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These researchers want you to mail them your gut bacteria

"2016-09-23-1474625521-500743-MicrobiomedataondisplayattheUCSanDiegoQualcommInstituteUCSanDiego2.jpg"

_{UC San Diego}

Most of the DNA in your body isn't yours; it belongs to the bacteria that comprise your personal microbiome. This bacterial make-up has significant health implications, but which factors determine our gut bacteria, and how the microbiome in turn impacts our heath, is not yet fully understood. That will require a lot of data, and the American Gut Project has come up with a novel way to collect it: a participant-funded citizen science program, through which thousands of volunteers have already mailed in samples of their gut, mouth, or skin microbiomes. Researchers Embriette Hyde and Rob Knight tell us more.

Want to receive updates on this project? Follow it on ResearchGate.

ResearchGate: What is the American Gut Project?

Embriette Hyde and Rob Knight: The American Gut Project is one of the largest crowdsourced citizen science projects in existence today. Established late 2012, the goal of the project is to build a comprehensive map of the human microbiome, enabling researchers to identify bad and good areas on the map, and promote research to determine how to move people from the bad to the good areas. We are open to anyone in the world, and our 8500+ participants have sent us over 10,000 samples and contributed nearly $2 million to cover the cost of processing, sequencing, and analyzing those samples. We are completely open source, which means that all of our protocols for sample processing, sequencing, and analysis, as well as the data, are open and freely available to anyone. Participants know exactly what we've done with their sample and can dig deeper into their data if they want, and a handful have. Other research groups can also access the data and use it in their own research.

RG: How did you come up with this idea?

Hyde and Knight: In 2012, Jeff Leach approached me with the idea that we could open up some of the tools developed for the Human Microbiome Project to anyone who was interested. I thought it was a crazy idea, but not so crazy that we shouldn't try it out. And clearly, in retrospect we're all glad that we did! The project has greatly enhanced the public's ability to participate in human microbiome science.

RG: Why is it important to collect data on gut microbiomes?

Hyde and Knight: If you compare the number of genes encoded by your own human DNA to the number of genes encoded by the DNA of the microbes that live in your gut, you'll quickly realize that you are a supraorganism carrying only about one percent human genetic information and 99 percent microbial genetic information. Those microbial gene products are not sitting by silently. In fact, we know they do really important things for us, such as break down plant polysaccharides that our human cells cannot, produce vitamins that we can't get from our diet, inform appropriate maturation of our immune system, and fight off pathogens. In the past decade, dozens of research groups have identified associations between the gut microbiome and countless health and disease states from inflammatory bowel disease to obesity to autism. If we want to improve human health, we need to treat humans as the supraorganism that they are, and determine how our microbiomes interact with us in health and disease.

RG: What exactly happens with the samples when you get them?

Hyde and Knight: When the samples arrive in the lab, we scan the barcode on the sample tube, which will tell us if the participant has signed their consent form and completed all of the required steps for us to begin sample processing. If all is good, one of the swab tips is then cut off with sterile scissors into a 96-well plate containing other samples--one sample per well. This plate is then stored at -20C to protect the sample. Once 90 samples are on the plate--the other wells are "blanks" to ensure our process is clean and accurate--the plate is passed off to a liquid handling robot that adds in buffers and other formulations for extracting the DNA from the sample. We then use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify a region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene (variable region 4), which enables us to profile the bacterial community present. These "amplicons" are then sequenced, and after sequencing, run through a series of computational steps to provide us-and the participants-with information about what is in the sample. We quality control the sequences to ensure only the highest quality sequences are included in the analyses, and then align those sequences against a reference database, which enables us to taxonomically classify the different bacteria present in the sample. We can then apply several statistical and visualization techniques to compare samples to one another and look for connections between the bacterial community and, say, diet type or disease state.

RG: What have you learned so far? Any surprises?

Hyde and Knight: Some of the strongest associations are with the country you live in, the number of types of plants you eat in a typical week, and how much sleep you get each night. We've also noticed that exercise frequency, alcohol consumption, and the number of bowel movements one makes in a day are also linked to microbiome diversity.

RG: How does the fact that these samples were collected at home by untrained participants affect your ability to use the resulting data?

Hyde and Knight: One of the biggest factors affecting samples is the fact that some bacteria do grow while the sample is in the mail. We have compared American Gut samples to several quality control and storage condition microbiome studies to identify the bacteria that grow in transit. We then remove those sequences from every sample before we move forward with analysis and produce results.

The sample collection itself isn't hard, and if someone has done it wrong (i.e. put the swab between their butt-cheeks instead of swabbing used toilet paper as instructed) we can tell when we see the data. The other factor that we have to deal with is the honesty of our participants because all of the data are self-reported. For example, we either see a link between the microbiome and exercise, or between the microbiome and lying about exercise. We hope to resolve this by working with athletes who are more closely monitored. We can try to validate some of the answers, for example by using the Food Frequency Questionnaire that participants can opt to complete.

RG: What do you think motivates people to participate?

Hyde and Knight: I believe the motivations are varied. Some people seriously take on the citizen scientist role and want to do all they can to help move our research forward. Others are just curious about what is living inside of them. Many have a serious disease and therefore are incredibly personally motivated to help scientists learn new things about that disease that may help find a treatment. Regardless of the motivation, all of our participants are helping us to achieve the same goal, and the project is a success because of their support and enthusiasm.

RG: How does the American Gut Project differ from other investigations of the human microbiome?

Hyde and Knight: American Gut is different from other microbiome research studies both in terms of operation and scope. Because it is crowdsourced citizen science, there is no official government funding directly associated with the project. While some collaborators have clinched grant money to support microbiome sequencing of their participants and we can receive charitable donations, the vast majority of monies come from the participants themselves. We also immediately release the data as soon as we have them. This is unique because most research data are not made available until after a publication is released. We are also one of the largest, if not the largest, human microbiome study in existence with over 10,000 samples from over 8500 people living in 35 countries!

RG: What are your plans moving forward?

Hyde and Knight: We will continue collecting samples until interest wanes, which we don't anticipate happening in the near future. We're working toward expanding our geographical reach even further by establishing additional aggregation sites in other countries. We're also nurturing current collaborations and building new ones to reach out to specific cohorts, such as student athletes, people suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases, fermented foods consumers, cancer patients, and babies and their nurses, among many others. The microbiome has some type of association with nearly every health and disease state that you can imagine, and we'd love for American Gut to be instrumental in furthering microbiome research in as many of those states as possible! It's important for people to remember that at the moment, microbiome analysis is still very much research. Some day we hope it will lead to FDA-approved tests for specific diseases, and our participants are helping bring that day closer.

This interview originally appeared on ResearchGate News.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-king/the-science-of-nobel-priz_b_12117976.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
The Science of Nobel Prize Prediction
If the scientific and scholarly world has an equivalent of filmdom's annual, pre-award "Oscar fever" of late February, it's just about upon us: Beginning on October 3rd, the committee that decides the Nobel Prizes will notify a select group of honorees that they've won science's highest award.

Since 2002, to mark Nobel Prize week, the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has released its own list of Nobel-worthy researchers. These are the Web of Science ™ Citation Laureates - scientists whose published work has won special recognition among peers by being read and footnoted, or "cited," at a level far above the norm. The latest group of Laureates
has just been announced.

Because citations serve as quantifiable markers of influence and significance, a high citation rate attests to work that has truly made a difference to ongoing research. The Citation Laureates, therefore, are scientists whose work has proved itself worthy of possible Nobel recognition - perhaps soon, perhaps a decade or two in the future, depending on the prize committee's inclinations and deliberations.

To select this latest class of Citation Laureates, analysts turned, as always, to the Web of Science, an online database that compiles publication and citation statistics in science, the socials sciences, and the arts and humanities, reflecting scholarly inquiry back to the year 1900. Scientists whose papers have attracted an unusually high number of citations, and whose work is clearly associated with a specific and notable discovery or advance, win the distinction of being "of Nobel class."

Continuing a feature introduced in last year's presentation of Laureates, an online "People's Choice" poll permits readers to vote on their favorite Nobel-worthy candidates, either from this year's new batch or from among previous Citation Laureate selections who still await the call from Stockholm. Register your vote here.

As always, the new Laureates represent all four science fields honored by the Nobel: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. A trio of scientists recognized in Physics, for example, represent a recent breakthrough in a longstanding astrophysical quest: Roland W.P. Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss were the key drivers behind the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facility, an installation in Pasadena built to detect gravitational waves. Earlier this year, LIGO captured evidence of these ripples in space-time, predicted more than a century ago by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

In Chemistry, George M. Church and Feng Zhang are recognized for their contributions to another recent breakthrough, the genome-editing method known as CRISPR-Cas9. This "find and replace" utility for gene sequences has been the subject of highly active research since the method was originated in 2012, as it raises the prospect of actually re-writing genetic code to cure or avert disease. But the method has also spawned qualms about the ethics of such gene-tampering, along with a bitter legal battle over who should own the lucrative patent rights for the method, pitting Zhang against another Citation Laureate, Jennifer A. Doudna, who was selected last year with another CRISPR inventor, Emmanuelle Charpentier. Furthermore, Nobel rules stipulate that no more than three researchers may share any given prize, so the selection by the Nobel committee for CRISPR, if and when it comes, seems certain to stir controversy.

Other new Citation Laureates are honored for findings that harness the immune system to attack tumors, or that permit non-invasive screenings for pregnant women, or provide a deeper understanding of why unemployment is a persistent problem in developed economies.

One of this year's selections, Stuart L. Schreiber, is tipped in Physiology or Medicine for work on a gene known as TOR, whose intracellular workings have provided insights for the targeting of therapeutic drugs. A decade ago, Schreiber was selected as a Citation Laureate in the field of Chemistry for work on small molecules. Thanks to groundbreaking work in these two areas, Schreiber may have doubled his chances for an invitation to Sweden someday.

The 2016 Thomson Reuters Web of Science Citation Laureates

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE
James P. Allison of the University of Texas Houston, and Jeffrey A. Bluestone of the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
For explaining how CD28 and CTLA-4 are regulators of T cell activation, modulating immune response

Gordon J. Freeman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, and Arlene H. Sharpe of Harvard Medical School
For elucidating programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its pathway, which has advanced cancer immunotherapy

Michael N. Hall, University of Basel, Switzerland, and David M. Sabatini of the Whitehead Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Stuart L. Schreiber of the Broad Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
For discoveries of the growth regulator Target of Rapamycin (TOR) and the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR)

PHYSICS
Marvin L. Cohen of the University of California Berkeley
For theoretical studies of solid materials, prediction of their properties, and especially for the empirical pseudo potential method

Ronald W.P. Drever of the California Institute of Technology, and Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that made possible the detection of gravitational waves

Celso Grebogi of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Edward Ott of the University of Maryland, and James A. Yorke of the University of Maryland
For their description of a control theory of chaotic systems, the OGY method

CHEMISTRY
George M. Church of Harvard Medical School, and Feng Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For application of CRISPR-cas9 gene editing in mouse and human cells

Dennis Lo Yuk Ming of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
For detecting cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, a revolution in noninvasive prenatal testing

Hiroshi Maeda of Sojo University and the University School of Medicine, Japan, and Yasuhiro Matsumura of the University of Tokyo
For discovering the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect of macromolecular drugs, a key finding for cancer therapeutics

ECONOMICS
Olivier J. Blanchard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
For contributions to macroeconomics, including determinants of economic fluctuations and employment

Edward P. Lazear of Stanford Graduate School of Business
For his development of the distinctive field of personnel economics

Marc J. Melitz of Harvard University
For pioneering descriptions of firm heterogeneity and international trade.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lab-notes/a-revolution-in-supercomputing-is-coming-from-a-remote_b_12116590.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
A Revolution In Supercomputing Is Coming. From A Remote Mountain Town. In New Mexico.

By Gary Grider

Tucked in the foothills of the Jemez mountains in northern New Mexico, among the ponderosa pines and endless blue skies, sits one of the world's fastest computers. Trinity is a 42-petaflop supercomputer (that's one quadrillion floating point operations per second, in case you're counting) that resides at Los Alamos National Laboratory and can perform complex 3D simulations of everything from ocean currents to asteroid impacts.

While a remote mountain town might seem to be an odd place for this computer to call home, it makes sense when you consider Los Alamos' history. Founded during World War II as the location of the top-secret Manhattan Project, scientists toiled away to build the first atomic bomb. What they didn't realize is that, in the process, they were pioneering the advent of Big Science. Today, Big Science brings together theory, modeling, experiments that produce massive amounts of data, and supercomputers to run incredibly sophisticated simulations providing feedback and validation to those theories and models. When J. Robert Oppenheimer led his all-star team of scientists to unravel the secrets of the atom, they were embarking on an integrated research program at a scale the world had rarely seen.

Computers were here from the start. During the war years, the term “computers” applied to mathematicians—mostly women—who worked the differential equations by hand, with help from mechanical desktop calculators and simple punch-card machines from IBM. These were the first steps in the process of inventing how to use computers. Los Alamos scientists went on to run the first production job on the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC, and Nicholas Metropolis spearheaded development of the Lab's own computer, playfully dubbed MANIAC, in 1952, to continue the work of modeling nuclear processes.

Working with corporate collaborators, the Lab has been stretching the boundaries of computing ever since, with innovation following innovation as the Lab's computers often topped the list of the fastest in the world. In 2008, the Lab's Roadrunner supercomputer became the first to break the petaflop barrier, processing a thousand million floating point operations each second. That kind of speed enables resolution in simulations that would have been unimaginable 70 years ago. In a global ocean climate model, for example, scientists can look at individual eddies in an ocean current. (See image below.)

None of these computers were “plug and play.” For each one, the Lab and its corporate partners developed new software and hardware to make it run. Those innovations benefitted public and private computer users everywhere, from how best to network very large clusters of computer processors to how to manage the data they produced.

Roadrunner's petaflop speed, for instance, was spinning out data at unprecedented rates during simulations running many months. Storage technology in that era struggled to keep up with the technology's ability to generate and consume data. During long-running calculations at very large scale, with thousands of processors operating for weeks to months, failures occur—several per day, potentially. A method for dealing with this recurring and somewhat random failure is checkpoint-restart, where the application periodically saves a snapshot of its current state to guard against impending failure. The program can restart from these checkpoints and thereby continue for long periods, making forward progress towards a meaningful scientific result.

If the stable storage that holds checkpoints is too slow, then computing time is lost either through spending too much time checkpointing, which bogs down the program, or by not checkpointing, which amplifies the effect of each failure.

The challenge intensified with Trinity, with its Cray architecture and two kinds of Intel processors. When fully installed, it will run about 40 times faster than Roadrunner and has memory roughly equal to the amount of memory of all the laptops in New Mexico. That performance would only make the check-point problems worse. But several years ago, we invented burst buffers, paving the way for Trinity. Using solid-state flash memory, similar to memory in the average smart phone, burst buffers take the rapid-fire data off the supercomputer processors and dole it out to slower disk drives while keeping the data handy for a restart. Performance improves, and flash memory for burst buffers is cheaper when bandwidth, basically access speed, is taken into account compared to disk drives.

Burst buffers were installed for the first time on Trinity to support its crucial nuclear stockpile simulations. Other Department of Energy laboratories, academia, corporations, and European supercomputer user sites are rapidly adopting this new technology. Our software engineers also went on to develop another storage tool that allows supercomputers to save extremely large data sets for years on relatively inexpensive devices similar to those used by cloud-based businesses like Amazon. Cloud-style inexpensive disk storage had not been applied to high performance computing before.

Trinity and these storage tools continue the tradition of close collaboration between Los Alamos and computer vendors on the very latest developments in computing technology. Big Science and its constant companion, Big Data, rely on the most advanced computers to simulate how the world works or to solve a mystery whose solution hides in a vast sea of data. We take on challenges at a grand scale, from climate modeling to genetics, earthquakes to cancer, black holes to nuclear physics—work that tests the limits of computing superpower. The computing innovations we develop to solve these problems gives others the tools to address more everyday problems, such as by simulating a car crash as a means of improving real-world safety—research that ultimately enriches everyone's life.

