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How to Stop the Racist in You
By Jeremy Adam Smith, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton

In the wake of racially charged bloodshed in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas, the city of Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention.

There Iowa Rep. Steve King argued that only whites had made contributions to civilization, while other "sub-groups" did not. Asked to clarify his remarks, King--who keeps a Confederate flag on his desk--did not back down. "The Western civilization and the American civilization are a superior culture," he said, deliberately associating "Western" and "American" with white. No leader at the convention publicly disavowed King's assertion.

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This is just the latest example of what seems to be a rise in polarizing public language that meets the dictionary definition of "racist"--"having or showing the belief that a particular race is superior to another." King's argument is an example of explicit, conscious prejudice, when someone outwardly expresses, through words or behavior, a view denigrating a particular group.

But what explains the fact that police departments are more likely to use force against black suspects than white ones, at a time when so many departments are consciously trying to reduce these discrepancies? What could explain why companies explicitly committed to diversity show racial bias in hiring decisions? Why would caring teachers be more likely to punish black students more harshly than white students?

In these cases, and many others, scientific evidence suggests that we're seeing the effects not of explicit prejudice but of implicit bias--the unconscious, often knee-jerk prejudices that subtly guide our behavior.

The distinction between explicit and implicit bias is important, because it changes how we address prejudice in every corner of society, from police departments to schools to homes. If the problem is with racists--individuals like Steve King--then the solution is to identify them and limit their influence. That does need to happen; indeed, after Chief David Brown took over the Dallas police department in 2010, he fired over 70 officers from his force--and excessive-force complaints dropped by 64 percent.

But the new science of implicit bias suggests that the problem is not only with bad apples. Instead, prejudice is a conflict that plays out within each and every one of us.

Since we published the book Are We Born Racist? in 2010--which explores racial prejudice as a neurological and psychological process--we've seen more and more research into the automatic and measurable associations that people have about others, and the subtle and unconscious behaviors that these associations influence. In many daily circumstances, automatic associations are natural and harmless. Not so when a police officer pulls a car over for a broken tail light, and the negative associations he has with the face of the driver can produce deadly results; or when a black defendant's facial features can make a jury more likely to give him the death penalty.

Last summer, Greater Good published a series of articles by researchers and law enforcement officials about how to reduce the negative influences of implicit bias in the criminal justice system. But this research isn't just for cops and judges--it can help all of us to understand how our brains work and why we are not as different as we might like to think from a police officer who shoots an unarmed suspect.

Indeed, the fact that implicit bias occurs outside of our awareness but affects explicit behaviors--from whether we pull a trigger to how we judge a resume to how we discipline young children--can deeply threaten our self-image. If I have implicit bias, does that mean I'm not really committed to fairness and equality? Am I, at a deep and unconscious level, actually a racist?

The answer is both yes and no. We all carry prejudices within ourselves--and we all have the tools to keep them in check.

From explicit to implicit bias

When we think of "racists," our minds conjure up people like the San Francisco police officers who were recently caught using racially derogatory words in text messages, or perhaps politicians like King. Their pronouncements shock many of us with their old-fashioned racism, in which people's out-group attitudes are conscious, explicit, and openly endorsed. This type of racism was characteristic of majority group members' attitudes up until around the 1950s--and today it does indeed appear to be undergoing a vocal revival in public life.

What current discussions about implicit bias recognize, however, is that a great deal of contemporary racism comes from people who say they don't want to be racist.

Evidence of this tendency emerged when negative attitudes or stereotypes became publicly frowned upon in the 1960s and 70s, and many people felt social pressure to not get "caught" saying something that sounded racist--an extrinsic motivation that many have labeled "political correctness."

This formulation implies that egalitarian behavior is not real or truly felt, but rather, a social grace to mask an unacceptable attitude. As many supporters have said about GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, he "says what nearly everybody thinks, but is too fearful or polite to say." This conception makes someone like Trump sound "honest," but by implication, suggests that those who speak up for egalitarianism are being somehow "dishonest."

Things become even more complicated when a person (or institution) sincerely values egalitarianism yet engages in some kind of behavior that nonetheless betrays bias. Many studies find evidence of anti-black bias in pain-killer prescription and other kinds of medical treatment. One study found that job applicants with stereotypically African-American names were less likely to be invited to be interviewed. And, despite the avowed commitment of the courts to "justice for all," the connection between criminal sentencing and race is well documented.

