Octopuses have three hearts and copper-based blue blood. More fascinating facts in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpHFnaNcbJ4
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THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
~ William Butler Yeats
Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Isle of Innisfree is indeed a real place. It's a small uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo in western Ireland, a relatively peaceful place where Irish poet William Butler Yeats spent his summers as a child.
Yeats describes the inspiration for the poem coming from a "sudden" memory of his childhood while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888.
W. B. Yeats never actually lived on Innisfree. Nor does anyone else. But the little island does serve as a landmark of 20th Century poetry, nevertheless.
Innisfree, among his early poems, is a favorite. Here, the young man finds a place of escape and natural beauty in the natural environment of a small island – where he can escape the “pavements gray” of city life.
The imagery and important symbols of Innisfree are tough to praise adequately. Imagine the profoundly peaceful life evoked where the bees humming in the glade are the loudest sound heard in the first stanza. In the second stanza, the pastoral visual imagery of the progression from the serene veils of morning and purple glow of noon are enhanced only by the music of crickets and the soft flutter of finches' wings heard at evening.
Only in the final stanza does Yeats reveal that, for him, the Innisfree island is not even a physical location. The entire poem happens really in the “deep heart's core” and is really the expression of the speaker's longing for peace while he stands on the noisy roadway or gray pavement of the city.
Sligo and the Lake Isle of Innisfree are on the Wild Atlantic Way of Ireland.
Lake Isle of Innisfree, evening
https://travelpast50.com/yeats-lake-isle-innisfree-sligo-ireland/
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YEATS AND THE OCCULT IMAGINATION
Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.
William Butler Yeats with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, 1923
When William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939, it may have seemed that his prophecies were coming to pass faster than he had predicted. Yeats spent the last two decades of his life in turmoil, public and private. Throughout most of the 1920s he served in the new Irish Senate. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He flirted with, then largely rejected, fascism at home and abroad, as Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Hitler’s militaristic ambitions grew plainer.
Born in 1865, Yeats grew up in the “Pax Britanica” of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the general feeling was that war in Europe was a thing of the past. But then the First World War, and the Easter Rising, brought Yeats’s mystically and abstractly inclined mind uncomfortably into the present.
Yeats was a strange modernist: an anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with modernity. From 1917 on until the end of his life, he was increasingly preoccupied by the contradictions of the individual—in particular, the artist, individual par excellence—inside the unalterable world of history, where we find ourselves trapped, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” as he wrote in perhaps his grandest and most compelling expression of this theme, the endlessly quoted “The Second Coming.” Now, in 1939, these grand currents of history seemed to be culminating, uncomfortably quickly, in the buildup to the planetary onslaught that was the Second World War.
The first and the shorter of the poem’s two stanzas is far more renowned than the second. Its last six lines in particular resonate:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
One doesn’t have to look far—be it the oceanic drowning of innocence in Gaza, Yemen, Somalia, or America—to recognize that the second coming Yeats warned of, and the “mere anarchy” of inhumanity that heralded it is only picking up speed.
It’s instructive to note how Yeats and W. H. Auden, in his elegy to Yeats, frame the approach of catastrophe. Auden’s vision is of the “intellectual disgrace,” both a symptom and a cause of the irrational “nightmare,” where nations cower in impotence. Its horror remains steadfastly secular, humanist in outlook, tinged with the influence of Marx and Freud, the two great prophets of a twentieth-century understanding of human “evil.” That “evil” was, in fact, something else, to be rationally explained and therefore, perhaps, improved–the repressed unconscious, or the repressed masses.
Yeats’s “widening gyre” and lost “ceremony,” by contrast, are expressions of a highly idiosyncratic and complex personal vision, worked out through defiantly anti-rationalist and anti-modern methods: prophecy, divination, mediums—in a word, magic.
None of Yeats’s continuous blossoming of finer and stranger poetry late in life would have been possible without those methods and without the book that brought them to their peak of articulation, a synthesis of a lifetime spent investigating increasingly unacceptable ways of knowing.
A Vision, published privately in a limited edition of 600 copies in 1925, is often cited, directly or indirectly, but seldom read. It has admirers—great critics, from Yeats’s biographer Richard Ellmann to Harold Bloom—but it seems to remain an embarrassing bafflement in Yeats’s work, with an uncomfortably undeniable importance.
Some knowledge of what it contains is necessary to fully appreciate Yeats’s later output, which culminated in his two great volumes, The Tower and The Winding Stair. Along with “The Second Coming,” Yeats wrote many poems of equal renown, including “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” which appear in these two collections.
A Vision is immensely strange, partly purporting to be a prophetic revelation while subtly and persistently undermining itself; it’s a work of magic and mysticism presented in abstract language, often approaching the tenor of a crank work of pseudo-science. A rationalist systemization of myth, symbol, and metaphor, it borrows from many sources and resembles none.
Yeats worked for nearly a decade toward its first form, published in 1926, and revised it for a further decade until it was republished, hugely altered, in 1937. Perhaps he never regarded it as truly finished—or finishable. The central conflict of the book, as in Yeats’s poetry, engages the necessity of maintaining the small dignity of our humanity in the chaos of uncontrollable events.
One early reviewer, Kerker Quinn, wrote in 1938 that A Vision would be taken as evidence that the poet had “gone unquestionably, though perhaps serviceably, mad.” That acknowledgment, “serviceably,” should give us pause, because for Yeats poetry, and the world that it worked towards, was always the final end.
“You were silly like us,” Auden writes in his tribute; “your gift survived it all.” Yeats’s silliness, for Auden, means his lifelong devotion to the study of the anti-rationalist arts that are modernity’s outcasts; Auden was likely voicing the majority view for those who read and enjoyed Yeats the poet.
Yet to imply that the poetic “gift” survived “despite” these deep preoccupations reveals a powerful misunderstanding—willful or not—on Auden’s part. Yeats remained a great poet not despite his magical investigations but because of them. “The mystical life,” he wrote to a friend, “is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
In his 1901 essay, “Magic,” which serves as a midlife retrospective of his investigations, Yeats offers a statement of his “beliefs” in “the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic.”
For him, magic refers to and relates several things: “the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are;” “the power of creating magical illusions;” and “visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed.” He expresses these alternately in “three doctrines which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices.”
That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
That these memories can be expressed by symbols.
From his earliest days as an apprentice writer in London and Dublin, Yeats was also, as biographer Roy Foster puts it, an “apprentice magus.” He studied a host of approaches to what he termed “nature’s finer forces.” For over twenty years he ascended the ranks of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London and, more briefly, Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; he studied Kabala and Rosicrucianism, Vedanta and meditation; he went through a spiritualist period and attended seances, going from “medium to medium.”
The Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus was important to him, as were later mystics like Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley were foremost influences, prophets of a new consciousness.
Through his early work on uncovering Irish folklore, Yeats developed his concept of the “Anima Mundi,” that “great mind and great memory” of the world referred to in his third magical tenet. These myths, and later the occult practices he sought to learn and perhaps revive, were part of a secret tradition of the supernatural, a common human inheritance of wisdom, where collective experience and its derivatives, ineffable “symbols” of meaning, were stored. This extended to poetics. The word, seen right and true, was magic, too: a great poem illuminated this hidden lamp of common memory in the mind of the reader, whether they were conscious of it or not.
Despite his anti-scientism, Yeats’s omnivorous and contradictory mind was incapable of swallowing anything uncritically. He notes in “Magic” that he quarreled with his close friend, writer-painter and fellow-mystic A.E. (George William Russell), “because I wanted him to examine and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still more because I thought symbolic what he thought real.” Here again the symbol is linked to magic, and therefore to its etymological relative, imagination, which is the poet’s domain.
This may help us see A Vision in a clearer light, as does the story of how it came to be written—or, rather, received. In 1917, Yeats, then past fifty, had at last gotten married to Georgie Hyde-Lees, twenty-seven years his junior. On their honeymoon, Yeats began brooding, and, largely to distract her husband from his instantaneous doubts about the marriage, George (as Yeats called her) began automatic writing.
Unsurprisingly, her messages contained unsubtle hints that he had chosen the right wife. Yeats was captivated. Then something else happened. As George later told friends and biographers including Richard Ellmann, she felt her hand “seized by a superior power.” In Ellmann’s account, her “pencil began to write sentences which she had never intended or thought, which seemed to come as from another world.”
Encouraged by her husband, George wrote for hours, usually daily, a process which eventually amassed around 3,600 pages. Over several years Yeats then worked to systematize these masses of automatic fragments, with guidance from what he called “my instructors.”
The omni-spiritual Yeats had always had a syncretic bent, and at last, he was presented with the chance to follow the lead of his beloved Blake, who asserted: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” To this vast and mad storehouse, he was bringing a lifetime’s study—A Vision is a synthesis, therefore, of the personal and the beyond, the beyond that Yeats had been unconsciously waiting for, and to which George allowed him access. “Truths without father came,” he writes, “truths that no book / Of all the uncounted books that I have read, / Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot.”
This synthesis of the subjective and the objective is the unifying factor of A Vision. The main body of the text is in five books, moving through analyses of the eternal laws of human personality, the development of the soul through life and after death, and the mirroring of these processes in the movements of history. Though often complex, confusing, contradictory, and perhaps ultimately unresolvable, Yeats’s “system” is unified by symbols, which are represented visually both in diagram form and in illustrations by Edmund Dulac.
The principal symbol is the title Yeats gives to one of the five sections: “The Great Wheel.” Organized according to the movement of the lunar month—maybe humankind’s oldest extrapolated symbology of any kind—the Wheel is divided into twenty-eight “phases”: each phase is a different stage of personality, through which each individual soul moves in its many reincarnations in a closed, circular journey.
Phase One, which mirrors the dark of the moon, symbolizes complete unity and potential, or “plasticity,” and Yeats dubs it and the other phases up to Phase Fifteen to be governed by the “primary.” This principle is related to ideas of the collective, the unifying, the given, and passivity, or in Yeats’s words, “that which serves.” It begins at Phase One in the essential ground or primordial dark out of which all springs and into which all must return. The subjective, or “antithetical,” is the primary’s opposing force, or motion, and it’s the realm of action in human life: subjective, individuating, differentiating, pluralist.
Superimposed on the lunar wheel image is the other major symbol: the gyres. It’s easiest to picture them in a kind of mental filmic projection: two interlocked cones, spinning, with the end-point of each meeting at a common center-point at the base. In a cross-section diagram, this looks like two concentric circles, one expanding while the other contracts, until at some point the reverse begins. “I can see them like jelly fish in clear water,” Yeats writes. He had finally found the symbol to express his own self-contradictory, opposite-clashing nature, the spring of all his poetry and thought. “[P]assion is conflict,” he wrote in a diary, “consciousness is conflict.”
To simplify much of Yeats’s long, knotty, sometimes unreadable explanations, these two symbols, with diagrams, examples, and counterexamples, form the basis of “the system.” It’s a different vision of dialectic than we find in Hegel or Marx, yet it is a dialectic: the gyre is the mechanism by which the wheel’s circle—and we, inside it—complete revolutions of the soul. The goal of life, then, is to attain self-understanding, which means to grasp which of the “phases” one is in during the incarnation in which we happen to find ourselves, and to live, in Yeats’s oft-repeated phrase, “according” to it.
Yeats illustrates the different phases with characteristic examples. Most of the great artists (Yeats’s archetypes are all of men and of “man”) fall somewhere between the two poles. Keats, Blake, Dante, and Yeats himself all fall into phases close to Phase Fifteen, the most perfectly human (hence, unattainable) point. Here, subjective “thought,” objective “will,” personalized “effort,” and idealized “attainment” are indistinguishable. Yeats calls this “a phase of complete beauty,” that is, humanized beauty. Though not a Christian, he can’t associate this phase with any person besides the figure of Jesus.
A Vision, for all its anti-modern methods, has a modern creed: life is about completeness of experience and learning what lessons we can, because human life is inherently “subjective”—it’s about differentiating ourselves from our surroundings, about creating oneself, and creating things. For all its throwback qualities, Yeats’s system seems to grow out of a curiously modern condition—the sense that we are irrevocably fallen—yet, in the words of Samuel Beckett, we will “go on.”
A Vision’s final two sections, full of comically complex divisions and subdivisions of time-cycles, discuss the applications of the system to history. To condense this to a nub of significance, we return to “The Second Coming”—its second stanza, of which the final line is the most quoted:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In accordance with A Vision’s final essay on history, titled “Dove or Swan,” what Yeats describes here is the birth of a new historical movement—in his reckoning, these grand revolutions come round every two thousand years, a reversal in the eternally gyring movement of opposites.
