WHAT TO SAY TO A BEAR
Do not run. Stand still and talk softly to the bear.
~ “What To Do If You Meet a Bear”
Canadian National Park Service
Bear, you could make these bones
crack, you could spill into roots
my desolate desire not to die.
How unhurried your tongue would be
burrowing into places
more secret than sex.
When you rise, you look
like a man – our image of terror.
We don’t trust ourselves;
our sleep is shallow.
I should carry a bell like a leper.
I couldn’t turn over rocks,
or paw the ground
with quartz-like claws;
it’s difficult
for a human to be beautiful.
You climb into yourself for winter,
into your bulk and hoarded warmth.
I dream another birth,
licked with a long bear tongue.
Bear, give me a sign
the universe is kind;
its paws and shaggy nights embrace
the wilderness of our mind.
Bear, black luxury of the earth,
in truth I don’t know
what I’d say. If talking softly
would be enough of an expiation.
Bear, pass me by. Another sky
begins in my silence.
~ Oriana
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TWENTY WORDS AND PHRASES INVENTED BY SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare was an incredible writer and poet, but did you know he also single-handedly added more than 1,700 words to the English language?
Shakespeare's use of language was unmatched 450 years ago with his sonnets and plays frequently debuting new English words he created. It didn’t take long for these terms to be adopted into the language and many of them are still in use today.
Here are 20 words and phrases you didn’t know Shakespeare invented — next time you use them, know you’re following in the footsteps of a true linguistic legend.
1. Addiction
While the concept of addiction has been around for centuries, the word "addiction" itself didn't exist until Shakespeare coined it in his play, Othello.
2. All the world's a stage
It means that life is like a performance, and that we all play different role and was spoken by Jacques in As You Like.
3. Bedazzled
Shakespeare uses the word "bedazzled" to describe someone who is overwhelmed by something that is sparkling or shining in his play, The Taming of the Shrew.
4. Brave new world
This phrase is often used to suggest a sense of wonder and amazement at the possibilities of the future and was spoken by the character Miranda in The Tempest.
5. Critic
Although the concept of a critic had existed for centuries, the word "critic" wasn't used in its modern sense until Shakespeare used it in his play, Love's Labour's Lost.
6. Eventful
In As You Like It, Shakespeare coined the word "eventful" to describe something that is full of events or occurrences.
7. Eyeball
While the concept of an eyeball had obviously existed for centuries, Shakespeare was the first to use the word "eyeball" in his play, The Tempest.
8. Generous
Shakespeare used the word "generous" in its modern sense to describe someone who is kind and giving in his play, Julius Caesar.
9. Good riddance
The phrase "good riddance" is frequently used to suggest relief at the departure of someone or something unpleasant. It is spoken in Troilus and Cressida.
10. In a pickle
This phrase is used to suggest being in a difficult or uncomfortable situation. The Tempest: This phrase is spoken by the character Alonso in Act V, Scene I.
11. It's Greek to me
Used to suggest a lack of understanding or confusion about something, this phrase is spoken by the character Casca in Julius Caesar. [Oriana: But let us remember that Roman aristocrats were educated by Greek tutors and spoke Greek among themselves.]
12. Lonely
Although the concept of loneliness had existed for centuries, Shakespeare was the first to use the word "lonely" in his play, Coriolanus.
13. Majestic
Shakespeare used the word "majestic" to describe something that is grand and impressive in his play, Henry VIII.
14. Manager
The word "manager" had been used in other languages before Shakespeare's time, but he was the first to use it in English in his play, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
15. Radiance
Shakespeare used the word "radiance" to describe something that is shining or glowing in his play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
16. Star-crossed lovers
This saying describes two people who are destined to be together despite the obstacles in their way and was first used in Romeo and Juliet in the Prologue.
17. Swagger
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare used the word "swagger" to describe someone who walks with an arrogant or pompous attitude.
18. Undress
In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare used the word "undress" to describe the act of removing clothing.
19. Wild-goose chase
This one is used to describe a pointless or fruitless pursuit. Romeo and Juliet: This phrase is spoken by the character Mercutio in Act II, Scene IV.
20. To thine own self be true
Used to suggest the importance of being true to one's own beliefs and values, this phrase was spoken by Polonius in Hamlet.
Did Shakespeare really write the plays, and did he really wear one earring? What about the "Dark Lady" of the Sonnets? Was he bi, then? I think scholars will keep entertaining us with their guesses forever.
https://www.ef.edu/blog/language/words-phrases-shakespeare-invented/
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BLACKOUT FOR BLACKOUT: UKRAINE PUNCHES BACK FOR RUSSIAN ATTACKS
Ukraine has built up its own long-range strike capability and is now punishing Russia for its attacks.
For much of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Moscow was able to pound Ukrainian cities and its energy grid and suffered very little retaliation.
That’s changing.
Thanks to a successful effort to develop its own long-range drones and missiles and then to dramatically ramp up production, Ukraine is now able to hit Russia almost daily. It can now methodically target not only oil refineries but also power plants and electricity substations, sparking a growing energy crisis inside Russia.
“After all, we told them they must understand that if they want to impose blackouts on us, we will do the same. There are no secrets here,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a meeting with several journalists, including POLITICO, in Kyiv last week.
The goal is to develop such a muscular non-nuclear strike capability that Russia will stop its own attacks on Ukraine. That hasn’t happened yet, but Ukraine can retaliate to Russian attacks in a way it hadn’t been able to do during the first three years of the war.
On Friday, the Kremlin launched more than 450 drones and 30 missiles on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, causing partial blackouts. Last week alone, Russia launched more than 3,100 drones, 92 missiles, and around 1,360 glide bombs against Ukraine, most of which were heading for energy infrastructure targets.
But Ukraine is now repaying in the same coin. In addition to bombing oil refineries, Kyiv hit a civilian power plant in Russia’s Belgorod city near the border with Ukraine earlier this month, causing blackouts.
Zelenskyy said it’s part of Kyiv’s deterrence strategy.
“The enemy must bear the cost of this war. But we do not kill civilians,” Zelenskyy said.
In the first years of the war, Ukraine did target military and energy infrastructure inside Russia, but these tended to be pinprick attacks that quickly petered out, allowing Russia to rebuild and Russian President Vladimir Putin to shield civilians from the impact of the war he had unleashed.
But Ukraine’s growing long-range arsenal is allowing for a much more sustained campaign.
So far this year, Ukraine has hit 21 of Russia’s 38 large refineries, BBC reported, knocking out about 38 percent of the country’s crude refining capacity. Zelenskyy said the attacks have caused Russia to lose up to a fifth of its gasoline supply and forced it to start importing from Belarus.
The attacks are triggering domestic fuel shortages, affecting military transport and leaving the Kremlin’s most important strategic industry teetering on the brink
“In an attempt to show its Western sponsors at least some semblance of success, the Kyiv regime is trying to target civilian facilities deep inside our territory. This will not help it,” Putin said.
Tightening ties with Trump
Relations between Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump have been fraught. They have included incidents such as the Ukrainian president being attacked in the White House, the U.S. temporarily halting arms deliveries and intelligence sharing.
In August, Trump slammed his predecessor Joe Biden for not allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia. [Oriana: I rarely agree with Trump, but this is one of the rare instances. Simply allowing Ukraine to defend itself is not enough; the allies should be willing to help Ukraine win.]
“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invader’s country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump now says he is thinking through Ukraine’s request for Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles.
"Frankly, I give Ukraine credit for doing so well. They are very good fighters. I think President Putin would look great if he got this settled. It’s not gonna be good for him if he doesn’t,” Trump told reporters on Sunday, claiming that before deciding on Tomahawks, he might speak to Putin first, as sending the missiles would be “a step up in war”.
Zelenskyy and Trump discussed Tomahawk deliveries to Ukraine during two phone calls in the past two days, an unusually frequent tempo.
"We see and hear that Russia is afraid that the Americans may give us Tomahawks. This is a signal that this kind of pressure can work for peace," Zelenskyy said on Sunday. Kyiv needs another powerful deterrent that would “sober Russia up," he added.
Local production
Ukraine is not waiting for Washington. It has started producing more and deadlier drones and missiles, a key reason why this year’s deep strike campaign is more sustained and successful, Zelenskyy said. Another plus is more active cooperation with U.S. intelligence, although the president refused to elaborate on that.
"Well, intelligence agencies are cooperating very actively. But for us it is more important they help to understand Russian intentions, help with air defense," a Ukrainian official told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. "But our weapons have become better and that also is helpful."
The Financial Times reported over the weekend that the U.S. has been providing targeting information to Ukraine to hit Russian energy infrastructure.
“The Palianytsia drone-missile has already begun hitting Russia’s ammo depots in dozens of cases,” Zelenskyy claimed. Another drone-missile called Ruta struck a maritime platform at a distance of 250 kilometers in the Black Sea, Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy said that targets like Russia’s Baltic ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk “are now within reach.”
Zelenskyy said that targets like Russia’s Baltic ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk “are now within reach.”
On Saturday, Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s Bashneft oil refinery in Ufa near the Ural Mountains, 1,400 kilometers from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s new 3,000-kilometer Flamingo cruise missile, which POLITICO first reported about in August, has started hitting Russia too, as has the shorter-range Neptune missile.
“I won’t give numbers — we have used our Neptune and Flamingo missiles in pairs. We are not talking about en masse use of this pair. We are only saying that it has been used, and there are initial signs of such success with this particular weapon,” Zelensky said.
The goal is to make Putin and the Russians feel the impact of the war and to force the Kremlin to rethink.
“More pressure on Russia is needed. Pressure will work — when they lose more from war than they would in any other scenario. Our long-range strikes, strong sanctions, holding the battlefield, defending ourselves — but also, undoubtedly, supporting peaceful initiatives, because that’s the right thing to do — this will work,” Zelensky said.
Oriana:
Where is Nixon now when we need him? We could use someone shrewd to deal with Putin. As is, we have someone struggling with dementia — and to make matters worse, he admires dictators like Putin. But he does have Nixon’s weaponized unpredictability.
However, fortunately, Europe is friendly toward Ukraine. Given Ukraine’s ability to produce its own drones and Europe’s limited but important help, it’s possible for Ukraine to win — or at least to freeze the war without further territorial losses. Yes, it's David and Goliath — and people naturally prefer David.
Another thing: this is entirely Putin’s deluded and disastrous war. Putin would love to live and rule forever, but — he too will die, and there’ll be dancing in the streets in both Moscow and Kyiv when he does. It's too late in history for imperial conquests, including the insane project of rebuilding the Soviet Union.
My favorite recent headline: Russia's latest big Ukraine offensive gains next to nothing, again (The Economist)
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RUSSIA REJECTS PREDICTIONS OF ITS ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
The Kremlin dismissed Donald Trump's warning of Russian economic collapse, asserting its "considerable reserves" and strength to achieve President Vladimir Putin's goals.
Mr Trump had stated that Putin should settle the Ukraine war, which he claimed was making Russia "look bad", also mentioning "long lines waiting for gasoline" and predicting the Russian "economy is going to collapse".
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, while not directly commenting on Mr Trump's remarks, said Putin was open to ending the war and Moscow was grateful for Mr Trump's efforts.
"As for the Russian economy, it has a sufficient and considerable margin of safety to allow the country's leadership and all of us to implement the plans that we set for ourselves," Mr Peskov told reporters.
He also clarified the BRICS grouping, called "an attack on the dollar" by Mr Trump, was never aimed at other countries or their currencies.
Russia's economy is slowing sharply this year and the government forecasts gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.0 per cent after 4.3 per cent growth in 2024 and 4.1 per cent growth in 2023, though the International Monetary Fund has downgraded its 2025 forecast to 0.6 per cent from 0.9 per cent.