For many people, the very possibility that they too might get caught saying one thing but doing another is extremely threatening and aversive. That threat, in fact, has a name: aversive racism. It refers to the type of racism in which a person's implicit biases are so out of line with their conscious values that social situations where they experience this conflict--such as interracial interactions--are something to fear and avoid.

In a 2008 study, for example, white participants who were about to discuss racial profiling with a fellow study participant who was black literally sat further away from them, and this distance was not predicted by their level of racial bias. Instead, it was predicted by their fear of being perceived as racist. In these kinds of situations, we create a self-fulfilling cycle of negative racial interactions--and to avoid them we may avoid contact with different kinds of people altogether.

This dynamic, ironically, can deepen racial segregation and inequality.

Did we evolve to be racist?

These behavioral findings have counterparts in neuroscience.

We often hear descriptions of the brain's limbic system as our "reptilian brain" that responds to environmental cues with the same level of sophistication as an alligator. Lightning quick and outside of our control, the limbic system has been called the seat of our fight-or-flight responses, perfectly adapted to the eat-or-be eaten environment of our early ancestors. A central player in this prehistoric narrative is the amygdala, a pair of almond-like structures that form part of the limbic system. Early findings that the amygdala responds strongly to fear conditioning led to the view that the amygdala is the structure that sets in motion the fight-or-flight response.

Researchers like Elizabeth Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji wrote a significant chapter in our understanding of implicit bias when they found that faces of different races trigger different amygdala activation in the brain, and that there's a relationship between levels of implicit bias and amygdala activity. These findings have fueled a conception of implicit bias as not only unconscious and automatic, but also as biologically determined--part of our ancestral heritage. The implication there is that our only hope is to contain it, but never realistically to overcome it.

Newer research--often by the same people--is beginning to challenge the core assumptions of this narrative. Once again, the amygdala plays a central role. Scientists are beginning to recognize that the amygdala, rather than responding exclusively to negative or fear-inducing stimuli, instead seems to be exquisitely sensitive to emotionally important information in the environment. This is a subtle but important difference, and suggests that depending on the task or the situation at hand, the amygdala may be able to respond differentially.

In one study, researchers found that the amygdalae of participants activated at levels consistent with how negatively they rated a set of faces, in line with prior findings. However, amygdala activity was also related to their judgments of the positivity of faces. And when they judged faces using a scale that was anchored by both positive and negative endpoints, the amygdala tracked the overall intensity of the responses. In other words, the amygdala is more than just a "fear" center, and its activation doesn't necessarily indicate prejudice.

In another study, researchers had participants engage in a face-sorting task in one of two different conditions--either by race, or by membership in teams that included people of different races. Interestingly, the amygdala did not only track race information--it tracked the socially relevant membership (team or race) depending on the social task in front of participants. This tells us that the amygdala is not necessarily pre-wired to detect race information, but rather, to track and respond to the category or social grouping that is most relevant at a given time.

Rather than contradicting an evolutionary narrative, however, these findings merely challenges us to think a little more broadly about the usefulness of categorization even in early times--we may have had to quickly recognize a member of an "out-group" on the basis of race, but it would have been just as helpful to quickly track whether an individual of the same race as us was part of a nearby enemy tribe. When we consider that "in-group" versus "out-group" distinctions don't neatly fall along racial categories, we can begin to consider that race is not a biological inevitability, but a social construction with social significance that our amygdala tracks.

In other words, if the brain adjusts to quickly process information that is deemed as socially relevant, it may be within our power to redefine what is socially relevant. And, rather than needing to squash or cover up our base biases, perpetually caught in a Freudian tug-of-war between Id and Superego, the current view opens the possibility of redefining our social environment so that it doesn't need to track race as a socially significant marker.

Six ways to stop the racist in you

What are the implications of this new way of thinking and conceptualizing brain function for our understanding of prejudice--and of how can we use it to limit our own biases?

At its most basic level, this new understanding of the brain reveals it not as a layered organ showing the layers of our evolution, as might layers of sediment in a canyon. Rather than thinking in terms of dualistic structures--primitive/evolved, emotion/thought, limbic system/neocortex--we are coming to understand that the brain is much more interconnected than previously thought.

But beyond this understanding, these new findings show that our automatic processes (including our implicit biases) are not unchangeable, and that we can learn new behaviors that can become second nature.

An everyday example shows how this is possible. Consider that not one of us is born learning how to drive, and yet by the time many people are adults, we find ourselves not even thinking about it even as we expertly maneuver the car. One day, with practice, egalitarianism might be like driving a car: a skill learned over time but eventually so automatic as to be second nature.