Each is marked by the birth of a symbolic god—such as the first coming of Christ, the “victim,” a peaceful, passive, unifying, and self-negating “dove.” As he approached the new millennium, Yeats saw the next cycle approaching, which would be replaced by an antithetical god, some kind of “teacher,” an active and subjectivizing force embodied by the “swan,” which moves towards the full Moon.
This image, this prophecy, is deeply ambiguous: Yeats has seen enough of how history looks on the ground to not be so naïve, and that “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” haunts us still.
Just how seriously this is all to be taken, how much Yeats really believed everything he put down in A Vision, is a vexing question. When he at first offered “to spend what remained of life” on solving their mysterious messages, he received this response from his tutelary spirits: “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” A Vision isn’t for the literal-minded reader, and any attempt at “cracking” its lessons will lead only to infinite regress, since, as Yeats always reminds us, consciousness is contradiction—never at rest.
Yeats wrote that everything in A Vision was “all a myth”. But he did not mean “myth” as our time has come to digest and contain that word, as something believed, but not actual, because not factual. Myth for Yeats “has something sensuous and concrete about it like a house or a person that stirs belief because it stirs affection.” Myth, in this sense, is our means of engagement, of love, with reality in the tallest, widest, most massive, and most luminous sense–or “thinking big” as the late philosopher William Irwin Thompson put it–something which Yeats always sensed modernity moving to extinguish.
Whatever we may see in A Vision, it is certainly the clearest evidence of the depth of Yeats’s immersion in magic imaginings: as for the results, we have only to feel the magic in those poems. We might then consider whether Yeats was on to something useful––our capacity to consciously and conflictedly do the endless work of making reality cohere, all while staying awake enough to remember that it’s all in our heads. In April 1924, Yeats wrote to his book’s illustrator Dulac, “I do not know what my book will be to others—nothing perhaps. To me it means a last act of defense against the chaos of the world.”
https://daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-the-occult-imagination/
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WHY THE SOVIET UNION FAILED TO LAND ON THE MOON
Here is the secret that was kept hidden behind the Iron Curtain for twenty years: The Soviet Union did attempt to send a crew to the Moon. They tried desperately.
They failed not because of a lack of ambition, but because of a massive explosion that obliterated their launch pad—and their hopes—just 17 days before Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface.
"Onward to the stars! Soviet Cosmos"
While the United States consolidated its efforts under NASA, a centralized civilian agency, the Soviet space program was a fractured collection of rival "Design Bureaus." The Soviets didn't have a single space program; they had several warring programs competing for the same limited budget.
To understand why they failed, you have to look at the beast they built to take them there: the N1 rocket.
The N1 was the Soviet equivalent of the American Saturn V. It was a staggering feat of engineering, standing over 300 feet tall. But inside the metal skin, the two rockets couldn't have been more different, and those differences sealed the Soviet fate.
1. The Engine Problem
The Americans solved the heavy-lift problem by building massive, powerful engines. The Saturn V first stage used just five F-1 engines. They were giants.
The Soviets, however, lacked the manufacturing capability to cast the combustion chambers for engines that large. Their leading engine designer, Valentin Glushko, refused to work with the head of the space program, Sergei Korolev, due to a bitter personal feud and disagreements over fuel types.
Forced to look elsewhere, Korolev used smaller jet-engine designs. To get enough thrust to lift the massive lunar payload, the N1 didn't use five engines; it used 30 engines arranged in a ring on the bottom of the first stage.
2. The Plumbing Nightmare
Synchronizing 30 rocket engines is a nightmare of fluid dynamics and vibration. The sheer complexity of the plumbing required to feed fuel and oxidizer to 30 engines simultaneously created insurmountable instability. If one engine sputtered or shut down, the thrust would become asymmetrical, and the rocket would spin out of control.
To manage this, the Soviets developed an automated control system called KORD. It was supposed to detect a failing engine and instantly shut down the corresponding engine on the opposite side to balance the thrust. In theory, it was brilliant. In practice, the vibrations of launch tore the delicate electronics apart.
3. The Gamble on Testing
This was the fatal error. NASA spent billions building static test stands to fire the Saturn V first stage on the ground, bolted down, to ensure it worked before they ever tried to fly it.
The Soviets, running out of money and racing against the clock, skipped this step. They decided to test the rocket "all-up" during actual launches.
The results were catastrophic:
Launch 1: The rocket lasted 69 seconds before vibrations ruptured a fuel line.
Launch 2 (July 3, 1969): A loose bolt was ingested into an oxygen pump just seconds after lift-off. The rocket fell back onto the launch pad with a full load of fuel. The resulting blast was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history. It vaporized the launch complex and shattered windows 25 miles away.
The United States landed on the Moon two weeks later.
The Soviets tried two more times in the early 1970s, but both rockets disintegrated during ascent. By 1974, the program was cancelled. The Soviet leadership, unwilling to admit defeat, ordered the destruction of all N1 hardware and blueprints. They then pivoted their propaganda, claiming they had never intended to go to the Moon at all and were interested only in robotic rovers and space stations.
The Soviet Moonlander
The world believed that lie for decades, unaware that the shattered remains of their attempt were buried under the concrete of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. ~ Kevin Miller, Quora
Thierry:
“due to a bitter personal feud” Glushko sent him for 10 years to the Gulag. It permanently damaged his health, and Korolev died in 1966 because of it (or at least related to it). On the other hand Glushko was probably tortured into giving his name.
This was the “good old times” in USSR…
Roberto de Leon:
It didn’t help Soviet efforts that, prior to the first N1 test firing, their Chief Engineer died.
Korolev went to the hospital for what was supposed to be routine surgery — removal of several colon polyps. Once started, however, the surgeon encountered one more.
He could have ended the operation, saving that last lesion for later, but decided to chance it anyway — which proved to be fatal, as it extended beyond the safe limits of anesthesia.
Korolev’s heart could not take it. Resuscitation was attempted, but the mask could not make a snug fit, probably due to the jaw having been broken and poorly set during the patient’s incarceration in Siberia.
In the end, even decisions made by Stalin doomed the Soviet space program.
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IS MORAL INJURY BEHIND THE RISE IN SUICIDES AMONG ISRAELI SOLDIERS?
The impact of killing may rouse identity conflict and political disillusionment.
High-stakes roles involving ethical dilemmas where no option feels right can result in moral injury.
Veterans cite the breakdown of an absolutist, us-versus-them mindset as a major catalyst for moral injury.
Ethnonationalist beliefs, along with the stigma of early discharge and whistleblowing, may isolate veterans.
Suicides among the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have reportedly hit a 13-year high. As of July 2025, at least 54 soldiers have died by suicide since the start of the Israel-Hamas War on October 7, 2023. This includes 16 suicides in 2025, 21 in 2024, and 17 in 2023—compared to 14 in 2022 and 11 in 2021.
Some thought leaders posit that this crisis is a byproduct of nationalistic policy choices: Israel seemingly prioritizing war and phased annexation over ceasefire and hostage negotiations. Without the scale of assaults on Gaza, for example, it's been estimated that 300,000 reservists would not have been re-drafted.
Among reporters and scholars who share this stance, "moral injury" has emerged as a focal point in a discourse about the systemic roots of suicides within the IDF. Moral injury describes when “individuals in high-stakes roles must navigate wrenching ethical dilemmas where no option feels right, leaving lasting scars on conscience and well-being.”
Amidst the early era of COVID, for example, frontline workers grappled with moral dilemmas like which patients to prioritize for ventilators, whether to continue caring for patients when supplies of protective equipment dwindled, and how to protect their families.
This year, the American Psychiatric Association formally recognized moral injury, which, when untreated in workers in high-stress, service-oriented occupations, can correlate with suicidality.
DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old Israeli father of four, died by suicide in June 2024. After 186 days of operating a 62-ton bulldozer in Gaza, Mizrahi returned to Israel and received counseling for anger episodes, insomnia, panic attacks, PTSD, and social withdrawal.
Yet treatment was unhelpful since, as Mizrahi’s sister shared in an interview with CNN, “He always said no one will understand what I saw.” His mother confirmed this alleged sense of alienation, adding, “They (soldiers) said the war was so different. They saw things that were never seen in Israel.”
Mizrahi’s mother also wondered if he had murdered civilians, sharing, “He saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. (But) we don’t teach our children to do things like this… so, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a shock for him.”
That may very well be true. According to Guy Zaken, Mizrahi’s friend and co-driver of the bulldozer, “We saw very, very, very difficult things. Things that are difficult to accept.” Zaken told CNN that he is now a vegetarian because the smell of meat gives him flashbacks from bulldozing.
Combat psychology research links the impact of killing to suicidality. Yet, perhaps more importantly, a major driver of distress among veterans who have killed civilians is ordinary citizens’ inability to grasp the moral gravity of feeling like a murderer, on top of the stigmatization of such a taboo self-disclosure.
Genocide denialism may further isolate this subgroup of IDF veterans. For example, terms like “Gazawood” and “Pallywood”—which imply that Arab Palestinians have staged photos and videos of suffering in Gaza—are often used by pro-Israel social media accounts. Nakba denialism also remains prevalent.
Dr. Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, a Jewish psychologist, coined the term “complex implication” to describe how “history often implicates us in networks of harm, even as we carry our own traumas—as humans, we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
Avoidance of this fact maps onto research linking stress to cognitive dissonance.
So, on one hand, the impact of killing may feel contradictory to soldiers' religious socialization; on the other, disaffiliating from the IDF may feel antithetical to political socialization for patriotic Israelis.
Some veterans claim that the IDF coerced them to act using threatening ultimatums, and, notably, propaganda that trafficked in anti-Arab racism. Yet reports indicate that only 25 percent of detained Gazans have been militants, and 83 percent of the more than 67,000 slain Gazans were civilians.
Dr. Seyda Eruyar, a trauma psychologist and Turkish professor, posited that some soldiers may initially cope with the guilt of killing civilians by dehumanizing them, an action that could allow them to emotionally detach from their actions. “But eventually, that defense breaks down, leaving soldiers with psychological collapse, identity conflict, and in some cases, political disillusionment,” she adds.
This breakdown of an absolutist, us-versus-them mindset that “othered” Arab Palestinians is exactly what some veterans pinpoint as the catalyst of moral injury related to IDF disaffiliation. One veteran, in an interview with Sky News, described feeling misled, claiming, “When you hear your government and your commanders telling things that are not true, you start thinking, are they lying to me also?”
Another shared with Haaretz, "I did it because I thought I was protecting my friends and my family, but it was a mistake. I don't believe the officers, I don't believe the government. I just want to get out of the army and start my life. Actually, I don’t know if I’ll succeed—is that even possible?”
It's true that healing can feel inaccessible when authorities appear to punish dissenters and discredit counter-narratives. In Israel, both conscientious objectors and pacifist soldiers have faced blowback and, in some cases, jail time. And notably, a poll reported by Haaretz in June of this year found that 82 percent of 1,005 Israelis surveyed support the IDF expelling Arabs from Gaza.
Israeli soldier at the Wailing Wall
Fortunately, the recent ceasefire may attenuate the force of structural ideologies that attempt to justify the human rights violations that are likely driving moral injury among IDF soldiers. Yet these structural worldviews are still intact psychologically, despite the ceasefire.
Thus, mental health advocates and suicidologists must remember that suicides within the IDF have not been isolated tragedies, Dr. Eruyar argues, but instead “reflect a broader systemic failure—one that fails to protect both civilians and soldiers from ethical collapse.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-cultural-competence/202510/is-moral-injury-behind-the-rise-in-suicides-among-israeli
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RUSSIA AND UKRAINE: THE PAST VS THE FUTURE
The war in Ukraine stopped being just a war between imperial Russia and independent Ukraine a while ago. It is now one of the issues that is a litmus test of separation in the mentality: the past vs. the future.
You know that the past can’t win against the future.
Anyone backing the past will lose.
Ukraine is fighting for her future.
Russia is fighting to resurrect the past.
Russia cannot win.
On February 28 last year that another significant event took place.
To me, it was the moment of Zelensky’s moral triumph—and the immediate global reaction confirmed it. It was there and then that I knew that Ukraine will survive, no matter what.
Peace in Ukraine can only arrive when Russia withdraws its troops in full (including Donbas and Crimea). Occupation isn’t “peace.”
Russia and Ukraine might sign a ceasefire agreement in the near future. It will not hold, no matter how carefully designed.
The final outcome can be only Russia out of Ukraine completely—or disappearance of Ukraine as an independent state.
I cannot see any possible future in which Russia wins this fight.
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WHY DOESN'T PUTIN WANT TO BURY LENIN?
Lenin’s dead body on public display smack in the middle of Russian capital has a profound symbolism. To throw him out may trigger some political tectonics with far-reaching consequences no one can predict.
