.
Fortunately we live in an era that could be called the “twilight of religion.” Modernity presents a huge challenge to the various “holy scriptures,” written many centuries ago when the world was a very different place, filled with demons and magic. Eve made from Adam’s rib, Jonah and the Whale — these are fascinating myths, but taking them literally is becoming difficult, to put it mildly.
People are also waking up to the fact that religious indoctrination of children is a form of child abuse. I hope to live long enough to see a dramatic decline not only of Christianity — that’s glaringly obvious, the empty churches becoming tombs of the dead god (pardon my stealing from Nietzsche) — but also of Islam.
As for religious fanatics becoming more extremist, I see it as a sign of desperation on the part of radicals who haven’t found a way to deal with the fact that religions are man-made, whether it’s Allah or Zeus, Ishtar or Kali. Ultimately, once you see that fact, you cannot unsee it. And the consequences of an encounter with this truth are bound to be revolutionary. 
*
HOW HERTHA AYRTON MADE WAVES
Hertha Ayrton’s experiment in a bathtub may have saved lives in the trenches, but it caused ripples among the ranks of the Royal Society.
Hertha Ayrton in her laboratory, by J. Russell & Sons, 1910.In 1903 the physicist William Ayrton was so worn down by chronic depression that he retreated to Margate for a three-month rest cure. Much as she adored him, his wife Hertha soon tired of strolling at his side around the beautiful bay. An avid inventor, she had nearly finished writing her definitive book, The Electric Arc, about electric lighting, but – like many authors – she kept avoiding that tiresome task of finalizing the details. High time, she decided, for a more exciting project.On her return from the beach one afternoon she startled her landlady by demanding that a zinc bath, along with soap dishes, pudding basins, and sundry other household containers, be supplied. During her daily walks she had become fascinated by the sand ripples that repeatedly formed beneath the waves, only to be washed away by the retreating tide. Before long her miniature model sea in the zinc bath provided convincing evidence that the standard account given by George Darwin, Charles Darwin’s second son, was wrong. Whereas he maintained that each sand ripple was created separately, she insisted that they are formed in pairs, symmetrically spaced out on either side of an initial ridge or depression. To convince her audiences, Ayrton shook in grains of black pepper that clearly revealed spiral ribbons of swirling water.
As scientific controversies go, Ayrton’s rejection of Darwin’s conclusion was hardly momentous. Even so, the effects of her drawing-room experiments rippled out beyond her temporary lodgings in Margate. Most tangibly, the mathematical equations she developed resulted in a practical device that saved lives – a cheap, portable fan for sweeping out noxious gases from military trenches.
In addition, her research provoked crucial debates about science’s role in society. Who counts as a scientist? Which is more important – searching for eternal truths or providing practical improvements? Should scientists benefit financially from their discoveries?
Marriage bar
After returning to London, Ayrton upgraded her zinc bath to a glass tank with motorized wave generators. The following year, 1904, she made history by becoming the first woman to present her own results to the Royal Society. She was not, however, the first woman to publish an article in the Society’s official journal, the Philosophical Transactions: that honor had been scooped in 1826 by the mathematician Mary Somerville. Even so, she was not allowed in the meeting room, so her husband read it out on her behalf.
From personal experience, Ayrton knew that other professional organizations were equally misogynistic. Twelve months earlier she had attended a lecture at the Royal Institution about the discovery of radium by Marie Curie.
Extraordinary as it now seems, Curie was relegated to a place in the audience, banned from the platform where her husband stood describing the research project for which she was responsible. The two women immediately became close friends, bound together by their shared exclusion from a male-dominated world.
Ayrton was furious when she realized that Curie’s discovery of radium had been wrongly attributed to her husband Pierre. ‘Errors are notoriously hard to kill’, she protested to the Westminster Gazette, ‘but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.’ The eminent scientist William Ramsay once casually remarked to a Daily Mail journalist that the two married couples, the Curies and the Ayrtons, illustrated a basic truth: female scientists ‘have achieved their best work when working with a male colleague’. But, as Hertha Ayrton promptly retorted, the same was true of Ramsay: he shared his Nobel prize with Baron Rayleigh for their discovery of the rare gas argon.
Although the Royal Society eventually permitted Ayrton to speak, admitting her as a fellow was another matter. When she was nominated, the fellows embarked on a tortuous series of discussions, but the outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion. After perusing documents dating back to 1660, and debating whether the Latin word sodales (‘fellows’) is intrinsically gendered male (no, they concluded), the council decided to seek legal advice. Unsurprisingly, the lawyers prevaricated and pontificated, but they issued one clear statement: Ayrton was ineligible for fellowship because she was married. The fellows plumped for this convenient excuse.
Disadvantages
Prejudice is often concealed, but Ayrton was branded as an outsider twice over – not only as a woman, but because she was Jewish. An obituary in Nature gratuitously referred to her Jewishness twice, and Ayrton herself recognized that it could pose a problem. In a self-deprecatory letter to George Eliot, she listed what she called her ‘disadvantages’: ‘1. Short hair. 2. Being a Jewess (I may add, a pretty Jewess).’
In addition, Ayrton’s rejection stemmed from conflicts about the Society’s aims and its attempts to restrict membership. The president of the Royal Society, William Huggins, explained in 1903 that the Royal Society was distinguished ‘by its unwearied pursuit of truth for truth’s sake without fee or reward’. By then he was nearly 80 and a younger, modernizing faction was emerging that stressed the importance of technological progress and saw nothing wrong in gaining financially from inventions.
The Royal Society had been founded as a club for wealthy gentlemen who paid an annual fee: membership depended on social status, and most of the fellows expected to be entertained rather than intellectually engaged. Before the 19th century, there were no university degrees in science, no public laboratories, no professional career ladders to climb. The word scientist was not invented until 1833, and it was still not in widespread use when the debates about Ayrton were taking place.
Inevitably, class was involved. The American engineer Thomas Edison declared that genius is ‘two per cent inspiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration’, but in Britain elite men of science looked down on inventors who got their hands dirty and worked for money. A prolific inventor since her student days at Cambridge, Ayrton filed a total of 26 patents, but for privileged purists, establishing intellectual property rights contravened the scientific ideology of freely exchanging information.
Ayrton’s nomination certificate was signed by an engineering faction who thought she deserved to be elected in recognition of ‘her long series of experiments on the electric arc, leading to many new facts and explanations’. This progressive group ensured that Ayrton was awarded the Society’s prestigious Hughes Medal for technological innovation. Huggins had been absent when the decision was made, but he was appalled that a woman should have triumphed. Referring to her support for suffragettes on hunger strike, he expostulated to a fellow skeptic that ‘[t]here will be great joy & rejoicing in HM’s gaol, among the women in prison! I suppose Girton and Newnham [the women’s colleges at Cambridge] will get up a night of orgies … in honour of the event!’
No fans
The First World War provided a marvelous opportunity for scientific organizations to convince the government that science was crucially important for the welfare of the nation. For decades, campaigners had pushed for greater recognition, arguing that rationally trained men made better citizens and that industrial research would benefit the country. With the outbreak of war, they stepped up the pressure. ‘In this hour of national emergency’, declared a Nature editorial, ‘there is no time to be lost. We cannot all be soldiers, but we can all help, we men of science, in securing victory for the allied armies.’
Reciprocally, the armed services professed themselves eager to recruit additional scientific expertise – but, as Ayrton discovered, penetrating military bureaucracy was not always straightforward. During a flash of inspiration in a taxi, she had realized that her conclusions about water rippling in a bath could be adapted to describe swirling currents of gas in a military trench. Before long, she had developed a small, cheap wooden fan that was easy to use and extraordinarily effective at whisking away poisonous gases. ‘I laughed aloud at the simplicity of the solution’, she wrote, ‘but that very simplicity was its undoing.’
Ayrton found it hard to convince military officials to take her invention seriously, although she recruited an impressive cohort of supporters – her son-in-law made two personal appeals to the prime minister, David Lloyd George – and an official army report was extremely enthusiastic. But all the familiar clichés about obstructive military bureaucracy proved true. Eventually, the army supplied 104,000 fans overseas – a large number, but not nearly enough to supply five million soldiers. Many of them ended up as firewood, but she did receive a few grateful tributes, including one from a Punch journalist who recalled using his fan to deal ‘with a cloud of mixed phosgene and chlorine – a state of affairs I devoutly trust it will never be called on to handle again’.
William Ayrton nicknamed his wife ‘BG’ for ‘Beautiful Genius’. Fortunately, neither of them read the damning comment by one of his friends that he would have been far better off with ‘a humdrum wife … who would have put him into carpet-slippers when he came home, fed him well and led him not to worry’.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/great-debates/how-hertha-ayrton-made-waves?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=c24155b503-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-c24155b503-1214148&mc_cid=c24155b503
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INVENTIONS THAT HAVE COME FROM AUSTRALIA IN THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
Australia, given it’s relatively small population, has quite a good history of inventing things. Some notable examples:
1925: Record changer - for playing multiple records on the same record player without human intervention. Almost exactly 100 years ago, even if it’s not something life-changing.
1928: Electronic pacemaker for heart problems. This certainly IS life-changing to those with heart problems.
1928: Aereal ambulace. Used regularly to save people’s lives across the world.
1929: Starter blocks. Made short-distance running better.
1930: Clapper board. The “clapper” is used to syncronise sound and picture in film and video. Still in use today, although these days they also have an electronic clock - basic idea, however, is identical.
1934: Braille printing press.
1939: Degaussing - helps prevent magnetic mines from being used against ships.
1955: Distance Measuring Equipment - used to allow planes to determine their distance to a land-based position by the time-delay. Crticial to modern “instrument flying.”
1956: Stainless steel braces - fixing people’s teeth.
1958: Black box recording device - what made investigation of aircraft crashes possible. Whilst now somewhat different in design, it is very much still in use (and despite the name, bright orange in color).
1960 (or so): Self-assembling tower crane - building a tall bulding using a tower crane is great, but how do you get up there to assemble the crane in the first place. This invention allows the crane to use its own mechanisms to build it.
1960: Plastic lenses for spectacles (vision correction lenses in “glasses”) - better and less expensive than glass for many use-cases.
1961: Medical ultrasound - a way to “see” inside a living organism without cutting it open, for soft tissue where X-ray won’t work.
1964: Latex gloves - protecting patients and doctors from each other.
1965: Inflatable escape slides for aircraft.
1965: “bag in box” wine storage - gets rid of the bottle, and makes for more compact storage, and because the bag collapses, the wine doesn’t get exposed to air when half-finished.
1975: Instant boiling water taps - so called Zip taps (Quooker is another variant on this).
1979: Digital sampler - part of a digital synthesiser, where you can sample the sound of some instrument (or some other sound, like a sheep’s bah or cat’s meow) , and use for example keyboard to play it back.
1979: Cochlear implants - making some types of deafness possible to fix.