Gary Grider is division leader of High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a recognized international expert on supercomputing.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-rockstrom/from-compassion-to-care-o_b_12096930.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
From Compassion to Care on Climate: Why The Dalai Lama's Visit to Brussels Raises Some Serious Questions For The EU
The Dalai Lama's visit to Brussels recently was hardly low-key. A crowd of 10,000 people turned up to listen to His Holiness's speech on individual commitment and global responsibility, after prominent scientists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists and other experts from far and wide had gathered for a conference on the themes of 'Power and Care' during the previous two days.

It is to be hoped that the impact that these discussions have on the Brussels policy scene does not end there, however. In one speech, the Dalai Lama reflected that, while compassion is a feeling essentially experienced on the mental level, care for others is rather defined by action. When it comes to restoring the Earth's delicate balance and tackling climate change, it's time for the EU to add more care to its compassion.

"2016-09-20-1474355926-9046887-Johanrockstromanddalailama.jpglarge"

The Dalai Lama in conversation with Johan Rockström on the "Great Acceleration" in consumption and production and the impact on Earth's life support system. Image: Nikolet Zwart

Let us recall the extremely compelling scientific reasons for why we should care in the first place. While the Earth's climate has always changed to a greater or lesser extent, the last 11,000 years - known as the Holocene epoch - have been remarkably stable. It is this climatic stability that has allowed humanity to cultivate land, sustain ourselves and flourish during that time.

Since the industrial revolution and especially in the last few decades, however, humans have stretched Earth and its resources to breaking point. Cutting down trees at unsustainable rates, overfishing and burning the fossil fuels that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and contribute to global warming - these human actions have taken us to the limits of the planetary boundaries, defined uncompromisingly by nature, within which we reduce risk of Earth slipping into a new state.

In concrete terms, this means that, after several consecutive months of record-breaking high temperatures, last month was tied with July 2016 as the hottest month the world has seen in the last 136 years. Arctic sea ice is melting at alarming rates with hugely disruptive consequences on the way in which heat is distributed around the world. The Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest reef system and one of the most beautiful sites on earth - is bleaching. Climate change has contributed to recent floods in the US, India and China, wildfires in Canada and drought in Africa.

Indeed, the EU's care for our climate need not exclusively be motivated by compassion for others - Europe, too, is extremely vulnerable to the negative changes to which it has contributed. Research suggests that the devastating June floods in France - which caused one billion euros worth of damage - were aggravated by global warming. The continent is also expected to suffer from a combination of ever scarcer fresh water and rising sea levels.

EU Heads of State and policymakers within the EU institutions are not oblivious to these facts. Few of them would challenge the statements of leaders like EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete when he called tackling climate change 'our solemn duty' and said that 'Europe has some of the broadest shoulders in the world and we are ready to continue leading by example'.

And yet, Europe, which has long prided itself on being a leader when it comes to climate action, is not doing all it can to save us - Europeans and non-Europeans - from the worst effects of global warming.

As I and other scientists have argued elsewhere, the scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the targets set out in last December's Paris Agreement is often underplayed in public discourse, and this is the world's biggest gamble. To limit warming to 2˚C compared to pre-industrial levels and have a fair chance of limiting warming to 1.5˚C drastic and immediate action would be needed within and outside of Europe to change the way we produce energy and goods on a level that we are still far from today. The world has already warmed by over 1˚C since the industrial revolution started, and even 1.5˚C and 2˚C worlds would impact our lives and those of the biosphere severely.

In the same paper in the journal Earth's Future, my colleagues and I assert that only a carbon roadmap will put the world on course to collapse GHGs and create the essential carbon sinks for Earth-system stability. The Paris Agreement has provided a framework for action and defined our end goals, but we must have a global plan for exactly when and through what means they will meet this challenge.

Progress has of course been made, globally and in Europe: renewable technology is developing at a rate few predicted, as is the battery storage technology that, when coupled with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, has the capacity to revolutionise energy generation. Renewable energy costs are falling, investment in renewable technologies is rising and jobs are being created. The existence of the Paris Agreement is itself a huge step forward, with all countries, on paper at least, putting a second-half-of-the-century time limit on the bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

The impacts of climate change are only getting worse, however - neither the EU nor any other country or bloc should ever feel justified in responding to calls for greater ambition by claiming that they have done enough. Upcoming Montreal Protocol negotiations to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the list of banned substances used in the refrigeration industry due to their atmospheric warming potential provide the EU and the world with an opportunity to further prove their commitment to climate action, especially as viable and less harmful alternatives to HFCs already exist. Negotiations on reducing aviation emissions within the framework of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and talks at COP22 in November to iron out the fine details of the Paris Agreement do the same.

To return to the title of the conference led by the Dalai Lama, then, EU politicians certainly have the 'Power' to effect change - they must now make sure that 'Care' is at the heart of how they use it.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johan-rockstrom/from-compassion-to-care-o_b_12096890.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
From Compassion to Care on Climate: Why The Dalai Lama's Visit to Brussels Raises Some Serious Questions For The EU
The Dalai Lama's visit to Brussels recently was hardly low-key. A crowd of 10,000 people turned up to listen to His Holiness's speech on individual commitment and global responsibility, after prominent scientists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists and other experts from far and wide had gathered for a conference on the themes of 'Power and Care' during the previous two days.

It is to be hoped that the impact that these discussions have on the Brussels policy scene does not end there, however. In one speech, the Dalai Lama reflected that, while compassion is a feeling essentially experienced on the mental level, care for others is rather defined by action. When it comes to restoring the Earth's delicate balance and tackling climate change, it's time for the EU to add more care to its compassion.

Johan Rockström in conversation with the Dalai Lama discussing the "Great Acceleration" in industrial production and the impact on Earth's life support system Image: Nikolet Zwart

Let us recall the extremely compelling scientific reasons for why we should care in the first place. While the Earth's climate has always changed to a greater or lesser extent, the last 11,000 years - known as the Holocene epoch - have been remarkably stable. It is this climatic stability that has allowed humanity to cultivate land, sustain ourselves and flourish during that time.

Since the industrial revolution and especially in the last few decades, however, humans have stretched Earth and its resources to breaking point. Cutting down trees at unsustainable rates, overfishing and burning the fossil fuels that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and contribute to global warming - these human actions have taken us to the limits of the planetary boundaries, defined uncompromisingly by nature, within which we reduce risk of Earth slipping into a new state.

In concrete terms, this means that, after several consecutive months of record-breaking high temperatures, last month was tied with July 2016 as the hottest month the world has seen in the last 136 years. Arctic sea ice is melting at alarming rates with hugely disruptive consequences on the way in which heat is distributed around the world. The Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest reef system and one of the most beautiful sites on earth - is bleaching. Climate change has contributed to recent floods in the US, India and China, wildfires in Canada and drought in Africa.

Indeed, the EU's care for our climate need not exclusively be motivated by compassion for others - Europe, too, is extremely vulnerable to the negative changes to which it has contributed. Research suggests that the devastating June floods in France - which caused one billion euros worth of damage - were aggravated by global warming. The continent is also expected to suffer from a combination of ever scarcer fresh water and rising sea levels.

EU Heads of State and policymakers within the EU institutions are not oblivious to these facts. Few of them would challenge the statements of leaders like EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete when he called tackling climate change 'our solemn duty' and said that 'Europe has some of the broadest shoulders in the world and we are ready to continue leading by example'.

And yet, Europe, which has long prided itself on being a leader when it comes to climate action, is not doing all it can to save us - Europeans and non-Europeans - from the worst effects of global warming.

As I and other scientists have argued elsewhere, the scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the targets set out in last December's Paris Agreement is often underplayed in public discourse, and this is the world's biggest gamble. To limit warming to 2˚C compared to pre-industrial levels and have a fair chance of limiting warming to 1.5˚C drastic and immediate action would be needed within and outside of Europe to change the way we produce energy and goods on a level that we are still far from today. The world has already warmed by over 1˚C since the industrial revolution started, and even 1.5˚C and 2˚C worlds would impact our lives and those of the biosphere severely.

In the same paper in the journal Earth's Future, my colleagues and I assert that only a carbon roadmap will put the world on course to collapse GHGs and create the essential carbon sinks for Earth-system stability. The Paris Agreement has provided a framework for action and defined our end goals, but we must have a global plan for exactly when and through what means they will meet this challenge.

Progress has of course been made, globally and in Europe: renewable technology is developing at a rate few predicted, as is the battery storage technology that, when coupled with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, has the capacity to revolutionise energy generation. Renewable energy costs are falling, investment in renewable technologies is rising and jobs are being created. The existence of the Paris Agreement is itself a huge step forward, with all countries, on paper at least, putting a second-half-of-the-century time limit on the bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

The impacts of climate change are only getting worse, however - neither the EU nor any other country or bloc should ever feel justified in responding to calls for greater ambition by claiming that they have done enough. Upcoming Montreal Protocol negotiations to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the list of banned substances used in the refrigeration industry due to their atmospheric warming potential provide the EU and the world with an opportunity to further prove their commitment to climate action, especially as viable and less harmful alternatives to HFCs already exist. Negotiations on reducing aviation emissions within the framework of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and talks at COP22 in November to iron out the fine details of the Paris Agreement do the same.

To return to the title of the conference led by the Dalai Lama, then, EU politicians certainly have the 'Power' to effect change - they must now make sure that 'Care' is at the heart of how they use it.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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science

%feed
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/connecting-the-dots-between-the-opioid-epidemic-and-philanthropy_b_11996752.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science
Connecting The Dots Between The Opioid Epidemic And Philanthropy
The Sackler family is justly famous in one way -- and justly notorious in two others.

Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer Sackler (and members of their families) have been among the world's greatest contributors to good causes -- particularly in the arts and sciences. The Sackler name is prominently displayed at the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, Tate, Louvre, and Harvard Museums; at various medical and science facilities at Berkeley, Tufts, MIT, Oxford, King's College, University Of London, and Tel Aviv University; at the beautiful Kew Gardens; and in many other important institutions in the US and abroad.

The Sacklers are on the short list of the world's greatest and most honored philanthropists. Family members have received the very highest awards and titles, bestowed in many different countries, by among many others, the Queen of England.

The great honor that comes from Sackler giving is tainted by the great dishonor in how their fortunes have been accumulated. Sackler notoriety comes from the two unsavory sources of their wealth.

The lesser evil was inventing drug company marketing; the greater evil was pushing opioid prescription painkillers that now kill close to 20,000 people a year in the U.S. alone.

The Sackler fortune is enormous and self-made. Even with all their previous generous philanthropy, the Sackler family still retains a net worth of $13 billion -- more than the much more famous, old money families like the Rockefellers, the Busches, and the Mellons.

Strikingly, none of the Sackler family fortune was inherited. The Sackler brothers all began their careers as psychiatrists, an unpromising profession when it comes to accumulating vast wealth. But the Sacklers were enterprising, energetic, and early on displayed remarkable business savvy. They made their initial fortune by inventing many of the aggressive marketing techniques that turned the pharmaceutical industry into a profit machine. They taught drug companies how to conduct the full court selling of drugs to doctors and how to gear sales pitches directly to consumers.

One can heartily dislike the pharma marketing machine and disapprove of the Sackler role in creating it -- but still recognize it as within moral bounds. It is much harder, however, to justify the Sackler role in creating the prescription opioid epidemic.

In 1952, the Sacklers purchased a small drug company -- Purdue Pharma -- and have since turned it into a giant cash cow. In the past 20 years, the company has generated more than than $35 billion in the U.S. and about an equal amount in other countries.

The star attraction was OxyContin, a time-released, preparation of oxycodone, that was misleadingly marketed as addiction-proof. In a later blog, we will go into detail on all the ways Purdue pushed opioids and created the deadliest drug epidemic in our history. Suffice to say, the company was only marginally less ruthless than the drug cartels and is now responsible for at least twice as many deaths per year.

The Sackler family seeks publicity and fame when it comes to their philanthropy, but keeps a very low profile when it comes to the notoriety of OxyContin gains. Thus far, they have largely succeeded in avoiding blame for the devastating epidemic of prescription opioid addiction that they caused and continue to profit from. This despite the fact that nine family members are currently on the Purdue board. There are encouraging signs, however, that Sackler impunity may soon change.

Richard Sackler has been the most active family member directing Purdue affairs and has left his fingerprints all over the OxyContin disaster. In 1971, shortly after graduating medical school, he began work at Purdue and has held just about every important leadership position in the company -- from directing its research and marketing to serving as president and co-chair of the board.

Of great public interest, Richard Sackler was recently deposed in a lawsuit for the first time -- in regard to Kentucky's claims charging Purdue with continued illegal marketing of OxyContin. It is easy to imagine the questions he must have been asked: What did you know about the addicting impact of OxyContin? When did you know it? What have you done to cause or prevent Purdue's misleading the medical profession and the public? What do your internal company documents show?

Current efforts to make Sackler's testimony public are crucial in strides to make the family accountable for the actions of the company and perhaps might result in the clawing back of some significant portion of their ill-gotten gains.

Sackler's deposition is one of several sealed documents that a Kentucky judge ordered to be released to the public at the request of STAT. Purdue said it will appeal the ruling, meaning the documents will be withheld, pending the outcome of the appeal.

For at least a decade, everyone knew OxyContin was misleadingly marketed and causing great damage. The $600+ million dollar fine levied in 2007 as punishment for Purdue's criminal activity would surely have been a wake up call for its company co-chairman. It is hard to believe that Richard Sackler can offer even a shred of plausible deniability.

If the Sacklers really are philanthropists, and not just seekers of fame, they should want to do the right thing and help those they have hurt.

Purdue is a privately held company and all its profits go to the Sacklers in one form or another. In any fair world, Purdue and the Sacklers should be hit with multibillion dollar fines -- the proceeds devoted to the compensation and rehabilitation of the millions of people they have harmed and to the reimbursement of the states (and their taxpayers) for the enormous public costs occasioned by the opioid epidemic.

It makes no sense to allow the Sacklers free rein to accumulate ever more I'll gotten profits and to launder them with donations to museums and medical centers -- in the service of glorifying and cleansing the Sackler name. The family should be forced to disgorge a significant portion of its fortune to help clean up the opioid mess they created.

If the Sacklers really are philanthropists, and not just seekers of fame, they should want to do the right thing and would come forward now to offer help to those they have harmed.

---

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner.

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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A Cosmic Perspective: Interview With StarTalk's Neil deGrasse Tyson

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When my daughter Lotus recently became interested in astronomy, and we began watching shows and documentaries about space and the universe, we discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, the dynamic host of the National Geographic talk show "StarTalk." While Neil is a world renowned and brilliant astrophysicist and author, and director of the prestigious Hayden Planetarium, he is also an immensely likable, jolly, and warm personality - one who exudes joie de vivre, as well as a contagious, passionate energy for expanding frontiers of science, human thought and innovation. Which is perhaps why, during my interview with him at his office at The Museum of Natural History, wearing his trademark tie of planets, he took such personal interest in my very outdated, essentially obsolete yet beloved RCA microcassette recorder, picking it up as if it were a fossil from prehistoric times asking incredulously, "What is this?!" When I explained that I used it as a back-up, a relic from my days 20 years ago as a magazine reporter, he couldn't control himself. He proceeded to take over my iPhone, setting the interview up to record on the Voice Memo application, beginning the recording with his trademark booming radio announcer voice: "And now, I am Neil deGrasse Tyson for HuffPo interview..." before handing my iPhone back to me, all ready to go.

That anecdote is a sampling of his humor and how he sees his role, as a teacher and provocateur, educating people in entertaining ways about what they should know -- about the universe, about science, and about ourselves and the world around us. He has done this through a variety of mediums: as the host of StarTalk, the popular podcast and National Geographic Channel talk show, as well as the miniseries Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, as the author of 10 books, including the best-selling Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, as well as cultivating a social media following with his thought-provoking and informative tweets. He is also the recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a nongovernment citizen.