During Putin's first two terms as president from 2000 to 2008, Russia's economy soared to $1.7 trillion from less than $200 billion in 1999. But Russia's nominal GDP is now $2.2 trillion, about the same level it was in 2013, the year before Russia annexed Crimea.
With Russia and Ukraine locked into a draining drone and artillery war of attrition for a fourth year, the economy is becoming a major area of competition between the West and Russia.
Ukraine's Western supporters say that Russia's economy is weaker than it looks and if pressure is increased then the pain of ordinary Russians will force Putin to change course.
The Kremlin says that the economy is being slowed on purpose to stop overheating and far outperformed the G7 average over 2023 and 2024 despite the most onerous sanctions ever imposed on a major economy.
Asked about Trump's remarks at an energy conference in Moscow, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who oversees energy and the economy for the government, said that Russia had a stable supply of gasoline.
"We have a stable domestic market supply. We see no problems in this regard," Novak said.
"The balance is maintained between production and consumption, and we, on the part of the government and the relevant ministries, are doing everything to ensure that this remains the case."
Double-digit interest rates deterred the biggest Russian retailers from buying up gasoline in the winter months when there was a surplus and then a series of Ukrainian drone attacks knocked out a chunk of Russian refinery capacity.
That led to some gasoline shortages in regions in the periphery of Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, though the government has moved swiftly to prioritize supplies to regions with shortages.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/russia-economy-kremlin-trump-putin-b2846017.html
Oriana:
Favorite quotation (from The Guardian): ~ “It will be truly crazy if, by the fourth year of the war, we still haven’t destroyed Ukraine’s energy sector, and they end up destroying ours,” one Russian pro-war blogger wrote this week. ~
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AFTER MONTHS IN CHAINS AND DARKNESS, FREED HAMAS HOSTAGES BEGIN THEIR ROAD TO RECOVERY
They will be treated for malnutrition, lack of sunlight and the trauma of wearing leg chains for months. They suffer from unexplained pain and unresolved emotions, and they will have to relearn how to make everyday decisions as simple as when to use the bathroom.
The last 20 living hostages released by Hamas are beginning a difficult path to recovery that will also include rebuilding a sense of control over their lives, according to Israeli health officials. Along the way, each one will be accompanied by a team of doctors, nurses, specialists and social workers to guide their reentry to society after two years of captivity in Gaza.
All of the hostages were in stable condition Monday following their release, and none required immediate intensive care.
“But what appears on the outside doesn’t reflect what’s going on internally,” explained Hagai Levine, the head of the health team for the Hostages Family Forum, who has been involved in medical care for returned hostages and their relatives.
The newly freed hostages will stay in the hospital for several days as they undergo tests, including a full psychiatric exam, according to protocols from the Israeli Ministry of Health. A nutritionist will guide them and their families on a diet to avoid refeeding syndrome, a dangerous medical condition that can develop after periods of starvation if food is reintroduced too quickly.
Elkana Bohbot, an Israeli hostage released from the Gaza Strip walks off a helicopter at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel, Monday, Oct. 13, 2025
Hostages emerged thin and pale
All of the hostages who emerged Monday were exceptionally thin and pale, the likely result of enduring long periods without enough food, Levine said.
The lack of sunlight and nutrition can lead to issues with the kidneys, liver and cognition, as well as osteoporosis. Many hostages wore leg chains for their entire captivity, which can lead to orthopedic problems, muscle waste and blood clots.
Elkana Bohbot told his family he suffers from pain all over his body, especially his back, feet and stomach due to force-feeding, according to Israeli television’s Channel 12.
“Ahead of his release, he received food in large portions so he will look a bit better for the world,” Rebecca Bohbot, Elkana’s wife, told reporters Tuesday from the hospital.
Some hostages who previously returned had minor strokes in captivity that were not treated, Levine said. Many also had infections and returned with severely compromised immune systems, which is why the number of visitors should be kept to a minimum, he said.
Levine denounced politicians’ visits to the hostages as both unnecessary and potentially dangerous. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited five hostages Tuesday evening and was diagnosed Wednesday with bronchitis. President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Israel Katz also visited hostages.
“Previously released hostages were told they look ‘pretty good,’ but some needed surgeries that were very complicated. Some had constant pain. Many have all types of pains that they are not able to explain, but it’s really impacting their quality of life,” Levine said.
Levine said Israel also learned from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when more than 60 Israeli soldiers were held for six months in Syria. Many of them later developed cancer, cardiovascular problems and accelerated aging and were at risk for early death.
The war began when Hamas-led militants burst across the Israeli border, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping 251. The fighting has killed more than 67,600 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government. The ministry maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. It does not say how many of the deaths were civilians or combatants.
Ziv Berman, an Israeli hostage released from the Gaza Strip gestures from a minibus at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel, Monday, Oct. 13, 2025.
Restoring a sense of autonomy
“I’m happy to see the sun. I’m happy to see the trees. I saw the sea. You have no idea how precious that is,” Elkana Bohbot told his family, according to Israeli media.
“Stimulation-wise and autonomy-wise, it’s really overwhelming,” Yehene said. “Someone is asking you a question — do you need to go to the bathroom? Would you like to eat something? These are questions they never heard for two years.”
Hostages’ sense of autonomy can be jump-started by allowing them to make small decisions. According to protocol, everyone treating them must ask their permission for each thing, no matter how small, including turning off a light, changing bedsheets or conducting medical tests.
Some returned hostages are terrified of the physical sensation of thirst because it makes them feel as if they are still in captivity, Yehene said. Others cannot spend time on their own, requiring a family member to be present around the clock.
Among the hostages who have experienced the smoothest integration from long-term captivity were those who were fathers, Levine said, though it took some time to rebuild trust with their young children.
“It’s a facilitator of recovery because it forces them to get back into the role of father,” Levine said. None of the women held in captivity for long periods of time were mothers.
The world starts ‘to move again’
The first few days after being released, the hostages are in a state of euphoria, though many feel guilty for the pain their families have been through, Yehene said.
For those who saw little media and have no idea what happened in Israel, people should take care to expose them to information slowly, she added.
Yehene said she also saw an immediate psychological response from hostages who were released in previous ceasefires after Monday’s release. Many of the previously released hostages have been involved in the struggle to return the last hostages and said they were unable to focus on their own recovery until now.
“I see movement from frozen emotions and frozen trauma,” Yehene said. “You don’t feel guilty anymore. You don’t feel responsible.”
Iair Horn was released from captivity in February, but it did not feel real until Monday, when his younger brother, Eitan, was finally freed.
“About eight months ago, I came home. But the truth is that only today am I truly free,” Horn said, sobbing as he spoke from the hospital where his brother is being evaluated. Only now that Eitan is back “is my heart, our heart, whole again.”
Liran Berman is the brother of twins Gali and Ziv Berman, who were also released.
“For 738 days, our lives were trapped between hope and fear,” Liran Berman said. “Yesterday that chapter ended. Seeing Gali and Ziv again, holding them after so long, was like feeling the world start to move again.”
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-hostages-gaza-recovery-e630d6b76185cd8b8f51b3c02857086f
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THE FATE OF UNWANTED NEWBORNS IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Unwanted newborns from Kings Cross, Camden, Pentonville and Islington would be dumped in the canal and collect at the foot of the Basin’s, or else float on down to Limehouse where another probationer would be searching the locks.
The bodies of adults and grown children would be checked for obvious and suspicious injury, if very obvious a murder would be reported to CID. If you couldn't find any injuries, you tried to identify the deceased by clothing, name tags or letters and sent the body to Bow Coroners where most often a ruling of ‘death by misadventure’ was recorded, especially if alcohol was suspected.
Babies under a certain length and weight (about six months of age, more if severely malnourished which was common) were taken straight to Bow Coroners. Those without obvious injures were ruled ‘unexplained infant mortality’ without more than a cursory examination. Those with obvious injuries were recorded as ‘infanticide’ and the investigation ended there. They went into mass graves in the Lea Valley with the paupers and unclaimed.
Infant mortality from disease, defect and complication was more common than survival. A regular feature of home birth, many of these babies would not have survived, but many were unwanted.
Churches wouldn't bury children from unwed parents, a common cause itself for the disposal of the child. Many wouldn’t take in unbaptized children and many wouldn’t baptize a child under six months because of the likelihood and cost of burying so many. So the canal became the depository for the unnamed and unwanted who didn't make it through their first few months.
Of course with the total lack of investigation by police or coroner back then, or particular interest from the church, families and local authorities, the number of those babies smothered, shaken, beaten or starved to death will never be known. ~David Rendahl, Quora
Damien Bower:
Abortion for the rich, infanticide for the poor.
One old term for abortion was “correcting the monthly cycle.”
Kenneth Schaff:
In 19th century America early term abortions were legal with little controversy up until the quickening of life.
John Maclachlangray
Were we transported to the Victorian era, you or I wouldn’t survive a month before we caught an infection & died, either of the germ or the cure.
Jeremy Barton:
Given the high rate of infant mortality in the past, I would assume that miscarriage, stillbirth, death in early infancy was at least as common as actual infanticide and possibly more so.
And if you lived in the city there probably weren't too many acceptable ways to deal with a dead infant, regardless of how it came about.
Tea 41
“The east end of London was the killing fields of the poor.” ~ Jack London
Pat Neill:
So the churches wouldn't bury dead babies of unwed parents. How bloody Christian of them. One of the many reasons I turned away from religion.
Geraldine Morola:
No birth control, prostitution was often the only way a woman without means could make a living. They were known to sit over a bucket of water and deliver the baby face first underwater. It never drew breath so it was never named. Just horrifying.
David Rehndahl:
To be fair infanticide was just as common a practice in rural areas. Until modern medicine death in pregnancy and childbirth was common for rich and poor alike. Look at poor old Queen Anne lost 17 out of 18 babies and the only one to survive infancy died at 11.
Of course there was poverty, there was also gin, and a generational acceptance going back tens of thousands of years that most children didn’t make it past six month.
Fred Barrett:
Great piece. At secondary school we were taught that the river police in London were formed to pull bodies from the river. We were told it was 1920 when the number of babies taken out went below 1000 for the first time.
Chuck Allen:
Ah the “good old days.”
John Maclachlanlgray:
There must have been a serious taboo about mentioning this (& so very Victorian) — Dickens must have known about this when he wrote Our Mutual Friend, in which a principal character drags for corpses in the Thames.
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ELEANOR THE GREAT (MOVIE): CAN YOU FAKE BEING A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR?
When we first meet Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb), she and her longtime friend Bessie (Rita Zohar) are living the “Golden Girls” life in Florida, sharing stories around the kitchen table, exercising on the beach, and putting lazy whippersnappers into their place. However, when Bessie dies, Eleanor decides to move back up to New York with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price), neither of whom has much time for her. Begrudgingly left behind at the local JCC, she stumbles into a meeting of Holocaust survivors and is mistaken for one of them.
Instead of quickly setting the record straight, she recounts Bessie’s life story as her own, catching the attention of a young observer, Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student grappling with the recent loss of her mother and growing up in the shadow of her famous anchorman father (Chiwetel Ejiofor). In trying to get Eleanor’s story, Nina strikes up a friendship with the difficult personality and, in the process, learns to process her own loss. Only, as Eleanor keeps sharing Bessie’s story, more and more people hear it, and she finds herself further trapped in her deception.
Scarlett Johansson’s feature debut is quite the surprise. It’s a tricky story with an uncomfortable moral quandary and a main character who’s not always so sympathetic. For as charming as Squibb is in the role, Eleanor is a bit of a firecracker, the type that burns those too close to her. She’s mercilessly tough on her daughter, needling and embarrassing her in front of her son, whom Eleanor is much kinder to. She doesn’t shy away from the occasional little white lie, which sets the stage for what’s to come. At first, Eleanor puts up that same tough act against Nina, who, fortunately, isn’t so easily pushed away. In some sense, Eleanor is a character at odds with herself. Still, her loneliness triggers her need to fit in with a group of survivors she doesn’t belong to and eventually, live up to Nina’s desire to tell her story.