So what are the tricks that you can use to stop the racist in you? There are many, of course, but here are six to consider that follow from the scientific insights we describe.

Consciously commit yourself to egalitarianism.
But recognize that unconscious bias is no more "the real you" than your conscious values. You are both the unconscious and the conscious.
Acknowledge differences, rather than pretend that you are ignoring them.
Seek out friendship with people from different groups, in order to increase your brain's familiarity with different people and expand your point of view.
It's natural to focus on how people are different from you, but try to consciously identify what qualities and goals you might have in common.
When you encounter examples of unambiguous bias, speak out against them. Why? Because that helps create and reinforce a standard for yourself and the people around you, in addition to providing some help to those who are the targets of explicit and implicit prejudice.

Those are steps you can take right now, without waiting for the world to change.

But this research has implications that go well beyond the personal. The split-second reaction of a police officer who shoots an unarmed black man might not be very different from your own. Instead of asking the question of whether a person is or is not racist--because we're all a mix--we can turn to thinking of the ways in which we might engineer our social environment to address racism and its worst effects, without believing that any one step will be a blanket fix.

Knowing that bias is part of the structure of our minds we can ask, for example, how can we change policing so that the results of bias are less deadly? How can we address economic inequality between different groups so as to reduce the stress on communities that are historically the targets of racism? What can school districts do to make sure teachers come in daily positive contact with different kinds of people, and receive training in techniques to help them consciously reduce unconscious bias?

There are many fronts in the campaign against bias, both implicit and explicit, but they all have one thing in common: us. We are all potentially part of the problem--and we can all become a part of the solution.

This essay was revised and updated by Smith from a piece by Mendoza-Denton and Amanda Perez in the journal Othering & Belonging, published by the UC Berkeley Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.

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Why Can't We Remember Our Early Childhood?
By Jeanne Shinskey

Most of us don't have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives.

In fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. And when we do try to think back to our earliest memories, it is often unclear whether they are the real thing or just recollections based on photos or stories told to us by others.

The phenomenon, known as "childhood amnesia," has been puzzling psychologists for more than a century--and we still don't fully understand it. But research is starting to suggest an answer: Autobiographical memory might begin with the stories we tell each other.

The journey into language

At first glance, it may seem that the reason we don't remember being babies is because infants and toddlers don't have a fully developed memory.

But babies as young as six months can form both short-term memories that last for minutes, and long-term memories that last weeks, if not months. In one study, six-month-olds who learned how to press a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform this action for two to three weeks after they had last seen the toy. Preschoolers, on the other hand, can remember events that go years back. It's debatable whether long-term memories at this early age are truly autobiographical, though--that is, personally relevant events that occurred in a specific time and place.

Of course, memory capabilities at these ages are not adult-like--they continue to mature until adolescence. In fact, developmental changes in basic memory processes have been put forward as an explanation for childhood amnesia, and it's one of the best theories we've got so far.

These basic processes involve several brain regions and include forming, maintaining, and then later retrieving the memory. For example, the hippocampus, thought to be responsible for forming memories, continues developing until at least the age of seven. We know that the typical boundary for the offset of childhood amnesia--three and a half years--shifts with age. Children and teenagers have earlier memories than adults do. This suggests that the problem may be less with forming memories than with maintaining them.

However, this does not seem to be the whole story. Language also plays a role. From the ages of one to six, children progress from the one-word stage of speaking to becoming fluent in their native language(s), so there are major changes in their verbal ability that overlap with the childhood amnesia period. This includes using the past tense, memory-related words such as "remember" and "forget," and personal pronouns, a favorite being "mine."

It is true to some extent that a child's ability to verbalize about an event at the time that it happened predicts how well they remember it months or years later. One lab group conducted this work by interviewing toddlers brought to accident and emergency departments for common childhood injuries. Toddlers over 26 months, who could talk about the event at the time, recalled it up to five years later--whereas those under 26 months, who could not talk about it, recalled little or nothing. This suggests that preverbal memories are lost if they are not translated into language.

How stories make memories

However, most research on the role of language focuses on a particular form of expression called narrative, and its social function. When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills--what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand.

Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory's accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far, thanks to Maori parents' highly elaborative style of telling family stories.

Reminiscing has different social functions in different cultures, which contribute to cultural variations in the quantity, quality, and timing of early autobiographical memories. Adults in cultures that value autonomy (North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier and more childhood memories than adults in cultures that value relatedness (Asia, Africa).