StarTalk, his two-time Emmy-nominated late-night talk show, is an outgrowth of his popular radio and podcast series of the same name and seeks to bridge the world of pop culture and science through intimate interviews and lively discussions with an eclectic roster of guests hewn from pop culture, politics or news discussing how science and technology have affected their lives and careers. The third season of StarTalk will premiere on Monday, September 19th, with actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg, followed by a diverse lineup of other high profile guests this season including astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actress and neuroscientist Mayim Bialik, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, comedian Jay Leno, Olympic Gold Medalist Hope Solo, actor Ben Stiller and more. Natgeo Books has also just released an illustrated companion book to the series, STARTALK: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond which curates the best of "StarTalk" and dives deeper into some of the most intriguing discussions from the show.

In our conversation below, Tyson talks about his passion for helping people discover "what role science plays in their lives," why he thinks education should teach our students "how to think," what gives him awe and the essential impact of seeing ourselves and the world through a "cosmic perspective." When you do, Tyson states emphatically, "it changes everything."

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Marianne Schnall: First of all, I wanted to let you know that not only is my 15-year- old daughter a fan, but so is my 18-year-old daughter, my husband, and my father, so you are officially multigenerational, which is a good thing. What is it you most want to accomplish through StarTalk and why did you decide, rather than this just being a science show, to bridge science with pop culture?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's a perfect question, because -- when we think of science, we think of this subject that's taught in a classroom, and you're either good at it or you're not, or you're interested in it, or you're not. And you can just walk by it and say, "Oh, I don't like science but I like history," and you go learn history, as though science is this compartmentalized topic that you can climb over, walk around, dig under, or ignore. And it occurred to me that, "No, of course, science is not that. Science is everywhere." And it especially touches pop culture. So if we create a radio show that pivots on a pop culture foundation, then we can -- think of it as a scaffold. It's a pop culture scaffold that walks into every episode of StarTalk, and we then clad it with science that fits that pop culture topic. I don't need to train you on that scaffold -- pop culture by definition means everybody knows what it is! I have a guest, and you know who that guest is because that person is a famous politician, or singer, performer, artist, whatever. And so I already have you half way. It's the rest of the way that is the celebration of science on the program. So I think it's just a more honest account of what role science plays in our lives. The popularity of StarTalk, I think, is evidence of how well that resonates with people.

MS: And the fact that it has cross-generational appeal is also a really good sign.

NDT: By the way, part of that might be the multiple platforms that it's on. Because I have an identity that exists apart and separate from StarTalk -- like I'm active on Twitter. That leans young. So people say, "Oh, I like Tyson's tweets... oh, he also has his radio show or TV show." And so there are tributaries to the show that do come from different demographics coming together, so I am pleased to learn in your case of the multiple generations.

One other thing: the honing of how we do StarTalk, some of it comes from these other places. So I'll send out a tweet that's pure science, and there'll be some interest in it. But if I connect the science to something pop culture, the interest is ten times greater. So these are insights that I glean daily by people's reactions to how I juxtapose information. So I use that to inform how we do shows with StarTalk.

MS: I feel like we often forget that we actually are on a planet spinning through space. I guess my question is: why do we seem to forget that we are one family on a planet spinning through space, and if we retained that perspective, how would that change the way that we treat the environment, each other and other forms of life on this earth?

NDT: It changes everything. You're absolutely right. And it's a cosmic perspective. The embarrassing part of this is that I and every one of my colleagues carry this perspective with us all the time. And what's embarrassing about that is we sometimes take that for granted, and we have to say, "Oh, my gosh, these other people I'm in this cocktail party with do not live with this awareness. So let me put in a little extra effort to alert you of this, of what's going on in the universe, to put our existence in a context that will either have you re-balance what you think may be important in your life or rethink how you're allocating your energies in the service of yourself versus the environment versus the planet as a whole." That's what a cosmic perspective does.

So yes, it's extremely important. Let me tell you how important it is. I can assert without hesitation that the modern environmental movement where we're caring for earth was born while we were landing on the moon, 1968, '69, and '70. 1968 was our first mission to the moon, Apollo 8. People don't think about it much, because they didn't land. They just went, and orbited and came back. Apollo 9, 10, and 11 would take us into 1969. You go to the moon, and what happened? We looked back, took a picture of earth, and discovered earth for the first time. There it was adrift in space, the dark void of space. And we saw it not as -- it's hard to even go back and remember this or think that it could have ever been this way -- but we saw earth not as earth appeared in social studies class with color coded countries, no. We saw earth as only space can reveal it to you. And there were oceans, land and clouds.

So like I said, we go to the moon, and we discover earth for the first time. After that photo was published, Earthrise and then the Blue Marble -- in that interval of time, we changed as a culture. They say what is it worth to go into space? We changed as a culture. By the way, we had plenty of other priorities on our plate -- there were assassinations, and a cold war, and a hot war, and a civil rights movement, and campus unrest. Yet, we found the time to create the Environmental Protection Agency! That was 1970. Oh, my God. Why didn't we create it in 1960? No one was thinking about it! 1950? Nobody was thinking about it. 1980 could be too late! Environmental Protection Agency under a Republican president, I might add.

What else happened? No one had thought of the atmosphere of earth as part of earth much before that. Ask someone to draw earth before 1968. They'll just draw earth and the continents - no clouds, no atmosphere. So this juxtaposition of ocean, land, and atmosphere became administratively codified in the founding of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA was founded in 1970. Comprehensive Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Protection of Species Act -- some of these existed in sort of skeletal forms earlier. They came of age in the versions that were ratified in 1970. What else happened in 1970? The first Earth Day. Why didn't we have an Earth Day in 1965? 1967? No, 1970. And then 1972, leaded gas would be banned. Catalytic converter would be introduced. So this is my long way to answer your question with a yes. Knowing space matters -- maybe more because it recalibrates what it is to know ourselves.

MS: Why isn't astronomy a required part of a standard educational curriculum so we have that foundational awareness? Why do you think that is?

NDT: Well, the curriculum is ossified for generations, and there's a lot of baggage. Is that the right word? There's a lot of legacy educational habits that exist particularly in the American system. I don't know the other systems very well.

MS: So without our school system, how can we change things?

NDT: No, I would change [the school systems] - I mean I'm not there yet, but I plan to work on that as one of my projects: What can we do with the future of the school systems? Is the portfolio of topics the right ones? Should you get an entire class on a cosmic perspective? What kind of math should you be taught if at all? There are people who say they don't need their math. I think that's a mistake, because it implies that what you learn is what you then apply. Whereas, in the best scenario what you learn -- the act of having learned it -- has established a new form of wiring in your brain that empowers you to have thoughts you've never had before. And by studying math, and by struggling to do a math problem set, and with every new problem you solve, it's a new wiring of your brain. And if you only think of school as, "I want to learn this so that I could apply it here," you'll be ill equipped to navigate the rapidly changing frontier of what actually matters in society. What is it now -- the average time someone spends in a job is three years or five years before you move? Whereas the generation before us, they would spend 30 years working in the factory or working for their company. So you're a freshman in college saying, "What should I major in to have the best chance of having a good job?" Well, major in "how to think," and then you can apply that to any job that arises that at this moment is unforeseen, because you're not getting out for another four years and if you go to graduate school, it's another seven or eight.

MS: You have this new companion book to the series, which is great - there's so much that's in it...

NDT: Can I say something? I didn't know in my heart how this would turn out, because it's organizationally ambitious. And I'd see the PDFs when they'd come about, but then when the book arrived in my box two days ago, I said, "Oh, my gosh, this is fun." And I'd say that even if I had nothing to do with the project. I mean I'm pleased to hear that you like it, because it's -- any page you turn, "I want to know about that! Oh, my gosh, this is cool too!" And it is the soul of StarTalk.

MS: I went to a local observatory recently, and I was shocked to see details so far off in space I had never seen before in the night sky. For example, stars that are different colors and shapes, twin stars that look like one but are actually two, and one of the furthest stars in the sky that was actually a cluster of a million stars. I was just awe-struck by the vastness of what is out there. What gives you the most awe? How would you describe the beauty of the universe?

NDT: So, philosophers historically like speaking of truth and beauty going together. And I don't think of beauty, because that value judges what you're looking at. Is the sunset beautiful but the underbelly of a tarantula not? Yet they're both part of nature. Is a squirrel cute but a rat ugly when they're both rodents? One just happens to have a furry tail, and the other doesn't. So to say something is beautiful is value judging nature, and I refuse to do that. I refuse to value judge what is beautiful and what is not. I accept it all as being part of nature.

And is a virus bad because it's trying to survive and it happens to give you a fatal disease? It's just being its own thing. We have the power now to render certain strains of mosquitoes extinct by disrupting their reproductive cycle. Should we? Well, the mosquitoes are bad for us. Bats eat them -- so I'm not going to say, "We're in charge. We don't like the mosquitoes. Fine. Get rid of them." I'm not going to say they're being bad mosquitoes. It's just we're making a decision, sort of a rational decision for our own survival as any creature would do in the interest of its own survival. The lion actually doesn't care if zebras go extinct. It's not thinking that. It just wants to eat the zebra. Okay. Now, if zebras do go extinct, then they'll eat the gazelles. They don't care, right? So for me, my awe comes not so much from the universe, but from our ignorance of the universe. If you add dark matter and dark energy together, which are two unknowns in our modern science -- we know they're out there, we measure their existence, but we don't know what causes it, we don't know what it's made of. If you add them together it's 95, 96 percent of all that drives the universe. I'm in awe of that. I'm in awe of how much we understand and have used to shape our civilization and to think of how much we have yet to understand and what that could mean for the future of civilization.

For more about StarTalk, visit www.channel.nationalgeographic.com/startalk/

Marianne Schnall is a widely published writer and interviewer whose writings and interviews have appeared in a variety of media outlets including O, The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, CNN.com, AOL Build, the Women's Media Center and The Huffington Post. She is also the co-founder and executive director of the women's website and non-profit organization Feminist.com, as well as the co-founder of the environmental site EcoMall.com. She is the author of Daring to Be Ourselves: Influential Women Share Insights on Courage, Happiness and Finding Your Own Voice and What Will it Take to Make a Woman President? Conversations About Women, Leadership, and Power. You can visit her website at www.marianneschnall.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Trump Supporters: Basket Of Deplorables Or Basket Cases?

Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

There's no doubt that Donald Trump has said many things that would have been political suicide for any other Republican candidate. And almost every time he made one of these shocking statements, political analysts on both the left and the right predicted that he'd lose supporters because of it. But as we have clearly seen over the past year, they were dead wrong every time. Trump appears to be almost totally bulletproof.

The only thing that might be more perplexing than the psychology of Donald Trump is the psychology of his supporters. In their eyes, The Donald can do no wrong. Even Trump himself seems to be astonished by this phenomenon. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Senator John McCain, who has been a regular target for Trump during his campaign, has a simple explanation for his unwavering support. "What he did was he fired up the crazies."

While the former Republican presidential nominee may be on to something, he doesn't exactly provide a very satisfying scientific explanation. So how exactly are Trump loyalists psychologically or neurologically different from everyone else? What is going on in their brains that makes them so blindly devoted?

1. The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance -- basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it's ever been, they simply take his word for it.

The seemingly obvious solution would be to try to reach those people through political ads, expert opinions, and logical arguments that educate with facts. Except none of those things seem to be swaying any Trump supporters from his side, despite great efforts to deliver this information to them directly.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn't just that they are misinformed; it's that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. This creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, "The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task -- and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment." Essentially, they're not smart enough to realize they're dumb.

And if one is under the illusion that they have sufficient or even superior knowledge, then they have no reason to defer to anyone else's judgment. This helps explain why even nonpartisan experts -- like military generals and Independent former Mayor of New York/billionaire CEO Michael Bloomberg -- as well as some respected Republican politicians, don't seem to be able to say anything that can change the minds of loyal Trump followers.

Out of immense frustration, some of us may feel the urge to shake a Trump supporter and say, "Hey! Don't you realize that he's an idiot?!" No. They don't. That may be hard to fathom, but that's the nature of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- one's ignorance is completely invisible to them.

2. Hypersensitivity to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fearresponse when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala -- a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

So how does this help explain the unbridled loyalty of Trump supporters? These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Mexican immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you've found your protector, you become less concerned with remarks that would normally be seen as highly offensive.

3. Terror Management Theory

A well-supported theory from social psychology, called Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump's fear mongering is doubly effective.

The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitably of one's death creates existential terror and anxiety that is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews -- like religions, political ideologies, and national identities -- that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have confirmed this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they influence actual voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forces that could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives, which can likely be attributed to their heightened fear response.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. Liberals and Independents who have been puzzled over why Trump hasn't lost supporters after such highly offensive comments need look no further than Terror Management Theory.

4. High Attentional Engagement

According to a recent study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session. This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn't necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple messages clearly resonate at a visceral level.

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America's addiction with entertainment and reality TV. To some, it doesn't matter what Trump actually says because he's so amusing to watch. With Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

Of course these explanations do not apply to all Trump supporters. In fact, some are likely intelligent people who know better, but are supporting Trump to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and Hillary Clinton that their vote for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington.

So what can we do to potentially change the minds of Trump loyalists before voting day in November? As a cognitive neuroscientist, it grieves me to say that there may be nothing we can do. The overwhelming majority of these people may be beyond reach, at least in the short term. The best we can do is to motivate everyone else to get out to the booths and check the box that doesn't belong to a narcissistic nationalist who has the potential to damage the nation beyond repair.

This article was originally published at Raw Story.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Shortage Of Organs For Transplantation -- Is More Research on Human-Animal Chimeras the Right Approach?
This piece was originally published on Bionews and co-authored with Giulia Cavaliere. You can read the original piece here.

It is time to discuss, once again, the lifting of a moratorium on research. We are not talking about the CRISPR genome-editing moratorium, but about the 20 August announcement by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lift the moratorium on research involving chimeric human/non-human embryos. The use of federal funds for this kind of research had been previously banned by the NIH in September 2015.

Although it does not state it explicitly, the NIH announcement seems to have been triggered by Harvard professor George Church's research on growing humanised organ models in non-human animals, namely pigs.

Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, followed with a perspective piece in PLOS Biology, stating that the benefits of this kind of research are so great that we should no longer hesitate to fund it.

The piece by Hyun addresses traditional concerns in animal ethics, such as safety, the moral status of the non-human animal (in this case, the human/non-human chimera) and the exploitation of non-human animals in research.
We agree with his precautionary stance which, is consistent with the existent ethical standards for chimera research developed by the Internal Society for Stem Cell Research in 2007, and with more emphasis on animal welfare than on speculative concerns about moral humanization of the human/non-human animal chimera.
Ultimately, we find that Hyun's conclusions that 'most, if not all, of these [traditional] concerns can be reasonably addressed' are plausible.

However, Hyun fails to address the elephant in the room: why should we invest significant resources in the creation of humanised animal models in the first place?

Let's take a look at the two main assumptions in Hyun's piece.

First assumption:

'The shortage of human organs for donation is a pressing problem worldwide.' (Hyun 2016, 2)

He adds: 'The humanitarian importance of this research is both apparent and urgent. There is currently a dire shortage of organs for transplantation in the United States, leading to approximately 22 deaths per day among patients waiting for organs.' (Hyun 2016, 2).

Hyun is right about the numbers, but we believe that the urgency of the research is not by any means self-evident. What he fails to examine is whether the creation of humanised animal models is the best way to address this pressing matter, and he fails to acknowledge the existence of viable alternatives, such as opt-out policies to increase organ donation from human to human, (one example notable is Austria with an organ donation rate higher than 90 %; and in the UK a similar law was approved in Wales in December 2015.

Second assumption:

'Given the noble aims of this research, it is puzzling to some why the NIH is so nervous about providing federal funds to researchers with a track record of success in this area.' (Hyun, p. 2)

When put in this way, it is difficult to object to research that aims to save lives and relieve suffering. The argument goes - We have the opportunity to save lives and we should do that. If we fail to do that, we are equally morally responsible (acts and omissions are morally equivalent). Such beneficence-based arguments are common patterns of moral argumentation about new and emerging science and technologies, but they risk to uncritically accept scientists' assumptions. In this case, the assumption being that the research has the noble aim of solving the shortage of human organs, and as along as precautionary measures are taken to ensure safety, and respect for the welfare the animals, then research should be allowed to go ahead.