Consider the following:
The towers of Kremlin are adorned with Communist red stars. The same red stars serve as the insignia of our military—the one that defeated Nazi Germany. The music of our national anthem is from the Communist era. Our secret police was founded by Lenin’s henchmen. If we throw out Lenin’s mummy, do we do the same with the elements of statehood he bequeathed to us?
Right behind the Mausoleum, there are dozens of graves of Communist luminaries. Why do we throw out Lenin, but keep Stalin and the rest of them?
Side by side with Communists are buried true heroes, like the first man in space Yuri Gagarin. If we start throwing out Stalin and other Communists, where is the line between servants of the brutal regime and people who really deserve our memory and respect?
The current generations of Russians are around exactly because several decades back millions of our ancestors killed or exiled millions of other Russians in the name of Communism. If the Civil War and the whole calamity afterward had played out differently, this land would have been populated by totally different men and women. Those people who won this land for us, don’t they deserve a modicum of our gratitude—even though we don’t share their convictions?
President Putin is acutely aware of these factors. Putin is an extremely cautious politician, who hates doing things that may make him unpopular. For many in the old generation, his most faithful electorate, Lenin’s body in the Kremlin is an important symbol of stability and continuity. Even with the servile Communist party of the Russian Federation in his pocket, Putin doesn’t want to pick the fight he doesn’t need, at the risk of alienating people who have trust in him.
“Don’t rock the boat” is the mantra of Putin’s internal policy ever since the mid-2000s. Getting rid of Lenin’s body runs totally counter to that. Besides, the Chinese have no problems with Mao’s body in the center of Beijing—and look how successful they have been!
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In the beginning, there were two immediate reasons to preserve the body. The Party needed to keep Lenin presentable for a long time in order to allow people from all over the country to travel to Moscow and say goodbye to the dead.
Also, some dreamers expected to develop a resurrection technology in the near future, so they wanted an option to resurrect Lenin. People had a lot of faith in technology and science at the time.
Later, Lenin’s body became the cornerstone of the Soviet Communist “religion” created to replace traditional religions in the minds of Soviet people who were not smart enough and not educated enough to comprehend the “scientific atheism” promoted by the Communist ideologues. Of course, it wasn’t officially called “Soviet religion” (it had no official name), but it obviously borrowed a lot of ideas from the Orthodox Christianity, including the worship of saintly relics.
Also, having Lenin presented for the viewing was protection from possible impostors. Political impostors were quite popular in Russian history, so that was a real concern when the Soviet system was still in its infancy'.
Beobachter:
To win time. Let me explain. Almost everyone agrees that sooner or later, the mummy will be removed from the Red Square to a cemetery. On the other hand, such a move would cause heart attacks from Lenin’s supporters who are mostly very old. The next generation will bury the mummy without any discomfort.
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During the Putin era, the official ideology tries to glorify both the Russian Empire and the USSR (which results in some unlikely monuments and posters combining both Czarist and Communist figures). The support base for keeping Lenin in his Mausoleum may be shrinking, but it’s not negligible — and they vote. (A 2013 poll indicated that the percentage of the population in favor of Lenin’s staying in the Mausoleum had dropped to 25% : Lenin's embalmed corpse edges nearer the exit of his Red Square mausoleum).
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The way that modern Russia has metabolized and reflected on its communist past is very different from how Germany has done with Nazism — in fact the display of Nazi symbolism is illegal. In Russia, according to numerous polls that are easy to reference on any search engine, more than half of the population views the communist period in generally positive ways. Communist symbolism in Russia has largely been subsumed, re-framed, and re-contextualized to represent Russian patriotism from the war-time period and beyond. ~ various posts on Quora
Oriana:
A modern mummy is pretty amazing. I’m in favor of keeping Lenin preserved as a historical exhibit. If I were to visit Moscow, the first place I’d want to see is Lenin’s Mausoleum — out of sheer curiosity.
As for the ideological wars of the past, more and more people seem to agree that a mixed system is best: wealth-creating capitalism with a robust social safety net. The only people going hungry should be those on a weight loss diet.
McFish:
A great majority of Russians never believed in Communism. They didn't even know what it was. That is why Lenin had no choice but to create a vanguard party dictatorship which would ultimately lead the socialist experiment in Russia to disaster. When the USSR fell Russia went right back to third world primitivism post haste.
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BACHELOR’S AND MASTER’S DEGREES WILL BE CANCELED IN RUSSIA IN THE NEW ACADEMIC YEAR
Russian authorities have been pushing high school students to choose trade schools over universities because Putin has sent every plumber and electrician to the trenches where they got promptly eliminated from the work force.
Coercion hasn’t worked, so move on to what they love to do best: leave those peasants no choice.
No more BAs and Masters degrees. They have been canceled. Either you go to a trade school after eighth grade or if you’re Putin’s daughter or oligarch’s son you go straight to earning a PhD. Russia will be once again the nation of tradesmen and academicians.
Another demographic that has been a perfect scapegoat for social transformation into a two-tier society are young women. Authorities blame them for everything from failure to win SMO in Ukraine to bad economic data.
Deputy Milonov accused Russian women of being greedy and suffering from inner emptiness. Remember the golden rule: every accusation is a confession. You have just learned that Deputy Milonov is greedy but all that wealth makes him feel empty inside.
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WHY STRADIVARIUS VIOLINS SOUND SO SPECIAL
The most compelling explanation for the unique sound of a Stradivarius lies not in a secret technique Antonio Stradivari possessed, but in a global climatic event he had to endure.
Between 1645 and 1715, Europe experienced a phenomenon known as the Maunder Minimum. This was a period of drastically reduced solar activity that coincided with the "Little Ice Age." Temperatures plummeted, and winters were brutal.
This climatic anomaly is likely the single biggest factor in the "Stradivarius Sound.”
The Wood of the Little Ice Age
Violins are typically made from spruce (for the top plate) and maple (for the back and ribs). The spruce used by Stradivari grew in the Italian Alps during those freezing decades. Because of the long winters and cool summers, the trees grew incredibly slowly.
In modern trees, you see wide growth rings (indicating rapid summer growth) and narrow dark rings (winter growth). The spruce from the Maunder Minimum had incredibly narrow, uniform growth rings. This resulted in wood with an abnormally high stiffness-to-density ratio.
This dense, consistent wood conducts sound waves differently than the wood available to modern luthiers. Even if a modern maker buys the most expensive European spruce today, that tree grew in the warmer 20th and 21st centuries. To replicate Stradivari's material, you would need wood from trees that grew during a mini-ice age.
The "Worm" Treatment
For centuries, luthiers suspected the secret was in the varnish—the shiny outer coat. However, modern chemical analysis suggests the "secret" was actually applied before the varnish.
Stradivari needed to protect his instruments from wood-eating worms and fungi common in Cremona. Research by biochemist Joseph Nagyvary has revealed that the wood was soaked in a chemical cocktail containing borax, zinc, copper, and alum.
This wasn't done for acoustics; it was done for pest control. However, these mineral salts inadvertently cross-linked the wood fibers and hemicellulose. Over 300 years, this chemical bonding effectively "petrified" the wood slightly, altering its resonance and filtering out certain dampening frequencies.
The Myth of the Unreplicable Sound
The premise that Stradivarius violins are acoustically superior to top-tier modern instruments has been largely debunked by psychoacoustics.
In 2010 and 2012, researchers conducted famous double-blind tests in Indianapolis and Paris. They gathered world-class violin soloists and gave them a mix of Stradivari/Guarneri violins (worth millions) and high-quality new violins (worth roughly $30,000). The soloists wore welding goggles to ensure they couldn't identify the instruments by sight or age-related wear.
The results were shocking to the music world:
The soloists could not distinguish the "Old Italian" violins from the new ones at better than chance levels.
When asked to choose their favorite instrument to take on a hypothetical tour, the majority chose a modern violin.
The "projection" (how well the sound carries to the back of a hall) was actually tested to be better in the modern instruments.t
The Psychoacoustic Factor
So, why do we still believe the Stradivarius is unreplicable? Part of it is survivorship bias. Stradivari made about 1,100 instruments; only the best 650 or so survive. We have forgotten the bad ones.
Furthermore, when a soloist picks up a Stradivarius, they are holding history. They know the price tag is $10 million. They know it was played by virtuosos for three centuries. This psychological weight changes how they play the instrument and how the audience listens to it. We hear a "golden distinctive tone" because we expect to hear it.
Stradivari was undeniably a genius of geometry and craftsmanship, and he used wood that literally does not exist in the modern lumber market. But the "magic" that makes them impossible to beat is likely in the mind of the listener, not the hands of the maker. ~ Kevin Miller, Quora
MARRIAGE CONTRACT, 310 BC
A very interesting marriage contract between a Greek couple dated to 310 BC. in Ptolemaic Egypt. Notable are the details of the contract, very close to a modern one and the legal equality of the couple.
“The seventh year of the reign of Alexander, son of Alexander, the fourteenth year of the satrapy of Ptolemy, in the month of Dios (the Octomber in ancient Macedonian calendar).
Marriage contract between Heracleides and Demetria. Heracleides takes as legitimate wife Demetria of Cos, daughter of Leptines of Cos and of her mother Philotis, both spouses being of free birth. She brings (as dowry) clothing and jewelry to the value of 1000 drachmas.
Heracleides, for his part, must provide Demetria with everything that is appropriate for a free woman, and they shall live in the place which shall seem best according to the common decision of Leptines and Heracleides.
If Demetria is found to have behaved shamefully towards her husband Heracleides, she shall forfeit her entire dowry; but Heracleides must prove everything he alleges against Demetria in the presence of three witnesses recognized by both spouses. It is also not permitted for Heracleides to bring another woman into the house to the detriment of Demetria, nor to have children by another woman, nor to mistreat Demetria under any pretext.
If Heracleides is caught committing any of the acts mentioned, and Demetria proves it in the presence of three witnesses recognized by both spouses, Heracleides must return to Demetria the dowry of 1000 drachmas that she brought, and in addition pay a fine of 1000 drachmas of silver coin bearing the effigy of Alexander. Demetria and those who assist her in her affairs shall have the right of execution, as if arising from a judicial decision, in accordance with the law, on the person of Heracleides and on all his property, both on land and on sea.
This contract shall be valid in every respect, wherever Heracleides may produce it against Demetria, or Demetria and those who assist her in her affairs may produce it against Heracleides, as if the mutual agreement had been concluded at that very place. Heracleides and Demetria shall each have the right to keep a copy of the contract and to produce it against the other. Witnesses: Cleon of Gela, Anticrates of Temnos, Lysis of Temnos, Dionysos of Temnos, Aristomachos of Cyrene, Aristodicos of Cos.”
Located in the National Museum of Berlin, where there is a valuable collection of similar contracts in papyrus material. ~ Eleftherios Tarlantezos, Quora
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"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.
"Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping” ~ Field and Stream, 1959
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THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE
'She was a beacon of light in a dark chapter in history': Ann Lee, the 1700s Christian leader who shocked America.
How did a charismatic but impoverished British woman become the leader of the progressive religious sect known as "the Shakers" – taking it to America and inspiring thousands to follow her?
The 18th-Century Christian sect known as the Shakers is best known today for its influential contributions to furniture, design, and architecture. What is less well known is how incredibly radical the Shakers were. Way ahead of their time, they espoused gender parity, communalism, pacifism and sustainability. They also pioneered social services in America, provided shelter to abused women, and freed enslaved African Americans. And then there was their insistence on celibacy and the abolition of marriage.
Even today, the Shakers' ideals seem daring – and many of them can be traced back to the religious movement's unlikely leader, British-born Ann Lee. She was an illiterate woman who grew up in poverty, and yet she convinced thousands to follow her teachings. How did she do it?
While she left behind no writings, testimonies from her followers describe her as an enormously charismatic and persuasive figure. "All the accounts of [Lee] speak about this fierce dedication to [her cause]," says film-maker Mona Fastvold.
Now Fastvold has co-written and directed a historical musical, The Testament of Ann Lee, which stars Amanda Seyfried as Lee. Described by Fastvold as a "speculative retelling" of Lee's story, the film charts the life of the charismatic figure, from her impoverished childhood in Manchester, England, to becoming leader of the Shakers and taking the movement to America, to her death at the age of 48.
Lee's progressive ideals intrigued Fastvold from the beginning. "I was just truly fascinated that there was this woman with these radical ideas and that it was part of American history," Fastvold tells the BBC.
Amanda Seyfried stars as Lee in Mona Fastvold's historical musical, The Testament of Ann Lee
Born in 1736 in Manchester, the second of eight children, Ann Lee had no formal education. After several jobs, including a stint in a textile factory, at 22 Lee joined an English sect called the Wardley Society. Nicknamed "the Shaking Quakers" for their ecstatic dancing and singing during worship, the group later became known as "The Shakers". A Protestant group, the Shakers believed the second coming of Christ would be in female form, and that Lee embodied this second coming. They also believed that men and women share the same responsibilities to each other and the world.