This is predicted by cultural differences in parental reminiscing style. In cultures that promote more autonomous self-concepts, parental reminiscing focuses more on children's individual experiences, preferences, and feelings, and less on their relationships with others, social routines, and behavioral standards. For example, an American child might remember getting a gold star in preschool whereas a Chinese child might remember the class learning a particular song at preschool.

While there are still things we don't understand about childhood amnesia, researchers are making progress. For example, there are more prospective longitudinal studies that follow individuals from childhood into the future. This helps give accurate accounts of events, which is better than retrospectively asking teens or adults to remember past events which are not documented. Also, as neuroscience progresses, there will undoubtedly be more studies relating brain development to memory development. This should help us develop other measures of memory besides verbal reports.

In the meantime, it's important to remember that, even if we can't explicitly remember specific events from when we were very young, their accumulation nevertheless leaves lasting traces that influence our behavior. The first few years of life are paradoxically forgettable and yet powerful in shaping the adults that we become.

This essay was revised from one originally published in The Conversation.

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Solitary Is Not Asocial: Social Interactions Among Mountain Lions

"F61 — F61 and F96, familial mountain lions followed by Panthera's Teton Cougar Project, engage in play. Photograph by Jeff Hogan.

On May 5, 2012, the way I—and many other scientists—understood mountain lions changed forever. A few days earlier, data collected from F57, an adult female mountain lion we'd captured as part of Panthera's Teton Cougar Project just the month before, revealed that she'd been in the same place for two full days, behavior typically indicative of having made a kill. When new data conveyed that another adult female mountain lion, F109, had closed to within 500 meters of F57's position, I rushed out with Jake Kay, a project intern at the time, to set motion-triggered cameras over the massive elk carcass we discovered on location.

Some days later, I retrieved the cameras and reviewed the video footage in our office with anticipation—F109's data indicated that she'd visited the kill and in fact spent some time there. Slowly I clicked on each video in succession, hopeful but aware that capturing an interaction between mountain lions on film would be like catching smoke in my bare hands. But at precisely 11:35 pm on May 5^th (the day I set the camera), F57 trotted into frame under cover of darkness. She quickly backtracked and hissed loudly in the direction from which she'd come. F109 emerged on screen, walking stiff-legged and tall; F57 snarled and retreated to the left side of the carcass. F109 followed, closing the distance between them from ten yards to two. F57 instantly rolled onto her back; her four clawed feet aimed at the interloper. F109 hissed quietly, and then turned her head to the side, communicating mild submission. Then the video ended. I sat alone in the quiet that followed, hand still on the mouse, stunned by what I'd just seen. And then I shot my arms above my head, and yelled “YES” at the ceiling, as thrilled and surprised as if I'd just won the World Cup. Because in mountain lion biology, I just had.

Mountain lions are solitary carnivores, and in fact every wild cat, big or small, is considered solitary, except two: the African lion that forms great family prides most people are very familiar with, and cheetahs, which sometimes form male coalitions that hunt and work together to court females and defend territory. Ecology has a particular definition for “solitary,” when referring to wildlife; Solitary species do not cooperatively raise young, forage, mates, or defend resources from competitors or predators. Solitary carnivores are expected to interact infrequently, and these rare interactions to be about courtship or territorial disputes. Everything you ever read about mountain lions would suggest that F57 and F109 should have avoided each other. But they didn't. So perhaps I'd caught something odd, something out of place in mountain lion society?

Not the case, as you can read in a new article just published in Current Zoology. Between May 2012 and March 2015, we documented 65 Male-Female, 48 Female-Female, and 5 Male-Male interactions among 12 overlapping mountain lions. We captured an amazing 59 of these interactions on film, 11 (17%) of which included courtship behaviors (see Rare Video Footage Shows the Dynamics of Cougar Courtship). We found that mountain lions interacted 5.5 times as often between December 1st and May 31^stas they did between June 1^st and November 30^th each year, which makes sense, since elk form massive winter herds on feed grounds from December-May and mountain lions court each other during breeding between February and May (see A Fortress For Cougar Kittens).

Sixty percent of the mountain lion interactions we documented occurred over food—a kill made by one of the mountain lions. And contrary to everything we read about mountain lions, kittens were present at 60% of Female-Female and Male-Female interactions at kill sites. Courtship interactions were less common. We even documented three adult pumas feeding together on 5 occasions, and as many as 9 pumas at a kill, including youngsters.