1980: Dual flush toilet - those “big flush, little flush” toilets were invented in Australia.
1981: CPAP mask - makes people with breathing problems sleep a lot better.
1979: Digital sampler - part of a digital synthesiser, where you can sample the sound of some instrument (or some other sound, like a sheep’s bah or cat’s meow) , and use for example keyboard to play it back.
1979: Cochlear implants - making some types of deafness possible to fix.
1980: Dual flush toilet - those “big flush, little flush” toilets were invented in Australia.
1981: CPAP mask - makes people with breathing problems sleep a lot better.
1988: Polymer bank notes - now used in many parts of the world, as they are both more hygienic and more durable than the paper variety.
1992: Multifocal contact lenses - for those who want contact lenses, but need bifocal or similar lenses. Prior to this, all contact lenses were entirely symmetrical, so not suitable for some types of vision problems.
1992: WiFi - you are probably using this to connect your computer or phone to the internet through which you are reading this post. Whilst many other steps have been added to improve the technology since, the original idea is an Aussie one.
1993: ATM - asynchronous transfer mode, a way to make telephones, data and video run on the same system. Your internet connection probably wouldn’t exist today if this hadn’t been invented.
1996: Anti-flu medicine - anti-viral medication for common flu.
2006: HPV vaccine - prevents cervical cancer.
2013: Blood test that detects risk of stillbirth - detects RNA in the blood of the mother that indicates low oxygen and nutrient uptake in a fetus.
2017: Concentric surf waves - a way to make a “lake for surfers.”
I didn’t list ALL of the inventions, and of course, these are only a selection of what is invented in Australia. Given a population of about 28 million people, I don’t think that’s bad. ~ Mats Peterssen, Quora
Stein Boddington:
Add in “the cause of stomach ulcers” — not strictly an invention, but a medical breakthrough that overturned a hundred years of ineffective treatment.
Jenny Peters:
And synthetic skin for burns.
Robert Gordon:
Triton Work centre (MK3). Ingenious table saw and router station. As used by yours truly for the last 30 years.
GJ Coop:
The most important invention: the Hills hoist washing line.
Sue:
Professor Fiona Wood, a plastic surgeon, invented the "spray-on skin" technique for treating burns. This innovative method involves delivering skin cells as an aerosol to the wound, minimizing scarring. She co-invented it with Marie Stoner, and it's now used worldwide.
Ennor:
Just to add to the above, a few other achievements, The Polilight, a high-intensity portable light source used in forensic science, was invented by a team at the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), the black box flight recorder, and of course WLAN technology that allowed wireless networks to become widespread and useful.
Paul Harrison:
Hats with corks too
Bill Colthurst:
Australian fishermen invented a type of lead sinker that prevents dangerous flybacks where the the weight is released under tension and can kill or maim a person or damage the boat.
Now saving lives around the world.
Gary Plozza:
And the stump jump plow
Peter Rowland:
The atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Used to determine the concentration of elements in a solution.
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THE REASON GROCERIES ARE MORE EXPENSIVE
There’s a connection between what you are seeing outside your window and what you are seeing in your grocery store, experts say.
Both extreme weather and food costs have been on the rise in recent years. The Consumer Price Index, or CPI, showed, inflation overall rose 2.7% in June from a year earlier, as tomatoes, eggs, and coffee have all seen significant increases. During the same period, the country has battled record heat, hurricanes, and dangerous flooding.
Research suggests it’s more than just coincidence that the price increases and weather extremes are coming together. A report published Monday in the journal Environmental Research Letters shows how extreme weather events is correlated to specific food price spikes in the immediate aftermath.
Food yield being affected by weather is a tale as old as agriculture, but researchers in the study map how climate change has exacerbated extreme weather events, and is directly correlated to specific food price surges. In fact, researchers name food prices as the second-biggest way climate change is currently being felt across the globe, second to only extreme heat itself.
The results of these food price spikes can be devastating, especially for lower-income consumers who spend more of their income on food than the average consumer. Increasing grocery prices have been a major issue on consumers’ minds, and were a significant factor in the 2024 election. Two-thirds of Americans say they are very concerned about these costs, according to an April Pew Research Center survey.
Though experts say there are other compounding factors related to the rising prices, the report notes that unexpected extreme climate conditions and their effects on crop yield cannot be understated.
“The unprecedented nature of many of the climate conditions behind recent food price spikes highlights the ongoing threats to food security as climate change continues to push societies towards ever less familiar climate conditions,” write the researchers, led by Maximilian Kotz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “While the 2023/24 El Ninõ likely played a role in amplifying a number of these extremes, their increased intensity and frequency is in line with the expected and observed effects of climate change.”
In 2022, for example, droughts across California and Arizona contributed to a 80% year-on-year increase in U.S. vegetable prices by the end of the year, the study found—an impact compounded by the fact that California accounts for over 40% of the country’s vegetable production.
Weather extremes outside the country have also affected prices: 2023 droughts in Mexico, it showed, contributed to a 20% price increase in vegetables the following January; droughts in Brazil have raised coffee prices 55% globally; and heatwaves in Japan contributed to a 48% raise in rice prices in the fall of 2024. These heatwaves and droughts were “unprecedented” researchers say, and were felt deeply.
David Ortega, food economist and professor at Michigan State University, says it is important to note that climate change does not just impact weather via heat and drought, though.
“It's not just drought, it's floods, it's hurricanes. It can be even colder temperatures that disrupt crops or freeze and frost that are earlier or later than the normal that affect agricultural production,” Ortega, who is not connected to the study, tells TIME. He points to citrus production in Florida, which was heavily impacted by the major hurricanes that hit the state hard in 2024.
The study specifically cites the United Kingdom as an example, in which “wet winters” contributed to an over 22% increase in potato prices.
“[Price increases are] being felt right away, because food is perishable. You can store some—a lot of the fruits and vegetables in Mexico tend to be frozen—but a lot of stuff is shipped fresh, and the stuff that is shipped fresh is going to be reflected in the price right away,” says Marc Bellemare, professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. “Food markets are reasonably integrated.”
Andrew Hultgren, assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says that these extreme weather events particularly impact farmers in “small locations that grow a majority of the world's supply of some crop,” as the study also notes. He points specifically to the study’s example of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced. The study links “unprecedented” temperatures in the region in February 2024 to an increase in global market prices of cocoa of around 300% by that April.
“Corn has grown all over the world, right? So if you have a bad corn season somewhere … it'll be smoothed by somewhere else that will probably be having a relatively good season,” Hultgren says. “If most of your production is in one location, you don't get that spatial smoothing,” he continues, noting the intensity of particular price increases in these instances.
The research also notes that food instability and extreme weather could stoke more political instability and inflation, with the world’s poor bearing most of the economic pain and health impacts.
Bellemare emphasizes that these food price spikes will be felt most by low-income people, who spend a more significant portion of their income on food than the average American.
“The average U.S. household spends about 10% of its budget on food. It is much higher for low income households,” he says. “I worry more about the distributional consequences than I worry about the geographic consequences.”
Hultgren stresses that shifting food prices change the value of the aid low-income Americans receive through programs like SNAP as well.
“That means that the value of food aid, if it's noted in monetary terms, is fluctuating for you as a family, and that does add unpredictability in the finances of a poor family and that variability can just make decisions on other expenditures more difficult,” he says.
Hultgren also points out that these inequalities will be felt differently in different countries. For those in Europe and America, the price increases will feel like inflation, he says, but they will be “an even bigger problem in developing and poorer parts of the world.”
Experts note that climate change is just one of a confluence of factors that are all coalescing to affect both supply and demand of food products, and leading to rising food prices. Ortega specifically points to 2022, when he says there was “the highest increase in food prices in a generation.” He says that the impact of the war in Ukraine must be noted—but the effect of climate change compounded supply chain disruptions and inflation problems.
The research paper also notes that food price increases are leading to increased headline inflation.
“Central bank mandates for price stability may become increasingly challenging to deliver if more frequent extreme weather events make food prices less stable domestically and in global markets,” the paper observes. “These challenges may be magnified if persistent temperature increases cause a sustained upward pressure on inflation or inflation volatility results in lower credibility and a de-anchoring of inflation expectation.”
Ortega conducts research on how “shocks,” like the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, affect the agri-food business and impact consumers. Many of these shocks are temporary, Ortega says, though their effects may be intensely felt. The impacts of climate change, however, have only just begun.
“Work like this that shows the impact of climate change on food prices really brings to the surface what I see as one of the significant threats that our food system faces going into the future,” Ortega. “Climate events and adverse weather that are driven by climate change are increasing in frequency, and that's only going to continue going into the future.”
The researchers note in the study that their work is a “a reminder of the urgency to enact policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming in line with globally agreed targets.” Further, though, they state that mitigations like early warning systems and "timely information on climate conditions” can help farmers limit their exposure and impact to certain extreme events.
“We're not unresponsive in the face of climate change,” Bellemare says. “There's a lot of adaptation going on. There's insurance products that are being rolled out to those farmers. Everyone's adapting either in terms of production or in terms of financial instruments to kind of insure themselves or hedge against those things.”
Some of this adaptation can also be done in farmers’ decision-making, Hultgren says, noting farmers can choose to plant more if they know prices are rising, can “think about what the price history has been for the crops that they can plant,” and can consider the forecast for the coming season. But to make those decisions, he says, information must be available and research conducted.
“If we cut information out of the picture, if we don't provide information about how weather distributions are shifting, how we think they're going to shift in the future, what they think the seasonal forecast for farmers [is] ... that potentially has negative consequences for the ability to for agents to just adapt,” Hultgren says.
Ortega notes that weather can be extremely hard to predict, especially fast-moving weather events like floods or hurricanes. And on that front, Ortega says that the government does not seem to be moving in the direction of progress.
“That's one area that I'm highly concerned about, given a lot of the funding cuts at the federal level in the United States, at the moment,” he says. “We need to be investing to ensure that we have the best science and technology in order to develop those drought resistant varieties, solvent varieties of crops, and ensure that our producers and producers around the world have the best tools needed in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change on their operations.”
https://time.com/7304646/climate-change-food-prices-extreme-weather/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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FOUR WAYS TO RESPOND TO HOSTILE COMMENTS
Hostile comments can show up anywhere, including in emails, letters, on Facebook, comments to internet articles, and in-person. Should you ignore them? React in the same hostile tone? Or is there a better way?
A BIFF Response® is a way to respond that usually puts a stop to the hostilities while leaving you feeling good about yourself. BIFF stands for brief, informative, friendly, and firm. We have been teaching this method for the past 12 years and the feedback has been universally positive.
Here are the four parts of a BIFF response:
Brief: Keep it short, typically a paragraph. This is even when the comment you’re responding to goes on and on for many paragraphs or pages. This leaves much less for the other person to react to and is often sufficient to get your main point across.