In 1762, Lee married Abraham Standerin, a blacksmith. They had four children, all of whom died in infancy. Following the death of her fourth child, Lee became more active in the Wardley Society. As Lee's involvement increased, the Shakers became more fervent and began attacking rival church services. Lee believed the people of Manchester were being corrupted by the Church of England, and at one point referred to the Church of England as damned.
In 1770, Lee was imprisoned for 30 days in Manchester for disrupting another church service. While incarcerated, Lee had a premonition that celibacy was the key to purity and would become the Shakers' cornerstone.
Four years later, Lee had another premonition that she was to establish the sect in America. On 10 May 1774, Lee and a small group of followers, including her brother, William Lee, and her husband, sailed from Liverpool to New York. Two years later, the Shakers established a community in Niskayuna, near Albany.
Norm-breaking beliefs
When Lee and her supporters arrived in America, which was on the precipice of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), their staunch pacifist stance soon aroused suspicion and controversy. Lee was accused of being a British spy, and she was imprisoned when she refused to take an oath of loyalty to New York State. Claiming that such an act contradicted her beliefs, Lee spent months in prison, until Governor George Clinton sought her release. Lee and other Shakers were also harassed and attacked by mobs for their beliefs.
Lee died in 1784, 10 years after arriving in America. Some believe injuries she sustained from being beaten contributed to her death. Yet, long after she died, the influence of "Mother Ann", as she was called by followers, continued to grow. By 1850, there were roughly 5,000 Shakers in the US.
One of Lee's defining characteristics was her norm-breaking belief in gender and social equality. "All were seen as brothers and sisters to all," says Elizabeth De Wolfe, professor of history, University of New England, and author of Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary M Dyer's Anti-Shaker Campaign.
"Rethinking family structures and societal structure and creating this utopia where there's a whole new way of living together and coexisting… [Lee] had to be come up with something drastic to redefine that. Brother and sister are equal; husband and wife are not," Fastvold says. Yet, in the years after Lee's leadership, the Shakers maintained some traditional gender divisions. "Both within and between Shaker communities there was a hierarchy. The leadership and decision-making structure was hierarchical," says De Wolfe.
As Fastvold points out, Lee lived in a patriarchal society, where the abhorrent treatment of women was commonplace. "Obviously, being a woman in this period in history sucked," Fastvold says. "That's just how it is. You had zero autonomy. You were considered your husband's property; you were expected to give birth to 10 children, 14 children. My great-grandmother had 14 children. Basically, your purpose was to bear children.”
CELIBACY AND PACIFISM
One of Lee's most controversial rules was her strict insistence on celibacy, believing as she did that sex was the root of all evil. Lee adopted celibacy "to live the life of Christ", De Wolfe says. "As it was believed that Christ was celibate, so too were the Shakers." It has been suggested that Lee's pivot towards celibacy was induced by her harrowing childbirths and the tragic loss of her children. "[Losing four of her children] surely increased her personal sense that sex was not a holy act that brought peace and joy, but one that resulted in suffering and sorrow," says Kathryn Reklis, assistant professor of modern Protestant theology at Fordham University.
Director Mona Fastvold was partly inspired to make the film by learning of Ann Lee's unwavering, radical ideas
Yet Fastvold believes that Lee's aversion to sex partly originated from her traumatic upbringing. In an early scene, her film depicts Lee witnessing her parents having sexual relations and confronting her father. "It's been referred to in [the Shakers’ testimonies] that she had this aversion towards what they call 'fleshly cohabitation' since her earliest youth," says Fastvold.
Another of the Shakers' major tenets was pacifism, a principle that was incredibly contentious in America. "They were such dedicated pacifists; that was very important to them," Fastvold says. "When [the Shakers] were pressured to partake in the Revolutionary War, [Lee] said, 'Absolutely not. We cannot harm anyone.' Which was also really radical at the time."
And some historians argue that Lee's radical beliefs meant that she was an early proponent of feminism. "I would say [Lee was] one of the [earliest feminists]," says Fastvold. "I'm sure there are many others we don't know about.”
Long after she died, the influence of "Mother Ann" continued to grow. By 1850, there were roughly 5,000 Shakers in the US.
Throughout her life, Lee remained committed to her principles, despite being attacked, beaten, accused of being a witch, and imprisoned. "[There are] multiple quotes [of Lee] saying, 'I don't care if you take my life. It doesn't matter. I will never compromise on any of this,'" Fastvold says.
While the Shaker movement had thousands of followers at its peak, there are only three Shakers in the US today. The third Shaker, a woman from Maine, joined the sect in 2025.
Yet, Fastvold says she believes Lee is still deeply relevant today. "[Shakers] were the first people who provided social services in America. It was a place for women who were abused or hurt to seek shelter. It was a place they took care of orphan children. It was a place where you could bring your elders to be cared for. They provided all these services before there was a structure for it here.”
Fastvold hopes the film brings attention to a forgotten figure who fought for equality. "The legacy that we knew before telling this story is truly in the design," says Fastvold. "That's what we know in America, internationally, the Shaker design. But [Lee's] true legacy is all of these ideas around equality and community. I think [these ideas] really speak to now.
"[Lee] was this beacon of light that existed [in a] chapter in American history that was quite dark.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260128-the-forgotten-story-of-18th-century-radical-ann-lee
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A CITY CAST IN CONCRETE, TRAPPED UNDER UNBEARABLE HEAT
Unchecked development has turned Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo into an unlivable urban nightmare. But solutions exist to lift it out of climate catastrophe.
Sri Lanka is an island, 7.8731°N, 80.7718°E — that is to say, just below India, just above the equator. There are mountains, rainforests, beaches, ancient ruins, and — before we turn into a travel brochure — enough problems to last several lifetimes.
One of these problems is Colombo.
On the surface, Colombo is a good pitch. It’s a small city, roughly 38 square kilometers. It comes with a beach and a port. It has the most wealth and best infrastructure in the country. The weather is warm all year round, the food ranges between dirt cheap and pretentiously overpriced, and . . . you’re now picturing a sort of semi-idyllic tropical paradise where business deals are struck in a verandah overlooking the sea.
To those more familiar with it, Colombo is a baking patch of asphalt and concrete, staring out with drying eyes at an indifferent sea. It’s a tropical paradise to those who can afford to live in hotels, but for the majority of its residents, it is exhausting. To walk or cycle anywhere in Colombo, even up the lane, is to slowly succumb to a wet, sickly heat, to arrive dripping in your own sweat.
There is a peculiar humiliation in this heat. The cold you can button up against; this heat makes savages of us all.
Perhaps for this reason, walking anywhere is an activity reserved mostly for the poor. Those who can afford it shelter in private transport; those who can really afford it spend half their lives moving from one air-conditioned environment to another.
I learned this firsthand in 2020, when I moved from a fairly green suburb to the heart of Mount Lavinia, a dense seaside suburb into which Colombo spills. My logic was simple: I’d spent years locked away in my own rooms, staring at a computer screen, writing furiously. I needed to get out more, and the city beckoned. The beach was within walking distance, I had friends around, and Mount Lavinia’s lively streets offered much more than the small store to which I made my daily pilgrimage for cigarettes.
What happened was that I became even more shut-in. It was too damn hot to walk outside in the day; the beach, so close to my door, became a distant memory. Crossing the road felt like being a cut-rate vampire, cursing a sun that beat down on me like a crucifix.
To my surprise, nights were no different. Venturing out, even at midnight, felt like being hit by a wall of damp, rolling heat — this time from below and around me. As the year heated up, my bedroom began to feel like an oven.
I initially discounted this as an isolated phenomenon; maybe it was just my neighborhood. After all, the road I live on is a smattering of flats (built as cheaply as possible) and an upwardly mobile waththa (a Sri Lankanism for a mishmash of tiny dwellings, just a few steps above a slum). I live in a haphazard maze of sorts, the kind where cooling breezes go to die.
And yet, as I made my way around the city in all kinds of weather — riots and protests included — I began to recognize that Colombo was suspiciously hot. Too hot for a beach town.
But here’s where things get odd. People I’ve spoken to over the past few months — particularly those in their 60s and 70s — recall a Colombo where they comfortably went for long walks and bicycle rides, a green city where the noise and bustle of the harbor gave way to cool glades and green paths. Over a much shorter time span, I had been coming to Colombo daily at least since 2010 — first for school, then for work — and once-walkable areas of the city had become scorching, difficult places to traverse.
But you know what they say: Anecdotal evidence is only evidence of an anecdote. Were these recollections true, or was it simply the rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia? And why do other coastal cities of Sri Lanka seem so much more comfortable than Colombo?
When I spoke about this to Nisal Periyapperuma, my good friend and cofounder of Watchdog (the open-source research collective that we run), he hit upon a simple but effective test. Nisal purchased a bunch of infrared thermometers, and, with our colleagues Sathyajit Loganathan and Ishan Marikar, we walked across a widely used section of the city in September 2022, between 2 and 3 p.m. As we walked, we logged the surface temperature, conditions (whether it was sunny or shaded), and the GPS coordinates.
This (admittedly low-budget and unsystematic) test gave us 158 observations. The zone with the highest surface temperature, on average, read at 54°C, or 129°F.
This might be odd to wrap your head around. Think of it as a composite indicator of temperature and humidity; it’s a better measure of heat as we feel it. For example, a bone-dry 32°C (90°F) is tolerable — something I’ve experienced firsthand; you sweat, and the sweat cools you off until you can get to shelter. But a muggy, humid 32°C is difficult to breathe in, and no matter how much you sweat, all you can do is slowly overheat.
Simultaneously, I began investigating the air. In his much-discussed 2020 novel “The Ministry for the Future,” Kim Stanley Robinson popularized the idea of the wet-bulb temperature. The concept originated when the US military sought to understand outbreaks of heat-related illnesses and eventually made its way into climate science. In a nutshell, wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled by the evaporation of water.
Let’s put this in perspective. The 2010 Russian heat waves, which killed some 56,000 people, saw wet-bulb temperatures of 28°C (82°F). The 2022 heat waves in the United Kingdom reached wet-bulb temperatures of 25°C (77°F). In Colombo, this is just another Tuesday. Our wet-bulb temperature stays steady at 26–27°C throughout most of the year.
Baking hot streets, heat waves in the air. It wasn’t just me and some anecdotes: we have an actual problem. How did this happen, and why?
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This is where we must examine two converging phenomena. First, Colombo has been urbanizing rapidly over the past several decades. Sri Lanka came relatively late to the urbanization game — it used to be called “one of the least urbanized countries” on the planet — but once we got there, we set off for the races. UN-Habitat data suggests that between 1995 and 2017, Colombo’s urban area grew by 9.57 percent per year — a pretty high figure, even by global standards.
To my parents’ generation, there were only a handful of landmarks on the horizon: a smattering of towers, a single giant market (Pettah) where you could buy anything or get scammed out of every last cent at a few well-known shops. It was otherwise row upon row of homes. Fast-forward to today: I’m sitting in a cheap apartment, staring at miles of cheap apartments, office blocks, and the occasional glimpse of the oft-mocked Lotus Tower — a landscape my mother disdainfully calls the “concrete jungle.”
With this comes the second phenomenon. There’s a well-observed correlation between urbanization and higher surface temperatures. As people build — more roads, more apartments — they remove greenery to make space and replace leaves and earth with surfaces like asphalt and concrete, which trap and retain heat.
In a collaboration between Rajarata University of Sri Lanka and the University of Tsukuba in Japan, researchers used LANDSAT data to examine surface temperatures in Colombo at different moments during the decades-long process of rapid urbanization. Using temperature measurements from 1997, 2007, and 2017, the study tells the story of a cooler city by the sea, and how it went from a pleasant 25–27°C (77-80.6°F) to a staggering 31°C (87.8°F), or more.
The heat maps created by the authors for 1997 are dominated by calming hues of green, but by 2017, a sprawling fungus of red heat spreads its tendrils in every direction. The old-timers weren’t just being nostalgic; in their time, it would indeed have been much, much cooler.
As urbanization spread, so did the loss of green spaces — especially trees. As the surface-temperature study’s authors point out, this happened across the central business district, near the harbor, across the coastal belt, and along the road networks. Greenery, which cools areas by providing shade and heat loss through evaporation, began to vanish, replaced by mounds of concrete, steel, and asphalt. These surfaces store heat during the day and release it at night, leading to the conditions I’ve been describing: unrelenting heat from above during the day and below after dark.