Tory Kamen, also making her feature screenwriting debut, treads into some ethically murky waters throughout Eleanor’s journey and absolves her too quickly from the hurt caused by her lies. The premise is a slippery slope with a thorny question: Does Eleanor’s loneliness justify the hurt she unintentionally causes? She can be tough to forgive, especially since she’s passing herself off as the victim of a genocide. Kamen never quite finds an even hand when it comes to Eleanor’s temperament and motives, or answers if her lead character reckons with the vanity that inspires her to pass her friend’s story as her own. Grief becomes the explanation for her bad behavior, but the story doesn’t really unpack much further.
Still, the film itself has its charming moments. Johansson and director of photography Hélène Louvart (“La Chimera”) give Squibb a glowing spotlight, and she wears it well. There are numerous close-ups of the actress, giving her the screen time and space to feel out her character’s conflicts, capturing her coy smiles, her impish delight over a cutting remark when it lands on its target, and panicked frowns when she realizes her stolen story has breached containment.
Squibb is, of course, the star of “Eleanor the Great,” but her rapport with her younger co-star Kellyman gives the movie something quite special. Their tender moments discussing grief and going out on the town are far more satisfying than the false pretense that brings them together. As a performance, Kellyman holds her own, shouldering the weight of her character’s profound loss and the pressure to keep a sense of normalcy, and becomes a worthy, earnest foil for Squibb’s character to open up and allow herself to enjoy the friendship.
If Johansson is as unafraid to tackle complex characters as she is with “Eleanor the Great,” then hopefully she will take on many more interesting stories and feature underseen actors. Her work with Squibb gives the actress one of her most challenging roles yet, a feisty nonagenarian antihero whose need for company moves her to tell a pretty unforgivable lie. The film struggles with what made “Jojo Rabbit” a contentious title–a comedy about a serious subject that does not quite stick the landing, only exposing its flaws even more. While “Eleanor the Great” never quite recovers from the moral issue at its center, Squibb’s lively performance makes it memorable.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/eleanor-the-great-movie-review
from another source: MISGUIDED
There’s one thing no one will fault while watching Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great: June Squibb is a national treasure. In the movie, she efficiently captures the effervescence and quick wit of the film’s titular character, Eleanor Morgenstein, with such contagious energy that it’s hard not to fall in love with her. In fact, she’s the primary reason you keep watching the film. Her sense of comedic timing is pitch-perfect, particularly during a well-mounted sight gag that made the (limited) crowd go in stitches.
However, it’s in Eleanor’s most vulnerable moments, where Johansson and writer Tory Kamen sit with the character as she still tries to make sense of the short time she still has on this planet in the wake of her best friend Bessie’s (Rita Zohar) passing, that Squibb excels the most.
You fully warm up to her personality, warts and all, because her heart is much bigger than ours. Her performance possesses the same amount of compassion and indelible energy that made us all fall in love with Squibb, who became a sensation at a particularly advanced age with her Oscar-nominated turn in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Twelve years later, she is still enjoying the adulation and success of a late-stage performer at the tender – and young – age of 95.
Last year’s Thelma was a massive hit for the actress, and now Eleanor the Great is poised to make her once again the talk of the Awards season town as it begins to ramp up. That will also be the only thing moviegoers will discuss when coming out of Johansson’s profoundly misguided debut, as it treads on the treacherous waters of making light of a subject that can’t be trivialized – or joked about – in any way. Only Roberto Benigni managed to use the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust as a story of resilience and survival through comedy, in Life is Beautiful, without ever exploiting the setting or making light of what happened.
The reason why comedies on the Holocaust don’t work is simple: the event is no laughing matter. It brings about many difficult emotions for its remaining survivors – and family members – who will carry these scars for the rest of their lives. So color me shocked (really, I read nothing about the movie, other than knowing Johansson was making her first film, starring June Squibb, which had a premiere at Cannes) when the plot of the movie begins to unravel and Eleanor the Great starts to do things I never thought to see in the year of our lord 2025.
After Bessie passes away, Eleanor decides to move back to New York to be with her daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and grandson Max (Will Price), but the two are far too busy to tend to her needs. Lisa encourages her to attend the local Jewish Community Center (JCC) to make friends, and it is here that Eleanor accidentally stumbles upon a support group for Holocaust survivors. Instead of coming clean and admitting that she is in the wrong room, Eleanor begins to recount Bessie’s life, as if it were her story of survival. That’s right, we have “Dear Evan Hansen, but on Holocaust survivors,” and it’s as thoughtless as you think reading a statement like this is.
And whaddaya know? In the room is aspiring journalist Nina Davis (Erin Kellyman), who wants to profile Eleanor after hearing her alleged story of surviving the Holocaust. Nina is also coping with the tragic loss of her mother, while her father, renowned television journalist Roger Davis (Chiwetel Ejiofor), ignores his daughter’s needs at a time when she needs affection the most and prefers to be back at work. Instead of coming clean, Eleanor continues to lie to Nina and befriends her, which leads to a concluding setpiece that’s as eye-rolling as anything featured in Dear Evan Hansen, no matter how sincere Squibb’s turn is. Again, she is the main reason why we keep watching, because Eleanor is such an attachable character on her own.
Everyone else does fine work, too, but Squibb frequently steals the spotlight away from the rest of the cast. After all, it’s her show, and possibly the last time she’ll do something at this scale. That being said, Johansson possesses no sense of aesthetics as a filmmaker, and her direction of Eleanor’s story feels much more in line with a television film than a theatrically-released drama, despite snagging cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who previously collaborated with the likes of Agnès Varda, Alice Rohrwacher, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Christophe Honoré, and Wim Wenders.
One could think that, with all of those talents she worked with, Louvart’s photography would stick out, but there’s no image in Eleanor the Great that holds our attention. Johansson would rather stay in clumsily framed zooms of Elearnor’s face than have the camera respond to the litany of emotions she feels, as someone still grappling with the loss of her best friend and coping with that grief by telling her story. It continuously treads in some territories that didn’t sit right with this fellow critic, especially as it tries to reach an unearned button-pushing conclusion that justifies her lies about being a Holocaust survivor as ones tied to the universal feeling of grief.
There is some truth to Ejiofor’s well-delivered monologue about human beings refusing proximity and human connection at a time when they need it the most, and it rings truer as someone who recently lost a close family member and needed to be with them during what was a challenging past few months for me and everyone else. Maybe it was the intended goal of using the framework of the Holocaust as a way to discuss grief. Yet, it still doesn’t entirely gel with me, especially when the movie sometimes highlights the comedic nature of her situation and stretches the premise thin to get to a dramatic turning point, when, again, real lives were lost and permanently altered by this genocide.
With all that said and done, it’s not as ill-conceived as Dear Evan Hansen, because at least its heart is in the right place, and Kamen’s script feels like it’s actively saying something about grappling with grief rather than merely gesturing about it. Johansson seems willing to spark a discussion and encourage audiences to talk about their feelings, especially when they are at their lowest. Perhaps a better framing device would’ve helped convey the message more effectively, because we lose sight of what matters most, as the subject matter is trivialized in ways that should never be treated on film this way.
There’s a better movie that discusses Eleanor’s reckoning as she grapples with the remaining years she has, while trying to carry Bessie’s legacy to as many people as possible by immediately coming clean and sharing her story of survival, not pretending it’s her own. It would’ve been fairly inspirational and life-affirming, despite the simplicity of the plot.
Sometimes, movies don’t need to be anything more than that, and that’s perfectly fine! Sadly, that road was not taken, and now we have a pretty middling debut for what I hope won’t be the last time we will see Johansson behind the camera, provided she flexes her filmmaking muscles a bit and finds a better screenplay.
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A GREAT PERFORMANCE
It’s a remarkable feat, still working at the craft she left her hometown of Vandalia, Ill., for seven decades ago, and eventually transitioned from theater and television to movies in 1990.
In 2014, she was Oscar-nominated as Bruce Dern’s gutsy, frank-talking wife in Alexander Payne’s brilliant ‘Nebraska,” after playing Jack Nicholson’s wife in “About Schmidt” for Payne 12 years earlier. She has not looked back. While she is well-suited as adrift Eleanor, she gets terrific support from a strong ensemble.
Now, the tonal shifts don’t turn this complex story into a feel-good endeavor. Nevertheless, the beauty of Squibb’s believable and emotionally rich performance is not so much in looking back but moving forward.
Directed by actress Scarlett Johansson with compassion and grace, Squibb draws some sympathy and understanding as she wrestles with this fraud – basically assuming the life of her best friend and roommate, Bessie (Rita Zohar), who has died and left her with inevitable challenges.
In Johansson’s first time as director, she thoughtfully navigates the sometimes awkward and very witty beats of Tory Kamen’s screenplay. Obviously, there are consequences, and that rocky shift from light to heavy is a sticking point with some viewers, because it does involve the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, if you look at it through Eleanor’s eyes, you can see her missteps and the way she can’t shift to reality without hurting multiple people she’s come to care about, including her rabbi (Stephen Singer) and new friends.
In no way does she make light of what Bessie went through and finally admits to the pretense. If only life were that easy …
After their husbands died, the two widows, best friends since their teenage years, moved to a retirement community in Florida, and maintained a fierce devotion to each other, completing each other’s sentences in a comfortable living arrangement.
Learning a thing or two about being dismissed as elderly, the pair make it their mission to live their best life. We see them rise above indignities in some very funny encounters as they go on about daily life. And we see Bessie’s torment about the people she lost when Nazis invaded Poland.
Faced with another transition, Eleanor moves in with her divorced daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and her grandson Max (Will Price). It’s obvious that Lisa offered accommodation in hopes that Eleanor would eventually choose a senior living arrangement instead. But she dotes on her grandson.
She has renewed her Jewish faith now that she’s adjusting to Manhattan, attending services. Growing up in Iowa, she converted to Judaism when she married. One day, instead of attending a singing class at the Jewish Community Center, she has mistakenly sat in as part of a Holocaust Survivors Support Group. Rut-ro.
Like Evan Hansen in the musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” a lie affords her a sense of belonging and opens doors to new friendships. She tells of Bessie’s torment losing her brother (brutally murdered), how family didn’t survive Auschwitz, and the pain of those losses. Her storytelling is so realistic, people are immediately drawn to Eleanor.
And that includes a NYU student journalist, Nina (an outstanding Erin Kellyman), who has recently lost her mother. Her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a renowned newscaster that Eleanor has long admired, which is another facet. She and Nina established a lovely intergenerational friendship.
That’s when this movie grabs hold with something important to say. Nina’s dad is grieving separately at a time when his daughter could really use his support, guidance and love – and that’s an aspect of the movie that’s not only easy to grasp but handled with sincerity.
The meaningful connections that Eleanor has forged – with her family, Nina, Roger and at the JCC, give the film an emotional resonance that tugs often at the heart.
This female-centered film touches on the resilience we need to keep going, and how adversity affects everyone, no matter how old or what that person’s circumstances are.
Besides girl bosses as director and screenwriter, so is the cinematographer Helene Louvart, whose perceptive capturing of moments is striking.
The film’s twists, while usually I leave most of those out, are important to know in advance, so you are not stunned by the premise nor the developments. While some people can get over the hurdles because of the charming performers and moments both funny and sweet, others can’t, and therefore, the film will vary in its acceptance.
Maybe it’s the combination that my cherished grandmother’s name was Eleanor, my fondness for June Squibb, my personal grief journey, and interest in a compelling redemption story, and acceptance of human flaws, but there’s value in seeing how the entanglements are played out.