In 1989, Sandell emphasized that solitary is not the same as non-social, and that all solitary wild cats are social to some degree. Researchers studying primates also offer useful insights applicable to solitary wild cats. They define solitary primates as those that look for food alone, but still maintain social relationships. So while the frequency with which we documented mountain lions interacting with each other is unprecedented and sheds new light on the social behavior of mountain lions, it is not enough to challenge their status as a solitary species; all evidence so far indicates that mountain lions (and most wild cat species) hunt alone.

Stay tuned for more on the social behaviors of mountain lions from Panthera's Teton Cougar Project. This research is the first in a series of papers we are publishing on the subject—the next explores patterns of social interactions and attempts to explain why mountain lions interact with some frequency. For updates, photos, and videos of all the mountain lions followed as part of Panthera's Teton Cougar Project, join us on Facebook.

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Further reading:

Sandell M, 1989. The mating tactics and spacing patterns of solitary carnivores. In: Gittleman JL ed. Carnivore Behavior, Ecology, and Evolution. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 164-182.

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California Knows Best: What's Good For The Environment Can Also Be Great For The Economy
Been there, done that. As states across the nation scramble to adjust their energy portfolios to meet increasingly stringent carbon emission limits and other climate change mandates, our experience in California since 2006 could prove to be a useful guide.

Back then, we heard the dire warnings that our groundbreaking law curtailing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions - the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) - would be economically catastrophic for the Golden State. But almost 10 years later, the many ominous predictions from opponents of clean energy have fallen flat.

California is on track to meet the near-term goals set by AB 32--limiting the state's GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020-- resulting in less air pollution and cleaner water and soil. What's more, our economy has not only survived, it has shown remarkable progress in recent years. This law and other forward-thinking policies have created a demand for private-sector investment in clean energy solutions without the economic Armageddon that the naysayers predicted. As the renewable energy industry and other "clean tech" fields have expanded, so have 21st-century job opportunities for our vast workforce.

Today, we face another chance to take a major step forward toward a low-carbon future. Senate Bill 32 (Pavley), proposed in 2014 and most recently amended in 2016, would bring about additional GHG cuts and provide even greater propulsion to our clean tech economy. The bill looks to reduce GHG by extending the long-term climate pollution target to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The usual suspects are once again sounding alarm bells, but thanks to our experience, California knows better.

Laws like AB 32 have helped California position ourselves on the cutting edge of sustainable development and green innovation - and we continue to reap the benefits. Our clean tech companies create more jobs and invest more money in the economy than similar companies in any other state, with more than 500,000 Californians now employed by the clean energy industry. Not only does this emerging field offer higher-than-average wages and new opportunities in construction and manufacturing, it has begun to create a valuable new export economy. Our international leadership on climate change is not just influential--it's marketable. The cutting-edge technologies and know-how created here in California are becoming increasingly valuable in a global market that is hungry for green solutions.

As nations around the world implement their own climate change policies, California companies have a competitive advantage thanks to the years spent developing new innovations and solutions. And as their profits rise, these companies continue to invest in new technology, innovations and training.

We've seen this kind of investment in green innovation right here in Los Angeles, where the Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is phasing out polluting coal-fired power--currently 50 percent of its energy portfolio--and expanding its reliance on locally produced clean energy through the CLEAN LA Solar feed-in tariff program (FiT), which takes advantage of the abundant solar energy available on more than 10,000 acres of rooftops in Los Angeles to supply zero-carbon, renewable energy to the city.

A study by UCLA and USC found that approximately 26 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions would be displaced by expanding the FiT and other solar programs to 1,500 megawatts (MW)--a goal that the researchers say will be feasible with the proper tools and resources. Major FiT projects recently announced include the Westmont Drive buildings, which will generate 16.4 megawatts of solar energy for LADWP customers, CRAFTED at the Port of L.A., which is expected to gross $5.6 million over 20 years, and the U.S. Postal Service Processing and Distribution Center in Los Angeles, which began installing 31,000 solar panels this month.

These initiatives not only help California meet stringent GHG reduction goals, they catalyze economic growth and private investment in the areas that need it most. Of all the FiT installations, more than 40 percent are located in low-income areas with a need for economic expansion. Experts project that when the FiT program is expanded to 600 MW, it will create more than 11,000 green jobs in the Los Angeles basin and add an additional $200 million more in direct private investment.