Informative: Give some straight information, rather than emotions, opinions, defenses or arguments. You don’t need to defend yourself when another person is being hostile. It’s not about you. It’s about their inability to manage their emotions and responses. Just stay focused on providing relevant information.
Friendly: This may seem hard to do when you’re being attacked in writing or verbally. But this avoids feeding the hostilities and may even calm an upset person. Just a friendly greeting and closing; nothing too involved. This helps keep the hostilities from escalating. It also shows that you have good self-restraint.
Firm: This means that you end the conversation rather than feeding the hostilities. It doesn’t mean harsh. Just avoid anything that opens the door to more hostile comments back. Say something that calmly ends the conversation. Sometimes, you will need a response from the other person, so just ask a question seeking a Yes or No answer by such-and-such time and/or date. Then end on a friendly note.
A Resentful Friend Example
Yolanda’s message:
"Samantha, I can’t believe that you used me to help you with your math homework. I mean, I did all the work and you just took advantage of me. I’m tired of you taking me for granted, just because I had an extra semester of math. What are you going to do for me? I mean, what are friends for? Not to be used!”
Samantha’s message:
"Yolanda, thank you for your email. I thought about it a lot. I agree we should stop doing our math homework together. It will help us each try harder to learn it ourselves. I’m still glad that we’re friends and will talk about other things when we’re together.”
Samantha thought about including this sentence: “But I disagree that I was just ‘using’ you and not helping you at all.” But after reading it out loud to herself, she decided to leave this out. That would have been defensive and just kept the argument going. The problem is solved already by stopping doing math homework together. No need to go backward in time and open up the past, which people rarely agree on anyway if it’s already become hostile. So she kept it brief, informative, friendly, and firm.
An Angry Divorce Example
Joe’s email:
“Jane, I can’t believe you are so stupid as to think that I’m going to let you take the children to your boss’ birthday party during my parenting time. Have you no memory of the last six conflicts we’ve had about my parenting time? Or are you having an affair with him? I always knew you would do anything to get ahead! In fact, I remember coming to your office party witnessing you making a total fool of yourself–including flirting with everyone from the CEO down to the delivery guy! Are you high on something? Haven’t you gotten your finances together enough to support yourself yet, without flinging yourself at every Tom, Dick, and Harry? …”
Jane:
“Thank you for responding to my request to take the children to my office party. Just to clarify, the party will be from 3-5 on Friday at the office and there will be approximately 30 people there–including several other parents bringing school-age children. There will be no alcohol, as it is a family-oriented firm and there will be family-oriented activities. I think it will be a good experience for them to see me at my workplace. With this information I hope you will reconsider. Please let me know by Thursday at 5 P.M. if you change your mind. Thanks!”
An Office Example
Roberta was fired for several violations of company policies. She writes this email to the human resources manager:
Roberta:
"Hi Jerry, I had another job interview this week. This is good, because my medical benefits are running out, thanks to you. You had no right to ruin my career and make it impossible for me to get a good letter of reference. Your corrupt company will be exposed sooner or later. By the way, I need a copy of that last list of job duties that I had. I’ve asked you three times for it, and you refuse to respond. Let me know if I need to drop by to pick it up. Your old friend, Roberta”
Jerry:
Here’s the first draft of Jerry’s response to Roberta:
“Hi Roberta, First of all, it will not benefit you at all to make threats about “exposing” our company. We have done nothing wrong and are ready to refute any claims you may raise against us. I was not aware of you ever asking for a list of your job duties. Please see it attached. As a reminder, you are not allowed to return to our company, nor allowed to set foot on our grounds. We will have you arrested if you attempt to do so. I hope that this message is clear. Sincerely, Jerry Butler, Human Resource Manager”
Is this a BIFF Response®? It’s brief and informative. But it’s not friendly and firm. It will unnecessarily invite another negative response from Roberta. Do you think the following is better?
“Dear Roberta, I’m glad you’re making progress and getting interviews. I really want you to find a company that’s a good fit for you. I am attaching a copy of your job duties. I hope that helps! Best wishes! Jerry”
This is brief, informative, friendly, and firm. By keeping it short and simple, he didn’t engage with her too much and gently ended the conversation with a friendly tone. He didn’t need to make extra comments about how she wrote her first response to him. He just kept it brief, informative, friendly, and firm.
There are many more tips for BIFF Responses® in my book, BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People, Their Personal Attacks, Hostile Email and Social Media Meltdowns and in videos on our website. The idea is to calm the conflict rather than escalate it, restraining your urge to attack the other person back. You can stop the hostile conversation without getting down in the mud yourself. Just keep it brief, informative, friendly, and firm.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/5-types-people-who-can-ruin-your-life/201809/biff-4-ways-respond-hostile-comments
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DOGS: FRIENDS OR FAMILY?
If you're having a conversation and the person you're talking to refers to "man's best friend," you almost immediately know that he is likely talking about his dog. That phrase is so common that, like "Fido", it can substitute for the word "dog" in casual interactions. Yet it seems in our modern society that our relationship to dogs is deeper than friendship, and more like family. For example, in one recent study, 94 percent of the dog owners surveyed reported that they considered their dog to be part of their family. We obviously care about our emotional bonds to dogs since, according to Google, nearly 3,000 people each month search for an answer to the question "Does my dog love me?" All of this indicates that we have strong feelings for our dogs, and they are very important in our social lives.
However, there are many different social relationships that people have, and they differ in intensity and quality. Friends are different from family, and various members of the family have different relationships to us, such as parent and child, or brothers and sisters, or the relationship that grandparents have with family, to mention just a few. A team of Hungarian researchers headed by Borbála Turcsán in the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest decided to explore the social relationships between dogs and people to find out exactly how we relate to our canine pets.
Measuring Relationships
The aim is to see how dogs fit into the complex set of social relationships that make up an average person's life. Social psychologists have created a number of inventories that allow them to investigate which people interact with which other people and how they do it. Dogs are not typically included in such measures. This team of researchers used a trick that I first popularized in my book, "The Intelligence of Dogs," which involves modifying a test or survey instrument that was designed to evaluate humans so that information can also be gathered about dogs.
In this case, they began with the Network of Relationships Inventory, which was initially designed to assess behavioral interactions between various human partners across 13 different relationship scales. The relationship among partners included interactions with a person's closest kin, their romantic partner, best friend, and their child. For this current research, the inventory was modified to include relationships with the participant's pet dog. In total, 717 people responded to the online survey. The majority of the respondents were female, and most of them were between 25 and 45 years of age.
How We Relate to Dogs
This study produced a lot of data, but the overall trends were quite clear. These investigators conclude that "owners rate their relationship with their dogs as good or better than any human relationships."
According to the researchers, what makes our relationship to dogs so special comes down to three main factors: high levels of companionship, opportunities for caregiving, and a minimum of conflict. They conclude that "Our results indicate that the owner-dog relationship is most similar to the child-parent relationship but can overall be interpreted as a mix of child and best friend relationships, combining positive aspects of the child relationship with the lack of negative aspects of friendship."
Like our relationship to a child, dogs provide virtually unconditional affection and fulfill our inherent need to care for and nurture another living being. An important factor is that dogs don't criticize your lifestyle or start arguments about political issues or your taste in music or movies. They also don't hold grudges, which means that your next interaction with your dog will start with a clean emotional slate. These facts alone might explain why dogs rank higher in relationship satisfaction than most other humans in your life.
Who Holds the Power?
According to the researchers, another factor that makes our relationship to dogs so special has to do with power or control. When it comes to relationships with dogs, there is a different kind of power balance than we find in most human-to-human associations. Putting it simply, owners have virtually complete control over their dog's life. This power asymmetry means that dogs usually don't engage in the kind of behaviors involving attempts to exert control, which often are the source of conflicts in human relationships.
With friends or family, there are always conflicts and tensions over the exercise of power. Often, conflicts are small, such as who gets to control the TV remote, who has to take care of the dishes after dinner tonight, or who gets the last slice of pie, but even small power struggles such as these can be annoying. Dogs don't usually engage in power contests with their owner, and if they do, because of the asymmetry in the amount of power and control, the outcome of such a conflict is predetermined in favor of the human.
Is the Dog Just Therapy?
There was one other surprising finding in this study. There is a widespread belief that many people become dog owners because they are looking for some way to compensate for the inadequacies and lack of fulfillment that they get from their human relationships. According to this viewpoint, dogs then become substitutes for the absence of a child, a romantic partner, or close friends. When these investigators dug into their data, they found something unexpected. Specifically, they discovered that people with high positive relationships with other humans also tended to have the highest positive relationships with their dogs. This led them to conclude that dogs complement, rather than substitute, for human social connections.
Is a dog best described as a friend and companion, or as a member of your family? Well, if we believe this latest piece of research, it appears that your dog's relationship to you is a blend of your child and your best friend — so, a bit of both.
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THE ANCIENT RITES THAT GAVE BIRTH TO RELIGION
The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters—elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for?
Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he’s been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines—archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science—to construct a profile of religious practices.
Whitehouse’s fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. He developed a theory of religion based on the power of rituals to create social bonds and group identity. He saw that difficult rituals, like traumatic initiation rites, were often unforgettable and had the effect of fusing an individual’s identity with the group. Over the years Whitehouse’s theory of religiosity has sparked considerable debate and spawned several international conferences.
Whitehouse remains a busy man in charge of various research projects. I caught up with him during a brief layover in London between trips to South America and Hong Kong. He’d just returned from Brazil, where he met with two research groups studying how soccer fans bond with each other in that football-mad nation. In our interview, we ranged over a wide range of topics: the social utility of difficult, often painful rituals; the psychological power of “God” in large societies; and why it’s so hard to come up with a good definition of religion.
Harvey Whitehouse points out bull horns at Çatalhöyük, an archaeological excavation in Turkey. Through an analysis of artifacts at the settlement, which thrived around 7000 B.C., Whitehouse has discerned “high-arousal” rituals associated with a religious life.
How far back can we trace religion in human history?
Well, one thing we need to sort out is what we mean by “religion.” People use this as a blanket term for many different things—belief in God or gods, belief in souls and the afterlife, magical spells, rituals, altered states of consciousness. Some of these things are incredibly hard to see in the ancient past, particularly in prehistory.
So what do you look for?
Archaeologists spend a lot of time looking for evidence of ritual activity. Some of the best evidence of belief in the afterlife comes from grave goods like pendants and beaded necklaces found in human burials. Some African sites date back more than a quarter of a million years.
How do you know these burial sites had something to do with the afterlife?
When people leave grave goods, there’s a strong suggestion that they imagine that’s not the end of the person they’re laying to rest. I think some of the paleolithic cave paintings are also suggestive. Lots of materials in those caves suggest that altered states of consciousness were being experienced. These environments have really remarkable acoustics, and you can imagine how lighting could be manipulated to enhance the effects on people.
What are you learning about the origins of religion based on this ancient archeological evidence?