Johansson, who is Jewish and had relatives affected by the Holocaust, cast some survivors in the support group. This sad topic is sensitively handled, but perhaps not to everyone’s satisfaction.
On a local note, actor Jacob Flekier, who is a graduate of the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at Webster University, plays Zephyr, although he is uncredited in the film.
Thorny? Yes. Tough losses well-portrayed? Yes. Knowing the difference between right and wrong? Heck, yeah. Worth mulling over if a lie can ever be accepted? Yes, if we understand moral complications. Is hard-fought wisdom earned? I think so.
Oriana:
I
enjoyed the movie, but found its main plot device questionable, No,
it’s not all right to pretend that you are a Holocaust survivor. If
Eleanor happened to blunder into a cancer support group, would it be OK
for her to pretend to be a cancer patient? Is loneliness a sufficient
excuse?
To make matters worse, the lie could have easily been
avoided. Eleanor could have said right away that she is presenting the
wartime experiences of her beloved companion — stories that Bessie could
not bring herself to share, except just before dying — nevertheless,
stories that deserve to be shared. The aspiring young journalist could
still use them, without compromising honesty. True, then the movie would
lose its tension, and either not come into being or become a completely
different movie. Eleanor IS a survivor — but with a different set of challenges.
“Eleanor
the Great” is worth seeing just because of the excellent acting, but to
me it wasn’t fully satisfying. Its fatal flaw keeps it from being a
masterpiece. Ultimately it's a flawed movie, though we can see a potential great movie underneath it. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, I have no problem recommending it.
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WHAT SUCCESSFUL LEADERS SHARE
Jon Levy explores what makes someone a successful leader in his third book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Creative Genius.
What Levy found through his research and conversations with heads of business is that there is, in fact, something that unites leaders, but it's not as straightforward as charisma. After all, we can all think of bosses who are just plain awkward.
Instead, these individuals share an ability to make us feel like we will have a better future, he says.
"If you can help people feel that they will earn more, grow bigger yams, have more career success, raise better children, defeat their nemesis, or at least make their ex envious, they will follow you," he writes.
Leaders don't even have to execute on that promise, he points out. "Producing the results versus making people feel that the result will be produced are two completely different things.”
It's an epiphany that occurred to Levy, an author and behavioral scientist, after hosting hundreds of dinner parties for successful people across various disciplines. He said he realized how unique all the leaders he knew were.
"When you study behavioral science, you realize that basically in every area of life, the things that we assume are true are just completely wrong," Levy told Business Insider. "You can't tell me there are these universal things that leaders have to have.”
Cultivating strong teams
Levy challenges several traditional management ideas in this book, including the notion that corporate leadership training is an effective means of improving how execs manage. It's an especially relevant subject, given that business coaching is a $20 billion industry in the US, according to IBISWorld.
Humans are complicated, and complex interpersonal skills can't really be learned effectively in the abstract, said Levy. That's why a "two-day leadership course at some Holiday Inn Express," as he writes it in Team Intelligence, doesn't actually result in managers suddenly being better equipped to give a challenging performance review or lead a more engaging meeting.
What does work, then? Leaning into what a specific leader is good at and coming up with a systemic solution to address their weakness.
"If you have a boss who is really terrible at giving feedback, then have somebody else give the feedback," he said. "Make sure that chief of staff is somebody with incredible emotional intelligence. Why do we have to force the boss to spend hours to learn to be better at something, if that's not their skill set?”
The smallest unit of effectiveness is not the individual, said Levy. It's the team. That means teams can be more effective when training happens at the group level, he said, pointing to how Navy SEALs practice drills as a cohesive unit, rather than individually.
"If we want the team to perform, then they need to be able to work together.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/successful-leader-quality-shared-leadership-trait-2025-10?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLE NOT WANTING CHILDREN
I saw a kid pulling down cereal at the grocery store. The boxes were falling on the ground loudly.
Then, he began screaming to his mother that he wanted a box of chocolates on the other side of the aisle.
She was scrambling to pick up after him, reprimanding him, which made him get upset and start wailing and making a scene.
A coworker of mine had children ages 2, 4, and 5 years old. He arrived at work everyday looked absolutely destroyed, with sunken eyes. He often fought with his wife over watching kids and splitting the workload.
My other kid’s teenager is driving him absolutely crazy, disobeying rules, skipping school, and testing every limit possible.
I’m sure that having a child is a beautiful, incredible experience with many joys. And I also know that every parent has a different experience raising children.
But few people argue it isn’t a lot of work.
I respect people who have kids and know that we can’t have this world without them. It is a huge feat to raise a child to adulthood fully intact and ready to contribute.
Conversely, many of us see that undertaking as not worth it to us personally.
This world is filled with screwed up people because either their parents didn’t think through how much they actually wanted children, or because they had kids due to social and family pressure. The end result is unhappy parents and unhappy children.
We should learn to give young people space to decide whether having children is right for them, and respect whatever path they choose to take.
~ Sean Kernan, Quora
Jonathan Brill:
Raising two kids costs us about 4k a month. Not counting college, and any savings, etc. That's just childcare, clothes, toys, books, and a swim class or something. You can lease 2 serviceable Mercedes for $1k per month. A pretty good rate on a $700k house with nothing down and a 30 year fixed is like $4k per month. You could fly to Maui two weekends a month, every month, and stay in the Grand Wailea, or some such, for $3k per month.
If you love your spouse as much as I love mine, you should enjoy the time you have together now, because that decreases at an alarming rate once you have kids. No joke. If your kids aren't talking yet (or if they're just mute I guess) it's not as noticeable, but once they hit about two, your meaningful conversations are relegated to naptime and bedtime.
If you have some hobbies or maybe a job that requires a lot of travel and long hours, you're going to have to choose, every day. You have 18 hours in a day. How much of that time are you spending with your kid? How much is not enough? If you're working 8-5 and their bedtime is 7:30, you've probably got an hour in the morning and maybe two at night. That's three hours a day, minus eating, dressing, bathing, etc. So you have maybe 90 minutes of quality time with your kid. If you have two and they're on different schedules (common when they're young), decrease accordingly. But you have them on weekends, right? Sure, but you're not the only one who wants to see them. And you've got house chores, errands, etc. Your time is no longer your own, and you never have enough for them, much less anything else.
You like traveling? Ever been on a 26 hour flight and been annoyed at the screaming kids in the row behind you? Well now those kids are yours. Traveling with kids in their first years can be without tragedy, but never optimal. And it always requires your normal amount of administration (planning, packing, etc.) times four, not to mention cost and sacrifice of stuff you just can't realistically do anymore. If this is on your bucket list, better start checking them off now.
Remember the first time you had your heart broken? Remember how you wanted to die and nothing ever hurt that much after? Having something happen to one of your kids is many times worse than that. I am blessed, but I had a scare with one of them, and it was the most traumatic thing I've ever been through. If you live a comfortable life where you're insulated from the highs and lows that come with emotional attachment, having a small human that's completely dependent on you for survival and loves you more than you could love anything in your adult life might not be for you.
My oldest kid gets up at 6 am. Every day. She doesn't get up like we get up either, like she needs time to get going or anything. She literally bursts out of her room every morning like sunlight cresting a mountain. She goes from sleeping to full OMGWTF adrenaline in a nanosecond. She wakes up motivated, like a miniature female version of Patton. Whereas later in the day she's polite, in the morning she commands people. "It's time for you to get up and make oatmeal, dad." Like a boss. What time do you get up on weekends? Ever sleep in? I kind of remember sleeping in. It actually hurts to try and remember it. Like if I lost the sense of smell, but could still remember the aroma of fresh baked cookies.
Having said all of that, I'd give up all the money I ever earned to keep being a dad. My wife and I were happy before kids, but there's no question we're happier now. Going to Disneyland with a toddler is more fun than going to Rome or Africa or Hawaii as newlyweds. All of my friends who don't have kids wish they had mine, and every hobby or sport or consulting gig I've given up means nothing to me if it would require giving up a few hours with my kids.
Rebecca Chambers:
Have you ever read Tolstoy's short story, " The Death of Ivan Ilich"? The message in the story is that a life lived for others is the only life worth living. True, you can find other ways to live out this message without children, but none is more intimate than in a family, the nucleus of society. I don't believe the downsides are displaced, but rather accepted as the price to be paid for the wisdom, patience and love that is learned by all those involved in raising the child.
It's certainly not something for everyone, but its not as bad as it sounds. And by the way, a good sense of humor and creativity gets you through anything.
Khenan Mak:
Some people think their kids will take care of them in old age. Good luck with that!
Jasmine Adamson:
I've always appreciated this line from Star Trek Voyager:
Tuvok — Offspring can be disturbingly illogical, and yet profoundly fulfilling. You should anticipate paradox.
Oriana:
I’ve been exposed to a wide range of opinions: “Smart women don’t have children”; “Don’t kid yourself: you’d never be where you are intellectually if you’d had a child”; “If I could do it all over again, Iwouldn't have had kids” — as well as “Having a child is always a great adventure, but for you it would be an especially great adventure”; “It’s the hardest work there is, but also the most fulfilling.”
Obviously, virtually nothing is all good or all bad. Life gives you a certain hand of cards, and you play them the best you can. There is a Polish saying that seems to fit this situation: “You say ‘Tough,’ and keep on loving.”
*
NIGHT OWLS OR EARLY BIRDS?
We all know that early birds get the worm. But who wants a worm? Not me. For most of my life I have identified as a night owl, clambering out of bed as late as possible and not so much seizing but reluctantly easing into the day.
US work culture is not really optimal for night owls. Rather, it favors CEOs who get up at 4am and run a marathon while the rest of us hit the snooze button. Still, I always consoled myself with the idea that night owls are actually more intelligent and creative than their early bird counterparts. Franz Kafka and Thomas Wolfe wrote at bedtime; Bob Dylan recorded at night. Even scientific studies indicated it was true.
However, something weird has happened. Due to a combination of existential dread, cutting out alcohol and having a small child who wakes me up at an ungodly hour, I’ve started to go to bed earlier and earlier. These days, a 9pm bedtime is perfection. The idea of routinely staying up until the wee hours, as I used to, is now horrifying.
This shift has me questioning everything. Is it actually possible for your body clock to change? Am I really turning into an early bird or have I just been forced into a child-dictated schedule? And if I am an early bird, does that make me a lesser being? I went on a mission to settle the owl-versus-lark debate for once and for all.
What makes someone an early or late riser?
My first discovery: you can’t help who you are; your optimal bedtime is hardwired into you. “We all have an internal biological clock, or a circadian rhythm, that controls numerous physiological outputs, including alertness levels, sleep, hormone levels and blood pressure,” says Kristen Knutson, an associate professor at Northwestern University who specializes in sleep research. Your “chronotype”, meanwhile, is your circadian preference: the scientific way of saying whether you’re a morning lark or night owl. Someone with an early chronotype will naturally find it easier to go to sleep early than someone with a later chronotype.
While it is difficult to fundamentally change your chronotype, it does naturally shift as you age. Anyone with a small child will understand why I don’t bother with an alarm clock any more – my four-year-old rudely wakes me up at 5.30am instead. But biological clocks delay as puberty hits, says Knutson: teenagers “have a later chronotype. Then, as we get older, our chronotype tends to drift earlier and earlier. By the time we are in our 80s, we are an early type.”
We all go through this same cycle, but from different starting points. “In young adults, morning and evening types can differ by as much as approximately four hours in how their biological clocks affect their behavior,” says Hans Van Dongen, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane. It’s not entirely certain why these differences exist but, along with possible evolutionary reasons, there’s probably a genetic component. “Children born to evening-type parents are more likely to be evening types, and likewise for morning types,” says Van Dongen.
Is there any evidence night owls are smarter than early birds?