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The urban heat island effect was first described in 1818, although not by that name. Based on detailed temperature measurements collected in London, British chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard noted that urban areas tend to have higher temperatures than surrounding rural expanses.
By the outbreak of World War II, researchers attempting to understand local climates were documenting the phenomenon all over the world and trying to figure out its effects. In general, they found that daytime temperatures between urban and rural areas tended to have differences between three and five degrees Celsius. At night, the differences were more intense: Urban areas cooled much more slowly. The difference between an urban area at night and a rural area could be as much as 12°C.
This doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t if you’re in a cold country. An increase from 10 to 15°C might actually seem like a welcome change. However, if you’re living on a tropical island, especially one that’s quite humid, a five-degree increase is the difference between a comfortable day and heat-wave conditions. This is where that nasty foe, the wet-bulb temperature, kicks in. Past a certain point, body heat is no longer being effectively carried away by sweat.
How do the denizens of Colombo counter this? Why, air conditioning, if you can afford it, and opting for private transport. These are two of the great boons of Sri Lankan city life. But each dumps more heat into the environment.
The effect never stops in the hot months. Buildings heat up, they stay hot at night, and heat up again during the day. Houses with concrete-slab roofs, in tropical conditions, become miniature ovens.
And this is how you get to me, sitting out here on a cramped balcony at midnight because it’s too hot to sleep inside. Stick some soil in my apartment and call it a greenhouse. Now add the other negative effects of the urban heat island effect: elevated ground-level ozone, increased mortality, increased energy consumption, more greenhouse gases, increased hospitalization of children and the elderly, and less biodiversity because of the death of urban plants and birds.
The dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.
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So, how do we get out of this mess? This is the moment where I ought to reach into my science-fictional imagination and pull out the grand ideas. Artificial clouds, or rockets heading for the sky, spreading reflective particles to block out the sun.
Before we blast into the stratosphere, let’s look at the approaches that exist today.
The first approach is the realm of ambitious makeovers. The push for greener cities has increased dramatically over the last decade. Serious funding and thought are being spent by big international movers and shakers — including the Asian Development Bank, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UN-Habitat, and the EU Commission — and this is to say nothing of the millions of smaller pushes that happen before something gets this big.
This kind of globalist, top-down push lends itself to elaborate visions of the future, ones in which the nation-state plays a central role. Take, for instance, China’s Liuzhou Forest City, designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti, which will supposedly contain a million plants built into almost every visible surface. The idea is that this will keep the temperatures down and the air much cleaner than in a typical city.
It’s not a bad idea, at least as far as the climate math is concerned. However, I’m skeptical of these grand ambitions. Grand plans never survive contact with reality, even in totalitarian regimes. The UK’s garden cities movement has seen its fair share of failures, and the same goes for high-tech “smart” cities. Large, centrally planned projects like these tend to encounter two problems.
One, they’re expensive and difficult to implement. Reorganizing Colombo to reduce the urban heat island effect would be a nigh-impossible challenge, involving billions of dollars and a nightmare of legislature and bureaucracy.
Two, they often ignore and brutally reshape local communities. We can turn to Jane Jacobs’s work in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” or to more recent documentation from Colombo, where poorer communities have been evicted and forced into government housing against their will.
The incentives of large, top-down change are written by those who have power over such systems; as Jacobs argues, these empowered elites and their metrics for success tend to oversimplify and overlook the lives, cultures, and habitual patterns of people who actually live in the places being changed.
Colombo, in particular, has been on the receiving end of many ambitious and all-encompassing Plans. I capitalize the word here because these Plans are giant political projects, imbued with the character and values of those championing them, and because they never seem to evolve from Plans to Action; they’re too big-picture to become reality; they exist in an abstract well of good intentions and power plays.
There’s the Colombo Megacity project, an ever-mutating hydra often championed by Ranil Wickramasinghe, the president of Sri Lanka from 2022 to 2024, who also served as prime minister several times since the 1990s. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the former president, had his “Vistas of Splendor and Prosperity,” apparently inspired by his former stint running the Defense and Urban Planning portfolios and getting armed soldiers to chase young couples out of parks.
Then there’s the Urban Development Authority’s rather optimistic Development Plans.
Unfortunately, given how tightly coupled the bureaucracy is with family political control and personal visions of grandeur, what actually emerges is “white elephant” projects: wasteful delusions of grandeur maintained at significant taxpayer expense. A good example is the Lotus Tower, a largely useless phallic shape, an emblem of Rajapaksa branding and political signage, which may take half a century to pay off at its current income.
A complex system, once set in motion, is hard to change. Its inertia is greater than the sum of all moving parts. And a city is a complex system. The chaotic interactions of a city are the bane of a central planner — but those chaotic interactions are what make cities interesting, and bring a welcome measure of serendipity to our lives. They make our self-built panopticons bearable.
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The second approach might be considered science fiction. Of solarpunk, at that — a particularly curious branch of science fiction that, like Janus, manages to look both forward and back at the same time. Solarpunk makes living sustainably an act of rebellion in a world that demands it die out; it sometimes professes a fondness for a simpler past, and sometimes it projects a simpler past onto the skeleton of a future, but either way, it says: The current way of doing things isn’t working. Let’s try something else.
This is where we, perhaps, ought to pay more attention to materials and design. Our ancestors, for example, built with stone, mortar, and lime, and had roofs with clay tiles. Large houses had madhamidhul — courtyards — prominently influenced by Dutch colonists. Adding to ventilation were narrow, brick-sized slots higher up, where shade from the overhanging roof could prevent them from letting in too much heat.
Much of what we have adopted as modern architecture — concrete boxes, glass facades, Le Corbusier’s leftover aesthetics — was designed for cooler climates, for dwellings that had to retain heat instead of release it.
We can build in ways that make more livable cities — from large-scale design to small-scale material choices. And we owe it to ourselves to critically question design trends imported en masse from colder countries, and to gaze upon the chaos we create for ourselves and dream better.
There’s a story here. As Terry Pratchett would say, at the heart of it all, we’re not Homo sapiens, the wise man — we’re Pan narrans, the storytelling monkey. Stories bind us to paths leading to the future.
The story of Colombo is about how we arrange our cities and how we idolize the endless sprawl. Which is to say, Colombo’s story is about growth, fueled by the construction boom that followed the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. The mismanagement of this growth has left even the basics of city planning behind. Many cities have some level of zoning in play — this area is residential, this is commercial, and so on. In Colombo, we don’t.
But like any story, Colombo’s can be changed — from growth to comfort. This requires the carrot and the stick. And to understand what might be a carrot and what might be a stick, we have to start with measurements.
As I’ve shown multiple times here, the idea of comfort can be measured, as the studies and self-propelled experiments described in this essay show. Air pollution levels, surface temperature, the ratio of green space to so-called gray infrastructure, or human-built structures, wet-bulb temperatures — these are easily measured with today’s technology.
Here’s a carrot, then. What incentives can we hand out for developments that improve on these things? Some things might work at the scale of large projects, such as requirements for maintaining public green spaces or shading proportional to the project’s size. There are even things that might work on a small scale: An experiment in Florida showed that low-income households are more willing to participate in rebate programs that encourage them to change their lawns to low-input, more environmentally friendly landscapes. The poor were willing; the rich, not so much. What we might have to do is spawn a veritable zoo of research around incentives, tied to methods that improve comfort for the whole.
The second step is to regulate: not ambitiously, but competently, and in an enforceable manner. Sri Lankan housing regulations are a bit of a joke; theoretically, there is a process of approval involving architects — but in practice, most people build first, without waiting for approvals. Corruption is rife within the system, of course.
Enforcing regulations for smaller homes might be immensely difficult. But larger-budget, high-visibility projects like apartment complexes, roads, parking lots, and office buildings already require more extensive approvals and a great deal more prep work than waking up one day and deciding to build an extra bedroom.
So, we regulate the visible. This is the stick. Large projects may be required to maintain a certain amount of greenery for the volume and area they displace, or to implement other schemes that help counter the heat. Maybe they contribute to an urban heat island effect control fund; perhaps they agree to maintain trees or shade along a set of roads nearby. Meeting these requirements can be incentivized; they can also be baked into the approval process.
It will be chaotic. Changing a story isn’t as neat and easy as dreaming up a radical new city from scratch; it’s tough to deal with so many people, and the idea of comfort will need to be thoroughly tested, its methods of observation worked out to be as fair as possible while erring on the side of whatever chips away at the urban heat island effect. But done right, we might encourage petri dishes of experiments that can be observed, scaled up, and implemented elsewhere.
Colombo isn’t unique in this story. Much of the world I’ve traveled and worked in also fits this description: cities in South and Southeast Asia, trapped under the relentless need to develop rapidly, to cater to large populations with barely enough time and money to build infrastructure.
Famously, New Delhi — a city of dense smog and Kafkaesque traffic jams — needs to build 700 to 900 million square meters of urban space annually just to keep up with the continuous influx of people. That’s adding a new Chicago every year.
We might not have the budget or the political will for a “ministry for the future.” But with knowledge, with stories, we might end up with a million smaller such ministries, each trying out different things, stumbling upon old hacks, discovering new ways, exploring all the dimensions of change. And, as long as we’re heading for cooler, more walkable, more livable cities, it might be worth stumbling along. Indeed, I’d say it’s necessary.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-city-cast-in-concrete-trapped-under-unbearable-heat/
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NEW US POPULATION DATA FILLED WITH ALARMING, SURPRISING FINDINGS
The data contained continued alarming trends in birthrates and some surprising regions that are gaining population.
America is still growing. But not by much.
According to U.S. Census estimates released on Jan. 27, population growth has slowed "significantly," with just 1.8 million more people between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025.
That amount of population growth – just 0.5% – is the slowest rate of growth since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when a worldwide shutdown slowed population growth to just 0.2% in 2021. And it comes after a significant uptick in 2024, when 3.2 million people were added to the U.S. population, which grew by a full percentage point, the most growth since 2006.
The main culprit for slower growth? What one Census Bureau official called "a historic decline in net international migration.”
But the data was also filled with continued alarming trends in birth rates and some surprising regions that are gaining population. Here's what to know:
What fewer international migrants means for Americans
Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections at the Census Bureau, said in a release from the agency that migration into the U.S. dropped from 2.7 million people to 1.3 million during the period from July 2024 to July 2025.
"With births and deaths remaining relatively stable compared to the prior year, the sharp decline in net international migration is the main reason for the slower growth rate we see today," Hartley continued.
The slowdown in population growth was evenly distributed across the country, the Census Bureau said, with every state except Montana and West Virginia seeing slower growth or accelerated declines in population.
The Census Bureau said that if trends hold, migration into the United States will drop by another 1 million people, to about 321,000, by this July.
Fewer babies, slower growth
There were about 519,000 more births than deaths in the United States between July 2024 and July 2025, about the same as the year before, the Census Bureau said. That's a higher rate than during the pandemic but still "represents a significant decline from prior decades," according to the agency. In 2017, for example, there were 1.1 million more births than deaths, and during the years between 2000 and 2010, natural change accounted for between 1.6 million and 1.9 million.
Research shows American women are having fewer babies, with the percentage of women 40 to 44 who have one child nearly doubling from 10% in 1980 to 19% in 2022.
Susan Newman, a social psychologist and author of "Just One: The New Science, Secrets & Joy of Parenting an Only Child," told USA TODAY in 2025 that struggles with infertility, the high (and rising) cost of parenting and cultural shifts are some of the reasons people are choosing to be "one and done," having only one child.
Young adults, faced with higher costs for education, health care and housing, are delaying typical milestones like marriage and family, as well.
Midwest is growing
Only one region of the country, the Midwest, saw every one of its states gain population between July 2024 and July 2025. The Midwest population has grown steadily each year since 2023, including slight gains in what the Census Bureau calls "natural change" ‒ births minus deaths.
Marc Perry, a senior demographer for the Census Bureau, said for the first time in the 2020s, the Midwest saw net positive domestic migration ‒ more people moving to the region from elsewhere within the United States, a "notable turnaround" from population losses in 2021-2022.
Population pops in the Palmetto State
People are moving to South Carolina from elsewhere in the United States, the Census Bureau noted: With 66,622 new residents moving in, the population grew by a total of 79,958 people between July 2024 and July 2025, the highest rate of growth (1.5%) of any state ‒ though even that was down from a 1.8% increase in 2024.
South Carolina's neighbor, North Carolina, followed close behind at 1.3% growth. Idaho saw 1.4% growth, with both states' growth fueled largely by domestic migration, the Census Bureau said. Texas' 1.2% growth was spurred by both domestic and international movement, even with a sharp decrease in international migration. Utah's 1% growth came mainly from natural change ‒ more births than deaths.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/28/us-census-data-trends-immigration-growth/88382925007/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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COULD WORKING FROM HOME INCREASE THE BIRTH RATE?