In the UK, any research of this kind would need a specific licence granted on a case-by-case basis from the HFEA. In 2007, two research groups in the UK (the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory directed by Dr Stephen Minger at King's College London, and the group headed by Dr Lyle Armstrong at Newcastle) applied independently for a license to the HFEA to carry out interspecies somatic cellular nuclear transfer for the creation of 'cybrids', which were eventually granted after a period of deliberation and public consultation.

These applications, and the research itself, were motivated by the need to create to develop patient-specific stem embryonic stem-cell lines through interspecies somatic cellular transfer using oocytes derived from non-human animals (rabbits or cows), to avoid the scarcity of human oocytes. According to HFEA rules, research on 'human admixed embryos' can only be conducted in vitro, and these embryos cannot be placed in non-human animals or humans. In spite of the high hopes, and of the HFEA approval, however, the cybrid experiments did not yield the expected results, in part because of lack of funding, and in part because another more promising technology came about - namely, induced pluripotent stem cells, discovered by Nobel-prize winner Japanese Shinya Yamanaka in 2007.

It remains to be seen how much funding research groups working on humanised animal models for organ transplants will be able to attract. But at these early stages of deliberation, it is important to reflect that investing in this research is a deliberate choice that will shape our collective future. By choosing to invest in this kind of research, we are actively deciding how to allocate scarce resources to address the social problem of shortage of human organs for transplants.

While we do not necessarily believe that the existence of viable alternatives should be used to ban humanised animal models outright, it is certainly a matter that deserves ethical attention. We need reflect on the fact that, by ignoring other potential solutions - or at least prematurely supporting one solution over another - we are actively privileging a medical/scientific solution over a political solution of devising and implementing policies to facilitate human-to-human transplants.

Historical reasons to be skeptical of scientific/medical solutions to a social problem abound. The appealing trend of using technology to fix a social problem, (e.g. sterilization of parts of populations considered a burden to society instead of investing of disability accommodations; the widespread use of Ritalin and Adderall to manage unruly children in schools instead of investing more resources in education; the use of high-income countries pharmaceutical solutions to epidemics in low-income countries which could be solved with basic public health measures) is problematic and needs further critical reflection. Technical feasibility alone should never be driving a change in law and policy.

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Why Humans Are Hard-Wired For Curiosity
By Vivian Hemmelder and Tommy Blanchard, Harvard University

This post was originally published on Footnote, a website that brings academic research and ideas to a broader audience.

Humans are deeply curious beings. Our lives, economy, and society are shaped so strongly by a drive to obtain information that we are sometimes called informavores: creatures that search for and digest information, just like carnivores hunt and eat meat.¹ What is it that drives our hunger for information?

From an evolutionary perspective, there is a clear reason why animals would seek out information: it can be vital to their survival and reproduction. A bird that spent its whole life eating berries from a single bush and never explored its environment could be missing out on a much better food source nearby. Thus it is not surprising that exploration is common in the animal world. For example, monkeys will push a button at high rates for a chance to peek out of the window,² and roundworms do not crawl to a food source directly, but rather circle towards it in a way that gives them the most information about their environment.³

What drives animals' information-seeking behaviors? One possibility is that each individual animal learns over the course of its life that a greater knowledge of its environment leads to rewards like food or other essential resources. However, while this is something we can imagine humans or monkeys learning, it is probably beyond the capacity of roundworms. Furthermore, we see curiosity-driven behaviors in very young animals, before they have had enough experience to learn the association between knowledge and rewards. For example, human newborns look at new visual scenes for much longer than at known visual scenes.⁴

Another possibility is that evolutionary pressures have made information intrinsically rewarding. The reason so-called "primary rewards" like food and sex are pleasurable is because animals that enjoy eating and reproducing are more likely to survive and produce offspring.^(a) Evolution has therefore built up a reward system in the brain that drives behaviors that help animals acquire essential resources. Could this same reward system be prompting information-seeking behavior by making animals find new information intrinsically rewarding?

If learning is intrinsically rewarding, the brain should respond to new information in a way similar to how it responds to primary rewards like food and sex. Indeed, neuroimaging studies show that when people are curious about the answers to trivia questions or watch a blurry picture become clear, reward-related structures in their brains are activated.⁵ However, since the resolution of neuroimaging is still quite rough, these studies cannot show whether the reward-related structures in the brain actually respond in the same way to information as they do to primary rewards like food. For this we need to study the behavior of single neurons.

Neuroscientist Ethan Bromberg-Martin and his colleague Okihide Hikosaka were the first to find signatures of reward responses to information within single neurons.6 They designed a task in which monkeys saw two pictures and had to choose one. Then, after a short delay, the monkeys would receive either a large or a small reward. If the monkey chose one of the pictures (the informative picture), it would get a cue that indicated whether the delay would be followed by a small or large reward. If it chose the other picture (the uninformative picture), it would see a cue that gave no information about the upcoming reward. Even though the choice of picture did not affect the size of the reward, the monkeys almost always chose the informative picture, presumably because they were curious and found it rewarding to get a hint about the outcome.

While the monkeys performed this task, Bromberg-Martin recorded activity in their dopamine neurons, which play a crucial role in primary reward processing and in motivating behavior. By increasing their activity in the face of both rewards and cues that predict rewards, dopamine neurons flag rewarding situations and experiences for the rest of the brain. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka looked at how the monkeys' dopamine neurons responded to the pictures and found that activity increased in response to the informative picture and decreased in response to the uninformative picture. The reward-predicting dopamine neurons responded to information in the same way they respond to other primary rewards like food and sex.

Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka's study indicates that a core component of the brain's reward processing system can motivate animals to seek out information as well as primary rewards. Since both food and information can drive behavior that promotes survival, it makes sense that somewhere in the brain they are processed similarly. However, we would also expect that they be represented differently in other parts of the brain. A good book and a candy bar are both rewarding, but in distinct ways - and if you're hungry, you are not going to be satisfied by reading the latest bestseller.

With this distinction in mind, neuroscientist Tommy Blanchard teamed up with Bromberg-Martin and colleague Ben Hayden to investigate how information and primary rewards are represented in the orbital frontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in many complex cognitive behaviors, including evaluating rewards.⁷ By again recording the monkeys, he found that neurons in this area responded to both information and primary rewards, but, unlike dopamine neurons, did not treat these two variables in the same way. For example, an individual neuron in the orbital frontal cortex might increase its activity in response to a primary reward, but decrease its activity in response to information (or vice versa).

Blanchard's research indicates that primary rewards and information are represented differently in the orbital frontal cortex, in contrast to the midbrain (the home of dopamine neurons), where they are integrated into a single representation. Processing these rewards differently in the more advanced part of the brain may allow for behavioral flexibility - the ability to seek out information in some contexts, but focus on primary rewards in other situations.^(b)

What this body of research demonstrates is that primates really are informavores - information stimulates our brains the same way food and sex do. Yet there are also parts of our brains that differentiate between information and other rewards, allowing for behavioral flexibility and complex decision making.

Many questions still remain about humanity's innate curiosity. For example, how do reward circuits in different parts of the brain interact with each other? Why are some types of information more interesting to us than others, and why are different people interested in such different things? Let's hope our curiosity will continue to lead us to a further understanding of curiosity itself!

Sidenotes

(a) Primary rewards are resources or activities that are necessary for the survival of a species. Without a reward system encouraging it to seek out food, water, and sex, for example, a species would go extinct. Secondary rewards are those that can indirectly result in primary rewards, money being a good example.

(b) Over the course of evolution, the orbital frontal cortex, together with other parts of the frontal cortex, has increased dramatically in size in primates compared to other animals. Perhaps the behavioral flexibility and intelligence we see in primates is facilitated by more complex and differentiated representations of the world, such as those that Blanchard observed.

Endnotes

Miller, G.A. 1983. "Informavores." Pp. 111-113 in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, edited by F. Machlup and U. Mansfield. New York, NY: Wiley.
Butler, R.A. 1957. "The influence of deprivation of visual incentives on visual exploration motivation in monkeys." Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 50: 177-179.
Calhoun, A.J., S.H. Chalasani, and T. O Sharpee. 2014. "Maximally informative foraging by Caenorhabditis Elegans." ELife 3: e04220.
Friedman, S., A.N. Nagy, and G.C. Carpenter. 1970. "Newborn attention: differential response decrement to visual stimuli." Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 10(1): 44-51.
Kang, M.J., M. Hsu, I.M. Krajbich, G. Loewenstein, S.M. McClure, J.T.-Y. Wang, and C.F. Camerer. 2009. "The wick in the candle of learning: epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory." Psychological Science 20: 963-973. Jepma, M., R.G. Verdonschot, H. van Steenbergen, S.A.R.B. Rombouts, S. Nieuwenhuis. 2012. "Neural mechanisms underlying the induction and relief of perceptual curiosity." Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 6(5). Gruber, M.J., B.D. Gelman, and C. Ranganath. 2014. "States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit." Neuron 84(2): 486-496.
Bromberg-Martin, E.S. and O. Hikosaka. 2009. "Midbrain dopamine neurons signal preference for advance information about upcoming rewards." Neuron 63(1): 119-126.
Blanchard, T.C., B.Y. Hayden, and E.S. Bromberg-Martin. 2015. "Orbitofrontal cortex uses distinct codes for different choice attributes in decisions motivated by curiosity." Neuron 85(3): 602-614.

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Rising Temperatures Are Making Life in Tropical Cities Precarious for the Poor

HONG KONG ― The numbers are in: NASA announced Monday that August 2016 was the hottest month ever recorded since global records began in 1880. Several parts of Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore, have also recently had their hottest months ever recorded.

Standing outside in the middle of the day in Jakarta, Manila or Mumbai is sometimes almost unbearable. Calling it “humid” would be an understatement. In Singapore, the mean annual relative humidity is 84 percent, frequently reaching 100 percent during prolonged rain. A World Bank report released last week estimates that the “welfare losses” as a result of air pollution have dramatically increased over the last 25 years as developing countries urbanized and industrialized.

This is the environment that millions of urban dwellers in the tropics currently live in. It does not need to be like this. Tropical cities can be made livable again. But it will require governments to make very difficult decisions.

If the people living in tropical cities are to survive our hot future, governments need to radically rethink how they manage urbanization.

Tropical Asia's dense and overcrowded cities are already subject to the heat-island effect, which makes them significantly warmer than their rural surroundings. As temperatures threaten to increase by a further two to three degrees, as some scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict, tropical cities are quickly becoming unlivable. And this is not even taking into account overcrowding, poor housing and slums, water and sewerage issues, solid waste disposal and the curses of urban traffic and pollution.

Yet like the proverbial frog in boiling water, city inhabitants appear helpless ― as if resigned to their fate with no other options. If tropical cities, and the people that live in them, are to survive our hot future, governments need to radically rethink how they manage the urbanization trend ― and perhaps even consider moving people away from these unlivable cities.

For those who live in temperate or sub-tropical zones (or in climate-controlled rooms), it can be hard to know what a tropical city life feels like. The humid air sits on you, preventing your body from cooling itself properly, thus affecting productivity. For the poor, without air-conditioning, heat can make entire homes unlivable. Night temperatures can be so high that deep sleep becomes impossible. Many have to work in the heat outdoors or in a poorly ventilated, uncooled office, sometimes a long uncomfortable and pollution-ridden commute away.

The upper and middle classes have an escape from the unbearable heat: air-conditioning. Cooling is not seen as a luxury, but a necessity: as an article in the New York Times notes, “an air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.” When air-conditioning first arrived in Asia, it was only available for the wealthy at a time when cities were a quarter the size they are now. But air-conditioning is now wildly popular in Asia, which now makes up half the global market for cooling units.

Rich cities like Singapore have even been able to ensure much broader access to artificial cooling; in Hong Kong, opposition politicians blocked the construction of a new homeless shelter, calling its lack of air-conditioning “inhumane.” For well-off households across Asia, air-conditioning is, to quote Lee Kuan Yew, “the greatest invention of the century.” One is perhaps also reminded of Noel Coward's old song: that only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Yet for hundreds of millions in these cities, escaping the midday sun is not an option ― they must live, work and sleep in uncooled and sweltering surroundings.

Air-conditioning is an unsustainable solution to the problem of hot cities. A/C units release heat as waste, which is then trapped between dense skyscrapers. This pushes cooling units to work harder and use more energy. All these units consume electricity, which is likely produced by fossil fuels. As more and more people in the tropics buy air-conditioning, more carbon is released into the atmosphere. A/C units are also a major contributor to other less known but potent greenhouse gases. Research suggests that the energy demand for air-conditioning will increase by 40 times this century, overtaking the energy used for heating by around 2060.

An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.
New York Times

Tropical cities in general are getting hotter even before we include the effect of climate change. The combination of heat absorbed by building materials and waste heat from transportation and homes means that cities can be up to 3 degrees warmer than rural areas. The temperature difference is greatest at night, as concrete and asphalt radiate the heat absorbed during the day. Waste heat from cities can even be carried to remote areas by air currents, with some scientists finding a temperature increase of 1 degree in some rural areas due to nearby urban development.

The well-off, thanks to air-conditioning, are insulated from a warming climate, and so there is little political will to make cities cooler. The upper and middle classes live and sleep in climate-controlled apartments, work in cooled offices and sit in air-conditioned cars when traffic is gridlocked. Their children enjoy the same and can sometimes cool off in private swimming pools. But for the vast majority of urban dwellers in tropical cities, these luxuries are out of reach.

The problem of these hot and unlivable cities has been worsened by uncontrolled and poorly conceived urbanization. According to the World Bank, 200 million people (equivalent to what would be the world's fifth-largest country) have moved to cities between 2000 and 2010. Urban areas have grown by an area the size of Taiwan. These migrants all need housing and transportation. Many are migrants who live in shanties or poorly constructed buildings and often work in uncooled environments that have become unbearable as temperatures have soared in recent years. They sit sweltering in congestion: in Jakarta, where the number of vehicles on the road increases by about 10 percent each year despite no growth in roads, 12 people reportedly died from heat and carbon-dioxide poisoning in a three-day-long traffic jam.

To make matters worse, urban migration often disproportionately targets one city: the capital. All cities are growing, but major cities like the capital attract the most migrants, which tests their provision of basic needs and social services ― in which regard most have failed. One would think that an urbanization drive that is much more equally shared amongst several cities and towns would lessen population pressures, but that is not what has been seen in the developing world because of poor economic policies and regional planning.

It is too often assumed that urbanization and economic development must go hand in hand. It is true that urbanization does unlock economic potential in a country's population. However, the problem is that many developing countries have not properly controlled and channelled urbanization. The enormous number of man-hours lost in traffic jams and persistent illnesses in crowded and hot cities decreases productivity and quality of life.

Letting people move to the city is “easy” but it is an archaic short-term path to growth with long-term negative consequences, as evident by the all-too-obvious and deteriorating conditions in tropical cites. It is also easy for the government to focus its energy and attention on the capital where big business is concentrated and where the rich tend to live, rather than developing a broad-based program that develops multiple reasonably sized cities and small towns simultaneously.

The well-off, thanks to air-conditioning, are insulated from a warming climate, and so there is little political will to make cities cooler.

If countries in the tropics are serious about mitigating and reducing the effects of climate change, they need to understand urbanization differently and appreciate that their increasingly unlivable cities must be the target of new and daring economic planning and environmental policy. Countries must find a way to channel people to less crowded areas, by providing economic opportunities in the countryside and developing secondary towns in order to broaden the economic base. They may need to do something that few have ever considered: moving people out of these large cities, to make sure that urban environments are actually livable.

All the efforts to make cities in the tropics adapt to climate change need a fresh dose of reality ― to move beyond hypothetical approaches towards reducing carbon demands, green cars and “smart cities” and toward an acceptance that these cities are too large and unmanageable to survive in a new climate that makes them too hot to live in. Only by cooling its drive to urbanize will Southeast Asia cool its sweltering cities.