Members of the Los Angeles Business Council and the CLEAN LA Solar Coalition recognize the potential of sustainable practices to continue driving economic growth. But while California has taken the lead on sustainable development for the moment, we must not take for granted the forward-thinking policies that have brought us here. To sustain our global leadership on climate change and continue to enjoy the robust economic benefits from our burgeoning green tech industry, we will need to forge a strategic path forward, drawing on experience from existing programs and relying on consistent, clear policy to incentivize future green development.

Innovative new proposals such as Senate Bill 32 will propel our state into a healthier future--both environmentally and economically. As always, there will be plenty of opposition to change. But California must stay the course and forge ahead with the confidence that comes from past experience, which assures us that not only are cutting-edge sustainability policies good for our planet, they're good for business.

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Danger, Will Robinson
The night sky, at least when you can see it, appears placid, serene and as inviting as a cold brew on a muggy afternoon.

Don't be fooled. The real universe is a nasty mélange of stuff that's mostly scorching hot or bitterly cold. The blackness of space is shot through with lethal particles and radiation. Without doubt, the "final frontier," often depicted as a beguiling playground for our Spandex-attired descendants, is deceptively treacherous.

Not only that, it's out to get you.

How's that? Well, you can start with the usual litany of heavenly harm: Asteroids that can mindlessly cannon our world, revenging their own destruction with ours, or solar flares, which could fatally sicken any humans who dare to rocket themselves to Mars. Then there's Mars itself, which even on a good day is less hospitable than the worst environment on Earth.

This cast of cosmic unpleasantries is well known. But there are other baddies whose malevolence is on a grander scale.

Consider gravitational waves. Their discovery is trumpeted as perhaps the most significant science result of the past thousand days. The waves themselves are feebler than the Lichtenstein Navy, as anyone who has read about the LIGO instrument knows. But that's because these waves come from far away. The slight shaking of space-time that made the headlines in February resulted from the collision of two black holes having a combined mass of five dozen suns. Their mutually assured destruction quickly released as much energy as all the stars in our galaxy have belched into space since Aristotle wrote rhetoric.

That prodigious, black hole crash twiddled the cosmos here at Earth, more than a billion light-years from the collision, and it may also have let loose a burst of radiation which, if you were near enough to the action, could ruin your whole planetary day.

It was an explosion of incomparable vigor, and explosions can be dangerous. But you may figure this is someone else's problem, and maybe not even that. After all, who's going to be hanging out in the vicinity of a pair of suicidal black holes?

But there's another threat that's more worrisome: Gamma Ray Bursts, the result of a slightly different variety of cosmic mishap. When large stars die, they don't go gently into the night. Single stars can implode, or two small, dead stars can collide. Either way, the resulting black hole is celebrated with a brief flash of gamma rays a million trillion times brighter than the Sun.

Because most of this energy is shot out in two, oppositely directed beams, it's highly concentrated. It could damage the atmospheres of planets even light-years away, which would be bad news for any biology.

GRBs are not rare. Astronomers find a new one just about every day. And this points out the fact that the universe is a war zone in which random and lethal explosions occur in the star clouds of every galaxy.

This has led some scientists to speculate that the majority of cosmic real estate is essentially a no man's land for life. A recent suggestion is that GRBs rule out 90 percent of all galaxies for life, and even the Milky Way is probably barren except for its outer realms (where we are).

That may sound like really bad news for biology. But wolves in the forest are bad news too, although there are still plenty of creatures out there. Only 15 percent of Earth's surface is arable, but nonetheless, there are billions of humans. So sure, most cosmic real estate may be worthless, but that may be OK.

However, the discovery of these mega-dangers does raise a maddening question: Why is the universe set up in such a way that GRBs don't happen a hundred times more often, or aren't a hundred times more energetic? After all, if that were the case, you wouldn't be reading this.

And there would be no one else able to read it either, in all the vast expanse of space.

Are we that lucky? If you believe in multiple universes, then maybe the correct answer to that question is yes. Sure, most of these hypothesized, other universes would be sterile. But not ours: we're just a winner in the most powerful of powerball lotteries, marveling at our fortune at being in a cosmos that is at least partially habitable.

If this seems too contrived -- if you're not a fan of this idea -- then science can't help you. Yet.

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r0B0t: John C. Reilly Is Giving One of the Best Performances in TV Comedy Today

This article originally appeared in Vulture.