Since the baby boom ended in the early 1960s, Americans have had fewer and fewer babies. In 2024, the birth rate fell to an all-time low, with American women having on average 1.6 babies each, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
But the United States had an additional 80,000 births between 2021 and 2025 when the pandemic shut down offices and ushered in a new age of remote and hybrid work schedules, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford University and other institutions, which analyzed data from 19,000 workers in 38 countries.
Even when only one person works from home, the couple was still more likely to have a child.
“Flexibility about when, where and how to work – or the absence of such flexibility – is one potentially important factor in fertility decisions,” the study said.
'You can't get pregnant by email’
Giving people more flexibility and freedom during the pandemic made having a family possible for couples, said Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who coauthored the “Work From Home and Fertility” study.
No more long commutes and the rush to make it home for dinner. Parents were on hand for the school pickups and soccer matches. They had more time to tuck kids into bed and catch up on their own sleep, maybe even exercise.
Not only did remote work schedules make it easier to look after kids, they made it easier to conceive them, Bloom said. After all, “you can’t get pregnant by email,” he said.
Even though she’s not planning on growing her family, remote work is now non-negotiable for Maley. With her second child, there were no pump parts to wash and no stress over storing milk or remembering to bring it home after a work day. She nursed her son under a cover during Zoom calls.
“I would certainly be a lot less likely to have more kids if I had to go into the office,” she said.
The new study raises important questions about the role flexible work arrangements could play in helping fertility rates rebound, Bloom said.
It is also not the first to suggest a link between working from home and having children. A National Bureau of Economic Research study of the 2021 baby bump concluded that improving childcare and allowing parents more flexibility to work from home “might be associated with higher future fertility.”
A 2023 study surveying 3,000 American women from economist Adam Ozimek and demographer Lyman Stone found that women working remotely were more likely to want to say they planned to have a baby, especially if they are more educated, affluent and older. About 15-20% of women working remotely were trying to become pregnant, compared with just 10%-14% of employed women without remote work options. Remote workers in the survey were also more likely to marry.
“We believe this evidence is suggestive that the ‘return to the office’ may contribute to falling birth rates, and that governments interested in supporting marriage and implementing pro-natal policies may be interested in considering how flexible work arrangements can be supported and encouraged,” Ozimek and Stone wrote.
Did return to office lower the fertility rate?
As women wait longer to have children or put off having them at all, research shows that many office workers – especially women – say flexible working schedules allow them to better balance work and caregiving responsibilities. A FlexJobs survey found that 80% of women ranked flexibility as the top benefit of a job.
“I’m one of the only millennial people I know IRL who have had a baby,” one person commented on Reddit. “It’s no coincidence my partner and I have both been working from home since 2020 now.”
“The fact I know I'll be able to work from home makes me feel way better about having kids in the future,” commented another.
Yet the study comes amid a broad crackdown on flexible work arrangements.
President Donald Trump ordered federal employees back to the office full-time. A growing number of corporations are following suit including Amazon and JPMorgan Chase.
Remote workers during the pandemic “didn’t work as hard,” according to Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “people who work from home are not efficient.” Former Trump adviser and Tesla CEO Elon Musk called working from home “morally wrong.”
Bloom said remote work’s bad rap conflicts with the Trump White House encouraging Americans to have more children.
As the United States and other developed countries struggle with declines in fertility rates, concerns are rising over aging populations, raising the specter of shrinking labor markets and economic stagnation.
In October, Trump announced a plan aimed at expanding access to in vitro fertilization and his administration has floated ideas including scholarships for married people and parents, a one-time $5,000 cash "baby bonus" for mothers.
“The odd thing is the current Trump-Vance administration is trying to end work from home despite pushing for higher birth rates,” Bloom said. “I would think any government wanting more American babies would embrace work from home. You can’t force couples to have kids, but it sure helps if you make it a lot easier, and working from home does that in spades.”
So far pro-natalist government policies haven’t moved the needle much. Countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland offer paid parental leave and subsidized childcare but the birth rate remains low. Hungary offers a number of incentives, including exempting women with four or more children from paying income tax, but is still struggling to coax people to have kids.
What's really behind the baby bust
The reasons Americans choose not to have children are hotly debated in academic circles, with many attributing America’s baby bust to shifting priorities and societal norms.
When asked, couples cite many reasons. More are delaying marriage and kids, shortening the window to conceive. They also blame the surging costs of childcare, fertility treatments, housing and health care.
Some say they no longer see children as necessary to leading meaningful lives and instead want more time for their careers or leisure pursuits. And recent research suggests men’s unequal participation in childcare and household responsibilities is another factor in lower birth rates.
Not everyone is convinced that remote and hybrid work schedules are a significant factor in the decision to have a family. Some economists say it could just be that the people who want to have children are the ones who choose to work from home.
“It’s not implausible that increases in working from home could have an impact on the birth rate. One of the problems that we do face and likely can contribute to changes in fertility is the difficulties of managing your career and your personal life,” Wellesley economics professor Phillip Levine said. “Given the evidence that is available today, it’s hard to say that it has a major influence.”
Most American workers have greater flexibility today than they did before the pandemic. More than half of them had hybrid roles in 2025 with 28% working fully remote, up from 18% five years earlier, according to Gallup data. But the birth rate is still falling, Levine said.
Even if flexible work arrangements don’t increase the fertility rate, they still have value because they can be a boon for families, he said. Some 45% of working Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 have a child 17 or under at home, making working parents a critical part of the labor force.
“Every positive intervention doesn’t have to solve all of society’s problems,” Levine said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/11/06/work-from-home-baby-boom/87067501007/
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THE POOR SOIL IN TROPICAL REGIONS
It is a common biological paradox: the most lush, biomass-dense ecosystem on Earth grows on top of some of the planet’s poorest, most acidic soils. If you were to clear a patch of Amazonian rainforest and plant corn, you would likely get a bumper crop the first year, a mediocre one the second, and a complete failure by the third.
To understand why, you have to look at where the nutrients are actually stored. In a temperate forest (like in North America or Europe), the nutrient cycle is relatively slow. Leaves fall in autumn, snow covers them, and they decompose gradually over years. This creates a thick, dark layer of humus—rich topsoil that acts as a nutrient bank. If you cut down an oak forest in Ohio, the soil remains fertile for decades because the nutrients are in the ground.
In the tropical rainforest, the "bank" is empty. All the capital is currently in circulation.
The rainforest is hot and humid 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This creates a hyper-efficient environment for bacteria, fungi, and termites. When a leaf or branch falls to the forest floor, it doesn't sit there for months; it decomposes in days or weeks.
Because the decomposition is so rapid, the nutrients are released almost instantly. The massive trees have adapted to this by developing shallow, dense root mats right at the surface of the soil. They snatch up phosphorus, nitrogen, and calcium the moment they are released from decaying matter, before those nutrients can even enter the soil.
The Problem of Leaching
The second enemy of rainforest soil fertility is the rain itself. Rainforests receive between 60 to 400 inches of rain annually.
If nutrients are not absorbed immediately by root systems, the torrential rains wash them away. This process is called leaching. The water percolates through the ground, carrying soluble minerals deep into the subsoil where roots cannot reach them, or washing them into river systems.
This leaves the remaining soil—classified largely as Oxisols or Ultisols—chemically depleted.
These soils are:
Acidic: The constant washing removes basic ions (like calcium and magnesium), leaving hydrogen and aluminum ions that create acidity.
Iron-Rich: What remains after the soluble minerals wash away are iron and aluminum oxides. This gives tropical soil its distinct, vibrant rust-red color.
Clay-heavy: The soil particles often pack tightly, making drainage difficult once the root structures are removed.
The "Slash and Burn" Trap
This geological reality explains why traditional slash-and-burn agriculture is both a necessity and a trap for subsistence farmers.
When farmers cut down the forest and burn the vegetation, they aren't just clearing space; they are manually transferring the nutrients. Burning the wood releases all the minerals stored in the trees (the "living bank") into the form of nutrient-rich ash.
This ash fertilizes the poor soil, allowing crops to grow. However, because the soil has no organic matter or clay structure to hold these nutrients, the rain washes the ash away within a few seasons. The soil hardens—sometimes turning into a brick-like substance called laterite when exposed to the baking sun—and the farmer is forced to move on and cut down more forest.
There is, however, a fascinating historical exception. Ancient indigenous populations in the Amazon created Terra Preta ("dark earth"). By mixing charcoal, bone, and manure into the ground over centuries, they created pockets of incredibly fertile, black soil that persists to this day. It proves that while the natural rainforest soil is poor, human ingenuity can bio-engineer it into something sustainable.
~ Amy Martin, Quora
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IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE WINTER SPORTS — IF CLIMATE ACTION IS TAKEN
I'm a figure skater. It's not too late to save Olympic ice sports.
Acting
sooner rather than later to decarbonize skating can help preserve the
frosty origins of our sport for future generations of skaters and
spectators – in the Olympic season and beyond. ~ Jasmine Wynn
In early January, more than 90,000 figure skating fans gathered in St. Louis to watch the glitz and grind of the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships – the final Olympic qualifier for Team USA figure skaters. But like with all things, it came at a cost.
For the past eight years, I too have competed, performed and trained in the discipline of women’s singles skating. I’ve also spent six of those years as a climate advocate. This duality is precisely why I can admit that figure skating, like other Olympic ice sports, is unsustainable in its current form. Ice sports decision-makers have an obligation to save the temperate foundation of our sport – for the sake of other Winter Olympic sports and, most important, our planet.
Warming winters have piqued concern within the International Olympic Committee in recent years. The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing were notably the first Winter Games to use solely artificial snow, relying on more than 192 million gallons of water. This upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Milan will likely use 85 million cubic feet of artificial snow to address declines in snowfall due to warming temperatures.
HOW ICE RINKS WARM THE PLANET
In early January, more than 90,000 figure skating fans gathered in St. Louis to watch the glitz and grind of the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships – the final Olympic qualifier for Team USA figure skaters. But like with all things, it came at a cost.
For the past eight years, I too have competed, performed and trained in the discipline of women’s singles skating. I’ve also spent six of those years as a climate advocate. This duality is precisely why I can admit that figure skating, like other Olympic ice sports, is unsustainable in its current form. Ice sports decision-makers have an obligation to save the temperate foundation of our sport – for the sake of other Winter Olympic sports and, most important, our planet.
Warming winters have piqued concern within the International Olympic Committee in recent years. The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing were notably the first Winter Games to use solely artificial snow, relying on more than 192 million gallons of water. This upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Milan will likely use 85 million cubic feet of artificial snow to address declines in snowfall due to warming temperatures.
Artificial snow production is notoriously water-resource intensive. One French environmental group – Collectif Citoyen – is pursuing legal action against 2030 French Alps Winter Olympics organizers due to the degradation, according to The Associated Press, of “water resources and fragile mountain ecosystems” that would be harmed by venue construction and other aspects of hosting the games.
Indoor ice arenas bring their own set of climate consequences due to dependence on a category of atmospherically potent “refrigerants," specifically human-made hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that are found in some everyday cooling appliances.
For ice rinks, HFCs are primarily used to cool the visible base layer of the rink, which typically consists of a slab of chilled concrete. However, HFC gas throughout the cooling process tends to leak out of equipment and subsequently into the atmosphere, where it resides with a greenhouse impact greater than carbon dioxide.
Furthermore, Zambonis − the predominant ice resurfacing mechanism – are vehicles that are traditionally reliant on diesel-based fuel. Their use amplifies indoor air pollution by emitting carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide, the latter of which is also one of the most prominent atmospheric pollutants.
The decarbonization of ice rinks, of course, won't alone fix global warming, with many other sports contributing to our climate catastrophe. Addressing climate change requires contributions from all of us – including sports that don't seem to be directly impacted and those on the front lines of the problem, such as skiing and snowboarding.
No one is exempt from responsibility, and especially not elite sport circuits.
Fortunately, we have already made progress toward sustainable skating. Even amid intensive water use, the Beijing Olympics made history by cooling the ice arena primarily with liquified carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide, a notorious greenhouse gas, brings its own set of issues, this adaptation eliminated reliance on particularly potent HFCs.
Additionally, the International Skating Union released inaugural “Sustainability Guidelines” in 2024 to help all member federations make elite competitions greener.
Individual facilities have already taken such steps, too.
In 2021, Union Arena Community Center in Woodstock, Vermont, became the “first net-zero indoor ice rink” in the United States. That status was achieved through energy-efficient equipment upgrades and a rooftop solar panel microgrid to power the arena. According to the executive director of Union Arena, Ejay Bishop, the facility is also saving an estimated $90,000 annually in energy bill costs due to the efficiency upgrades.