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Year of the Monkey: Primate Research under the microscope in UK and US
It seems that 2016 has been the Year of the Monkey in more ways than one. In both the United States and the United Kingdom the use of primates in research has been under increased scrutiny this year.

From the US Congressional mandate that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) review its use of nonhuman primates for research, to last week's publication of an open letter in the UK Independent signed by 21 experts including Sir David Attenborough and Dr. Jane Goodall raising concerns about the use of monkeys in brain experiments.

As one might expect all this attention seems to have put the primate research industry on the defensive.

Last week, the NIH essentially facilitated a circling of the wagons at what I hoped would be an open and critical discussion on the use of non-human primates in research as requested by Congress.

To take a step back for context, the 2016 spending bill passed by Congress last December included language authored by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) that requested the NIH to 'conduct a review of its ethical policies and processes with respect to nonhuman primate research subjects, in consultation with outside experts, to ensure it has appropriate justification for animals research protocols and to provide and update on these efforts in the fiscal year 2017 budget request.'

In a follow up letter sent to the NIH in January by five members of Congress [Roybal-Allard, Sam Farr (D-CA) Dina Titus (D-NV), Eliot Engel (D-NY), and Brendan Boyle (D-PA)] it was reiterated that the review should be, "as independent as possible, so that the most difficult ethical questions with regards to the use of all non-human primates in a wide range of experiments can be honestly asked and answered." Unfortunately the workshop held by the NIH last week, largely failed to meet this stipulation.

As I monitored this workshop online, I was struck that the meeting seemed to be more of a cheerleading session for primate experiments and, at times, a macabre audition for researchers to make a case for their experiments to receive continued funding.

The few "outside experts" who were invited and not financially tied to primate research, were Dr. Tom Beauchamp, an ethicist at Georgetown University and Dr. Jeffrey Kahn a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University but they were not invited to give presentations and had to vie for time in the discussion sessions where they were frequently shut down. This was especially shocking since Dr. Kahn had such relevant expertise, having chaired the 2011 review committee on the use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which led to the decision by the NIH to end support for invasive chimpanzee research.

The lack of balance was, I believe, no accident. When the workshop was first announced I contacted the workshop organizers to encourage a robust review and specifically suggested our own Dr. Jarrod Bailey who has published multiple peer-reviewed papers on the use of non-human primates in biomedical research and who participated in the aforementioned review of chimpanzees. Despite his impressive resume he, and many other possible candidates, were not invited to participate in the workshop.

A few weeks ahead of this workshop the NY Times published an opinion piece titled "Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher" by Dr. John P. Gluck, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, who seemed to suggest that the NIH workshop was poised to miss the mark from its inception; he wrote, "...the N.I.H will hold a workshop on, "continued responsible research" with these animals. This sounds like a positive development. But as someone who spent decades working almost daily with macaque monkeys in primate research laboratories, I know firsthand that "responsible" research is not enough. What we really need to examine is the very moral ground of animal research itself."

Across the pond, Dr. Gluck joined Dr. Jane Goodall, Sir David Attenborough and 18 other scientists, primatologists and animal welfare experts in signing an open letter, organized by Cruelty Free International, to bodies in the UK and EU responsible for funding and licensing controversial brain experiments on monkeys. Of particular concern is neuroscience research involving monkeys being subjected to invasive brain surgery, water deprivation and prolonged restraint.

A recent review of the claims of the human relevance of data made by researchers, who use monkeys in these kinds of experiments, were found to be overstated and the availability and use of ethical studies involving humans were of more value to medical progress.

Sir David Attenborough, said:

"The recognition that apes, certainly, and to an extent other primates, are so akin to ourselves, and can suffer so much, as we can, has transformed our attitude, or should have transformed our attitude, to using them for our own benefit. They are sentient beings that have mental lives comparable to ours, and sensitivities, and pain and deprivation mean things to them, just as they mean things to us."

Dr Jane Goodall, said:

"I and my team have studied chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, for over 50 years. I can state categorically that they have a similar capacity for suffering, both mental and physical, and show similar emotions to many of ours. We also study baboons and other monkeys and there is no doubt they too can suffer and experience fear, depression, anxiety, frustration and so on. To confine these primate relatives of ours to laboratory cages and subject them to experiments that are often distressing and painful is, in my opinion, morally wrong. To restrain their movement and deprive them of water is inhumane and extremely cruel and we have no right to exploit them in this way for any reason."

In response to the letter, a group of UK primate researchers have gone on the defensive, attacking the credibility of those scientists who disagree with them.

Last week's lopsided NIH workshop and the hostile response to the open letter seem to suggest that those directly involved with primate research aren't quite ready for an open, honest, discussion about the ethics of non-human primate research and the inevitable soul searching that will come with it. But whether they are ready or not, the conversation with the public and policy makers has begun.

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Weekend Roundup: China's Slump Tests Brazil's Democracy
What global interdependence giveth it can also take away. As long as China's economy grew rapidly, as it did over recent decades, the demand for Brazil's iron ore, oil and soybeans generated enough rising prosperity to disguise the cracks in the democratic system of Latin America's largest country.

China's slump has now exposed the malignant corruption and mismanagement that festered in the shadows of the "Brazilian miracle," sending the nation into a downward spiral of deep recession, high inflation and burdensome debt. Social unrest and massive demonstrations have regularly filled the streets, culminating in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.

"china

Animated chart representing China and Brazil's economic relationship. (Getty)

Writing from Sao Paulo, Brazil's revered former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso says, "Brazil has turned a sad page in its history. I would have much preferred that Dilma Rousseff had proved the political and administrative capacity to complete her mandate. Unfortunately the crime of responsibility was compounded by the collapse in her overall ability to govern." But, for Cardoso, Brazil's troubles reflect a larger calamity. Representative democracy is in crisis across the West, he writes. "At the core of this crisis is the widening gap between people's aspirations and the capacity of political institutions to respond to the demands of society. It is one of the ironies of our age that this deficit of trust in political institutions coexists with the rise of citizens capable of making the choices that shape their lives and influence the future of their societies." The challenge for all democracies, he concludes "is to bridge the gap between demos and res publica, between people and the public interest, reweaving the threads that may reconnect the political system with the demands of society."

Writing in HuffPost Brazil, Raphael Tsavkko Garcia warns of further turmoil ahead. "Don't fool yourself; Dilma's impeachment won't alleviate Brazil's current crisis," he says. "For the next two years, [President Michel] Temer's government will be under strong (and necessary) pressure. Cuts on the social programs that Dilma started may be increased and accelerated. ... Our problems didn't start yesterday, and they won't go away anytime soon."

On the other side of the globe, China is seeking to expand its integration with the economies of Central and South Asia through reviving the Silk Road by building out new infrastructure and trade routes. Peter Cai reports on the wariness over China's plans he found during a recent visit to India. "At the heart of India's reluctance to embrace Beijing's promise of road building and connectivity," he writes, "is strategic mistrust. The country is wedged between two nuclear-armed neighbors and has fought wars against both in the last 60 years." Cai cites local experts who see China's effort to build roads and bridges "as instruments of Beijing's intention to build influence in its neighborhood." Some, he says, even suggest that a "new Great Game," not unlike when Russia and Britain jostled for power in the region in the early 20th century, is now underway.

In a WorldPost debate, China scholars Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess spar with Beijing-based scholar Daniel A. Bell over claims in an essay I wrote recently arguing that Chinese President Xi Jinping's current crackdown on an independent civil society must be understood in light of that country's long history as a unitary state with no autonomous realm beyond its fold. Wasserstrom and Merkel-Hess argue that President Xi is selectively reading China's history, dismissing periods of pluralism as a way to justify authoritarianism. Bell argues that Wasserstrom and Merkel-Hess display a "colonial mindset" by engaging in their own selective reading of Chinese history to suit Western notions of human rights and democracy. All agree, as Bell puts it, that "It's a mistake to say that there is only one political tradition in Chinese history and to draw implications for contemporary China based on that assumption."

In an essay in HuffPost France, Prime Minister Manuel Valls condemns what he calls the "proselyte contestation" of those in France who "seek to defy two of the fundamental principles of our country" -- the equality of men and women and secularism. Marc Steinau, Benjamin Reuter and Nicholas Miriello report that political violence is rising in Germany along with the right-wing Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran's National Security Council, and Hesam Rahmani assess the state of the Iran nuclear deal, which continues to be attacked by opponents both in the U.S. and Iran. The fear, they write, is that "radical voices on both sides that have sought to undermine the deal will win, and escalation will once again become the name of the game between Iran and the U.S. The path to peace will diverge back onto the path to war."

As if it couldn't get worse, Willa Frej reports that child suicides are escalating in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya. Rowaida Abdelaziz, however, has a glimmer of hope from there -- a family suffering from meningitis has been evacuated for treatment just weeks after one member, an 11-year-old boy, had himself been removed due to the same illness. On the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Dean Obeidallah surveys how the lives of Muslims in the Middle East have been impacted.

Arthur Molella contends that the 1900 world's fair in Paris has shaped our present-day attitudes toward technology He recalls Henry Adam's reflections at the time. "In a chapter titled 'The Dynamo and the Virgin,' he cites Adams as "ponder[ing] the implications of the machine age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology -- what he calls 'the Dynamo' -- and the essential undergirding of humanity, religion and traditional values, which he christens 'the Virgin.'"

Finally, our Singularity series this week talks to virtual reality pioneer Chris Milk, who says, "I don't think the future of VR looks like video games; I don't think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives."

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

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Montreal Is About To Kill A Lot Of Dogs, Based On Quack Science
A dog registered as a boxer has killed a woman in Montreal, so the mayor is calling for a ban on pit bulls. This would be amusing, if it weren't so predictable and depressing: in few areas of public policy do you encounter thinking this routinely deranged. And it all starts with contempt for science.

Consider the National Post's Barbara Kay, almost certainly Canada's most prominent enemy of this ill-defined category of dog: the "pit bull." Kay is one of the saner voices on her side of the debate, and I sense she genuinely believes that she is acting on behalf of dog bite victims. For years she has written screeds calling for the ban of these dogs, based on what she considers solid scientific evidence. It would help, however, if she actually knew what a scientist was, and how they can be identified in the wild. I've never dealt with a journalist so distressingly lax when it comes to vetting her sources: she does not so much cherry-pick experts as pick diseased cherries and pronounce them epidemiologists.

In particular, Barbara Kay relies upon two crusaders who stress that they were personally bitten by pit bulls. I have written before about Merritt Clifton, the alleged statistician she describes as "her primary source." I addressed his claim that he had "more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications." I found only one -- unrelated to pit bulls -- in a marginal Asian journal. Since then an immaculately researched book has emerged -- Pit Bull: the Battle Over an American Icon (Knopf) -- and the author, Bronwen Dickey, is a more intrepid detective than I am: she managed to find two. Both in this same comically obscure journal. "In one of them, he cites his own newsletter twelve times. The rest of the citations came mainly from Web sites, news reports, and press releases." Dickey is clear on Clifton's credibility as a scientist: he "possesses no relevant credentials."

The woman Barbara Kay describes as her "other primary source" is Colleen Lynn. Here, Bronwen Dickey's revelations are priceless: "Before her bite injury, Lynn maintained a fortune-telling Web site called DivineLady.com, on which she referred to herself as 'Divine Lady, Beholder of the Soul.' In 2011, she self-published the third edition of Divine Lady's Guide to the Runes."

And the Divine Lady now runs DogsBite -- a sober, professional looking website, as long as you don't click on the links to drooling hate groups -- which credulous journalists consider a primary source for scientific information about pit bulls. Bronwen Dickey reminds us: "Lynn has no professional credentials in statistics, epidemiology, or animal behaviour; neither do the sources she relies upon most frequently."

These are the experts, peddled by Barbara Kay, who are informing Mayor Denis Coderre's decision to introduce a breed ban. Their favoured legislation is strongly rejected by every expert organization on the continent, including the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists.

When it comes to Breed Specific Legislation, it is not a question of two worthy opinions to be carefully considered and weighed against each other. It is a matter of science versus the worst kind of quackery: rune-throwing fortune tellers, wildly unqualified statisticians, and a posse of foul-mouthed trolls. There is no argument here, any more than there is in the sorry vaccine debate: it's simply knowledge versus willful, howling ignorance.

Barbara Kay's third vaunted source -- her "bible" -- is a book by Alexandra Semyonova, a former welfare inspector for the Dutch SPCA. Despite having spent time at good schools -- Johns Hopkins and University College London -- Semyonova likes to talk about "science whores": these are trained scientists with peer-reviewed publications, who come to radically different conclusions from hers, and therefore must be in it for the money.

I read Kay's bible after some urging. Semyonova's book is called The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs. Which doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "The Old Testament." Still, it's not a bad book. Sure, she cites Merritt Clifton, so her statistics can be safely ignored, but it's not a dreadful book, really, until you come to the end -- the section entitled: "Myth 99: Scientists know what they are talking about because they study animals in an objective way."

Here the counterfactual statements are truly special. "The scientists who have studied dogs have done it either in highly unnatural circumstances (the lab), or they've only watched the dogs for short intervals." If you believe this silliness, I suggest you look up Dr. Ian Dunbar, a scientist with stellar academic qualifications -- a veterinary degree, a doctorate in animal behaviour from Berkeley, a Special Honours degree in Physiology and Biochemistry -- who has become famous for training dogs through decades of experience in the field. (He oppose BSL, of course, calling it "frankly stupid".)

I urge you to read "Myth 99" in its ridiculous entirety. Semyonova writes: "We now know that science often attracts people who have various, more or less serious, autism related disorders, perhaps in particular Asperger's syndrome." She laments science's "obsession with measurement and quantification." She suggests it might be a result of autism.

In short: rigorous science is overrated. Perhaps a kind of illness.

Barbara Kay seems to have come to her own self-serving conclusion: rigorous science reporting is overrated. I read her quirky bible, but despite my insistence, she has declined to read Bronwen Dickey's book, an exhaustive and likely definitive study representing seven years of research. Which didn't prevent Kay from tweeting this bit of non-libel, based on her profound insight into a book she hasn't read: "Why does @BronwenDickey hate kids?"

Let's take a look at what happened in Ontario when those evil "science whores" failed to prevent Breed Specific Legislation in 2005. For a short time it looked good: "A total of 486 bites were recorded in 2005. That number fell generally in the six years following, to 379 in 2010." And then -- when pit bulls were finally getting thin on the ground -- the numbers began to rise: "Toronto's reported dog bites have been rising since 2012, and in 2013 and 2014 reached their highest levels this century."

How could this be? Simple: other dogs stepped in to fill the gap. Irresponsible owners remained irresponsible -- since the laws did not apply to them, simply to maligned breeds -- and their dogs continued to bite. In 2014, pit bulls didn't even make the top ten list; the top biter in Ontario was the German Shepherd (a perennial), followed distantly by the Labrador retriever. Of course, had the wise rulers of Ontario listened to the science whores, they would have known to expect this: Breed Specific Legislation has been a disaster worldwide. Not one respectable study supports breed bans.

Oh, and if you care about dogs at all: "By 2012, the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association estimated that the law had led to over 1,000 dogs and puppies in Ontario having been needlessly put down."

Perhaps you don't care about dogs, but you value fiscal responsibility? Ontario's worthless Breed Specific Legislation -- while killing dogs, and doing nothing to make humans safer -- has certainly cost a whole lot of money. The precise figure hasn't been released, despite numerous requests, but we can infer how much from a study of Prince George County, Maryland (whose BSL costs are considered on the low side, relatively speaking): "The average cost to seize, detain, test, and euthanize a single pit bull was $68,000. In the fiscal year of 2001-2002, the total cost of pit bull confiscations was $560,000." Needless to say, this half million dollars purchased precisely zilch: "Studies proved that the community had no measurable safety benefit from the ban, and lost out on thousands of dollars from cancelled dog shows, tourism, and consistent 'pit bull' report calls from concerned citizens."