When we can see how frequently certain kinds of rituals were performed, we think it’s possible to estimate—based on animal remains, for example—how often feasting events occurred. Some rituals involved killing large and dangerous animals. It’s been estimated that meat from a wild bull could feed 1,000 people. We can learn from burials, particularly in houses where burials are associated with founding events or closures.
We can then estimate the frequency of particular rituals. The frequency of a ritual will be inversely proportional to the level of arousal it induces. Those inducers include sensory pageantry, singing, dancing, music, altered states of consciousness, and painful or traumatic procedures. We find that religions with high-frequency rituals will be more hierarchical than traditions that lack those rituals.
One common explanation for the origin of religion is that gods and supernatural beings could explain things that didn’t make any sense, whether it was the explosion of thunder or the death of a child. Was that the root of religious belief?
I suppose people do try to fill in the gaps in their knowledge by invoking supernatural explanations. But many other situations prompt supernatural explanations. Perhaps the most common one is thinking there’s a ritual that can help us when we’re doing something with a high risk of failure. Lots of people go to football matches wearing their lucky pants or lucky shirt. And you get players doing all sorts of rituals when there’s a high-risk situation like taking a penalty kick.
So ritualistic activities in a football match are not that different from explicitly religious rituals?
No. In fact, I find it odd that people would even want to think that they’re different. Psychologically, they’re so incredibly similar.
But presumably what sets religion apart is something to do with the transcendent, with another dimension of reality.
It’s true that there’s a certain sacredness to religion that people don’t associate with supporting a football team. But frankly a lot of football fans hold their team and all its emblems pretty sacred. We tend to take a few bits and pieces of the most familiar religions and see them as emblematic of what’s ancient and pan-human. But those things that are ancient and pan-human are actually ubiquitous and not really part of world religions.
Again, it really depends on what we mean by “religion.” I think the best way to answer that question is to try and figure out which cognitive capacities came first. We know that tool-use goes back deep in history. Homo habilis, otherwise known as handyman, is an early species that used tools, so it’s quite possible that he had some notion of creator beings. Language clearly plays an important role in some aspects of religion, like the development of a doctrinal system. But I’m not sure it’s necessary for many of the fundamental beliefs that undergird what we think of as religion.
All religions seem to have creation stories. Don’t you need language to formulate this kind of mythic imagination?
When you look at the myths of many cultural traditions, they seem to have a kind of dreamlike quality. Often they’re actually inspired by dreams. Dreaming seems to be a widespread feature of the mammalian brain, so while it’s true that sharing dreams depends on language, having dreams doesn’t require language. I’m guessing the mythic imagination wouldn’t depend on having a language.
Psychologically, why is God such a powerful idea?
It may be a product of cultural evolution and the shift to much larger and more complex societies. When you use the singular “God,” you’re talking about some kind of high god, which probably means a god that’s omniscient and cares about the morality of our behavior and punishes us when we behave badly. That’s a relatively recent cultural innovation that may have been an adaptation to living in very large societies.
At some point in human history many societies switched from animistic forms of religion to institutionalized systems that are closer to today’s religions. How do you explain this transition?
The really critical transition is one that occurs in the gradual switch from a foraging, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle to settled agriculture, where you’re domesticating animals and cultivating crops. What happens is a major change in group size and structure. I think religion is really a core feature in that change. What we see in the archeological record is increasing frequency of collective rituals. This changes things psychologically and leads to more doctrinal kinds of religious systems, which are more recognizable when we look at world religions today.
Why did that transformation occur in agricultural societies?
The cooperation required in large settled communities is different from what you need in a small group based on face-to-face ties between people. When you’re facing high-risk encounters with other groups or dangerous animals, what you want in a small group is people so strongly bonded that they really stick together. The rituals that seem best-designed to do that are emotionally intense but not performed all that frequently. But when the group is too large for you to know everyone personally, you need to bind people together through group categories, like an ethnic group or a religious organization. The high frequency rituals in larger religions make you lose sight of your personal self.
I suppose an example of social bonding would be the Muslim practice of praying five times a day.
Or in Christianity, it’s going to church regularly to attend services. All really large-scale religions have rituals that people perform daily or at least once a week. We think this is one of the key differences between simply identifying with a group and being fused with a group. When you’re fused with a group, a person’s social identity really taps into personal identity as well. And identity fusion has a number of behavioral outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, fused individuals demonstrate a significant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their groups.
What about the other kind of ritual where you have very intense experiences?
A lot of small groups are bound together through painful or frightening initiation rituals, particularly in groups that face high levels of threat from people outside their group. You need to stand together firmly to resist. Where I worked in New Guinea, a lot of the small tribal groups had initiation rites for boys and young men. They emerged as tightly bonded military units capable of carrying out raids against neighboring villages. We see the same sort of thing in modern armies. The elite forces have dysphoric training programs and informal initiation rites that bind the group together.
A secular example of these initiations would be the hazing rituals in a college fraternity.
That’s right. We’re developing a survey to see whether the intensity of hazing rituals in fraternities and sororities correlates with group fusion. We’ve also been researching military groups and football fans. What we’re finding is that football fans that suffer more are also more bonded. Going through bad experiences together is actually a more powerful bonding agent than simply having a good time.
Doesn’t a well-trained army have to break down a soldier’s individuality so that he’s committed to helping his comrades?
I think that’s right. Painful or bad experiences are remembered better and become part of our sense of who we are, what makes me, me and you, you. Sharing those powerful experiences breaks down the boundary between self and other and creates the psychological state that we call fusion. One of the interesting correlates of being fused with a group is willingness to fight and die for it. So people willing to make huge sacrifices to groups are typically fused with them.
What brought you to Papua New Guinea?
I didn’t intend to study religion. I’d gone out there to study economic anthropology, but these people had other ideas. They were all members of a religious movement calling itself the Kivung, which had a huge number of beliefs and practices geared toward bringing the ancestors back from the dead. This was what people really wanted me to understand.
Can you describe some of these rituals to bring back the dead?
There were two aspects to the movement and this is really what has driven so much of my later research. There was a large tradition uniting hundreds of villages and thousands of followers across quite a wide region. It involved very high frequency rituals, most of which were focused on laying out offerings to the ancestors in specially constructed temples. Operating on a very large scale, it was quite hierarchical and very well organized. But there were also small groups that sporadically broke away and performed much more emotionally intense rituals that seemed to have a very powerful bonding effect, even though they never succeeded in bringing the ancestors back from the dead.
What were these intense rituals in smaller groups?
In the village where I lived, they performed special rituals where they discarded their clothes and went around naked, which had quite an emotional impact, particularly on women who were exposing their bodies to the predatory gaze of men. They destroyed all their animals and had huge feasts, performing a mass marriage and lots of rituals that were intended to herald the return of the ancestors. They performed vigils under quite difficult conditions where people were forbidden to leave and were forced to endure unpleasant conditions.
Did they ever explain why they thought these rituals would bring back their ancestors?
They had a complex doctrinal system that explained the history of the world and the relationships between their groups and white folks. As in any religion, I’m not sure that everyone bought into every detail of the doctrine. The most compelling aspect of this belief system is that they would be released from a history of exploitation through a brotherhood with invading colonial powers.
They talked about a period when ethnically European businessmen and technologists would appear in the jungle and create, magically overnight, huge high-rise buildings and cities, and they would have a Western lifestyle as a result. But those European people would actually be ancestors of the group who’d just come back from the dead but with the appearance of white skin and European-type hair.
So they thought bringing back their ancestors would give them an opulent lifestyle?
I don’t think it was just about being wealthy in a crass materialistic sense. It was about release from all the sufferings of the hard life that they lived in the forest, where horrible sores, tropical ulcers, malaria, and all kinds of diseases and injuries—including premature death of loved ones—are a common part of everyday life. They were really dreaming of a time when all of that suffering would be eliminated.
You’re suggesting you don’t have to reduce religious experience to belief systems. It’s the experience itself that sweeps you along and binds you to other people.
It’s about both belief and experience. I do think we can kind of separate the two. Imagine having a brain that’s naturally predisposed to believe some things more readily than others, and then over generations, cultural systems develop in ways that essentially play into those predispositions. The point is that our experiences are made meaningful by our implicit beliefs and the two basically work together.
I’m curious, are you religious yourself?
Well, I’ve got the full repertoire of religious intuitions like everyone else. I don’t personally subscribe to beliefs in the supernatural, and since I’m not a member of an organized religion, I suppose you could say that I’m not religious. But like I said earlier, it really depends on what you count as religious. I actually think on one level we’re all religious, even atheists. People can train themselves to dismiss religious intuitions, but I don’t think they can eradicate them.
What kinds of intuitions are you talking about?
The intuition that when people die they’re still around in some sense. I think we have that intuition whether we declare ourselves to be religious or not. And the sense of being watched when you’re doing something you should feel guilty about. When you see the amazing features of the natural environment—like rivers, marine life, trees in the forest—it’s hard not to believe that some creator put them there. Our brains are set up to put a designer in charge of that extraordinary complexity of design.
I think we have the intuition that there are supernatural agents around, that they created the world, that we live on after we die. The question is whether we buy into a cultural tradition that builds on those ideas and turns them into something more formalized and doctrinally coherent. I don’t myself, but I think a lot of people around the world don’t have much choice. If I’d grown up in different parts of the world—for example, in Papua New Guinea, where I did my fieldwork—I’m quite sure I would be religious. It’s been interesting to see the decline of organized religion in certain countries, which are usually affluent, safe, and secure. As life gets easier, you could say people get more selfish and less attached to group values.
But if the core impulse of religion is to help us find meaning and purpose in our lives, shouldn’t that also apply to affluent societies?
That’s true, but the question is how we go about looking for meaning in the world. I personally don’t agree with the idea that the main explanation for religion is that we’re on a quest for meaning. I think we need to look at what participation in a particular cultural tradition—religious or otherwise—does for the individual and the community. There are lots of different components to religion. But if we’re just thinking about the ones that are universal, that seem to be part of our evolved psychology, I don’t think innate curiosity and desire to puzzle together the meaning of life explains religion.
And so what does, in summary, explain religion?
Well, it’s not a monolithic entity for which we could offer an overall explanation. If we define what we’re really interested in—supernatural agents, rituals, afterlife beliefs, creation stories—then we’d find they result from quite different mechanisms and have different evolutionary histories. There just can’t be a magic bullet explanation of “religion” as if it’s one single thing.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-ancient-rites-that-gave-birth-to-religion
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THE BOOK OF REVELATION
I understand Revelation the same way Thomas Jefferson did.
Jefferson considered Revelation "merely the ravings of a maniac."
Robert G. Ingersoll branded Revelation "the insanest of all books."
Martin Luther said "Christ is neither taught nor known in it."
John Calvin "had grave doubts about its value."
Martin Luther believed Revelation contradicted much of the content of the Gospel of John and the synoptic Gospels, so he relegated it to an appendix in his German translation of the Bible.