Back to that all-important question, though: does being a night owl make you more creative and intelligent?
One 2007 study found “that evening-disposition is correlated with the ability to apply divergent thinking strategies to visual content” – a science-y way of saying “more creative”. In a 2009 study called “Why night owls are more intelligent”, psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa checked the bedtimes of 20,745 adolescents against the results of an intelligence test. He found people with higher intelligence were more likely to be night owls, and posited that it might be because it’s “evolutionarily novel” to stay up late.
More recently, researchers at Imperial College London studied UK data on more than 26,000 people who had completed various intelligence tests. The 2024 paper found that those who stay up late had “superior cognitive function” to morning larks.
However, all the experts I spoke to were cautious about making definitive links between chronotype and traits like creativity, intelligence or sociability. While they make for good headlines, all of these studies have important limitations.
That 2009 study, for example? Van Dongen notes the “analysis is based on how late individuals choose to go to bed … [and] cannot rule out the possibility that adolescents with higher IQ choose to study longer into the night and require more sleeping in for recovery on the weekend, or are involved in more or different after-school activities.”
(I emailed Kanazawa, the study’s lead researcher and an academic at the London School of Economics, to get his take on this criticism and got a reply saying: “Yeah, like I’d speak to someone from the Guardian.” It turns out that Kanazawa, who once claimed that a study showed black women to be less attractive than women of other races, is somewhat controversial and definitely not a Guardian fan.)
So my beliefs about night owls were built on shaky ground. But the stereotypes of creative geniuses burning the midnight oil and early bird CEOs could still be relevant. “The timing of the biological clock determines more than just when people like to go to bed and get up and when they feel most alert during the day,” says Van Dongen. “It also determines in part the kinds of activities they may end up participating in and the experiences they get exposed to.” If you naturally get up early, it may be easier for you to thrive in a corporate work environment, for example.
The dark side of being a night owl
One thing sleep experts all seem to agree on is that trying to force a routine that is at odds with your biological clock is unhealthy. In fact, it could send you to an early grave.
In 2018, Knutson, of Northwestern, co-authored a study that found night owls have a 10% higher risk of early death and more health problems compared with early risers. The study couldn’t determine the underlying reasons, but Knutson notes the issue may have something to do with “circadian disruption caused by desynchrony between their internal clock and the external world”. In other words, she says, “it is difficult for a night owl to live in a morning lark’s world”.
Being a night owl may come with other risks. A 2024 study from Stanford Medicine researchers found that being up late is not good for your mental health, regardless of chronotype. The reasons are unclear, but researchers suspect it’s because unhealthy behaviors such as drinking alcohol or eating junk food are more likely late at night.
Similarly, University of Groningen researcher Ana Wenzler worked on a recent study that found staying up late is linked to cognitive decline. Wenzler notes that at least 25% of the effect was because of lifestyle rather than anything intrinsic; again, you’re more likely to make poor choices late at night.
Can you hack your chronotype?
While you can’t change your chronotype, you can try to work in harmony with it. But to do that, you first have to understand which type you are, and it’s not always obvious. Looking back, I thought I was a night owl for many years just because of my habits. I was young and went out a lot. Yet once I stopped drinking, my body clock seemed to shift.
But it’s not like I’m waking up with the birds like Snow White, ready for the day. In fact, I’ve started to think I’m neither a morning person nor an evening person, but something in the middle. Which, apparently, is possible. According to sleep specialist Dr Michael Breus, someone whose chronotype sits firmly in the middle is a “bear.” And us bears actually dominate: by some estimates, half the population is in that category.
So how do you figure out your natural biological clock? Wenzler says the way to determine a person’s chronotype is to measure the melatonin levels in their saliva “throughout the day to see when the melatonin goes up”. Melatonin is a hormone your body secretes to signal to you that it’s night; morning people release it earlier.
Obviously, saliva tests won’t be practical for most people. In the absence of a home science lab, says Wenzler, try sleeping without an alarm for a week. Stay away from depressants and stimulants like alcohol and coffee and avoid artificially extending your natural bedtime by doomscrolling or binging TV, and your body will find a natural rhythm. You’ll wake up whenever your body deems best.
I would have tried this experiment myself, but you can’t really get rid of your alarm clock when that alarm is a small child.
Finally, if you are certain you’re a night owl, but have to get up early for work (or, in my case, entertain a hyperactive four-year-old in the wee hours), can you tweak your biological clock? Sort of!
“It’s possible to shift, but usually only modestly,” says Matthew P Walker, director at the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Walker mentions a 2019 study that “advanced night owls by about two hours in three weeks using structured routines: morning light, fixed mealtimes, earlier exercise and caffeine cutoff. People reported better mood and performance in the mornings, though most drift back if the changes aren’t maintained.
“One could not imagine anyone sticking to this regimen in perpetuity,” he adds, and these findings indicate that people should operate in tune with their chronotype, not against it. “Yes – the early bird may catch the worm. But the second mouse gets the cheese!”
Now try telling that to your boss.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/oct/16/which-is-better-night-owls-early-birds-sleep
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PEROVSKITE: THE WONDER MATERIAL THAT COULD TRANSFORM SOLAR
Some argue advances in perovskite solar cells mean we are on the brink of the next solar energy revolution. But it all depends on how they hold up in the real world.
Inside a lab on the outskirts of Oxford, UK, sample solar photovoltaic (PV) cells are stacked up waiting to be put through various tests. One researcher uses an electron microscope to scan and analyze the cells for impurities that could impact efficiency. Another measures cells' response to changes in the light spectrum.
The lab is run by Oxford PV, a spin-off from Oxford University, one of several start-ups around the world developing what some argue is the game-changing next generation of solar power: tandem perovskite solar cells.
The technology combines silicon, the material currently used in solar photovoltaics (PV) in panels across the world, with perovskite materials to massively increase the efficiency of solar panels' conversion of sunlight to electricity.
Perovskite is a mineral first discovered in the Ural Mountains in Eurasia in 1839. But the name today refers to various materials made synthetically with crystal structures that mirror that of the mineral. It can be manufactured from materials such as bromine, chlorine, lead and tin, which are all readily available today.
According to proponents of this "wonder material", perovskite panels promise to cheaply boost the energy generated by solar farms and rooftops, and could work far better than silicon panels on satellites and electric cars.
But critics of the technology worry that perovskite's greater susceptibility to moisture and heat will mean faster degradation. They are also concerned about perovskites generally containing lead, a toxic substance which can have health and environmental impacts.
Many of the start-ups and researchers working to overcome these hurdles believe that tandem panels are now ready to go mainstream. But despite the efficiency records piling out from labs, it is yet to be proven they will achieve tangible results in the real world.
The new solar
Solar power now accounts for almost 7% of global electricity generation and is rising fast: it grew by 29% in 2024. It has also become the second-cheapest new source of electricity globally, including in the US (only onshore wind is cheaper). A 2023 analysis found the trajectory of solar technology may have already reached a tipping point towards dominating global electricity markets, even without further climate policies.
Conventional silicon panels dominate today's solar PV market, but their efficiency (a measure of the amount of sunlight converted to energy) has a relatively low upper limit. Efficiency is key for renewables, since expanding growth at the scale needed for global decarbonization relies on producing the highest level of energy for the lowest possible cost.
The main advantage of perovskites over silicon is that they can convert more of the light spectrum into energy, due to a combination of factors including high mobility of electrons inside the cells.
Perovskite cells can be used by themselves in some applications. They are ultra-thin, meaning they can be sprayed onto surfaces, such as windows, with a number of companies currently piloting this technology. But using perovskites in tandem with silicon gives the benefits of both silicon and perovskites in terms of absorbing the Sun's energy. Silicon-only cells typically have an efficiency of 21-23% and though improvements are possible, the theoretical maximum is around 33%. In perovskite tandem solar cells the theoretical maximum efficiency increases to more than 47%.
Oxford PV says the ability of these panels to generate more power over the same area will reduce the cost of electricity by around 10% compared with standard silicon panels, according to its own internal analysis.
When discussion on them started in the late 2000s, tandem panels were initially met with skepticism in the industry, with many believing they were simply too good to be true, says David Ward, chief executive of Oxford PV. "Putting two cells together to absorb more sunlight has been known in the past, but it has been very expensive," he adds. "A combination called gallium arsenide works on the same principle, but it's significantly more expensive than silicon.”
Perovskite tandem solar panels have their downsides too. One study found the technology has up to 7% higher environmental impact per panel than normal silicon solar PV, due to the extra processes needed for manufacturing, although it also noted that their increased output more than compensates for this, since fewer panels are needed for the same amount of energy.
Perovskites are also susceptible to moisture and high temperatures, and early products were far less durable and stable than silicon. The small amount of lead – a toxic substance – inside the panels has also raised eyebrows.
However, when compared with the energy output of the panels, the scale of lead used is tiny, and much lower than for the same amount of energy produced by burning coal, according to Joseph Berry, a researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which studies the commercially viability of perovskites for solar technology. Any toxicity problems when disposing of the panels could be avoided through designing appropriate recycling or reuse processes, he adds.
Oxford PV says that its panels are designed to be recycled in the same way as standard silicon panels (which also contain lead). The solar industry at large is looking at how best to recycle panels, including lead.
Real world benefits?
In Oxford PV's lab, operations are laser focussed on solving tandem solar cells' remaining technical issues.
Here, an environmental chamber carries out "accelerated aging tests", where test cells are exposed to extreme conditions such as high heat, humidity and rapid hot-cold cycles, simulating years of environmental exposure in weeks or months. "These tests give an idea of how the cells could degrade in the field under various conditions without having to wait five, 10 or 15 years," says Laura Miranda, Oxford PV's head of sustainability.
Considering perovskite's sensitivity to moisture and heat, data showing its long-term reliability will be vital for commercialization. But it's hard to come by in such a young technology, says Berry.
"Manufacturers of silicon modules can guarantee 30-year lifetimes because they've got 30 years of field data," he says. "But for perovskites, knowing that the module we're making today is going to last 30 years is a really hard material science question."
The rapid pace of development means real-world field tests are not going to provide the answers, he adds. "The devices we were making 10 years ago are not relevant to what's reliable now."
In any case, while tandem cells degrade faster than silicon-only ones, it's the extra power they produce that matters for viability, according to Scott Graybeal, chief executive of Caelux, a US-based spin-off from the California Institute of Technology also developing perovskite tandem cells.
"The real value here is how much energy are you going to produce over the term of a power purchase contract," he says. "That's what folks care about."
Oxford PV's efforts appear to be paying off. In 2024 it set a new record for the world's most-efficient residential-size solar module, achieving a 26.9% conversion efficiency. It believes its research and development program will continue to improve its cells' efficiency by one percentage point a year.
Other tandem perovskite players have been hitting headlines with efficiencies of more than 30%, but these are often lab-scale tests for cells not yet on the market. According to Japanese expert Tsutomu Miyasaka, whose team was the first to use perovskites for solar power applications in 2009, records achieved for lab-made cells generally represent "champion" cells that perform better than larger panels manufactured in factories, where quality can be inconsistent over large areas.
Berry highlights that the data a company claims in commercial spec sheets to buyers is more representative of performance. "If they're able to close the gap between this and their record, that is meaningful," he says.
Oxford PV says it is now manufacturing its cells at a factory in Germany and recently sent its first pilot of around 100kW of tandem solar panels (enough to power around 14 average US households) to a commercial-scale solar farm in the US. These solar models have an efficiency of 24.5%, Oxford PV says, and their performance will be closely monitored. "We want our panels tested in multiple different parts of the world so we can build a dataset of performance," says Ward.