You'd think that Barbara Kay, a political conservative, would have strong ideas about fiscal restraint. But no, saving money has the unbearable consequence of saving pit bulls from the needle. Which is the only reason I can imagine Ms. Kay so greatly favours the failed Ontario legislation over the much less expensive program introduced in Alberta, which happens to actually work.

You see, Mayor Coderre need not look south of the border for relevant expertise here. By coincidence, the most lauded urban experiment in the containment of dog bites -- studied across the world -- is the Calgary Model. It's a remarkable success, and it's much cheaper than Breed Specific Legislation. The downside? It's a lot of work, and -- this really hurts -- it requires humans to be responsible. Calgary's bylaws governing dog ownership, described in depth here, are some of the strictest you'll encounter: yes, leashes are mandatory, as are licences. The legislation happens to be breed neutral, meaning that if your German Shepherd or your Dalmatian bites someone, you won't be off the hook. The program stresses education -- as opposed to BSL, whose fertilizer is ignorance -- which means even more in the way of human responsibility. So, it's a bit onerous. On the plus side it saves money, dogs, and humans.

Mayor Coderre has a genuine opportunity here: he could set an example, internationally, by introducing this groundbreaking legislation to a city twice the size of Calgary. This is personal: I lived in Montreal off and on for years -- one of my favorite cities -- and it would be thrilling to see it celebrated for a major contribution to the history of animal welfare.

The Calgary Model is not perfect, of course; nothing involving dogs and humans ever is. It requires constant vigilance and enforcement, and these have waned somewhat in recent years -- in 2011, for instance, Calgary experienced a distressing uptick in biting incidents. (Although not that distressing: the city retained "the lowest bite-per-population ratio in North America.") When the legislation is properly enforced, however, the results are peerless: Calgary "saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years -- from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006."

Pardon my obsession with measurement and quantification. It's an illness I share with rational people who care about dog-bite victims.

NOTE: regarding the boxer I refer to at the top -- to be honest, we have no idea what kind of dog killed Christiane Vadnais. It was identified as a pit bull by the press, who are always quick to jump to this headline-friendly conclusion; then we discovered that it was registered as a boxer. Even this could be wrong; until we have DNA tests, we're simply throwing runes. All sorts of mixes can look like pit bulls. Alanna Devine, SPCA Montreal's director of animal advocacy, has the right approach: "The information that I think is pertinent here is that the dog was unsterilized, the dog was named Lucifer, and the dog had previously been involved in an attack against a human." In short, the owner would have been properly dealt with under the Calgary Model, and this tragedy would likely have been averted.

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With Our Planet At The Crossroads, The Future Of Conservation Depends On Science
This week, conservation takes center stage as 6,000 global experts dive deep into the issues that will define the physical future of our planet. And with the all the far-reaching impacts of these decisions affecting the long-term sustainability of our planet, it's a gathering that cannot come soon enough.

"2016-09-06-1473177013-8324484-RebeccaShawblogphoto.jpg"

Photo Credit: © Michel Roggo / WWF

The World Conservation Congress is the single largest conservation event in the world. It brings together a broad cross-section of conservation minds. Leaders and decision-makers from governments, businesses, indigenous organizations, academia, and NGOs are here to identify evolving trends, current threats, and innovative solutions to the challenges we collectively face in safeguarding biodiversity and protecting ecosystems that provide life-supporting services like clean water and air.

Expectations are high as momentum is on our side. Last year, international leaders set a collective agenda to end poverty and ensure sustainability remains front and center when they adopted the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. And, some 195 nations came together in a concerted effort to combat climate change and prepare our communities for its impacts, with the signing of the Paris Agreement. On the heels of these two ambitious agreements, this year's Congress looks to set a global agenda for how we manage our natural environment for human, social and economic development - and do so in a way that lives up to the promise set by these pacts.

It's no small task. And like all significant challenges the world faces today, we need the right mix people with the right kind of talent and a diversity of perspectives to drive the kinds of innovative solutions needed to get us back on course. At the Congress, delegates are building relationships among unlikely partners - from local communities to multi-national companies to global NGOs - to identify the kinds of disruptive solutions we need.

We are sharing our insights into new technologies that can help plan for future growth, making sure the pace of development does not exceed the pace of conservation. We're driving solutions with unleashed creativity, grounding them in sound science, and redefining the way we approach conservation at scale.

I'm here talking about how WWF works with our partners to help drive conservation, using science to accelerate biodiversity protections while helping improve local communities.

We're ramping up high-tech solutions for combatting wildlife poaching. The illegal taking of wildlife has sky-rocketed in recent years, largely driven by demand in Asia. It's an incredible threat to tigers, rhinos, elephants, gorillas and other extraordinary wildlife in Africa and Asia. With sky-high price tags for horns, tusks and other body parts, these animals don't stand a chance unless we can stem the tide and reverse these trends.

Made possible by a grant from Google.org, WWF's Wildlife Crime and Technology Project is using adapted and new technologies to create seamless systems to protect wildlife from poachers. We are arming parks and reserves with thermal cameras and human-detection software, equipping rangers with devices to track the presence and movement of wildlife, and aggressively testing new uses for drones as part to our anti-poaching efforts. By deploying these and other technologies, we are leveling the playing field for rangers and actively protecting threatened species.

Science can also quench the thirst of a water-loving planet. Across the globe, climate-driven droughts are increasing in frequency and intensity. In recent years, heat waves and droughts in the Midwestern US, India, Brazil, and California set records. As these events grow more severe, we'll likely see increased conflicts among industry, farmers, city-dwellers and the environment as the amount of water available for consumption progressively declines.

We need to manage these resources with a transparent and collaborative science-based approach. It's our best hope for escaping future water wars and the scarcity trap. We need to embrace these new approaches, such as WWF's community-based Basin Report Cards, in which participants create a shared knowledge base to actively manage their local water supply sustainably and adaptively over time, even in the face of a changing climate.

We must continue conserving the reefs that foster biodiversity and feed local communities. For 3.1 billion people around the world, fish is an essential source of protein, accounting for almost 20 percent of the annual intake of animal protein. For those who are highly dependent on marine sources of protein, the local fish market is the nearest coral reef. Coral reefs provide the most diverse habitat of all marine ecosystems, housing one quarter of marine species in only one-tenth of the ocean's surface area. In these places, we must meet human dietary needs while ensuring the long-term persistence of the diversity of species. This requires a mix of social and natural science to get the balance right.

In Indonesia, WWF and its partners have established Marine Protected Areas designed to safeguard biodiversity, ensure productive fisheries and increase human well-being. Carefully established monitoring programs for social and environmental outcomes indicate that in many cases, the triple bottom line is possible and sustainable.

As this week's Congress points out, it's not an understatement to say our planet is at a crossroads when it comes to conserving nature. Decisions we make in the coming years - and even this week - will have long-term impact on the health and sustainability of the world we leave to those who follow in our steps. As we discuss, debate, and decide on those actions, it's critical we ensure good science guides the way.

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The 1900 World's Fair Helped Shape How We Talk About Tech Today
Debates rage today about the risks and benefits of modern technology -- driverless cars, robots and drones in warfare and commerce, surgery by robotic rather than human hands, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation of food, organisms and even human beings.

The National Institutes of Health recently announced that it plans to end the ban on funding research for part-human, part-animal embryos, raising urgent ethical questions like: What if this produces an animal with a partly human brain?

But the origins of these very modern concerns date back more than a century, with lively discussions about "modernization" underway as early as the world's fair in Paris in 1900. One especially compelling, yet largely forgotten, analysis was penned by Henry Adams, the son of a congressman and diplomat, descendant of two U.S. presidents, a highly regarded historian and a conflicted technology enthusiast. His reflections were contained in his posthumously published autobiography, "The Education of Henry Adams."

What if this produces an animal with a partly human brain?

In a chapter titled "The Dynamo and the Virgin," he ponders the implications of the machine age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology -- what he calls "the Dynamo" -- and the essential undergirding of humanity, religion and traditional values, which he christens "the Virgin."

More introspective than descriptive, "The Education of Henry Adams" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. It tops the Modern Library's list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century, outranking Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery," Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring."

Today, Adams's work is not nearly as widely known as those, but not for lack of merit and timeliness. Indeed, one could argue that it is even more relevant today than it was when it was written.

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The Galerie des Machines at the 1900 world's fair in Paris. (Photo12/UIG/Getty)

After studying exhibitions on art, science and technology at the world's fair in Paris, Adams concluded that -- despite his own appreciation of the merits of "progress" -- Americans were too ready to embrace new technology at the cost of traditional values. This raised for him a disquieting question for the dawning century: Will the human spirit survive the new age of the machine?

Adams was anxious that American culture was about to take a fateful turn, sacrificing traditional values on the altar of technology. Prompting his reflections was a visit to the Hall of Electrical Machines. He fixated in particular on one of the gigantic dynamos on display. Its purpose was beside the point. Adams's focus -- and his fear -- centered on its size and mechanism, its "huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed" while making hardly a sound. Its workings, he wrote, were an unfathomable but seductive mystery -- one that left him in awe. The dynamo became for him the incarnation of modernity and a symbol of the "revolution of 1900" -- interwoven revolutions in science and technology that ushered in, most impressively, the new age of electricity, along with automated production, the car and the airplane.

And then there was the art. Adams contrasted the dynamo with the figure of the Virgin, which he suggested was the central inspiration behind much of what he had viewed in the fair's acclaimed art pavilions. The Virgin became his symbol for Christian tradition and, equated by Adams to the Roman mythological Venus, the female force in general. Looking to the future, he wondered if the god of technology, the dynamo's apotheosis, was on the verge of replacing, as he put it, the church and the cross. Adams was in fact seeking a middle ground between religion and science.

Will the human spirit survive the new age of the machine?

Adams's guide through the Hall of Electrical Machines was a leading American scientist, S. P. Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Although holding Langley in the highest esteem, he wrote of being puzzled and a bit disturbed by the scientist's laser-like focus on machines and forces, to the exclusion of the art displays and all else that was non-scientific at the fair. "Langley," he wrote, "with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit."

Adams, writing in the third person about his experiences, described how Langley taught him to appreciate, if not really understand, recent discoveries in radioactivity, radio and electricity. "[Adams] wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly [the inventor of the Branly coherer, one of the earliest radio wave detectors] had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo."

Long fascinated by modern physics, Adams later experimented with applying physical theories to the theory of human history, even in the face of skeptical feedback from scientist friends. But it was the dynamo that excited his strongest reactions at the Paris fair: "As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross ... Before the end, one began to pray to it."

"the

Adams plays with his dog in an undated photograph. (Bettmann via Getty)

Indeed, Adams later did pray to it, composing a poetic tribute, "Prayer to the Dynamo: Mysterious Power! Gentle Friend! Despotic Master! Tireless Force!" he wrote, with more than a hint of ambivalence.

The rush of discoveries in science and technology sometimes left him longing for the solace of tradition, security and unity that he associated with medieval society and the church. That people who now seemed to be turning away from the Virgin worried him, for he believed it could mean the end of the great artistic traditions that were propelled by the power of Christian faith, "the highest energy ever known to man," surpassing even the power of the steam engine and the dynamo.

Adams noted that in Europe, the "force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes and seemed to be as potent as X-rays," while "in America, neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force." Despite his personal religious skepticism (he was attracted to religion but remained agnostic, never really reconciling the truths of science and religious faith), he regretted that his countrymen were apparently throwing in their lot with the machine worshippers.

'Before the end, one began to pray to it.'

So, what does Adams have to say to us today as we confront the dilemmas of our own technological revolution? Adams was enthusiastic about modern science and technology -- today we might refer to him as an early adopter -- but he remained an essentially 19th century man, mindful of the challenges to society posed by 20th century technology. His hope was that dynamo and Virgin would ultimately join together in support of both our spiritual and material lives.

To be sure, we no longer speak of dynamos and Virgins, much less of "hugging dynamos." Yet, in many ways, Adams was extraordinarily prescient. With today's advances in artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation, we face the very existential crisis that Adams foresaw.

Precisely 100 years after Adams toured the Paris Exposition of 1900, Bill Joy, the co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote his now famous essay in Wired magazine, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," projecting a dystopian future in which "our most powerful 21st-century technologies -- robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech -- are threatening to make humans an endangered species." Adams was not half so gloomy as Joy. From the vantage of the revolution of 1900, he welcomed our technological future, but with a crucial caveat: make sure our technology has a soul, not in the sense of superseding us as sentient human beings, but of living in spiritual harmony with our better selves.

This was produced by Zocalo Public Square.

Also on WorldPost:

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Want To Prevent Lone Wolf Terrorism? Promote A 'Sense of Belonging' Among Immigrants
Robert F. Barsky, Vanderbilt University

This September, as they start the school year, French children aged 14 years old and upwards are going to get lessons on how to deal with a terrorism attack on their school. Meanwhile, the debate over the ban on wearing burkinis and whether they are, in the words of France's prime minister, "a political sign of religious proselytising" continues.

The big question, however is this: Why are we seeing a rash of these attacks in Europe and especially in France, and are such measures effective in countering them?

What have we learned from the horrors of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the murder of 130 people in and around Paris last November, the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice and the killing of an 85-year-old priest inside of a church in Normandy?

Examining the reactions of French authorities, we can conclude there are only limited actions that can be taken to prevent such atrocities.

Security can been heightened by extending the state of emergency that it declared last November. Intelligence efforts can be redoubled. Such efforts are raising concern about civil liberties being curtailed. But the Nice attack is also a dire warning that these measures aren't effective as a means of protecting citizens from continued attacks.

Police guard the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray where Father Jacques Hamel was killed.
Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

The point is that none of the above policies could have prevented Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel and Abdelmalik Petitjean from carrying out their violent actions. Thousands if not millions of people living in Europe have similar profiles. Tunisian or Algerian descent and French citizenship are not enough to tip off authorities that a person could run over 84 people with a truck or slit the throat of a priest.

So how can we hope to prevent future attacks? We need to change our focus, in my opinion, to examining these perpetrators' "sense of belonging" rather than looking for reasons to detain or expel them because they don't belong.

A Canadian case study

A number of years ago, while working at the National Institute for Scientific Research in Montréal, I was invited to join a research team studying the integration of refugees and immigrants into Québec society.

This led me to work on research projects that looked at a broad range of questions - from why people claim refugee status to how immigrants use storytelling to talk about their displacement and assimilation into Canada.

A scene from a play by Lebanese Canadian writer Wajdi Moawad.
Nicolas M. Perrault, CC BY

My first project was focused upon immigrant literary works - especially novels and short stories - that were a largely untapped source of information to help officials understand the complex process of integrating into Quebec society, and in particular, as a way to understand relationships between immigrants and individuals from the host country.

There's a pretty large body of so-called immigrant literature in Québec. Interestingly, many of these narratives include graphic and sometimes even pornographic descriptions of encounters between native-born and immigrant protagonists.

A broad reading of these stories made me realize that developing relationships with friends and lovers contributed to the migrant's "sense of belonging." They helped him or her to forget their country of origin and forge a new beginning in the host society.

In fact, I came to believe that these immigrants' ability to adapt had something to do with the very process of exchange. Or, put another way, the many acts of giving and receiving that they committed each day helped them to feel connected to society.

Measuring belonging

In order to evaluate this process of adaptation, I turned to work by French biblical scholars called the Groupe d'Entrevernes, which focuses upon how narratives "make sense": that is, how a story creates meaning in the context of the text, but also in regards to the world to which it refers.

This approach focuses on looking for meaning by analyzing particular actions, notably "who does what to whom where." So in the case of immigrant literature, a group of us looked in minute detail at the complex interactions between characters, with special focus upon how relationships begin and end, and what is gained in the process. We also assessed characters' attitudes prior to and after each interaction, with an eye to understanding the effect of the exchange.

Our goal was to assess which specific actions help foster a sense of belonging, in a new country and which alienate the character from his or her society.