From Matthew McConaughey to Rachel McAdams, John Travolta to Jessica Lange, Terrence Howard to Taraji P. Henson, acclaimed actors who travel to television from the big screen tend to bring a lot of attendant hoopla with them—provided their shows air in prime-time, apparently. That's the only reason I can think of that Tony- and Oscar-nominee John C. Reilly isn't regularly showered in praise for what he's been doing on late-night ratings powerhouse Adult Swim on a weekly basis this summer. The star of films ranging from Talladega Nights to We Need to Talk About Kevin, Reilly is anchoring the fourth season of Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule, the bizarre local-news parody from co-creators Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. (The season finale airs tonight at 12:15 a.m.) Reprising a role he developed over five seasons of the pair's Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, he plays Dr. Steve, the semi-functional host of a disastrous human-interest show. And word to the wise, he's delivering one of the best comedic performances on TV.

It starts with the character's look. Reilly's physical appearance has always served him well as an actor. There's something about the combination of his large frame and round, expressive face that makes him look not so much tall as overgrown, like a child stretched to adult proportions. This gives him an air of vulnerability that belies his size; it lends pathos to his dramatic performances, like the sad-sack cop in Magnolia, and a goofball naïveté to his comedic turns, like the fake music legend in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. It's how a guy who's six-foot-two can sing the ode to interpersonal invisibility “Mr. Cellophane” in the film adaptation of Chicago and earn an Oscar nomination, or pair up with the relatively diminutive Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights and come across like a natural sidekick.

In these strictly physical terms alone, Dr. Steve is his magnum opus, the idiot man-child he was born to play. Wearing a brown suit that's at least two sizes too small, teasing his curly hair to fright-wig proportions, twisting his mouth and squinting his eyes to give his face a vibe of permanent confusion, Reilly leans into his quirks as Dr. Steve.

It's the sort of role that demands slapstick with an almost Newtonian certainty, and Reilly never fails to rise, or more accurately fall, to the occasion. Dr. Steve stomps, lurches, and bumbles through every segment; even something as simple as standing still and introducing his latest topic can end in physical havoc, with smashed props and toppled glass-brick sets. This being a Tim and Eric production, the pratfalls often stretch into cringe-comedy territory. In last week's episode alone, Brule tripped on the way to the soundstage and cut his head so badly that his producer stapled the wound shut on camera; he got hit hard enough in the head with a baseball bat during a piñata stunt gone wrong that he vomited from the impact. For a performer equally at home in absurd Judd Apatow comedies and painful Paul Thomas Anderson dramas, the blend of funny-ha-ha and funny-yikes is ideal.

But it's the sense that you're watching a toddler in the body of a large middle-aged man that gives Reilly/Brule his best material. Dr. Steve greets his topics—space, friends, cars, music, eggs—with appropriately childlike wonder and delight, his twinkling eyes and introductory shout of “Let's check it out!” evoking Christmas-morning levels of enthusiasm. He reacts to his guests with a complete lack of guile, whether holding their hands and kissing them on the head or announcing their physical flaws to the world like a child ignoring his mother's advice that it's impolite to point. He'll eat anything put within range of his mouth, from seafood out of a dumpster to MDMA offered by a strip-club owner. The result is often gross-out body-fluid humor that Reilly throws himself into with terrifying commitment; the scene in which he “had to go to the bathroom at both ends” after having too much to drink at a leather bar he mistook for a Hell's Angels hangout is the ne plus ultra of the genre. When he gets hurt, insulted, excluded, or frightened, he cries, sulks, panics, and screams so convincingly you want to go get his parents. (Unfortunately, his mother, Dorris Pringle-Brule-Salahari, is an abusive murderer who kept him caged in the basement as a boy after his fry-cook father skipped town, so that rules that out.)

Then there's his voice, a masterful mangling of pronunciation and grammar that's the character's trademark. Back when Brule was a recurring character on Awesome Show, Reilly played him relatively straight, sounding simply dopey rather than deranged. Once he became the star of his own series, however, his speech pattern took a turn for the weird. He adds unnecessary “r”s to the opening consonants of words: “boats” becomes “broats,” “pirate” becomes “prirate,” “puppets” becomes “pruppets,” and so on. (The bit during an episode on fear where he popped out from behind the set and shouted “Broo!” may be the series' funniest moment.) He's incapable of properly pronouncing anyone's name, and he's often not even in the ballpark; those that begin with “D” are especially taxing on him for some reason, and Davids, Dans, and Dons are invariably mangled into something like Dang or Dong or Drungus. The preposition “of” gets a real workout, most memorably when the Doctor discovers that when it comes to American currency, “one of paper equals four of coin.” And there's a mushmouthed quality to his voice throughout, as if he'd been suddenly awoken from a nap just before the camera started rolling. (The overall effect is so strange and singular that it defuses criticism that the character is some sort of mean-spirited ableist stereotype: No real person on Earth sounds like this.)