The company is not alone in pushing ahead with scale-up. In June 2025, Swift Solar, a spinout from US universities Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford, announced a pilot with communications-infrastructure firm American Tower Corporation to deploy its perovskite tandem panels across some of its 42,000 telecommunications towers. Boston-based CubicPV and NREL have achieved 24% efficiency in tandem cells. And Caelux recently sent out its first commercial shipment of its Active Glass perovskite technology.
Firms in China, the world's largest solar market by far, are also moving fast. In April 2025, Changzhou-based solar giant Trinasolar reportedly announced a new world-record conversion efficiency of 31.1% on a tandem solar cell, and Oxford PV recently signed a deal to allow the firm to license its technology in China's domestic market. Other firms have announced high conversion efficiencies of their own, including Shanghai-based Longi which says it has achieved a 33.9% efficiency for a single cell.
Cars and spacecrafts
While the main push among these developers is to make tandem panels mainstream on solar farms and rooftops, some are also exploring other new uses for them. They say their higher efficiency could make them particularly suited to several niche uses – such as putting solar panels on the roof of electric cars.
In Japan, Panasonic aims to build perovskite-only panels such as these into the glass windows of buildings
Tandem solar panels could provide emergency reserve capacity if a driver runs short of power en route to a charging station, says Graybeal, whose company Caelux is in discussions with "some of the major" automotive manufacturers about testing their products. "You can't run a vehicle solely off solar because it's a lot of weight to push around, but providing a trickle charge to the battery to give a little extended range is absolutely a possibility," he says.
Oxford PV is also in discussions with the automotive sector about using their panels on electric vehicles. "Cars are mostly sat in the open for big chunks of the day – why would you not want to harvest that power?" says Ward.
Tandem perovskite panels are also being eyed for potential space applications, such as powering satellites. Solar power in space has traditionally been generated using solar panels made from gallium arsenide, since it is both more efficient than silicon and can cope far better with the high temperatures and radiation found in space. But tandem perovskite panels have the same benefits at a far lower cost – important for the new generation of cheaper satellites with shorter lifespans being sent up today, says Ward.
Development of products for space is in the early stages, he acknowledges, noting that Oxford PV is talking to "a number of people" about it.
Graybeal admits that even for uses on solar farms and rooftops, things are still "just at the start" for perovskite tandem cells. But he believes the solar sector is "inexorably shifting" to the technology. "It's going to be utterly transformational," he says.
For Berry, the key now is to see how tandem perovskite panels perform in the real world. "It's one thing to think that you've got something durable, but it's another to show it out in the field. While we expect the perovskite to be what really drives a lot of the different aspects of performance out in the real world, we need to see that."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251015-perovskite-the-wonder-material-that-could-transform-solar-energy
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LIQUID AIR POWER PLANT
An overlooked technology for nearly 50 years, the first liquid air energy storage facility is finally set to power up in 2026. It's hoping to compete with grid-scale lithium batteries and hydro to store clean power, and reduce the need to fall back on fossil fuels.
As the world's use of renewable electricity soars, surpassing coal for the first time, the need to store that energy when the Sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing is growing in step. While some turn to grid-scale lithium batteries and others to pumped hydro, a small but growing industry is convinced there's a better solution still: batteries that rely on air.
Near the village of Carrington in north-west England, the foundations are being laid for the world's first commercial-scale liquid air energy storage facility. The site will eventually become an array of industrial machinery and a number of large storage tanks, filled with air that has been compressed and cooled so much it has become a liquid, using renewable energy surplus. The stored energy can be discharged later when demand exceeds supply.
If the project succeeds, more will follow. The site's developers Highview Power are confident that liquid air energy storage will make it easier for countries to replace fossil fuels with clean renewable energy – though at present, the technology is expensive. But as the need for clean energy storage surges, they're betting the balance will tip in favor of liquid air.
The intermittency problem
Switching to renewable energy is essential if the world is to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But doing so poses challenges for electricity grids.
Power plants that burn fossil fuels like coal and gas can be turned on and off largely at will, offering a predictable supply of electricity that can be matched to demand. In contrast, renewables are intermittent. This means there is sometimes there isn't enough electricity being generated, risking power cuts, and sometimes there is too much – such as on very windy days – which could damage the grid.
A big part of the solution is to store the surplus energy so that it can be released when it's needed. This helps ensure a reliable supply and minimizes the risk of damage to the grid. As renewable use has ramped up, it has become increasingly important to build up grid-scale storage capacity, says Shaylin Cetegen, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who studies energy storage systems.
For decades, the main form of energy storage has been pumped hydro. Surplus electricity is used to pump water uphill, where it sits behind a dam. When energy is needed, the water is allowed to flow through turbines, generating electricity. In 2021, the world had 160 gigawatts of pumped hydro capacity.
More recently, as demand for energy storage has risen, large-scale battery storage systems have been built. This is happening quickly, and accelerating. According to the International Energy Agency, grid-scale battery storage grew from 1GW in 2013 to over 80GW in 2023, with over 40GW added in 2023 alone.
The liquid air solution
Liquid air energy storage, by contrast, is a relatively new technology on the block. The basic idea has been around since 1977, but it received little attention until this century.
The process works in three stages. First, air is taken in from the surroundings and cleaned. Second, the air is repeatedly compressed until it is at very high pressure. Third, the air is cooled until it becomes liquid, using a multi-stream heat exchanger: a device that includes multiple channels and tubes carrying substances at different temperatures, allowing heat to be transferred between them in a controlled way.
"The energy that we're pulling from the grid is powering this charging process," says Cetegen.
When the grid needs extra energy, the liquid air is put to work. It is pumped out of storage and evaporated, becoming a gas again. It is then used to drive turbines, generating electricity for the grid.
Afterwards, the air is released back into the atmosphere.
There are a few neat energy-saving tricks along the way. For instance, gases under high pressure get hotter, so the processing of compressing the air generates heat. This heat can be used to help restore the liquid air in the second half of the process. "Without these thermal recovery cycles, the efficiency of the process is closer to 50%, but when we implement this, we can get over 60%, approaching 70% efficiency," says Cetegen.
The challenge is to roll out enough liquid air energy storage to meaningfully accelerate the green transition.
A grid-scale stop-gap
The new plant at Manchester is the first commercial-scale endeavor in the world. It's being built by Highview Power, which has been developing liquid air energy storage for 20 years. It follows a demonstration plant at nearby Pilsbury. The Carrington plant will be able to store 300 megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to plug a short gap in power for as many as 480,000 homes.
It will come online in two stages, says chief executive officer Richard Butland.
In August 2026, the turbine is set to begin operating. This will not generate electricity, but will help to stabilize the electricity grid. At present, says Butland, the grid operators are sometimes turning on gas-fired power plants to stabilize the grid. "It's a huge cost to the system," he says. By offering an alternative means of stabilization, "we can stop them doing that.”
Then in 2027 the liquid air storage is expected to begin operating. Highview intends to make money by selling electricity to the grid when it is most needed.
The bottom line
Under the most aggressive decarbonization scenario, liquid air energy storage was viable in Florida and Texas, but nowhere else. "We didn't observe any economically viable systems under the other decarbonization scenarios," says Cetegen.
While this could be naively seen as "a negative result", says Cetegen, she emphasizes it does not mean liquid air energy storage is a bad idea. For starters, her methods were deliberately conservative, and her study found other forms of energy storage like pumped hydro and batteries were even less economically viable. More to the point, the biggest issue was that storage facilities could not make much money in their early years, because there weren't enough renewables on the US grid to drive up price volatility. "The system wasn't getting used a lot in the early years [of the model]," she says.
Large-scale energy storage with lithium batteries is one way to store excess renewables, but liquid air could be cheaper
Providers of liquid air energy storage could wait a few years until renewables drive up price volatility, but doing so would impede the energy transition, says Cetegen.
Instead, she says governments could support the technology. In her study, subsidizing the initial capital costs to set up the systems "could be a viable approach to achieve economic viability in the short term", she says.
Furthermore, faster uptake of renewables would increase energy price volatility, making energy storage more economically viable.
The plan for global roll-out
People who run Highview Power don't seem concerned. "Manchester will make very good returns," says Butland. They have been aided by a UK government policy called a "cap and floor", which guarantees the company a minimum return on capital. This gave investors confidence, Butland says. However, he adds it shouldn't cost the government a penny. "They're expecting every project to make more than the minimum," he says, "so the government doesn't expect to have to pay out on it."
And the company has plans for two additional UK plants, plus more in Japan and Australia. These will be much bigger: while the Carrington plant will store 300MWh, the Scottish one will be almost 10 times larger, capturing 2.5GWh. While compressors and cooling machinery are expensive, storage tanks are cheap, so it's easy to scale up.
Cetegen makes a final point in favor of liquid air energy storage: it's cheap. Energy storage technologies are often assessed using a metric called the "levelized cost of storage", which estimates how much each unit of stored energy costs over the lifespan of the project. For liquid air, this can be as low as $45 (£34) per megawatt-hour – compared to $120 (£89) for pumped hydro and $175 (£130) for lithium-ion batteries.
"While none of these storage methods are likely economically viable right now without policy support, liquid air energy storage stands out as a particularly cost-effective option for large-scale storage," Cotegen says.
Ultimately, Butland expects electricity grids to rely on a mix of storage technologies. Pumped hydro is extremely effective and works for decades, but it's location-dependent because it needs a water supply. Meanwhile, batteries are highly efficient and can be placed anywhere, but need to be replaced after about 10 years. Liquid air has the advantage that it can store energy for longer than batteries, with minimal losses.
As any country enters the green transition, its electricity grid needs to be remodeled to cope. "We're rebuilding all grids globally, based on new generation," says Butland. And that could well mean a lot of liquid air energy storage.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251009-the-liquid-air-alternative-to-fossil-fuels
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THE CEMENT THAT COULD TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A GIANT BATTERY
Concrete is perhaps the most commonly used building material in the world. With a bit of tweaking, it could help to power our homes too.
On a laboratory bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stack of polished cylinders of black-colored concrete sit bathed in liquid and entwined in cables. To a casual observer, they aren't doing much. But then Damian Stefaniuk flicks a switch. The blocks of human-made rock are wired up to an LED – and the bulb flickers into life.
"At first I didn't believe it," says Stefaniuk, describing the first time the LED lit up. "I thought that I hadn't disconnected the external power source, and that was why the LED was on.
"It was a wonderful day. We invited students, and I invited professors to see, because at first they didn't believe that it worked either."
The reason for the excitement? This innocuous, dark lump of concrete could represent the future of energy storage.
The promise of most renewable energy sources is that of endless clean power, bestowed on us by the Sun, wind and sea.
Yet the Sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing, and still waters do not, in megawatt terms, run deep. These are energy sources that are intermittent, which, in our energy-hungry modern world, poses a problem.
It means that we need to store that energy in batteries. But batteries rely on materials such as lithium, which is in far shorter supply than is likely to be needed to meet the demand created by the world's quest to decarbonize its energy and transport systems. There are 101 lithium mines in the world, and economic analysts are pessimistic about the ability of these mines to keep up with growing global demand.
Environmental analysts note that lithium mining uses a lot of energy and water, which nibble away at the environmental benefits of switching to renewable energy sources in the first place. The processes involved in extracting lithium can also sometimes lead to toxic chemicals leaking into local water supplies.
Despite some new discoveries of lithium reserves, the finite supply of this material, the over-reliance on just a handful of mines around the world and its environmental impact have driven the search for alternative battery materials.
This is where Stefaniuk and his concrete come in. He and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way of creating an energy storage device known as a supercapacitor from three basic, cheap materials – water, cement and a soot-like substance called carbon black.
Supercapacitors are highly efficient at storing energy but differ from batteries in some important ways. They can charge much more quickly than a lithium ion battery and don't suffer from the same levels of degradation in performance. But supercapacitors also release the power they store rapidly, making them less useful in devices such as mobile phones, laptops or electric cars where a steady supply of energy is needed over an extended period of time.