The signing of a lease, the acquisition of immigrant status (whether a work visa or a green card) or being hired for a job all foster a sense of belonging. Being kicked out of an apartment, divorced or deported are all examples of loss of belonging.

Implications for policymakers

The advantage of research like this for a case like Nice is that it forces the investigator to examine all of the concrete details of the perpetrators' lives leading up to the horrific event, rather than just focusing upon the act of violence.

It's not sufficient to know that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had a violent relationship with his wife, or that Abdelmalik Petitjean visited Turkey just prior to entering a church in Normandy.

What's more important is to understand what they wanted for themselves in the longer term. As difficult as it now seems in light of their murderous actions, we would gain a lot by undertaking meticulous investigations into these individuals' sense that they didn't belong in France, and that they had to destroy what it represents.

By creating concrete conditions for different communities to feel they belong, policymakers can help their diverse populations feel connected to, and thus protective of, their societies.

Many of the analyses of recent terrorist events have focused upon the "lone-wolf" quality of the perpetrators. These lone wolves are difficult to predict, because they are acting independently, and without any contact with extremist organizations or individuals.

The work of policymakers, then, is to figure out how to prevent these individuals from acting impulsively, on the basis of some unpredictable trigger. My sense is that the only way to do this is to build a sense of belonging that will prevent them from feeling destructive. If they feel alienated from their society and feel they don't belong there, then they can also feel that other people deserve to suffer or die.

Following the logic of this approach, we can try to figure out which actions serve to reinforce belonging and which hinder it and then develop policies that build on the positive rather than the purely negative.

Our research in Quebec indicated that most of these actions are quite simple and achievable. They range from providing federal funds for ethnic celebrations and translations for pamphlets about available social services to encouraging local tolerance for so-called "foreign" customs such as the wearing of burkinis (something that has not happened in France) or Sikh turbans. In the Quebec example, our reading of the literature also indicated that undue bureaucratic wrangling that hinders the process of procuring basic necessities, like a driver's license, or that made access to social services such as health care or daycare difficult, can become sources of frustration and alienation.

At the same time, it is crucial to explain which of these customs can lead to severe punishment in the host country. Such actions as Latin Americans shooting off guns during parties or immigrants from Africa and the Middle East sending children abroad for female genital mutilation can become grounds for serous punishments.

Most importantly, our research suggested that successful integration generally occurs through individual incentive and personal relationships, fostered, whenever possible, by the community or the government. The 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act formalized a policy to encourage multicultural diversity and develop a sense of tolerance through recognition and understanding. One result of our own research was to help contribute to a higher profile for the Ministry of Immigration and Cultural Communities and to support their championing of diversity and inclusion.

A minute of silence July 18 in Nice.
Eric Gaillard/Reuters

I may have traveled to Nice this summer with my family in order to celebrate Bastille Day, because it's a beautiful setting, a city where we dream of the passion, luxury and the sultry pleasures of the French Riviera. Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel may have decided to target those same celebrations for exactly the same reasons, because while we might feel like sharing in that sense of belonging, he most certainly didn't.

Robert F. Barsky, Professor of English and French Literatures, and Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Critical But Overlooked: ICU Patients' Gut Bacteria

"2016-09-06-1473152539-3120502-wischmeyer.JPG"

^{Paul Wischmeyer}

Our bodies are full of bacteria, and when we get sick, those microbial populations change. Hospitals monitor patients' bloodwork and vitals, so why not track the makeup of their microbiomes too? Paul Wischmeyer and his collaborators are conducting research that could allow them to do just that, opening the door for microbiome diagnostic indicators and probiotic measures to restore patients' normal bacterial signatures. We asked him about the research, and what he's learned so far.

This text was edited for length. Read the full interview on ResearchGate News.

ResearchGate: How did you first get involved in this field?

Paul Wischmeyer: My passion for the research I do started when I was a teenager. At 15, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. I had been a very healthy kid until I took antibiotics for strep throat and began to bleed and had other gastrointestinal symptoms. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis shortly thereafter, and it progressed rapidly. I spent six months in the hospital and was given steroids and other medicines that never really made me better. I ultimately ended up losing my colon, getting quite sick, and being put in the ICU. Many surgeries later, it's still a part of my life. But it was at that age that I realized I wanted to study treatments that worked with the body, not against it, and to find ways to restore normalcy to the body after illness.

RG: And what was the impetus for this particular study of microbiomes of ICU patients?

Wischmeyer: Any of us who work with the microbiome will say we're far more bacterial as humans than we are human as humans. More than 50 percent of the cells that exist in our body are bacterial cells, and 99 percent of the genetic material in our body is bacterial rather than human. So the role those organisms play in who we are as healthy or sick individuals is probably enormous.

So I reached out to Rob Knight and explained that we have this large nutrition research platform with Daren Heyland in a number of hospitals that collect quite a bit of data, and do it largely for free. I said we'd love to start collecting microbial samples along with the other data, and we really can't do that without someone who's a true microbiome expert like he is. Rob and his lab said, that's great, because we have thousands of healthy people's data from the American Gut Project, but we don't know much about disease and how it changes the microbiome. And so the collaboration began. With essentially no funding, we worked together to initiate a project involving four medical centers across the US and Canada and multiple ICUs, generating an initial data set of 115 patients. It appears right now to be the largest survey of the microbiome in critical illness published to date.

RG: And how did you collect the samples?

Wischmeyer: In each of the participating hospitals, if patients had been on a ventilator for 48 hours and were expected to stay in the ICU at least three days, they met inclusion criteria and we collected samples from them, anonymizing the data. The samples were collected by nurses and dieticians at the hospitals using techniques that mimic those of the American Gut Project, because we knew that would be the large control group we'd compare against.

We collected the first sample at around 48-72 hours after ICU admission, and we'd collect another sample at discharge from the ICU, or day 10, to look for change over time. It was basically a small swab of the stool of the patient, a small swab of the oropharyngeal region--avoiding the teeth, which have quite a distinct microbiome--and then a skin swab across the forehead, looking at changes in the skin microbiome.

RG: And what have you learned so far?

Wischmeyer: Our initial results have really supported the hypothesis that critical illness would lead to a loss of diversity of the microbiome and that this loss of diversity would correlate with adverse outcomes. Patients lose significant, significant amounts of their normal flora, the families of bacterial species that make up a healthy gut or oropharynx. They're largely replaced by pathogens or proteobacteria; like staph, proteus, and other bacteria we associate with GI-associated bacterial translocation. Under normal circumstances, the human gut is made up of many different species. Our patients often start out with that normal appearance, but within just a few days we saw that in some patients 95 percent of bacteria in the gut were one taxa, and often this was a pathogen that dominated. One bacterial taxa overwhelms the rest, or grows because the others have been wiped out by antibiotics or other interventions. The lack of diversity that can occur is severe.

One of the bacteria we noted was quite depleted in the sick patients is a Faecalibacterium, which is a very important bacterium that makes short-chain fatty acids and helps nourish and protect the gut under normal and stress circumstances. It's been shown to be deficient in inflammatory bowel disease, and probably plays a role in controlling inflammation in the gut. Significant depletion of this bacterium had not to our knowledge been well-described before in critical illness, so that's one of the first results. Faecalibacterium is likely a bacterial species we should be studying as a replacement for our patients, because it probably plays a key role physiologically, and it becomes quite depleted in acute illness.

The microbiomes of critically ill patients also mirrored some known bacterial compositions in ways that were often quite unexpected. In many patients, the bacteria began to revert back to what an early neonatal gut looks like. In other cases, the gut and the mouth--especially the gut--would resemble samples taken from corpses found at outdoor crime scenes or around autopsy sites.

RG: Does the type of illness matter in terms of the expected impact on the microbiome?

Wischmeyer: That's another question we're trying to answer. At the moment, we aren't seeing those patterns emerge yet. This is very initial, but it appears that perhaps the microbiome's response to illness is not necessarily related to the disease we have, but may also be linked to other factors, such as the types of antibiotics people are treated with. In some of the more recent research we've done, we used a standardized score that quantitated some of the pressures that different antibiotics exert--some are much more broad in their killing activities than others--and it appears that antibiotic pressure may relate to some of the bacterial changes we're seeing. It doesn't appear to be all antibiotic related, but the treatments we give are fairly common across different diagnoses of patients, and do seem to drive some of these changes. That's one of the next steps: to look at the data and really break out diagnoses groups and identify the trends that actually drive microbiome patterns. As I move my research program to Duke University's Department of Anesthesiology, we hope to embark on answering many of these questions.

RG: Do you think the composition of the microbiome could become the standard way we look at illness in ICUs?

Wischmeyer: We hope it becomes part of it. I think you could imagine a day where we follow patients' microbiomes on a daily or weekly basis, much like we would blood cultures, blood pressure, or other laboratory markers. This could allow us to predict which ICU patients are at risk for adverse outcomes or have undiagnosed infections. It could also tell us who needs to be treated aggressively and early with restoration therapies--we call it "resodding the lawn." We could tell individually, patient to patient, what bacteria need to be given back based on a sample collected at admission.

We can save just about anybody in the ICU from just about anything and get them out of the hospital. But the reality is these patients are so depleted, they're never able to go back to their lives as normal. Many of them, because of their weakened state and the other things we've done to their bodies and microbiomes, will die within a year, never having held their grandkids again, never having walked down the street with their spouse again. With all of our advances in critical care, we must ask ourselves, are we creating survivors or are we creating victims, people who will never really go home and back to the quality of life they had before? Now that we've gotten good enough to save people from severe disease and injury, we need to work on ways of restoring health and life and normalcy. By creating effective methods of restoring the microbiome, together with nutrition and exercise, we hope we can begin to give people their lives back.

Want to receive updates on this project? Follow it on ResearchGate.

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Weight Loss Pills And Products Don't Work And Aren't Safe
Our ancestors lived in a feast or famine world. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or when it will arrive, the smart play is to pig out every time food is available. Our genes are programmed to extract as much energy as possible from what we eat and to store any extra energy in fat reservoirs, available in reserve for future famines.

These deeply ingrained genetic tendencies worked great in the austere world of our ancestors, but are a disaster in our current world of refrigerators, ubiquitous fast food joints and milk shakes.
Only one third of Americans are now able to maintain a normal weight; one third are overweight; and one third are obese. Excess weight is a risk factor for most illnesses, and for many people is also a consuming cosmetic concern.

Pharma knows that a safe and effective diet pill would be one of its biggest potential cash cows. Over the past 80 years, drug companies have done extensive research and have developed many products trying to capture the enormous market of unsuccessful weight watchers. None have worked well; all have had considerable risks.

But hope and hype always spring eternal. Dick Bijl is the perfect person to describe this troubling story and provide much needed cautions against our future credulity. He is president of the International Society of Drug Bulletins, representing 53 national drug bulletins, each engaged in evaluating the pluses and minuses of medications. Drug bulletins are essential-truthful antidotes to the misleading falsehoods turned out by the Pharma propaganda machine.

Dick writes: "The rate of overweight and obesity in adults and children is increasing rapidly all around the world. This results from a long lasting energy imbalance -- people who take in more calories than they burn. Being overweight increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases and certain types of cancer -- and of death related to these diseases.

Desperate consumers eagerly turn to fad diet programs and diet pills to obtain weight reduction. But treatment for overweight is difficult, the results are poor and the risks are great.

The FDA has an extremely low standard in approving weight control drugs -- all they have to demonstrate is a weight loss that is statistically different from placebo -- but the weight losses the meds actually achieved have always been very small and usually vanish almost immediately after stopping the drug. It is doubtful whether small statistically significant differences in weight are at all clinically relevant in promoting any real health benefit.

History has also shown that diet pills can cause severe, and sometimes even fatal, side effects that appear only after approval and that force them to be taken off the market.

In the 1930s, Dinitrophenol was introduced as a safe and effective drug for weight loss in the USA and Europe. Its mechanism of action seemed ingenious- cells were made less efficient in storing energy and instead burned it off as heat. Soon hundreds of thousands of people were using the new wonder drug. But after just four years, dinitrophenol had to be taken off the market as doctors noticed that many patients lost their vision, completely or partially, through cataracts.

Others suffered from renal disease or died because of fatally increased body temperature. Of note, these harms haven't stopped some reckless body builders, who still use the substance despite its risks.

The basic message from the disaster that followed the introduction of this first approved diet pill should have been clear -- careless tampering with our body's energy system can be dangerous.
This lesson has never been learned. The same scenario of groundless hope, disappointment, and damage has been repeated over and over again.

In the 1960s, aminorex was the promising new diet pill, but it led to pulmonary hypertension.
In the 1970s, dexfenfluramine was the great hope, but it caused disorders of cardiac valves.
The market-authorization of rimonabant was withdrawn in 2008 mainly because of psychiatric side effects.

The market-authorization of sibutramine was suspended in 2010 because of severe and sometimes fatal cardiovascular side effects.

Phentermine and fenfluramine have been used for the treatment of obesity, but gave rise to pulmonary hypertension and disorders of cardiac valves.

The balance of efficacy and side effects of orlistat, now the only registered and available weight losing drug in the EU, is also not positive. This drug has only marginal efficacy, often leads to gastro-intestinal side effects, and sometimes causes severe liver damage. Recently, it came out that the reporting of side effects in orlistat publications was systematically understated.
The combination of topiramate and phentermine has been approved in the U.S.A., but not in Europe -- because of serious doubts regarding long term safety.

Recently two products were granted approval for the treatment of overweight: naltrexon/bupropion (an opioid antagonist and an antidepressant) and liraglutide (which already was approved for diabetes mellitus). These produce only minor weight loss of four to five kgs -- not worth the long term risks of side effects.

There are also lots of herbal preparations promoted as safe and effective in weight control. Great caution is necessary because they are not intensely studied before entering the market, or carefully monitored after. And safety and efficacy are both doubtful. In the past, many preparations contained ephedra, which can cause cardiovascular problems (hypertension, arrhythmia, myocardial infarction) and central nervous system side effects. In Europe and the USA, it is now forbidden to market preparations that contain ephedra.

It would be a great benefit to the world's health and fitness, if an efficacious and safe weight losing drug became available -- but at this moment weight control with drugs remains an illusion. It must be recognized that diet pills have so far produced meagre benefit and lots of bad complications.

The lasting effects of non-drug interventions, like counseling on diet and physical training, have also proven to be small- but they are safe and remain the first option in treatment.

The solution of the obesity-problem does not lie in the consulting room of the physician or in the pharmacy, but must be focused on prevention and changes in lifestyle."

Thanks, Dick, for reminding us that there is no mystery to achieving healthy weight -- and no shortcut. A long term dedication to proper diet and regular exercise are crucial to any successful weight control program. Diet pills are an attempted short term fix that doesn't work and may cause a great deal of trouble.

And be skeptical of future diet pills that enter the market with extravagant claims. If a pill solution to overweight were easy, we would already have it.

There is no low hanging fruit, no easy answer.

Many promising scientific discoveries have been made revealing the brain and gut mechanisms regulating appetite and weight. But the treatments derived from them never work because each addresses only one simple target in a very complicated system. Maintaining weight in the face of famine was so essential to the survival of our ancestors, going back millions of years, that we have many inbuilt, overlapping, redundant systems to ensure that we use energy efficiently and develop fat stores whenever possible. Try to change the workings of one system with a diet pill and others kick in to restore the previous balance.

And a remarkably delicate balance it is. Eat just one extra candy bar a day for a year -- a very easy thing for me to do -- and you gain thirty pounds. In a world that ubiquitously offers ridiculously tempting food choices, gaining weight is for most of us the inevitable default position.

So how can we fight the good fight against overweight without resorting to diet pills?
On a personal level, the only answers are insight into the absolute necessity for lifestyle changes, combined with the discipline to effect them.

On a national level, we must target being overweight as our number one public health risk and number one policy priority. Stop subsidizing the sweetener makers; start subsidizing veggie products. Make exercise and good dietary habits an essential part of the school curriculum, recess periods, and lunches. Give tax deductions for exercise equipment and gym memberships. Spend more public dollars on weight control programs and fewer on medical treatments.