And as ill at ease as Brule appears in his man-on-the-street segments, he fits right in to the peculiar public-access world Heidecker and Wareheim have built around him. The VHS-distortion effects, the no-budget graphics and set design, the cast of non-actors playing Brule's fellow Channel 5 employees, the occasional eruptions of Mulholland Drivelevel menace amid the ridiculousness: Dr. Steve's solo show is the Tim & Eric aesthetic in its purest form, at a time when the pair's other ventures (notably their bigger-budget recent series Bedtime Stories) have largely moved away from the deliberately crude, visually noisy look that once defined them. As Reilly's collaborators, they seem determined to rise to his level of calculated madness. I don't think it's an exaggeration to compare this relationship to Sam Esmail and Rami Malek on Mr. Robot or Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen on Hannibal, in the sense that the look and work of the performer enables the filmmaker to take things farther than they otherwise could. That's the mark of a great performance, no matter how odd it looks, or how late you have to stay up to see it.

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Jeremy Hunt, You Need to Sort Out the Mental Health Service - Now!
What I am going to write in this post isn't going to shock people. There is no big revelation hidden within it. But I have come to the conclusion that if Jeremy Hunt isn't constantly nagged about the state of the Mental Health Service in England, nothing is actually going to be done about it.

This isn't a problem exclusive to 2016. I have had personal experience of its shambolic state for seven years.

Undoubtedly mental health problems are complex to treat. If you break your leg, you go to A & E, you have an X-ray, you might get your leg put in a cast, you will have follow up appointments and probably physio for a maximum of a year afterwards.

Now let's say you are depressed. You go to your GP, you might get prescribed anti-depressants, or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (counselling), you might feel better, you might not.

A common misconception about anti-depressants is that you take them and they immediately work and everything is fine. There is more than just one anti-depressant out there. Some people have to try all of them to find the one that actually helps them.

Counselling, alongside medication, helped me when I needed it for anxiety. But again, there is no magic formula and you aren't necessarily going to have the right sort of bond with the first counsellor you see. (Just for the record on both the occasions I have had counselling I have paid for it myself).
Then when you find the right counsellor, sometimes you can have a few sessions and have a breakthrough, and sometimes it can take years of talking therapy.

I hope you understand what I am saying. With mental health problems often you are not ever properly healed. The same problems can recur over and over again. Exhausting, heart-breaking and like I said incredibly hard to cope with for the NHS.

Financially something needs to be sorted. Over the last few years the amount of money being set aside for mental health care has been going gradually down - which is frankly laughable. It is a service in absolute chaos.

I was prompted to write this post because of a relative of mine. He is in his early seventies, living alone, recovering from a stroke, and suffering awfully with anxiety. Even getting a parcel (and this is not even him answering the door) sends him into a total, frantic panic.
He is also terribly depressed and admits he gets no pleasure from the small things in life he used to enjoy.

One day I was at his bungalow when he was having a really bad week, the previous day one of his brilliant carers had fought tooth and nail to get his doctor or a paramedic to come out to him. The carer and I continued trying this the next day and eventually we had a phone call from someone in the mental health team saying they would be out to see him that evening (hours later).

When the man, presumably a doctor (he didn't say) arrived, he was reassuring. Sensibly he suggested an increase in medication. Because of the vulnerability of my relative, he also said he would send someone out again in the next few days to talk to him about how he was feeling.
This all happened on a Wednesday evening. A week and half a later there had been no increase in medication and no visit.

I then witnessed my mum having to phone four or more different numbers trying to find out why nothing had been done. The majority of people she spoke to made her feel like an inconvenience.

This reminded me of a time seven years ago when I was sent a letter from a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) team, basically saying I told them I didn't want counselling - when in fact the total opposite was the case. I had waited weeks to be assessed and weeks to get that letter. When I read it, it sent me crashing over the edge.

It is a feeling I hope Mr Hunt, or anyone close to him, never experiences. But I do hope he realises that measures need to be put in place to sort out the mental health care shambles in England. Otherwise it is going to be too late for too many people!
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