Yet according to Stefaniuk, carbon-cement supercapacitors could make an important contribution to efforts to decarbonise the global economy. "If it can be scaled up, the technology can help solve an important issue – the storing of renewable energy," he says.
He and his fellow researchers at MIT and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, envisage several applications for their supercapacitors.
One might be to create roads that store solar energy and then release it to recharge electric cars wirelessly as they drive along a road. The rapid release of energy from the carbon-cement supercapacitor would allow vehicles to get a rapid boost to their batteries. Another would be as energy-storing foundations of houses – "to have walls, or foundations, or columns, that are active not only in supporting a structure, but also in that energy is stored inside them", says Stefaniuk.
But it is still early days. For now, the concrete supercapacitor can store a little under 300 watt-hours per cubic meter – enough to power a 10-watt LED lightbulb for 30 hours.
The power output "may seem low compared to conventional batteries, [but] a foundation with 30-40 cubic meters (1,060-1,410 cubic feet) of concrete could be sufficient to meet the daily energy needs of a residential house", says Stefaniuk. "Given the widespread use of concrete globally, this material has the potential to be highly competitive and useful in energy storage.”
Stefaniuk and his colleagues at MIT initially proved the concept by creating cent-sized 1V supercapacitors from the material before connecting together in series to power a 3V LED. They have since scaled this up to produce a 12V supercapacitor. Stefaniuk has also been able to use larger versions of the supercapacitor to power a handheld games console.
And the research team are now planning to build larger versions, including one up to 45 cubic meters (1,590 cubic feet) in size that would be able store around 10kWh of energy needed to power to power a house for a day.
The supercapacitor works due to an unusual property of carbon black – it is highly conductive. This means that when carbon black is combined with cement powder and water, it makes for a kind of concrete that is full of networks of conductive material, taking a form that resembles ever-branching, tiny roots.
Capacitors are formed of two conductive plates with a membrane in between them. In this case, both plates are made of the carbon black cement, which were soaked in an electrolyte salt called potassium chloride.
When an electric current was applied to the salt-soaked plates, the positively-charged plates accumulated negatively charged ions from the potassium chloride. And because the membrane prevented charged ions from being exchanged between the plates, the separation of charges created an electric field.
As supercapacitors can accumulate large amounts of charge very quickly, it could make the devices useful for storing excess energy produced by intermittent renewable sources such as the wind and solar. This would take the pressure off the grid at times when the wind is not blowing, nor the Sun shining. As Stefaniuk says, "A simple example would be an off-grid house powered by solar panels: using solar energy directly during the day and the energy stored in, for example, the foundations during the night.”
Supercapacitors are not perfect. Existing iterations discharge power quickly, and are not ideal for steady output, which would be needed to power a house throughout the day. Stefaniuk says he and his colleagues are working on a solution that would allow their carbon-cement version to be tuned by adjusting the mixture, but they will not disclose the details until they have finalized the tests and published a paper.
carbon cement supercapacitor
The researchers at MIT are working on scaling up their carbon cement supercapacitor so it can be used in a number of different applications
There could be other issues to overcome too – adding more carbon black allows the resulting supercapacitor to store more energy, but it also makes the concrete slightly weaker too. The researchers say any uses that have a structural role to play as well as energy storage would need to find an optimum mix of carbon black.
Nevertheless, it seems to be a promising innovation, says Michael Short, who leads the Center for Sustainable Engineering at Teesside University in the UK. The research "opens many interesting potential avenues around the use of the built environment itself as an energy storage medium", he says. "As the materials are also commonplace and the manufacture relatively straightforward, this gives a great indication that this approach should be investigated further and could potentially be a very useful part of the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable future.”
But more research will be needed to move this from the laboratory into the real world.
"Often, new discoveries are problematic when considerations are made to move from lab or bench scale to wider deployment at larger scales and volumes. This can be due to manufacturing complexities, resource scarcities, or sometimes due to the underlying physics or chemistry. Desirable properties occurring at smaller scales may reduce or even vanish when attempts are made to make it larger."
But there may be a way of overcoming the problem of environmentally-unfriendly cement, adds Short. His colleagues at Teesside University are already working on low-emissions cement that is made from the by-products of the steel and chemical industries.
Projects such as low-emissions cement and energy-storing concrete raise the prospect of a future where our offices, roads and homes play a significant part in a world powered by clean energy.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240610-how-the-concrete-in-your-house-could-be-turned-into-a-battery
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SHINGLES VIRUS REACTIVATION AND INCREASED RISK OF DEMENTIA (abstract)
Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is a neurotropic virus that establishes lifelong latency in humans. VZV reactivation is associated with a wide range of symptoms, including herpes zoster (HZ; also known as shingles), and has been implicated in the development of dementia, although to an unknown extent. Here we present a large-scale longitudinal analysis of health records from more than 100 million individuals in the United States that demonstrates a consistent relationship of VZV reactivation with dementia after controlling for nearly 400 measured characteristics (covering demographics, socioeconomic factors, comorbidities, medications, proxies for healthcare-seeking behavior, shifts in clinical guidelines and completeness of records). We found that recurrent HZ was associated with an increased risk of dementia compared to a single HZ episode.
Additionally, exposure to HZ vaccines was associated with a reduced risk of dementia compared to the control 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine. Furthermore, the reduced risk of dementia after administration of the live-attenuated zoster vaccine waned over time and was highly correlated with a waning of the vaccine-mediated protection against HZ.
The dementia risk reduction at 3 and 5 years postexposure was also stronger in individuals who received multiple as opposed to only one dose of the recombinant HZ vaccine and those at greater risk of HZ. Our findings strongly implicate VZV reactivation as a modifiable risk factor for dementia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03972-5
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THE RECOMBINANT SHINGLES VACCINE IS ASSOCIATED WITH LOWER RISK OF DEMENTIA (abstract)
There is emerging evidence that the live herpes zoster (shingles) vaccine might protect against dementia. However, the existing data are limited and refer only to the live vaccine, which is now discontinued in the United States and many other countries in favor of a recombinant vaccine. Whether the recombinant shingles vaccine protects against dementia remains unknown. Here we used a natural experiment opportunity created by the rapid transition from the use of live to the use of recombinant vaccines to compare the risk of dementia between vaccine types.
We show that the recombinant vaccine is associated with a significantly lower risk of dementia in the 6 years post-vaccination. Specifically, receiving the recombinant vaccine is associated with a 17% increase in diagnosis-free time, translating into 164 additional days lived without a diagnosis of dementia in those subsequently affected. The recombinant shingles vaccine was also associated with lower risks of dementia than were two other vaccines commonly used in older people: influenza and tetanus–diphtheria–pertussis vaccines. The effect was robust across multiple secondary analyses, and was present in both men and women but was greater in women. These findings should stimulate studies investigating the mechanisms underpinning the protection and could facilitate the design of a large-scale randomized control trial to confirm the possible additional benefit of the recombinant shingles vaccine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03201-5?fromPaywallRec=false
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ANTIBIOTICS, ANTIVIRALS AND VACCINES COULD HELP TACKLE DEMENTIA
Using drugs approved for other conditions could dramatically speed up hunt for cure, experts say
Antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines could be used to tackle dementia, according to experts, who say repurposing drugs approved for other conditions could dramatically speed up the hunt for a cure.
The number of people living with the disease globally is forecast to almost triple to 153 million by 2050, presenting a major threat to health and social care systems.
New drugs are coming down the pipeline, but slowly, and experts say more must be done to see whether existing medicines could help prevent or treat dementia.
Dr Ben Underwood, from the University of Cambridge, said: “We urgently need new treatments to slow the progress of dementia, if not to prevent it. If we can find drugs that are already licensed for other conditions, then we can get them into trials and – crucially – may be able to make them available to patients much, much faster than we could do for an entirely new drug.”
In new research led by Cambridge and the University of Exeter, researchers examined studies which linked commonly used drugs to dementia risk. They analyzed data from 14 studies that tracked the health of more than 130 million people and involved 1m cases of dementia. They also analyzed prescription data and identified several drugs that appeared to be linked to dementia risk.
Overall, they found a “lack of consistency” between studies in identifying drugs that might modify a person’s risk of dementia. But they found some “candidates” that could warrant further studies.
One unexpected finding was an association between antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines and a reduced risk of dementia. The finding supports the hypothesis that some cases of the disease may be triggered by viral or bacterial infections.
Anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen were also found to be associated with reduced risk. Inflammation is increasingly being seen to be a significant contributor to a wide range of diseases.
There was conflicting evidence for several classes of drugs, with some blood pressure medications and antidepressants and, to a lesser extent, diabetes medication associated with a decreased risk of dementia and others associated with increased risk, the researchers said.
But the study published in journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions suggests there is “biological plausibility” for some medicines to be tested further.
“The association between antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines and decreased risk of dementia is intriguing,” the researchers wrote. “Viral and bacterial infectious causes of common dementias have been proposed, supported by epidemiological data linking infection to dementia risk, antiviral drugs have been identified as some of the most promising repurposed drugs for dementia and there is increasing interest in vaccination as being generally protective.
“Our findings support these hypotheses and lend further weight to these agents as being potentially disease-modifying or preventive for dementia.”
Dr Julia Dudley, the head of research strategy at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said it was too early to say if the existing drugs could be used to reduce the risk of dementia. Researchers will need to confirm the findings in clinical trials, she added.
Dr Richard Oakley, associate director of research and innovation at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “If we can repurpose drugs that have already been shown to be safe and approved for use for other conditions, this could save millions of pounds and decades it takes to develop a new dementia drug from scratch, and get us closer to beating dementia.
This research provides some initial groundwork and indicates which drugs have potential for being repurposed for dementia and should be prioritized for further investigation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/21/antibiotics-antivirals-and-vaccines-could-help-tackle-dementia-study-suggests
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MEDITERRANEAN DIET AND LONGEVITY
Who, by now, has not heard of the many benefits of the Mediterranean diet? Characterized by a reliance on fresh, whole vegetables, fruits, and legumes, with a moderate amount of oily fish, this diet seems to help with everything from weight loss to better heart health.
In 2025 alone, different studies have found that a Mediterranean-type diet is linked to better brain health, a lower risk of cancer, lower blood pressure, and even a decreased risk of chronic constipation.
Research looking at how a Mediterranean diet may help protect memory, for instance, has suggested that it has a unique and beneficial effect on the gut, which could influence what happens in other parts of the body.
In time, some researchers have even come up with certain modified versions of the generic Mediterranean diet, in order to help with specific health issues, many of which appear as the body ages.
Most recently, a team from Spain found that following a lower-calorie Mediterranean diet was associated with improved weight management and bone density. The best-known modified versions of this diet, however, are the Green Mediterranean diet and the MIND diet.
The Green Mediterranean diet emphasizes whole, fresh, plant-based foods and does not include any meat. This version is meant to be not only more environmentally friendly but also better at reducing visceral fat — the type of fat that accumulates around organs, and can cause them damage.
It may also help slow down brain aging and lower blood sugar levels, recent research has shown. The MIND diet, however — which combines elements of the classic Mediterranean and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diets — was specifically designed to fight cognitive decline.
In this episode of In Conversation, Thomas (Tom) Barber, MD, helps us unpick the evidence linking a Mediterranean diet to a longer, healthier life, and offers his own tips on how to make our diets healthier as we continue our journeys through life.
Dr. Barber is a professor of endocrinology, consultant endocrinologist, and obesity expert at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire, the University of Warwick, and Coventry University in the United Kingdom. In 2023, he and his colleagues published a review of the existing evidence discussing the effects of the Mediterranean diet on health and the gut microbiota.
Dr. Barber has previously joined us to lend his expert perspective on the history of insulin therapy, lifestyle changes to reverse prediabetes, and what a person can do to slow down diabetes-related brain aging.