PLASTIC COULD BE THE ANSWER
To the south, Mexico City substituted the real ice surface of the world’s largest ice rink for a plastic-based alternative, saving nearly 49,000 gallons of water annually. Notably, synthetic ice also does not rely on any potent greenhouse gas to remain cool.
While plastic-based synthetic ice inevitably presents its own range of environmental and performative trade-offs, water conservation is an important consideration as drought intensity increases – this is a central issue in the French Alps case.
Today, the United States possesses the largest number of indoor ice rinks behind Canada. If anyone must lead the sustainability revolution of skating, it is the U.S. Figure Skating association, Skate Canada or a combination of the two federations working in unison. Acting sooner rather than later to decarbonize skating can help preserve the frosty origins of our sport for future generations of skaters and spectators – in the Olympic season and beyond.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2026/01/28/ice-winter-olympics-climate-change/88066840007/
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THE VARIOUS TIMES THE WORLD WAS SUPPOSED TO END
I know, I know — all the signs mentioned in the Bible presaging his imminent return are coming true right this very second and anybody who is willing to look with an open mind should be able to see this clearly, right? Except, that there have always been “wars and rumors of wars” and people have been making the same claim pretty much since he was first reported to have died in the first place.
Here’s a brief sampling from history:
In the year 365, early French bishop Hilary of Poitiers announced the end of the world would happen during that year.
Between the years 375–400, French bishop Martin of Tours stated that the world would end before 400 AD, writing, "There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power."
In 482, Portuguese bishop Hydatius wrote his firm belief that humanity was living in the end times, marching towards its certain doom on this day, when Jesus would come back and the world would end.
In 500, Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenaeus all predicted Jesus would return in this year, with one of the predictions being based on the dimensions of Noah’s Ark.
Another prediction was based on the dimensions of the tabernacle built by the Israelites under Moses.
In 793, Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana prophesied the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world on that day in front of a large crowd of people.
In 799, French bishop Gregory of Tours calculated the end would occur between 799 and 806.
In 992, many Christians claimed that the end times would begin within three years due to the fact that Good Friday coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation (which had long been believed to be the event that would bring forth the Antichrist).
In 1000, many Christians, including Pope Sylvester II, predicted this date as the Millennium. As a result, riots are said to have occurred in Europe and pilgrims headed east to Jerusalem.
1033 was the year that, following the failure of the prediction for 1 January 1000, some theorists proposed that the end would occur 1000 years after Jesus' death, instead of his birth.
In 1200, Italian mystic Joachim of Fiore determined that the Millennium would begin between 1200 and 1260.
In 1284, many Christians believed the world would end 666 years after the rise of Islam in 618 due to a prophecy made years earlier by Pope Innocent III.
This lists goes on and on for pages . . . let me skip to the middle of the twentieth century
In 1959, Florence Houteff, The leader of the Branch Davidians predicted the apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation would proceed on April 22.
In 1951, Johann Gottfried Bischoff stated the Second Coming would occur before he died. He died on July 6, 1960.
In 1967, Jim Jones, the founder of the People's Temple stated he had visions that a nuclear holocaust was to take place in 1967.
In 1969, George Williams, the founder of the Church of the Firstborn predicted the Second Coming of Christ would occur on August 9.
In 1974, David Berg, the leader of Children of God, predicted that there would be a colossal doomsday event heralded by Comet Kohoutek.
In 1975, many Jehovah's Witnesses expected the end to be nigh due to The Watchtower having published articles starting in 1966 which stated that the fall of 1975 would be 6000 years since man's creation, and suggesting that Armageddon could be finished by then.
1977 was one of the years that John Wroe, the founder of the Christian Israelite Church predicted the Armageddon would occur.
Also in 1977, Christian minister William M. Branham predicted the rapture would occur no later than 1977.
In 1979, Roch Thériault, led a commune in the wilderness of eastern Quebec in the late seventies. Formerly a Seventh-Day Adventist, he told his group they would form the center of a new society during God's 1000-year reign following Armageddon.
In 1980, Leland Jensen predicted that there would be a nuclear holocaust, followed by two decades of conflict, culminating in God's Kingdom being established on Earth.
In 1981, the founder of Calvary Chapel, Chuck Smith, predicted the generation of 1948 would be the last generation and that the world would end by 1981 at the latest. Smith identified that he "could be wrong" but continued to say in the same sentence that his prediction was "a deep conviction in my heart, and all my plans are predicated upon that belief."
In 1982, followers of Pat Robertson, awaited the end of the world after he predicted the end of the world would come in this year back in 1976.
In 1985, minister Lester Sumrall predicted the end in this year, even writing a book about it entitled I Predict 1985.
In 1988, Hal Lindsey believed that Jesus would return within 40 years, a "biblical generation", of the founding of Israel in 1948.
In 1988, Edgar C. Whisenant predicted in his book 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 that the rapture of the Christian Church would occur between September 11 and 13, 1988. After his September predictions failed to come true, Whisenant revised his prediction date to October 3. After all his 1988 predictions failed to come true, Whisenant revised his prediction date to this day.
In 1990, Elizabeth Clare Prophet predicted a nuclear war would start on this date, with the world ending 12 years later, leading her followers to stockpile a shelter with supplies and weapons.
In 1992, born-again Christian Rollen Stewart predicted the rapture would take place on September 28.
In 1992, Lee Jang Rim, the leader of the Dami Mission church, predicted the rapture would occur on October 28.
In 1993, followers of David Berg believed his prediction that the tribulation would start in 1989 and that the Second Coming would take place in 1993.
In 1994, Harold Camping predicted the rapture would occur on 6 September 1994. When it failed to occur he revised the date to the 29th of September and then to the 2nd October. He then changed it once again to March 31, 1995.
In 1997, some Christians awaited the end based on the prediction of Aggai, the 1st-century bishop of Edessa, who claimed that August 10 of this year would be the birth date of the Antichrist and the end of the universe.
Also in 1997, some Christians awaited the end due to 17th-century Irish archbishop James Ussher prediction of this October 23, 1997 to be 6000 years since creation, and therefore the end of the world.
In 1999 and 2000, a whole slew of predictions were made that the end times were upon us either at the end of the last millennium or the beginning of the next.
In 2011, Harold Camping popped up again and predicted that the rapture and devastating earthquakes would occur on 21 May 2011, with God taking approximately 3% of the world's population into Heaven, and that the end of the world would occur five months later on October 21. And then, when this latest prediction failed to come about, he revised his prediction and said that on May 21, a "Spiritual Judgment" took place and that both the physical rapture and the end of the world would occur on 21 October 2011.
In 2014–2015, due to the so-called “Blood Moon Prophecy” (first predicted by Mark Biltz in 2008 and then by John Hagee in 2014), some Mormons in Utah combined the September 2015 blood moon with other signs, causing a large increase in sales of preppers survival supplies.
In 2015, the eBible Fellowship predicted that world would be destroyed 1600 days after “Judgment Day”, which they believed had happened on May 21, 2011, per Harold Camping’s prediction.
It’s still just the highlights.
As I said, there have always been “wars and rumors of war.” There have always been natural disasters. Jesus told his followers that there were some living then who would still be alive when Jesus returned in his glory. And yet, here we are, 2000 years later, still waiting (and waiting and waiting and waiting…)
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THE PROBLEMS WITH DESALINATING WATER
The problem isn't that we don't know how to filter salt out of water. We do it on a massive scale every day, producing over 25 billion gallons of desalinated water globally per day.
The problem is that separating salt from water requires fighting a fundamental law of thermodynamics, and nature charges a steep energy tax for winning that fight.
When people imagine "filtering" seawater, they often picture a very fine mesh—like a high-tech coffee filter—that catches the salt while letting the water pass through. But salt isn't a particulate like sand or coffee grounds. When salt dissolves in water, it breaks down into sodium and chloride ions. These ions are incredibly small, roughly 0.4 nanometers in size. To put that in perspective, if a water molecule were the size of a tennis ball, a single grain of sand would be the size of Mount Everest.
Because the salt ions are roughly the same size as the water molecules, you cannot separate them using a standard physical sieve. You have to use a process called Reverse Osmosis (RO), which relies on a semi-permeable membrane. And this is where the physics gets expensive.
The Tyranny of Osmotic Pressure
In nature, water wants to flow from a pure state into a salty state to dilute it. This force is called osmotic pressure. To filter seawater, we have to reverse this natural flow. We have to push the salty water against a membrane so hard that the pure water molecules are forced through the microscopic pores, leaving the salt ions behind.
This requires immense pressure. The natural osmotic pressure of seawater is about 27 bar (roughly 400 psi). To overcome that natural resistance and push water through at a useful rate, industrial desalination plants must pressurize the water to between 60 and 80 bar (800 to 1,200 psi).
To visualize this, imagine a fire hose. A standard fire hose operates at roughly 100 to 300 psi. A desalination plant needs pumps that are four times more powerful than a fire hose, running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That requires a massive amount of electricity.
The "Soup" Problem
Even if energy were free, the ocean is not just salt and water. It is a biological soup teeming with algae, bacteria, plankton, silt, and oil.
If you shove raw seawater directly into a high-tech Reverse Osmosis membrane at 1,000 psi, the membrane will clog almost instantly. The microscopic pores get fouled by organic slime (biofouling) and mineral scaling.
Therefore, "filtering" salt actually involves a long, expensive chain of pre-treatments. You need intake screens to stop fish, sand filters to stop silt, micro-filters to stop algae, and chemical dosing systems to kill bacteria and adjust pH levels. Only then does the water hit the expensive RO membranes. These membranes are delicate; they cost thousands of dollars per element and must be cleaned chemically and replaced every 3 to 5 years.
The Brine Disposal
Finally, you can't filter all the water. If you take 100 gallons of seawater, you generally only get about 50 gallons of fresh water. The other 50 gallons become "brine"—a hyper-concentrated, toxic sludge that is twice as salty as the ocean and filled with the chemical residues from the cleaning process.
Pumping this heavy, salty brine back into the ocean can suffocate marine life on the seabed if not done carefully using expensive diffusers to dilute it.
The Verdict
We have become very efficient at desalination. Modern plants are approaching the theoretical thermodynamic limit of efficiency. But even at peak efficiency, desalinated water costs roughly $2,000 to $3,000 per acre-foot to produce.
Compare that to water from a river or aquifer, which often costs roughly $50 to $300 per acre-foot just to pump and treat. As long as gravity delivers fresh water from the sky for free, desalination will always remain the expensive backup plan for when the rivers run dry. ~ ~ Amy Martin, Quora
Distillation using CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) is way less energy intensive than vapor compression or steam powered distillation. It is a technology that has been around for a while and holds promise to enable provision of fresh water at rates far less than RO or traditional distillation plants. Yes, it is asset-intensive, and requires a significant amount of solar thermal receiver tubes and parabolic mirror troughs, but it is a viable and proven technology that can help provide fresh water at much less of an energy and carbon-footprint penalty.
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Israel is a world leader in seawater desalination,
with five major Mediterranean plants (Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera,
Sorek, Ashdod) providing approximately 80% of its domestic household
water consumption as of late 2025. The country utilizes advanced reverse
osmosis (RO) technology to produce over 85% of its total water needs
from both seawater and brackish wate
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WHY OUR ANCESTORS HAD NATURALLY STRAIGHT TEETH
Every year, millions of children and teens undergo a common ritual of growing up: getting braces. And it’s not just young folks who turn to metal brackets to handle some common dental issues—the Cleveland Clinic estimates that some 20% of new orthodontic patients are over the age of 18.
Braces, be it the classic metal brackets, the slightly less noticeable ceramic editions, or even a clear aligner, solve a multitude of problems that many people face, from crowding, to gaps, to crooked teeth. For the 93% of children and adolescents with a crossbite, underbite, or overbite, braces may be just the fix.
The technology behind braces first came on the scene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Roger Forshaw, dental health expert at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester. In early iterations, metal bands, wires, and rudimentary braces were used to solve severe teeth crowding and misalignments to improve chewing function and relieve pain—hardly the common cosmetic fix we think of today.
But what did people do before braces were invented? Well, it turns out, for a lot of human history, braces weren’t necessary. And it wasn’t because people were less worried about the way they looked or bore painful chewing better than their modern cousins. It’s a classic case of evolutionary mismatch, a sign of just how much our lifestyle has changed in recent times while the basic hardware of human existence simply hasn’t caught up.
Big jaws, little jaws
Let’s start with a metaphor. Take an old house, says Peter Ungar, a biological anthropologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Arkansas. Door frames used to be much smaller and lower than would be comfortable for today’s humans, and it’s not because humans were any genetically shorter than today. Instead, people didn’t have the nutrients available to reach their tallest potential, Ungar explains. For our jaws, the story kind of goes in reverse.