Mark Twain said, "Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand."
What bothers me about the Revelation of John of Patmos is not the parts I don't understand, but the parts I do understand: the parts where God, Jesus Christ and the Angels abandon every ethical teaching enshrined in the Bible to become a pack of rabid, religion-besotted serial killers.
I think John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, was crazy and was probably doing some really strong hashish.
Revelation is full of errors and contradictions.
John got the names of the twelve tribes wrong, leaving out Dan and Ephraim. It seems highly unlikely that an all-wise god would have forgotten the names of the twelve tribes of Israel! (The only way to get the twelve tribes correct is to include Dan and let Joseph represent his sons Ephraim and Manasseh.)
John prophesied that Jesus would return while the men who pierced him were still living.
While most Christians believe Revelation forecasts future events, the bible clearly prophesied that Jesus would return while his disciples, accusers and killers were still alive:
Mathew 16:28―"I tell you the truth, there are some standing here who will not experience death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."
Luke 9:27―"I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”
Mark 13:30―"I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place."
Mark 14:62―[Jesus speaking to his accusers said] "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
John called Jesus the "bright and morning star" when that was Lucifer's designation (Isaiah 14:11-15).
John put words in Jesus’s mouth and had Jesus vow to murder children for their mother’s sins.
According to John of Patmos, Christians are condemned for eating food sacrificed to idols, but according to Jesus, Peter and Paul, all food is clean. In fact, Paul said he could eat food offered to idols with a clear conscience.
That John of Patmos was a Judaizer is clear, because even if a church is doing well, it must continue doing works to be saved. Salvation is not by grace, but depends on works, eating the right things, not having the wrong kind of sex, etc. This is clearly illustrated in these verses:
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.
Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. (Revelation 20:12-13)
So obviously grace had nothing to do with salvation, according to John. The only thing that mattered was works.
John’s "god" is evil and unjust, a monster. For instance, John heard all the creatures of the earth praise god, after which he turned around and destroyed them. Why?
John’s "god" made ridiculous mistakes. For instance, all the grass was destroyed by fire, but then later god "forgot" that the grass had been destroyed and told the giant locusts not to harm the grass.
John said Jesus had "paps" (female breasts). Nowhere else in the Bible is God or the Messiah described as being a hermaphrodite, although some pagan "gods" had such attributes.
John said God has seven spirits. This is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.
John said Jesus would search the hearts and kidneys ("reins") of believers. Kidneys, really? No one believes kidneys play a role in how we think, act or feel, today. We know the will and emotions spring from our brains, not our kidneys.
Woman clothed with the sun.John obviously believed that the earth was flat, with corners, and that the stars were tiny pinpoints of light. We know John’s earth was flat because he said every eye would see Jesus when he descended from the clouds. That can only happen on a flat earth.
John obviously believed Jesus would return in his own lifetime, because he said the people who had "pierced" Jesus would see him return. The people who had pierced Jesus were the Roman soldiers who crucified him. John may have written his original text while living in Jerusalem as it was being besieged by the Romans (circa AD 70). If so, John was understandably full of hatred for the Romans and wanted Jesus to return and destroy them. In John's vision, which seems to have been wishful thinking, the people who had murdered Jesus would see him return to judge the "Beast" (the Roman emperor) and "Babylon" (the Roman empire).
His hatred of the Romans probably led John to say they would be tortured with fire and brimstone "in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels." But Jesus had asked God to forgive his murderers because they didn’t know what they were doing. How can these two very different visions of Jesus be reconciled? And how can anyone believe Jesus and the Angels are going to torture human beings, in heaven? So much for hell being "separation from God."
The bible is a fairytale book that ends with a nightmare called Revelation. ~ Michael R. Burch, Quora
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THE FUNGI IN THE HUMAN BODY
The fungi within our bodies may have a much greater effect on our health than we've long given them credit for.
While we might acquire some fungi from our mothers at birth, new fungi are also constantly entering our bodies; we ingest yeasts every time we drink beer or eat bread, and we inhale floating fungal spores with every breath. Many of these fungi are quickly killed off by our immune systems, but others are transient passengers or lifelong acquaintances.
Lately, scientists have been exploring how our fungal inhabitants could even influence our brains, minds and behavior.
Doctors have long known that fungi can cause dangerous brain infections. But researchers are now also finding curious – albeit sometimes controversial – hints that these microbes might have other neurological effects on humans.
The idea might evoke images of the human-zombifying fungus from HBO's apocalyptic series The Last of Us. But while scientists agree that the idea of fungi taking complete control over our bodies is implausible, they're earnestly investigating whether some fungi inside us could contribute to brain-damaging diseases, or if gut-dwelling fungi could influence our behavior and mental health.
Much more research is needed, experts say. But these possibilities are important to study – both to understand the deep and complex relationships with the microbes within us and to explore new ways of boosting our health.
fungi we inhale
In general, humans are pretty good at resisting fungi (our warm body temperature tends to make it hard for them to take hold). And many of the fungi that do might actually be good for us, possibly supporting our immune systems or helping wounds to heal, says microbiologist Matthew Olm of the University of Colorado Boulder, US. "I would say fungi are definitely a critical part of being a healthy human," he says.
But many other fungi can cause infections, from athlete's foot to thrush. This happens when we encounter new, harmful fungi in our environment or when fungi that naturally coexist with us are under certain conditions triggered to explode in abundance, says Rebecca Drummond, a fungal immunologist at the University of Birmingham, UK.
It's rare for fungi to reach the brain, thanks to protective barriers in the lungs and intestines, along with the brain's own defensive wall, the blood-brain barrier, and immune cells that are primed to destroy any fungi that slip through. But fungal brain infections do happen, and the number of cases has increased in recent decades.
This is due to a growing number of people with weakened immune systems, Drummond says, partly because of the global spread of the immune-crippling virus HIV, especially in parts of Africa, but also due to rising use of immune-suppressing medications in cancer patients and organ transplant recipients. "The more of these immune-modulating drugs we use, we'll see more of these fungal infections," Drummond says.
Fungi that infect the brain sometimes originate in the lungs, including Aspergillus or Cryptococcus, which we inhale as airborne spores that can germinate, grow and spread if left unchecked, Drummond says. Less often, common gut residents such as Candida albicans grow out of control and, once in the brain, branches out and produces nerve-killing toxins, Drummond adds. Cryptococcus, meanwhile, can grow into tumor-like masses. "Obviously, that causes huge amounts of damage," she says.
Fungal brain infections are often fatal, with Aspergillus reaching mortality rates of above 90%. They can be tricky to treat, says Drummond: there aren't many antifungal medications, and not all drugs get across the blood-brain barrier to kill off brain-dwelling fungi. Some fungi have also already developed resistance to these drugs.
People who survive fungal infections of the brain are often left with long-term brain damage. Aids patients who have survived cryptococcal meningitis, which arises from a brain infection by Cryptococcus x, suffer vision impairments, memory loss and dizziness, says Drummond.
Scientists have long known of the dangers of fungal brain infections. But in recent years, some have been exploring the possibility that fungi are getting into the brain much more frequently than previously believed, and may even be contributing to the loss of nerve cells that occurs in conditions like Alzheimer's disease.
To Richard Lathe, a molecular biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, some of the most interesting evidence for this theory comes from a handful of cases where fungal and other microbial brain infections were coincidentally discovered in people initially diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In several cases where doctors prescribed infection-fighting medication, "the symptoms of dementia remitted", Lathe says. "Quite remarkably, some of them went back to work".
Lathe believes that microbes slip across the blood-brain barrier quite frequently but are usually suppressed or killed in people with healthy immune systems. Because our immune systems weaken with age, that could allow microbes to accumulate in the brain, perhaps triggering nerve-killing inflammation. "It's only when the immune system declines that you see damage," he says.
Scientists have long linked Alzheimer's to a build-up of certain proteins in the brain, but there's now a growing debate over whether the presence of those proteins is the cause or merely a symptom of the disease. Lathe argues these proteins are actually produced as a defense mechanism against microbial intrusion, based on research suggesting the proteins have infection-fighting properties.
Further evidence that brain-intruding microbes could be causing Alzheimer's comes from experiments in mice, where scientists have witnessed the fungus Candida albicans entering the brain after the rodents' immune systems were compromised. And in one pre-print study – which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed by other scientists – Lathe and his colleagues examined brain slices from deceased healthy people and Alzheimer's patients. They found large quantities of bacteria, viruses and fungi in both groups – but more in the brains from patients who had Alzheimer's.
If microbes are indeed a factor in Alzheimer's, we may be able to mitigate or even prevent the disease by strengthening people's immune defenses, for instance with vaccines that have been shown to boost general immunity. But this theory is young, Lathe says. "It's a new idea."
And a debated one, too. Olm and others argue it's hard to rule out that the microbial genetic material may have appeared because of contamination, as fragments of microbes tend to be ubiquitous. Lathe finds that unlikely, though, pointing to reports that microbe fragments in brain tissue are just as abundant inside the samples as they are on the surface, whereas contamination from the air would mostly settle on the brain surface.
Still, Olm says that finding more microbe fragments in Alzheimer's brains isn't proof that those microbes cause the disease. For instance, those people's brains might simply have had a weaker blood-brain barrier or some other issue, meaning more microbes entered their brains over time before being killed off by their immune systems.
However, new evidence that microbes can invade the brains of animals like fish strengthens the notion that this could be happening in mammals – and perhaps even humans, Olm says. In a 2024 study, scientists labelled bacteria with tiny, fluorescent green molecules and added them to tanks housing salmon and trout. "After a week, you see these microbes making their way into the fish brain, lighting the fish brain up green," Olm says, and curiously, "[the microbes] seemingly live there without huge consequences for these fish over their lifetime."
In any case, the notion of fungi and other microbes getting into the brain in old age – either due to a weakening brain immune system or a worn-out blood brain barrier – is more plausible. "I think we've now reached that threshold where there's enough smoke around this hypothesis… it's worth spending money on figuring out if that is happening," Olm says.
Interestingly, fungi might not need to enter the brain in order to influence it.
In a 2022 study, immunologist Iliyan Iliev of Weill Cornell Medicine in the US and colleagues found that adding Candida albicans to the guts of mice made them more resilient to damage of their gut linings caused by bacterial infections or heavy antibiotic use. Strengthening the gut wall may be a defense mechanism by the body to prevent the fungus and other microbes from escaping the gut and infecting other tissues, Iliev says.
But the big surprise came when the team observed the rodents' behavior. Remarkably, fungi-colonized mice were much more likely to sniff, communicate and engage with other mice – meaning that exposure to the fungi appeared to have some sort of behavioral effect too. Based on other experiments, the scientists theorize that certain molecules released by the immune cells of the mice enter the bloodstream and somehow stimulate certain nerve cells in the brain that are involved in behavior. "It was very surprising to us," Iliev recalls.