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In April 2024, two nutrition studies made the headlines, emphasizing the critical impact of diet on cardiovascular health.
The first study, which appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on April 8, was conducted by researchers from the Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.
It involved 89 adults who were at risk for type 2 diabetes, and it made a finding that might, at first, sound surprising, namely: That eating plant-based meat substitutes offered no significant benefits to heart health over actual animal meat.
The second study — whose results were presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session at the beginning of April 2024 — was led by experts from Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital in Athens, GA.
It analyzed data from 3,170 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in the United States, all of whom were adults with cardiovascular disease.
This study found that 89% of these consumed more than double the “ideal” allowance of sodium recommended by the American Heart Association, which is 1,500 mg/day.
But why are certain foods, regardless of whether or not they are plant-based, so bad for the heart? How does salt impact the cardiovascular system? And what makes a diet truly heart-healthy?
In summary:
In the era of evidence-based medicine, the Mediterranean diet represents the gold standard in preventive medicine, probably due to the harmonious combination of many elements with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which overwhelm any single nutrient or food item. The whole seems more important than the sum of its parts.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03972-5
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YOUR BIOLOGICAL AGE PREDICTS DEMENTIA AND STROKE REGARDLESS OF YOUR ACTUAL AGE
As we journey through life, the risk of developing chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease and neurological disorders, increases significantly. However, while we all grow older chronologically at the same pace, biologically, our clocks can tick faster or slower. Relying solely on chronological age – the number of years since birth – is inadequate to measure the body’s internal biological age.
This discrepancy has prompted scientists to find ways to determine a person’s biological age. One way is to look at “epigenetic clocks” which consider chemical changes that occur in our DNA as we age. Another approach uses information from medical tests, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels and other physiological measurements.
By using these “biomarkers”, researchers have discovered that when a person’s biological age surpasses their chronological age, it often signifies accelerated cell aging and a higher susceptibility to age-related diseases.
Our new research suggests your biological age, more than the years you’ve lived, may predict your risk of dementia and stroke in the future.
Previous studies have shed light on this association but they were often limited in scale. This has left gaps in our understanding of how biological aging relates to various neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and motor neuron disease.
To bridge this gap, our study, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, examined over 325,000 middle-aged and older British adults. We investigated whether advanced biological age increases the future risks of developing neurological diseases, including dementia, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and motor neuron disease.
To assess biological age, we analyzed 18 biomarkers collected during medical checkups conducted between 2006 and 2010. These included blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol levels, inflammation markers, waist circumference and lung capacity.
We then followed participants for nine years to see who developed neurological diseases. Those with older biological ages at the study’s start had significantly higher risks of dementia and stroke over the next decade – even after considering differences in genetics, sex, income and lifestyle.
Imagine two 60-year-olds enrolled in our study. One had a biological age of 65, the other 60. The one with the more accelerated biological age had a 20% higher risk of dementia and a 40% higher risk of stroke.
Strong association
It is worth noting that while advanced biological age showed a strong association with dementia and stroke, we saw a weaker link with motor neuron disease and even an opposite direction for Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease often exhibits unique characteristics. For instance, although smoking typically accelerates aging, it paradoxically exerts a protective effect against Parkinson’s disease.
Our findings show that biological aging processes probably contribute substantially to dementia and stroke later in life. Together with our previous research showing a significant association between advanced biological age and cancer risks, these results suggest that slowing the body’s internal decline may be key to preventing chronic diseases in late life.
Assessing biological age from routine blood samples could someday become standard practice. Those with accelerated aging could be identified decades before dementia symptoms arise. While currently incurable, early detection provides opportunities for preventive lifestyle changes and close monitoring.
For example, research starts to suggest that biological age may be slowed down or even reversed by lifestyle intervention including exercise, sleep, diet and nutritional supplements.
Replicating our results in diverse groups of people is next step. We also hope to unravel connections between genetic background, biological aging and other major diseases, such as diabetes and heart diseases.
For now, monitoring internal aging processes could empower people to delay cognitive decline, providing hope for a healthier and more fulfilling life in later years.
https://theconversation.com/your-biological-age-predicts-dementia-and-stroke-regardless-of-your-actual-age-new-study-215611
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HIGH-INTENSITY EXERCISE MAY REVERSE NEURODEGENERATION IN PARKINSON’S DISEASE
High-intensity exercise induces brain-protective effects that have the potential to not just slow down, but possibly reverse, the neurodegeneration associated with Parkinson’s disease, a new pilot study suggests.
Prior research has shown that many forms of exercise are linked to improved symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But there has been no evidence that hitting the gym could create changes at the brain level.
Now, a small proof-of-concept study involving 10 patients showed that high-intensity aerobic exercise preserved dopamine-producing neurons, the brain cells that are most vulnerable to destruction in patients with the disease.
In fact, after six months of exercise, the neurons actually had grown healthier and produced stronger dopamine signals. Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells communicate with each other. The researchers published their findings in npj Parkinson’s Disease on February 9, 2025.
“This is the first time imaging has been used to confirm that the biology of the brain in those suffering with Parkinson’s disease is changed by intense exercise,” says Evan D. Morris, PhD, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the paper.
What causes Parkinson’s disease?
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by the misfolding of alpha synuclein protein that is naturally present in our cells. The misfolded protein accumulates within neurons and damages them.
The dopamine-producing cells that are most affected reside in the part of the brain known as the substantia nigra, an area near the base of the brain. As these cells die off, the lack of dopamine creates the physical symptoms of the disease, particularly motor symptoms such as tremors and slowed movement. It’s a gradual progression, and at the time of diagnosis, typically patients have already lost over half of their dopamine-producing neurons.
“By the time patients clinically manifest the typical motor symptoms of Parkinson’s, you can assume that the neurodegenerative process actually started much earlier, maybe a decade or two,” says Sule Tinaz, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and co-principal investigator.
The most common available medication, levodopa, replaces the missing dopamine. While the drug is effective in alleviating motor symptoms, it does not prevent the ongoing neurodegeneration and can cause undesirable side effects with long-term use such as uncontrolled excessive movements [dyskinesia]. There is currently no cure for the disease.
“This is the first time imaging has been used to confirm that the biology of the brain in those suffering with Parkinson’s disease is changed by intense exercise,” says Evan D. Morris, PhD, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the paper.
What causes Parkinson’s disease?
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by the misfolding of alpha synuclein protein that is naturally present in our cells. The misfolded protein accumulates within neurons and damages them.
The dopamine-producing cells that are most affected reside in the part of the brain known as the substantia nigra, an area near the base of the brain. As these cells die off, the lack of dopamine creates the physical symptoms of the disease, particularly motor symptoms such as tremors and slowed movement. It’s a gradual progression, and at the time of diagnosis, typically patients have already lost over half of their dopamine-producing neurons.
“By the time patients clinically manifest the typical motor symptoms of Parkinson’s, you can assume that the neurodegenerative process actually started much earlier, maybe a decade or two,” says Sule Tinaz, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and co-principal investigator.
The most common available medication, levodopa, replaces the missing dopamine. While the drug is effective in alleviating motor symptoms, it does not prevent the ongoing neurodegeneration and can cause undesirable side effects with long-term use such as uncontrolled excessive movements [dyskinesia]. There is currently no cure for the disease.
Exercise plays a vital role in treating Parkinson’s disease
Exercise is an essential component of Parkinson’s disease management. In fact, some gyms offer exercise programs specifically for the condition. “I always tell patients that exercise is a part of their treatment,” says Tinaz. “The same way I prescribe medication, I also prescribe exercise.”
In Connecticut, Michelle Hespeler is the founder of Beat Parkinson’s Today, an evidence-based non-profit exercise program that offers online and in-person classes throughout the state. Hespeler was inspired to create her program after being diagnosed with the disease herself. “She took all of the elements of high-intensity interval training and combined it with the needs of people with Parkinson’s disease,” says Tinaz.
Previously, two well-designed clinical trials have shown that engaging in high-intensity exercise—in which participants reach around 80% to 85% of their age-appropriate maximum heart rate—three times a week for six months is correlated with less severe motor symptoms. “These trials suggested that exercise really is disease-modifying in a clinical sense,” says Tinaz. The Yale team used these clinical trials as a model for its new study.
Using brain imaging to study impact of high-intensity exercise
For their study, the Yale researchers recruited patients who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease for less than four years. At this early stage of their disease, the patients had not yet lost all of their dopamine-producing neurons. All participants initially went through a two-week trial period to ensure they could handle the intensity of the exercise classes before enrolling.
After the trial period, the participants received their first round of brain scans. One was an MRI scan that measured the amount of neuromelanin—a dark pigment found in dopamine-producing neurons—in the substantia nigra. The second scan was a PET scan that measured dopamine transporter (DAT) availability. DAT is a protein that helps the neurons maintain proper dopamine levels.
Ten participants completed a six-month high-intensity exercise program through Hespeler’s Beat Parkinson’s Today program. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the classes took place online. These classes involve High Intensity Functional Intervals [HIFI] designed to keep participants’ heart rates elevated for the majority of the workout.
Participants wore heart rate monitors to ensure they were reaching their target heart rates and other wearables (e.g., a Fitbit) to record their movements. After the six months, the researchers repeated the MRI and PET scans.
High-intensity exercise reverses neurodegeneration
Following the six-month program, brain imaging showed a significant increase in both the neuromelanin and DAT signals in the substantia nigra. This suggests that high-intensity exercise not only slowed down the neurodegenerative process, but also helped the dopaminergic system grow healthier.
“Where we would have ordinarily expected to see a decline in the DAT and neuromelanin signals, we saw an increase,” says Bart de Laat, PhD, associate professor adjunct in psychiatry and the study’s first author. “We had hoped to see that the neurodegeneration would not progress as quickly or stop temporarily, but instead we saw an increase in nine out of 10 people. That was remarkable.”
The study highlights the importance of including an exercise regimen as part of one’s Parkinson’s treatment plan. “The medications we have available are only for symptomatic treatment. They do not change the disease course,” says Tinaz. “But exercise seems to go one step beyond and protect the brain at the neuronal level.”
While this is an exciting finding, additional research will be needed to fully understand the neuroprotective effects of exercise. The team hopes that its work will inspire other scientists to prioritize research into exercise and its disease-modifying potential.
Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurological disease. By 2040, researchers estimate that over 12 million people worldwide will be living with the condition. The new study holds promise that exercise can help mitigate the enormous personal and economic costs the disease poses. “Exercise is accessible to everyone, is relatively cheap, and is safe [if your health care provider approves],” says Tinaz. “If it also has this neuroprotective effect with the potential to reverse the disease course, that is something to celebrate and to study. [You can find more exercises designed for Parkinson's patients online — where you will also find videos on ketogenic diet for Parkinson's. See also the ameliorative, tremor-reducing effects of high-dose B-1 and niacinamide, and intravenous Vitamin C.]
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/high-intensity-exercise-can-reverse-neurodegeneration-in-parkinsons-disease/
ending on beauty:
INHERITANCE
You want to forget me, my father says when I won’t take his cracked bowling ball
— Still rolls!
How would you know? I ask. You can't even lift it anymore.
Same story for the handleless pots he's piled for me—brought on the boat from Hungary! And the lopsided lawn chair he watched the first moon landing on— with you asleep on my lap!
I cave every time, hoping he won’t ask what I caught with his fishing rod—its rusted-stuck reel.
I cannot love these things
the way he does. He yells, Try harder! I didn't love you right away either.
His way of saying he does now. I know. So I counter-attack, since we can only take so much niceness: Really? When did you start?
The way you took care of your mother.
Then he points to a jar of old nails and says, Take that, too.
~ Michael Mark, published in The Southern Review
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