Back in the day, before agriculture and processing food became commonplace, humans had to chew really hard to turn their food into useful calories for their bodies. When you put that kind of chewing stress on the lower jaw (mandible) and upper jaw (maxilla), “it stimulates the cells that produce bone, [known as] osteoblasts, to grow the jaw in both thickness and height and length,” says Ungar. In other words, hearty chewing makes for a strong, full-sized jaw.
On the other hand, there’s not a workout that will make your teeth grow. Those little pearls of enamel, dentine, and blood vessels have their size predetermined by genetics, he adds.
Nobody gave teeth the update that modern jaws are chewing less on wild game and more on applesauce, especially in their youth. When teeth grow in, they are expecting a full-grown jaw from a hard-chewing hunter-gatherer.
So when your teeth finally arrive on the scene, there simply isn’t enough space for them. For many of us, the top row of teeth juts out in front of the lower set, and that lowered set turns into a jumbled pile of cramped teeth. Our third molars, also known as our wisdom teeth, either don’t develop, don’t erupt, or need to be yanked out. Our comparatively small jaws opened the floodgates to all sorts of other issues, Ungar adds, including the sleep apnea epidemic, which occurs when our tongues don’t have enough room to wiggle around in our mouths.
Embracing braces
Our ancestors had room for every tooth in their larger mouths. Their teeth also lined up more neatly on top of each other. But that doesn’t mean our ancestors had smiles fit for a Colgate commercial.
“Early humans used chewing sticks, twigs, bird feathers, animal bones, and plant fibers to remove debris from their teeth,” Forshaw adds. “The earliest known example of possible operative dental work dates to approximately 14,000 years ago in northern Italy.”
While there are some references to misaligned teeth, and the likely painful solutions that ensued, in Greco-Roman times, it wasn’t until recently that orthodontics really took off. “Early orthodontic treatments were slow, uncomfortable, and often unpredictable because dentists didn’t fully understand how teeth moved,” Forshaw says.
The first tool to move teeth around via force was Pierre Fouchard’s Bandeau, a horseshoe-shaped metal strip that slowly expanded, straightening teeth as it went. Then came the metal brackets, thanks to E. H. Angle, who first introduced them around 1910. Braces were then tweaked over the following decades as scientists figured out how teeth moved, grew, and best reacted to smile-correcting technology.
Today, things are a little different, and a great deal less painful, thanks to digital imaging, advanced materials, and less invasive (and less obvious-looking) techniques and tools. From an evolutionary and a modern perspective, the solution to our small-jawed problem starts in childhood. Nonetheless, you probably don’t want your kids gnawing on giant hunks of meat just to save their jaws, which invites a risk of choking. Instead, maybe just get an orthodontist appointment on the calendar around their seventh birthday.
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-need-braces/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE TYPE OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY MOST ASSOCIATED WITH LONGEVITY
Getting enough physical activity can help us all live longer, healthier lives.
What can be confusing is knowing what types of physical activity are best for longevity.
A recent study published in BMJ Medicine helps answer that question by finding that regularly engaging in a variety of physical activities may be the best way to prolong your life span.
For this study, researchers analyzed data from two large studies — the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study — comprising more than 173,000 participants. The current study analyzed data from over 111,000 participants.
During these two studies, participants had their physical activity assessed over more than 30 years. Study participants were asked about their involvement in certain activities, including:
Cardio activities like walking, jogging, running, cycling, rowing, tennis, and swimming.
Lower-intensity exercises like yoga, stretching, and toning.
Weight or resistance training
Vigorous activities like mowing the lawn.
Moderate-intensity outdoor work, such as gardening.
High-intensity outdoor work, like digging and chopping.
Yang Hu, ScD, research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Massachusetts, and corresponding author of this study, told Medical News Today that he and his team decided to examine physical activity and its potential impact on life span because it’s a modifiable lifestyle factor to prevent premature death.
“Unlike genetic makeup that you cannot change, people can choose to exercise more to prevent disease and live longer,” Hu explained. “Accumulative research has shown that most chronic diseases are largely preventable from adopting a good diet and lifestyle. As public health researchers, it’s our mission to keep figuring out the ways to prevent diseases and improve life quality, which makes people live longer."
NO EXTRA BENEFITS BEYOND A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF EXERCISE
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that the total physical activity and most individual types of physical activity, except for swimming, were linked to a lower risk of death from any cause.
However, scientists said, these associations weren’t linear — the associations for total physical activity leveled off after reaching a certain number of hours.
“It’s common to see a limit of benefits for healthy lifestyle factors such as physical activity because you can’t expect the risk (to) go down to zero with increasing exercise level,” Hu explained.
“We found that all activities included in this study have such limits, meaning that no additional benefits may be gained beyond certain amounts of exercise. So, combining different activities together may be more effective to receive health benefits as long as the total activity level is maintained,” according to Yang Hu, ScD.
MORE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY, LOWER MORTALITY RISK
Additionally, scientists discovered that participants who engaged in a greater variety of physical activities had a lower mortality risk. Those with the broadest range of physical activities had a 19% lower risk of death from all causes, and a 13-14% lower risk of death from heart disease, respiratory disease, cancer, and other causes.
“It’s a pretty novel finding that engaging in more types of activities at a given total activity level may offer additional health benefits toward longevity,” Hu said. “It means that although maintaining a high level of total physical activity is still most important, mixing up different types of activities that have complementary health benefits may be more helpful to prevent premature death.”
“Habitual engagement of almost all commonly practiced physical activities is beneficial to prevent premature death and achieve longevity,” he added. “It’s important to keep a high level of total physical activity, and on top of that, diversifying the types of activities may be more beneficial.”
EXERCISE VARIETY JUST AS IMPORTANT AS VOLUME
MNT spoke with Zeeshan Khan, MD, chief of geriatrics at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center in New Jersey, about this study, who commented that his first reaction to its findings as a geriatrician is one of validation and excitement.
“Being physically active helps you live longer; this study helps support us when we discuss this,” Khan explained. “For years, we’ve been advising patients to stay active and undergo lifestyle modifications with exercise. This study provides robust long-term data that adds a crucial new dimension to that advice: variety is just as important as volume.”
Khan said, “This gives us a new tool when counseling our patients. Unable to run? OK, we can try chair exercises and swimming. My hope is that this study will make the discussion between the patient and their doctor more of a conversation as opposed to being one-sided, viewed as an exercise prescription with a portfolio of activities that can be utilized.”
MNT also spoke with Bert Mandelbaum, MD, sports medicine specialist and orthopedic surgeon and co-director of the Regenerative Orthobiologic Center at Cedars-Sinai Orthopaedics in Los Angeles, who said that to increase our “playspan,” or ability to remain physically active late into life, we have to be like a decathlete and participate in many different categories.
“Our bodies have this incredible plastic capability and we could turn it on in a lot of different ways,” Mandelbaum detailed. “From a non-impact way, working on balance, strength, resistance, (and) body weight exercise. Running, sprints, biking, and swimming, all of which have a very additive effect. This paper identifies some of those, but I think the more we look into this, the more we’ll find the same conclusions.”
RESEARCH FOCUSED ON OLDER ADULTS NEEDED
For the next steps in this research, Khan said he would like to see research that specifically focuses on older adults.
“The participants in this study were followed from middle age,” he explained. “I suspect starting a varied exercise program would still confirm benefits, but dedicated studies are needed to confirm this.”
“Next, it would be beneficial to better define the optimal variety of exercises. This study shows that more variety is beneficial but what is the ideal mix? Future research could explore the specific benefits of combining aerobic exercise, strength training, and balance/flexibility work — like tai chi or yoga — to create an evidence-based ‘longevity exercise prescription’.”
And Mandelbaum said as each different exercise type has different components, such as VO2 max, load, and levels of sleep and recovery, all of which needed to be part of the equation.
“Ultimately we have to develop some type of machine learning, that capability that looks at all of these things, all the epigenetic drivers and to see the effect on it, and then we can weight it,” he added. “And I think that those studies are forthcoming.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/types-physical-activity-help-prolong-life-span-longevity-exercise#Research-focused-on-older-adults-needed
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WHY VARIETY OF EXERCISE IS SO IMPORTANT
Don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to exercise — doing a variety of different physical activities every week is the key to boosting your health and living longer, a study suggests.
After tracking the weekly exercise habits of 110,000 men and women in the US for 30 years, researchers found active people who did the greatest variety of exercise were 19% less likely to die during that time than those who focused on one activity.
That effect was greater than for individual sports like walking, tennis, rowing and jogging.
The total amount of exercise you do is still key, experts say, but doing a range of activities you enjoy can bring lots of benefits.
'Each one offers something different’
Maddie Albon, 29, a global marketing manager who lives in London, does triathlons in her free time — but that's just for starters.
Her other sports include tennis, spin classes, yoga, pilates and lifting weights.
"Each different exercise offers something different," she says.
"You need to have the variety to be good at one sport — to be good at running you need to be weight training.”
As well as the physical health benefits, Maddie — who's from New Zealand — finds the mix of activities helps her mood.
"Sometimes I don't have the energy for an intense session so doing that yoga to unwind, relax, it really helps my mental well-being."
"It's nice to have those other options to be moving your body and really dedicating that time for yourself in the day," she told the BBC.
Maddie took up triathlons last year and says she'd now like to try out some team sports, because they can be "a bit more social" than some of the current exercises she does.
Being active is already known to benefit our physical and mental health and help reduce the risk of developing a number of diseases affecting the heart, the blood vessels and the lungs. Exercise can also reduce the chances of dying early from some cancers.
"It's important to keep a high level of total physical activity, and on top of that, diversifying the types of activities may be more beneficial," said Dr Yang Hu, from Harvard School of Public Health, lead author of the study in the journal BMJ Medicine.
"Combining activities that have complementary health benefits [such as resistance training and aerobic exercise] can be very helpful," he added.
NHS advice says adults aged 19-64 should aim to do:
strengthening activities that work all the major muscles on at least two days a week
150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week
spread it evenly over 4-5 days a week
and don't spend too much time sitting, lying down or not moving
Aerobic activities raise your heart rate and make you breathe more quickly. They include brisk walking, riding a bike, playing tennis, dancing, hiking or mowing the lawn.
Vigorous exercise makes you breathe hard and fast. Examples are running, swimming, football, hockey, gymnastics or walking up stairs.
Exercises which strengthen the muscles include yoga, lifting weights, tai chi, sit-ups, energetic gardening, and carrying heavy shopping bags.
For the research, more than 70,000 nurses aged 30-55 and 40,000 health professionals aged 40-75 were asked to provide information on activities they did every week, like walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, rowing, tennis and squash.
They filled in questionnaires every two years, and included how much weight training exercise they did, as well as lower intensity exercise like yoga, and other activities such as gardening and climbing stairs.
After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that most individual types of exercise reduced the risk of death from any cause. But people who took part in the widest mix of activities fared even better.
Their risk of death from cancer, heart disease, lung illnesses and other causes was 13-41% lower than other people's.
The research also found six hours of moderate activity or three hours of vigorous exercise was the optimum amount of exercise each week, after which the benefits leveled off.
Although the study is large and physical activity was measured repeatedly, the research does have limitations. It can't rule out that people's health may have influenced the exercise they do, rather than the other way round, although it did try to account for a range of lifestyle factor.
HOW CELERY HELPS YOUR ARTERIES
Lowers Blood Pressure: Contains 3-n-butylphthalide (NBP) and apigenin, which relax artery walls and act as diuretics, improving blood flow.
Reduces Inflammation: Its antioxidants and polyphenols fight inflammation in blood vessels, a key factor in atherosclerosis (plaque buildup).
May Prevent Plaque: Some studies suggest celery compounds can lower bad cholesterol (LDL) and prevent plaque formation, protecting against heart disease.
Provides Key Nutrients: High in water for hydration, fiber for digestion, and potassium for blood pressure regulation.
Steaming for 10 minutes retains most antioxidants.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=benefits+of+celery
Oriana:
Celery is wonderful — so refreshing and hydrating! But if you are serious about lowering your blood pressure, bear in mind that the best vegetable for increasing the blood-vessel widening nitric oxide is beets. And the best nitric oxide supplement? In my opinion, citrulline. Combine it with CoQ10, and prepare to be amazed.
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Ending on beauty:
Myth its only the last stage
In the assembly of the soul —
Not the abstract thing, but that trembling you feel
When you’re too tired to sleep.
You call out, another wolf alone in a barren country.
The city burns with a hot, stiffish wind,
sits deep beneath the mounting sand.
~ Jeffrey Levine
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