It's a mystery why, at least in mice, this crosstalk between gut fungi and the brain exists. Is it a coincidence that fungus-triggered immune signals affect the brain, or "is that actually deliberately done by the fungus to benefit its survival?" Iliev asks. Perhaps mammalian bodies somehow benefit from changing their behavior in response to fungi, Iliev speculates.
Mice with more fungi in their gut were found to be more sociable
There's no evidence yet that this crosstalk between gut fungi and the brain happens in humans, but the possibility would be worth investigating, Olm says. In recent years, evidence has mounted that gut-dwelling bacteria may be able to send signals to the brain via the immune and nervous systems, or by producing substances associated with the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and relaxation. In principle, Olm says, "there's no reason to think that fungi aren't doing this as well."
Some scientists are even investigating whether fungi could be involved in mental disorders. Several studies have found differences in the makeup of gut fungi in people who suffer from depression or bipolar disorder.
In women with schizophrenia, those who showed signs of exposure to the gut-dwelling Candida albicans tended to score lower on tests of memory and other cognitive abilities, according to a 2016 study by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Emily Severance and her colleagues. She is exploring the possibility that Candida overgrowth – caused by stress or antibiotics, for instance – provokes an imbalance of gut microbes, altering the substances they produce in ways that make susceptible people more likely to develop schizophrenia.
If true, it could allow doctors to treat schizophrenia symptoms by giving people probiotics that help reverse the overabundance of Candida – which would in any case be helpful, she says.
But finding an association doesn't mean that the fungi cause schizophrenia. It could simply be that these patients are somehow more prone to high levels of Candida. So far "we can only come up with associations", says Severance. “I think that that's typical for a field of study that is very exciting – but still very early on in the timeline.”
Which of our fungal inhabitants – if any at all – are really influencing our brains is something scientists hope to learn in the coming years. "[Fungi are] definitely important," Drummond says, "but exactly how they're important, I think, is still being worked out." One thing is already clear: while bacteria have long been in the limelight, it may be time we also pay serious attention to the fungi quietly shaping our health from within.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250716-how-fungi-residing-in-our-bodies-could-influence-our-minds-and-brains
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BENEFITS AND HARMFUL EFFECTS OF SUNLIGHT
Each day, Apollo’s fiery chariot makes its way across the sky, bringing life-giving light to the planet. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, Apollo was the god of medicine and healing as well as of sun and light—but Apollo could bring sickness as well as cure. Today’s scientists have come to a similarly dichotomous recognition that exposure to the ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in sunlight has both beneficial and deleterious effects on human health.
Most public health messages of the past century have focused on the hazards of too much sun exposure. UVA radiation (95–97% of the UVR that reaches Earth’s surface) penetrates deeply into the skin, where it can contribute to skin cancer indirectly via generation of DNA-damaging molecules such as hydroxyl and oxygen radicals. Sunburn is caused by too much UVB radiation; this form also leads to direct DNA damage and promotes various skin cancers. Both forms can damage collagen fibers, destroy vitamin A in skin, accelerate aging of the skin, and increase the risk of skin cancers. Excessive sun exposure can also cause cataracts and diseases aggravated by UVR-induced immunosuppression such as reactivation of some latent viruses.
However, excessive UVR exposure accounts for only 0.1% of the total global burden of disease in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), according to the 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) report The Global Burden of Disease Due to Ultraviolet Radiation. DALYs measure how much a person’s expectancy of healthy life is reduced by premature death or disability caused by disease. Coauthor Robyn Lucas, an epidemiologist at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in Canberra, Australia, explains that many diseases linked to excessive UVR exposure tend to be relatively benign—apart from malignant melanoma—and occur in older age groups, due mainly to the long lag between exposure and manifestation, the requirement of cumulative exposures, or both. Therefore, when measuring by DALYs, these diseases incur a relatively low disease burden despite their high prevalence.
In contrast, the same WHO report noted that a markedly larger annual disease burden of 3.3 billion DALYs worldwide might result from very low levels of UVR exposure. This burden subsumes major disorders of the musculoskeletal system and possibly an increased risk of various autoimmune diseases and life-threatening cancers.
The best-known benefit of sunlight is its ability to boost the body’s vitamin D supply; most cases of vitamin D deficiency are due to lack of outdoor sun exposure. At least 1,000 different genes governing virtually every tissue in the body are now thought to be regulated by 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25[OH]D), the active form of the vitamin, including several involved in calcium metabolism and neuromuscular and immune system functioning.
Although most of the health-promoting benefits of sun exposure are thought to occur through vitamin D photosynthesis, there may be other health benefits that have gone largely overlooked in the debate over how much sun is needed for good health [see “Other Sun-Dependent Pathways,” p. A165]. As for what constitutes “excessive” UVR exposure, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, says Lucas: “‘Excessive’ really means inappropriately high for your skin type under a particular level of ambient UVR.”
Vitamin D Production
Unlike other essential vitamins, which must be obtained from food, vitamin D can be synthesized in the skin through a photosynthetic reaction triggered by exposure to UVB radiation. The efficiency of production depends on the number of UVB photons that penetrate the skin, a process that can be curtailed by clothing, excess body fat, sunscreen, and the skin pigment melanin. For most white people, a half-hour in the summer sun in a bathing suit can initiate the release of 50,000 IU (1.25 mg) vitamin D into the circulation within 24 hours of exposure; this same amount of exposure yields 20,000–30,000 IU in tanned individuals and 8,000–10,000 IU in dark-skinned people.
The initial photosynthesis produces vitamin D3, most of which undergoes additional transformations, starting with the production of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D), the major form of vitamin D circulating in the bloodstream and the form that is routinely measured to determine a person’s vitamin D status. Although various cell types within the skin can carry out this transformation locally, the conversion takes place primarily in the liver. Another set of transformations occurs in the kidney and other tissues, forming 1,25(OH)D. This form of the vitamin is actually a hormone, chemically akin to the steroid hormones.
1,25(OH)D accumulates in cell nuclei of the intestine, where it enhances calcium and phosphorus absorption, controlling the flow of calcium into and out of bones to regulate bone-calcium metabolism. Michael Holick, a medical professor and director of the Bone Health Care Clinic at Boston University Medical Center, says, “The primary physiologic function of vitamin D is to maintain serum calcium and phosphorous levels within the normal physiologic range to support most metabolic functions, neuromuscular transmission, and bone mineralization.”
Without sufficient vitamin D, bones will not form properly. In children, this causes rickets, a disease characterized by growth retardation and various skeletal deformities, including the hallmark bowed legs. More recently, there has been a growing appreciation for vitamin D’s impact on bone health in adults. In August 2007, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research published Effectiveness and Safety of Vitamin D in Relation to Bone Health, a systematic review of 167 studies that found “fair evidence” of an association between circulating 25(OH)D concentrations and either increased bone-mineral density or reduced falls in older people (a result of strengthened muscles as well as strengthened bones). “Low vitamin D levels will precipitate and exacerbate osteoporosis in both men and women and cause the painful bone disease osteomalacia,” says Holick.
Evolution of the Great Solar Debate
In the 2002 book Bone Loss and Osteoporosis in Past Populations: An Anthropological Perspective, Reinhold Vieth, a nutrition professor at the University of Toronto, writes that early primates probably acquired their relatively high vitamin D requirements from frequent grooming and ingestion of oils rich in vitamin D precursors that were secreted by their skin onto their fur. The first humans evolved in equatorial Africa, where the direct angle of sunlight delivers very strong UVR most of the year. The gradual loss of protective fur may have created evolutionary pressure to develop deeply pigmented skin to avoid photodegradation of micronutrients and protect sweat glands from UVR-induced injury.
In the July 2000 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, California Academy of Sciences anthropologists Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin wrote that because dark skin requires about five to six times more solar exposure than pale skin for equivalent vitamin D photosynthesis, and because the intensity of UVB radiation declines with increasing latitude, one could surmise that skin lightening was an evolutionary adaptation that allowed for optimal survival in low-UVR climes, assuming a traditional diet and outdoor lifestyle.
Cooler temperatures in these higher latitudes resulted in the need for more clothing and shelter, further reducing UVR exposure. With shorter winter days and insufficient solar radiation in the UVB wavelengths needed to stimulate vitamin D synthesis, dietary sources such as fatty fish became increasingly important.
Over time, clothing became the norm in higher latitudes and then eventually a social attribute in many societies. By the 1600s, peoples in these regions covered their whole body, even in summertime. Many children who lived in the crowded and polluted industrialized cities of northern Europe developed rickets. By the late 1800s, approximately 90% of all children living in industrialized Europe and North America had some manifestations of the disease, according to estimates based on autopsy studies of the day cited by Holick in the August 2006 Journal of Clinical Investigation and the October 2007 American Journal of Public Health.
Doctors throughout Europe and North America began promoting whole-body sun-bathing to help prevent rickets. It was also recognized that wintertime sunlight in the temperate zone was too feeble to prevent rickets. For this reason, many children were exposed to UVR from a mercury or carbon arc lamp for one hour three times a week, which proved to be an effective preventive measure and treatment.
Around the time the solar solution to rickets gained widespread traction in medical circles, another historic scourge, tuberculosis (TB), was also found to respond to solar intervention. TB patients of all ages were sent to rest in sunny locales and generally returned in good health. Dermatology professor Barbara A. Gilchrest of Boston University School of Medicine says that, whereas sun exposure was shown to improve cutaneous TB, sanatorium patients with pulmonary TB likely responded as much or more to rest and good nutrition than to UVR. Nevertheless, a meta-analysis published in the February 2008 International Journal of Epidemiology found that high vitamin D levels reduce the risk of active TB (i.e., TB showing clinical symptoms) by 32%.
Almost overnight, as awareness of the sun’s power against rickets and TB spread, attitudes toward sun exposure underwent a radical shift. The suntan became valued in the Western world as a new status symbol that signified both health and wealth, as only the affluent could afford to vacation by the sea and play outdoor sports. Phototherapy quickly emerged as a popular medical treatment not only for TB, but also for rheumatic disorders, diabetes, gout, chronic ulcers, and wounds. The “healthy tan” was in, and “sickly-looking” pale skin was out.
Cancer: Cause, Prevention, or Both?
The first reports of an association between sun exposure and skin cancer began to surface in dermatology publications in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it was not until the 1930s that the U.S. Public Health Service began issuing warnings about sun-related health risks. People were cautioned to avoid the midday summer sun, cover their heads in direct sunlight, and gradually increase the time of sun exposure from an initial 5–10 minutes per day to minimize the risk of sunburn.
In the decades that followed, the skin cancer hazards of excessive sun exposure would be extensively studied and mapped. Today, the three main forms of skin cancer—melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma—are largely attributed to excessive UVR exposure. Skin cancers became the most common form of cancer worldwide, especially among groups such as white residents of Australia and New Zealand.
When atmospheric scientists first called attention to possible chemical destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer in the early 1970s, one predicted consequence of the increased UVB radiation was a rise in skin cancer rates, especially in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Latin America. To counter this threat, the WHO, the United Nations Environment Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection established INTERSUN, the Global UV Project, with the express goal of reducing the burden of UVR-related disease. INTERSUN activities have included the development of an internationally recognized UV Index to help frame sun protection messages related to the daily intensity of UVR.
Australia was among the first countries to spearhead large-scale sun protection programs, with the Slip-Slop-Slap initiative (short for “slip on a shirt, slop on some sun-screen, and slap on a hat”) introduced in the early 1980s. “This program and the subsequent SunSmart campaign have been highly effective in informing Australians of the risks and providing clear, practical instructions as to how to avoid excessive UVR exposure,” says Lucas.
As a result of increased use of hats, sunscreen, and shade, the incidence of malignant melanoma has begun to plateau in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Northern Europe among some age groups. However, because other UVR-induced skin cancers typically take longer than melanoma to develop, their incidence rates continue to rise in most developed countries. Lucas says a gradual improvement in these rates is to be expected as well.
Whereas skin cancer is associated with too much UVR exposure, other cancers could result from too little. Living at higher latitudes increases the risk of dying from Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as breast, ovarian, colon, pancreatic, prostate, and other cancers, as compared with living at lower latitudes. A randomized clinical trial by Joan Lappe, a medical professor at Creighton University, and colleagues, published in the June 2007 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, confirmed that taking 2–4 times the daily dietary reference intake of 200–600 IU vitamin D3 and calcium resulted in a 50–77% reduction in expected incidence rates of all cancers combined over a four-year period in post-menopausal women living in Nebraska.
Moreover, although excessive sun exposure is an established risk factor for cutaneous malignant melanoma, continued high sun exposure was linked with increased survival rates in patients with early-stage melanoma in a study reported by Marianne Berwick, an epidemiology professor at the University of New Mexico, in the February 2005 Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Holick also points out that most melanomas occur on the least sun-exposed areas of the body, and occupational exposure to sunlight actually reduced melanoma risk in a study reported in the June 2003 Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Various studies have linked low 25(OH)D levels to diseases other than cancer, raising the possibility that vitamin D insufficiency is contributing to many major illnesses. For example, there is substantial though not definitive evidence that high levels of vitamin D either from diet or from UVR exposure may decrease the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS).
Populations at higher latitudes have a higher incidence and prevalence of MS; a review in the December 2002 issue of Toxicology by epidemiology professor Anne-Louise Ponsonby and colleagues from The Australian National University revealed that living at a latitude above 37° increased the risk of developing MS throughout life by greater than 100%.
Still to be resolved, however, is the question of what levels of vitamin D are optimal for preventing the disease—and whether the statistical associations reflect different gene pools rather than different levels of 25(OH)D. (Interestingly, Holick reported in the August 1988 issue of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism that no previtamin D3 formed when human skin was exposed to sunlight on cloudless days in Boston, at 42.2°N, from November through February or in Edmonton, at 52°N, from October through March.)
“Scientific evidence on specific effects of vitamin D in preventing MS or slowing its progression is not sufficient,” says Alberto Ascherio, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Nevertheless, considering the safety of vitamin D even in high doses, there is no clear contraindication, and because vitamin D deficiency is very prevalent, especially among MS patients, taking vitamin D supplements and getting moderate sun exposure is more likely to be beneficial than not.”
As with MS, there appears to be a latitudinal gradient for type 1 diabetes, with a higher incidence at higher latitudes. A Swedish epidemiologic study published in the December 2006 issue of Diabetologia found that sufficient vitamin D status in early life was associated with a lower risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Nonobese mice of a strain predisposed to develop type 1 diabetes showed an 80% reduced risk of developing the disease when they received a daily dietary dose of 1,25(OH)D, according to research published in the June 1994 issue of the same journal. And a Finnish study published 3 November 2001 in The Lancet showed that children who received 2,000 IU vitamin D per day from 1 year of age on had an 80% decreased risk of developing type 1 diabetes later in life, whereas children who were vitamin D deficient had a fourfold increased risk. Researchers are now seeking to understand how much UVR/vitamin D is needed to lower the risk of diabetes and whether this is a factor only in high-risk groups.
There is also a connection with metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that increases one’s risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. A study in the September 2006 issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology demonstrated that in young and elderly adults, serum 25(OH)D was inversely correlated with blood glucose concentrations and insulin resistance. Some studies have demonstrated high prevalence of low vitamin D levels in people with type 2 diabetes, although it is not clear whether this is a cause of the disease or an effect of another causative factor—for example, lower levels of physical activity (in this case, outdoor activity in particular).
People living at higher latitudes throughout the world are at higher risk of hypertension, and patients with cardiovascular disease are often found to be deficient in vitamin D, according to research by Harvard Medical School professor Thomas J. Wang and colleagues in the 29 January 2008 issue of Circulation. “Although the exact mechanisms are poorly understood, it is known that 1,25(OH)D is among the most potent hormones for down-regulating the blood pressure hormone renin in the kidneys,” says Holick. “Moreover, there is an inflammatory component to atherosclerosis, and vascular smooth muscle cells have a vitamin D receptor and relax in the presence of 1,25(OH)D, suggesting a multitude of mechanisms by which vitamin D may be cardioprotective.”
To determine the potential link betwen sun exposure and the protective effect in preventing hypertension, Rolfdieter Krause of the Free University of Berlin Department of Natural Medicine and colleagues exposed a group of hypertensive adults to a tanning bed that emitted full-spectrum UVR similar to summer sunlight. Another group of hypertensive adults was exposed to a tanning bed that emitted UVA-only radiation similar to winter sunlight. After three months, those who used the full-spectrum tanning bed had an average 180% increase in their 25(OH)D levels and an average 6 mm Hg decrease in their systolic and diastolic blood pressures, bringing them into the normal range. In contrast, the group that used the UVA-only tanning bed showed no change in either 25(OH)D or blood pressure. These results were published in the 29 August 1998 issue of The Lancet. According to Krause, who currently heads the Heliotherapy Research Group at the Medical University of Berlin, a serum 25(OH)D level of at least 40 ng/mL should be adequate to protect against hypertension and other forms of cardiovascular disease (as well as cancers of the prostate and colon).
William Grant, who directs the Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center, a research and education organization based in San Francisco, suspects that sun exposure and higher 25(OH)D levels may confer protection against other illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), asthma, and infectious diseases.
“Vitamin D induces cathelicidin, a polypeptide that effectively combats both bacterial and viral infections,” Grant says. “This mechanism explains much of the seasonality of such viral infections as influenza, bronchitis, and gastroenteritis, and bacterial infections such as tuberculosis and septicemia.” For example, RA is more severe in winter, when 25(OH)D levels tend to be lower, and is also more prevalent in the higher latitudes. In addition, 25(OH)D levels are inversely associated with the clinical status of RA patients, and greater intake of vitamin D has been linked with lower RA risk, as reported in January 2004 in Arthritis & Rheumatism.
Some reports, including an article in the October–December 2007 issue of Acta Medica Indonesiana, indicate that sufficient 1,25(OH)D inhibits induction of disease in RA, collagen-induced arthritis, Lyme arthritis, autoimmune encephalomyelitis, thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel disease, and systemic lupus erythematosus. Nonetheless, interventional data are lacking for most autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases, with the exception of TB.
How Much Is Enough?
Gilchrest points out a problem with the literature: “Everyone recommends something different, depending on the studies with which they are most aligned. One study reports an increased risk of prostate cancer for men with 25(OH)D levels above 90 ng/mL, for example.” In the June 2007 Lappe article, she notes, subjects in the control “high-risk” unsupplemented group had 25(OH)D levels of 71 nmol/L and the supplemented group had levels of 96 nmol/L.
Nevertheless, given the epidemiologic backdrop described above, there are now calls to rethink sun exposure policy or to promote vitamin D supplementation in higher-risk populations. Such groups include pregnant or breastfeeding women (these states draw upon a mother’s own reserves of vitamin D), the elderly, and those who must avoid the sun. Additionally, solely breastfed infants whose mothers were vitamin D deficient during pregnancy have smaller reserves of the nutrient and are at greater risk of developing rickets. Even in the sun-rich environment of the Middle East, insufficient vitamin D is a severe problem among breast-fed infants of women who wear a burqa (a traditional garment that covers the body from head to foot), as reported in the February 2003 Journal of Pediatrics.
Several recent reports indicate an increase in rickets particularly among breastfed black infants, though white babies also are increasingly at risk. A study in the February 2007 Journal of Nutrition concluded that black and white pregnant women and neonates in the northern United States are at high risk of vitamin D insufficiency, even when mothers take prenatal vitamins (which typically provide 100–400 IU vitamin D3). Studies by Bruce Hollis, director of pediatric nutritional sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina, and colleagues suggest that a maternal vitamin D3 intake of 4,000 IU per day is safe and sufficient to ensure adequate vitamin D status for both mother and nursing infant.
These days, most experts define vitamin D deficiency as a serum 25(OH)D level of less than 20 ng/mL. Holick and others assert that levels of 29 ng/mL or lower can be considered to indicate a relative insufficiency of vitamin D. Using this scale and considering various epidemiologic studies, an estimated 1 billion people worldwide have vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency, says Holick, who adds, “According to several studies, some forty to one hundred percent of the U.S. and European elderly men and women still living in the community [that is, not in nursing homes] are vitamin D deficient.” Holick asserts that a large number of infants, children, adolescents, and postmenopausal women also are vitamin D insufficient. “These individuals have no apparent skeletal or calcium metabolism abnormalities but may be at much higher risk of developing various diseases,” Holick says.
In the context of inadequate sunlight or vitamin D insufficiency, some scientists worry that the emphasis on preventing skin cancers tends to obscure the much larger mortality burden posed by more life-threatening cancers such as lung, colon, and breast cancers. Many studies have shown that cancer-related death rates decline as one moves toward the lower latitudes (between 37°N and 37°S), and that the levels of ambient UVR in different municipalities correlate inversely with cancer death rates there.
“As you head from north to south, you may find perhaps two or three extra deaths [per hundred thousand people] from skin cancer,” says Vieth. “At the same time, though, you’ll find thirty or forty fewer deaths for the other major cancers. So when you estimate the number of deaths likely to be attributable to UV light or vitamin D, it does is not appear to be the best policy to advise people to simply keep out of the sun just to prevent skin cancer.”
To maximize protection against cancer, Grant recommends raising 25(OH)D levels to between 40 and 60 ng/mL. Research such as that described in Holick’s August 2006 Journal of Clinical Investigation article indicates that simply keeping the serum level above 20 ng/mL could reduce the risk of cancer by as much as 30–50%.
Cedric F. Garland, a medical professor at the University of California, San Diego, says that maintaining a serum level of 55–60 ng/mL may reduce the breast cancer rate in temperate regions by half, and that incidence of many other cancers would be similarly reduced as well. He calls this “the single most important action that could be taken by society to reduce the incidence of cancer in North America and Europe, beyond not smoking.” Moreover, these levels could be readily achieved by consuming no more than 2,000 IU/day of vitamin D3 at a cost of less than $20 per year and, unless there are contraindications to sunlight exposure, spending a few minutes outdoors (3–15 minutes for whites and 15–30 minutes for blacks) when the sun is highest in the sky, with 40% of the skin area exposed.
Holick, Vieth, and many other experts now make a similar daily recommendation: 4,000 IU vitamin D3 without sun exposure or 2,000 IU plus 12–15 minutes of midday sun. They say this level is quite safe except for sun-sensitive individuals or those taking medications that increase photosensitivity.
Gilchrest says some sunlight enters the skin even through a high-SPF sunscreen, so people can maximize their dermal vitamin D production by spending additional time outdoors while wearing protection. “Without the sunscreen, this same individual would be incurring substantially more damage to her skin but not further increasing her vitamin D level,” she says.
Creating a Balanced Message
A growing number of scientists are concerned that efforts to protect the public from excessive UVR exposure may be eclipsing recent research demonstrating the diverse health-promoting benefits of UVR exposure. Some argue that the health benefits of UVB radiation seem to outweigh the adverse effects, and that the risks can be minimized by carefully managing UVR exposure (e.g., by avoiding sunburn), as well as by increasing one’s intake of dietary antioxidants and limiting dietary fat and caloric intake.
Antioxidants including polyphenols, apigenin, curcumin, proanthocyanidins, resveratrol, and silymarin have shown promise in laboratory studies in protecting against UVR-induced skin cancer, perhaps through antimutagenic or immune-modulating mechanisms.
Central to the emerging debate is the issue of how to best construct public health messages that highlight the pros and cons of sun exposure in a balanced way. Such messages must necessarily take into account variations in skin pigmentation between groups and these groups’ differing susceptibilities to the dangers and benefits of sun exposure. Moreover, says Patricia Alpert, a nursing professor at the University of Las Vegas, age matters. “The elderly [have a] declining capacity to make vitamin D,” she says. “Many elderly, especially those living in nursing homes, are vitamin D deficient, [even] those living in areas considered to have adequate sunshine.”
Many experts are now recommending a middle-ground approach that focuses on modest sun exposures. Gilchrest says the American Academy of Dermatology and most dermatologists currently suggest sun protection in combination with vitamin D supplementation as a means of minimizing the risk of both skin cancer and internal cancers. Furthermore, brief, repeated exposures are more efficient at producing vitamin D. “Longer sun exposures cause further sun damage to skin and increase the risk of photo-aging and skin cancer, but do not increase vitamin D production,” she explains.
Lucas adds that people should use sun protection when the UV Index is more than 3. As part of Australia’s SunSmart program, “UV Alerts” are announced in newspapers throughout the country whenever the index is forecast to be 3 or higher. “Perhaps,” she says, “this practice should be extended to other nations as well.” U.S. residents can obtain UV Index forecasts through the EPA’s SunWise website (http://epa.gov/sunwise/uvindex.html).
In the near future, vitamin D and health guidelines regarding sun exposure may need to be revised. But many factors not directly linked to sun protection will also need to be taken into account. “Current observations of widespread vitamin D insufficiency should not be attributed only to sun protection strategies,” says Lucas. “Over the same period there is a trend to an increasingly indoor lifestyle, associated with technological advances such as television, computers, and video games.” She says sun-safe messages remain important—possibly more so than ever before—to protect against the potentially risky high-dose intermittent sun exposure that people who stay indoors may be most likely to incur.
Serotonin, Melatonin, and Daylight
As diurnal creatures, we humans are programmed to be outdoors while the sun is shining and home in bed at night. This is why melatonin is produced during the dark hours and stops upon optic exposure to daylight. This pineal hormone is a key pacesetter for many of the body’s circadian rhythms. It also plays an important role in countering infection, inflammation, cancer, and auto-immunity, according to a review in the May 2006 issue of Current Opinion in Investigational Drugs. Finally, melatonin suppresses UVR-induced skin damage, according to research in the July 2005 issue of Endocrine.
When people are exposed to sunlight or very bright artificial light in the morning, their nocturnal melatonin production occurs sooner, and they enter into sleep more easily at night. Melatonin production also shows a seasonal variation relative to the availability of light, with the hormone produced for a longer period in the winter than in the summer. The melatonin rhythm phase advancement caused by exposure to bright morning light has been effective against insomnia, premenstrual syndrome, and seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
The melatonin precursor, serotonin, is also affected by exposure to daylight. Normally produced during the day, serotonin is only converted to melatonin in darkness. Whereas high melatonin levels correspond to long nights and short days, high serotonin levels in the presence of melatonin reflect short nights and long days (i.e., longer UVR exposure).
Moderately high serotonin levels result in more positive moods and a calm yet focused mental outlook. Indeed, SAD has been linked with low serotonin levels during the day as well as with a phase delay in nighttime melatonin production. It was recently found that mammalian skin can produce serotonin and transform it into melatonin, and that many types of skin cells express receptors for both serotonin and melatonin.
With our modern-day penchant for indoor activity and staying up well past dusk, nocturnal melatonin production is typically far from robust. “The light we get from being outside on a summer day can be a thousand times brighter than we’re ever likely to experience indoors,” says melatonin researcher Russel J. Reiter of the University of Texas Health Science Center. “For this reason, it’s important that people who work indoors get outside periodically, and moreover that we all try to sleep in total darkness. This can have a major impact on melatonin rhythms and can result in improvements in mood, energy, and sleep quality.”
For people in jobs in which sunlight exposure is limited, full-spectrum lighting may be helpful. Sunglasses may further limit the eyes’ access to full sunlight, thereby altering melatonin rhythms. Going shades-free in the daylight, even for just 10–15 minutes, could confer significant health benefits.
Other Sun-Dependent Pathways
The sun may be best known for boosting production of vitamin D, but there are many other UVR-mediated effects independent of this pathway.
Direct immune suppression. Exposure to both UVA and UVB radiation can have direct immunosuppressive effects through upregulation of cytokines (TNF-α and IL-10) and increased activity of T regulatory cells that remove self-reactive T cells. These mechanisms may help prevent autoimmune diseases.
Alpha melanocyte-stimulating hormone (α-MSH). Upon exposure to sunshine, melanocytes and keratinocytes in the skin release α-MSH, which has been implicated in immunologic tolerance and suppression of contact hypersensitivity. α-MSH also helps limit oxidative DNA damage resulting from UVR and increases gene repair, thus reducing melanoma risk, as reported 15 May 2005 in Cancer Research.
Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP). Released in response to both UVA and UVB exposure, this potent neuropeptide modulates a number of cytokines and is linked with impaired induction of immunity and the development of immunologic tolerance. According to a report in the September 2007 issue of Photochemistry and Photobiology, mast cells (which mediate hypersensitivity reactions) play a critical role in CGRP-mediated immune suppression. This could help explain sunlight’s efficacy in treating skin disorders such as psoriasis.
Neuropeptide substance P. Along with CGRP, this neuropeptide is released from sensory nerve fibers in the skin following UVR exposure. This results in increased lymphocyte proliferation and chemotaxis (chemically mediated movement) but may also produce local immune suppression.
Endorphins. UVR increases blood levels of natural opiates called endorphins. Melanocytes in human skin express a fully functioning endorphin receptor system, according to the June 2003 Journal of Investigative Dermatology, and a study published 24 November 2005 in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology suggests that the cutaneous pigmentary system is an important stress-response element of the skin.
Research Challenges
Growing evidence of the beneficial effects of UVR exposure has challenged the sun-protection paradigm that has prevailed for decades. Before a sun-exposure policy change occurs, however, we need to know if there is enough evidence to infer a protective effect of sun exposure against various diseases.
Only through well-designed randomized clinical trials can cause-and-effect relationships be established. However, most sunlight-related epidemiologic research to date has relied on observational data that are subject to considerable bias and confounding. Findings from observational studies are far less rigorous and reliable than those of interventional studies. But interventional studies would need to be very large and carried out over several decades (since most UVR-mediated diseases occur later in life). Moreover, it is not at all clear when, over a lifetime, sun exposure/vitamin D is most important. So for now scientists must rely on the results of well-conducted observational analytic studies.
In sunlight-related research, there are two main exposures of interest: vitamin D status, which is measured by the serum 25(OH)D level; and personal UVR dose, which involves three fundamental factors: ambient UVR (a function of latitude, altitude, atmospheric ozone levels, pollution, and time of year), amount of skin exposed (a function of behavioral, cultural, and clothing practices), and skin pigmentation (with dark skin receiving a smaller effective dose to underlying structures than light skin).
When measuring sun exposure at the individual level, many scientists have relied on latitude or ambient UVR of residence. But these measures are fraught with uncertainties. “While ambient UVR varies, . . . so too do a variety of other possible etiological factors, including diet, exposure to infectious agents, temperature, and possibly even physical activity levels,” says Robyn Lucas, an epidemiologist at Australia’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. “Additionally, under any level of ambient UVR, the personal UV dose may vary greatly. In short, there is no real specificity for ambient UVR.”
Researchers also assess history of time in the sun at various ages, history of sunburns, dietary and supplemental vitamin D intake, and other proxy measures. Nonetheless, says Lucas, “there are drawbacks to inferring that a relationship with any proxy for the exposure of interest is a relationship with personal UV dose or vitamin D status.” On the bright side, she adds, our ability to accurately gauge an individual’s UV dose history has been enhanced with the use of silicone rubber casts of the back of subjects’ hands. The fine lines recorded by the cast provide an objective measure of cumulative sun damage.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2290997/
Oriana: RED AND INFRA-RED LIGHT MAY BE JUST AS IMPORTANT
I find this article somewhat problematic because it focuses exclusively on the ultraviolet frequencies of sunlight. But sunlight, especially in early morning and late afternoon, also provides the red and infra-red frequencies.
“Sunlight's infrared (IR) radiation, specifically red and near-infrared (NIR), can offer various health benefits, including promoting healing, reducing inflammation, and potentially impacting chronic diseases. These benefits are often associated with photobiomodulation (PBM), a process where red and NIR light interact with cells to enhance cellular function and tissue repair.” (AI summary)
We can prevent Vitamin D deficiency through diet and/or supplements, but we can’t compensate for lack of exposure to the longer frequencies of sunlight (red and infra-red). Ultimately, there is no substitute for spending some time outdoors — preferably in the morning and/or late afternoon.
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ending on beauty:
FIRST DAY OF WINTER
Afterwards I whispered
you know I will write
about you have no fear
you will not be recognized
your voice will be wind
your eyes will be clouds
your shoulders the wings
of remaining light
~ Oriana
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