There is not a pill for every problem. As individuals and as a society, we must face the fact that weight control in a time of plenty will be an ongoing and never ending struggle- but one we cannot safely avoid.

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Waiting For The Next Sunspot Cycle: 2019-2030
Forecasters are already starting to make predictions for what might be in store as our sun winds down its current sunspot cycle in a few years. Are we in for a very intense cycle of solar activity, or the beginning of a century-long absence of sunspots and a rise in colder climates?

Figure showing the sunspot counts for the past few cycles.
(Credit: NASA/ARC: Hathaway)

Ever since Samuel Schwabe discovered the 11-year ebb and flow of sunspots on the sun in 1843, predicting when the next sunspot cycle will appear, and how strong it will be, has been a cottage industry among scientists and non-scientists alike. For solar physicists, the sunspot cycle is a major indicator of how the sun's magnetic field is generated, and the evolution of various patterns of plasma circulation near the solar surface and interior. Getting these forecasts bang-on would be proof that we indeed have a 'deep' understanding of how the sun works that is a major step beyond just knowing it is a massive sphere of plasma heated by thermonuclear fusion in its core.

So how are we doing?

For over a century, scientists have scrutinized the shapes of dozens of individual sunspot cycles to glean features that could be used for predicting the circumstances of the next one. Basically, we know that 11-years is an average and some cycles are as short as 9 years or as long as 14. The number of sunspots during the peak year, called sunspot maximum, can vary from as few as 50 to as many as 260. The speed with which sunspot numbers rise to a maximum can be as long as 80 months for weaker sunspot cycles, and as short as 40 months for the stronger cycles. All of these features, and many other statistical rules-of-thumb, lead to predictive schemes of one kind or another, but they generally fail to produce accurate and detailed forecasts of the 'next' sunspot cycle.

Prior to the current sunspot cycle (Number 24), which spans the years 2008-2019, NASA astronomer Dean Pesnell collected 105 forecasts for Cycle 24. For something as simple as how many sunspots would be present during the peak year, the predictions varied from as few as 40 to as many as 175 with an average of 106 +/-31. The actual number at the 2014 peak was 116. Most of the predictions were based on little more than extrapolating statistical patterns in older data. What we really want are forecasts that are based upon the actual physics of sunspot formation, not statistics. The most promising physics-based models we have today actually follow magnetic processes on the surface of the sun and below and are called Flux Transport Dynamo models.

"2016-09-01-1472723936-1238552-cycle24magneticfield.png"

Wilcox Observatory solar polar field trends
(Credit: Wilcox Solar Observatory)

The sun's magnetic field is much more fluid than the magnetic field of a toy bar magnet. Thanks to the revolutionary work by helioseismologists using the SOHO spacecraft and the ground-based GONG program, we can now see below the turbulent surface of the sun. There are vast rivers of plasma wider than a dozen Earths, which wrap around the sun from east to west. There is also a flow pattern that runs north and south from the equator to each pole. This meridional current is caused by giant convection cells below the solar surface and acts like a conveyor belt for the surface magnetic fields in each hemisphere. The sun's north and south magnetic fields can be thought of as waves of magnetism that flow at about 60 feet/second from the equator at sunspot maximum to the poles at sunspot minimum, and back again to the equator at the base of the convection cell. At sunspot minimum they are equal and opposite in intensity at the poles, but at sunspot maximum they vanish at the poles and combine and cancel at the sun's equator. The difference in the polar waves during sunspot minimum seems to predict how strong the next sunspot maximum will be about 6 years later as the current returns the field to the equator at the peak of the next cycle. The forecasts suggest Cycle 25 might continue the declining trend of polar field decrease seen in the last three sunspot cycles, and be even weaker than Cycle 24 with far fewer than 100 spots.

"2016-09-01-1472724012-5461392-ZharakovaConvection.jpg"

Figure showing the meridional circulation patterns on the sun.
(Credit Zharkova et al )

So what can we bank on?

Statistically speaking, the current Cycle 24 is scheduled to draw to a close about 11 years after the previous sunspot minimum in January 2008, which means sometime in 2019. We entered the Cycle 24 sunspot minimum period in 2016 because in February and June, we already had two spot-free days. As the number of spot-free days continues to increase in 2017-2018, we will start seeing the new sunspots of Cycle 25 appear sometime in late-2019. Sunspot maximum is likely to occur in 2024, with most forecasts predicting about half as many sunspots as in Cycle 24.

The bad news is that some studies show sunspot magnetic field strengths have been declining since 2000 and are already close to the minimum needed to sustain sunspots on the solar surface. This is also supported by independent work in 2015 published in the journal Nature. By Cycle 25 or 26, magnetic fields may be too weak to punch through the solar surface and form recognizable sunspots at all, spelling the end of the sunspot cycle phenomenon, and the start of another Maunder Minimum cooling period perhaps lasting until 2100.

But the good news seems to be that none of the current forecasts suggest Cycle 25 will be entirely absent. A few forecasts even hold out some hope that a sunspot maximum equal to or greater than Cycle 24 is possible.

If you are an aurora watcher, 2022-2027 would be the best years to go hunting for them. If you are a satellite operator or astronaut, this next cycle may be even less hostile than Cycle 24 was! In any event, solar cycle prediction will be a rising challenge in the next few years as scientists pursue the Holy Grail of creating a reliable theory of why the sun even has such cycles in the first place!

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Can Innovative Transportation Options Help Narrow Health Disparities And Increase Clinical Trial Diversity?

Once reliant solely on buses and subway systems, our nation's seniors may soon have new choices on how to navigate their communities, including to their doctor's appointments. In March, the National Hispanic Council on Aging (NHCOA) released a poll indicating that Hispanic older adults felt that affordable and safe driverless cars could improve the lives of themselves and their family members. Although approximately 70% of senior surveyed live within an area with mass transit, they still felt that driverless cars could provide significant value, highlighting an opportunity for innovative transportation options to address the needs of a population that will reach 20 million by 2060.

This poll comes at a critical juncture as our transportation landscape continues to shift towards ride-sharing and health disparities persist among older Latinos and African Americans. Zhai Yun Tan reports in an August 2016 article in The Atlantic that hospitals nationwide are now starting to partner with ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber to help patients get to their appointments on time. In some cases, these rides are even being paid for by Medicaid and other insurance plans. According to a 2013 Journal of Community Health review by Samina Syed, Ben Gerber, and Lisa Sharp, patients with lower socioeconomic status, particularly those lacking a vehicle, report higher barriers to accessing health care and are more likely to miss their appointments. These ride partnerships could help fill in the gaps for patients who struggle to make it to appointments; although many hospitals provide transportation services, these typically need to be planned in advanced and may not offer a direct route to the hospital.

Patients with lower socioeconomic status, particularly those lacking a vehicle, report higher barriers to accessing health care and are more likely to miss their appointments.

In addition to providing quick and reliable rides for routine medical care, ride-sharing services may also help improve access to medical research opportunities for communities of color that often cite transportation as a barrier to participation. Despite a higher prevalence for diseases like Alzheimer's, Latinos and African Americans are chronically underrepresented in clinical research for life saving drugs. According to the FDA Office of Women's Health, Latinos make up less than one percent of clinical trial participants despite making up 17 percent of the U.S. population. However, polling data has demonstrated that Latinos and African Americans are willing to participate in these trials. A recent poll from the Global Alzheimer's Platform Foundation found that 39% of Americans said they would consider taking part in an Alzheimer's clinical trial, including 34% who are African American, 41% who are Hispanic. This diversity gap has real consequences for public health and both the FDA and NIH agree that minority inclusion in medical research is vital to ensuring drug safety and spurring medical innovation.

Yet transportation is a persistent issue. The Eliminating Disparities in Clinical Trials Project (EDICT) named unreliable transportation among the key socioeconomic obstacles working class individuals face when participating in medical research. Ride-sharing, and eventually driverless cars, could offer new avenues for addressing these transportation issues.

We need Uber for Clinical Trials -- why can clinical trials go to the patient. #bcsm
— Alicia C. Staley (@stales) June 14, 2016

Data released by Uber reveals that ride-sharing services are uniquely positioned to serve diverse communities. A March 2014 Uber study concluded that in Chicago, four in ten rides begins or ends in an underserved neighborhood, and the average wait time and likelihood that a ride will be completed has no relationship with the median neighborhood income. Further, ride-sharing company Lyft recently partnered with Axovant Sciences to provide transportation to seniors enrolled in an Alzheimer's clinical trial in California. If successful, this novel partnership model should be further explored with minority communities in mind.

Ride-sharing may not be a panacea for eliminating health disparities or for the exclusion of minorities in clinical research, but it is an example of a fresh approach that could help bridge the divide today.

While promising, these services have their own set of challenges that must be addressed. For example, advocates have noted that ride-hailing services have mixed success serving individuals with disabilities. Additionally, these services rely heavily on electronic payments and smart phones, which can be a barrier for individuals of lower socioeconomic status. Despite these challenges, innovative transportation options have the potential to improve mobility while increasing access to care and treatment for many communities.

Ride-sharing may not be a panacea for eliminating health disparities or for the exclusion of minorities in clinical research, but it is an example of a fresh approach that could help bridge the divide today while larger fixes are developed. As our population ages and diseases like Alzheimer's become more prevalent, demand for these types of innovative solutions will only grow.

Jason Resendez, executive director of the LatinosAgainstAlzheimer's Network and Coalition - a network of UsAgainstAlzheimer's - with contributions by Beth Moretzsky, The George Washington University.

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The Write Questions: Advice From The Wrong Side Of The Lens

Photo by Rhododendrites (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I am unashamed to admit it: I am terribly proud of my people.

To what "people" am I referring here? To doctors? To scientists? To astronauts and aspiring astronaut-types? I'm surely proud of all those people. Today, I'm referring to another group to which I belong; to something I've done on and off for more than half my life; to one of the most important things I've ever done, as well as one of the most important things that occurs in a truly free and democratic society. I am referring, of course, to the press.

My people - journalists - are amazing. We bust in doors behind which lie nefarious activities that undermine the basic tenets of our civil liberties. We point the spotlight on violations of human rights. We call "foul" when justice isn't being served and, in that sense, are our own sort of justice. Therein lies the agony and the ecstasy of the media: with words, sounds, and images, we convene trials, summon the accused, calls witnesses, and cause judgments to be made. Like an outstanding attorney, an excellent journalist solicits input from relevant experts and arranges concrete evidence in such a way that the jury - our audience - can make an informed decision. In outstanding journalism - not editorial, just plain ol' features about life and the people who live it - there's no need to prosecute or to defend. The facts, well-presented, do that for themselves. The facts, poorly presented or not presented at all, twist and maul the truth and raze our ability as professionals to educate, empower, and vouchsafe civilization.

Photo By Txbeaker [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

These days, both facts and the way in which they are presented are more malleable than ever. When I first got into the field, it wasn't so. Back then, I inked an honest-to-god press. The thing was a behemoth - a giant born from the black depths of global mechanization. You basically had to wrestle it in order to get your paper out. Every word you fed into that thing you thought about. Then you thought about it twice and twice again, because lord knows you didn't want to go more rounds with that infernal machine than was absolutely necessary. My summer at The Otter Valley News and Views is witnessed by the ink particles still embedded deep within the lining of my lungs.

Photography used to follow a similar plodding, dedicated to-the-point-of-cultish course. At The Daily Californian, we photographers rolled our own black-and-white film, ran up and down at sporting events at nearly the same pace as the players, and worshiped the smell of fixer in the morning- or at least pretended to, because what we sweated (and sometimes bled) for mattered. Our shots were a critical part of the process. They provided more than just meaning and context. Photographs printed on paper drew people in: they gave the words our colleagues penned the opportunity to inform readers and transform the world for the better. That was before I graduated from college, before I built something that flew into space, before I ever laid hands on a patient. Long before I ever saved someone's life, through journalism, I was able to have a significant, positive impact on the lives of my fellow human beings. And also: really great calves.

So here I am, 18 years and several degrees later, dealing first-hand with journalism from the far side of the lens. A lot has changed. For one, the cameras are now in my face, not hanging about my neck as they ought to be. The questions will be coming my way. In 48 hours, my exit from "Mars" will be attended by 55 members of the media (and my brother, who has promised to heckle me "like a reporter"). On either side of me will be five very nice, very smart, very tired innocent bystanders: my crewmates, who have born a ceaseless onslaught of media for the last 12 months with an impressive amount of grace.

In return for our patience, we've had some outstanding coverage. My most sincere thanks to VICE, The History Channel, The Surge, BBC Stargazer, The University of Rhode Island, The British Journal of Medicine, Radio New Zealand, Voices from L5 and many others for your thoughtful, thorough, and accurate pieces. We've also had our share of "What the heck is this? We don't play xBox! No one has actually been chosen to go to Mars! As for sending robots ahead of time to build our shelters for us... it's a cool idea, but not, as some people would have you think, "a done deal." Those last two informational travesties resulted from what increasingly passes for reporting: taking a story written by someone else, distilling it (badly), sprinkling it with Googled facts, and passing it off as news.*

Here we arrive at something else that's changed since that fateful day when I talked my way into a job shooting mayoral candidates, house-fires, extra softball innings, and other natural disasters for a living: As much good journalism as there is (more than ever, really), really bad media abounds.

What's the disparity between good journalism and...not? Here's my view: a journalist gathers and contextualizes information such that readers can imbue it with social relevance and personal meaning. Making up facts, distilling other peoples' articles without adding value, and lifting quotes from blogs posts rather than conducting interviews is not journalism. It takes up space in news feeds, but it isn't news. Predigested and filling, it lacks mentally nutritional value while giving readers a serious case of brain gas.

True, there's always been fluff out there. Also true: like the scarlet letter, sensationalism used to be highly visible from a distance (and for the same reason). Clearly marked by cheap newsprint yellowing before it even hit the stands or by super-glossy covers with garish titles, these tabloids practically glowed when held against a dark background. If you wanted news, you had to pluck off your doorstep or out of a metal box at a busy intersection.

These days, good journalists and bad media are jammed into the same space. No books, no covers: just the great equalizer of pixels on a screen. In the digital age, the friendly labeling we once counted on to help us discriminate between medicine and poison - between information and aggrandizement - has faded away. A text from your mother and a text from a scammer claiming that your mother is in the hospital and needs $10,000 for a procedure appear exactly the same way on your phone's LCD. An opinion piece written on an iPad on the way home from work may look as, or more, legitimate than a Pulitzer-winning piece of investigative reporting. On the surface, these two often appear the same.

That's one major change since I got into this business in 1996. The other is that properly trained, properly-paid journalists are vastly outnumbered by people under deadline to write click-bait.

So: what's a simulated astronaut to do?

Fundamentally, my job, whether I'm an astronaut or a reporter or a doctor, is to make things work: to take the limited resources at hand and deliver a victory for the home team. Ship me anywhere in the 'verse. Make the delay 20 minutes, 200 hours, or 40 days and 40 nights. Whatever the apparent barriers, I won't abandon my people - many of whom are or could be good writers who aren't given the time or training to make their product what it rightfully should be. I can't change that right now, but I can help even the odds stacked against us all by expediency, mediocrity, and inertia.

On 8/28 you will be able to ask us any question in the world. To help even the odds, here's a list of questions we've already answered many, many times:

What have you learned?
What do you miss?
What did you eat?
Have you seen The Martian?
How did it feel to not have the Sun and the wind in your face for a year?
What's the first thing you're going to do?
What's been the biggest challenge about being on Mars?
Do you guys argue? How do you deal with conflict?
What do you do if someone gets sick?
Have there been any disasters during the mission?
Do you really want to go to Mars?
Did this mission - do any simulations - help pave the way for the human exploration of Mars?
How is this simulation different from Mars?
How did your families react to your decision to go into isolation?
Did you always want to be an astronaut?
Have you ever felt like quitting?
What will be the hardest part about coming back to Earth?
Would you do it again?
Are any of you signed up for the one-way trip?

We're very glad that people are curious enough about our mission to ask any question that comes to mind. At the same time, anyone locked in a box with no direct access to the outside world, no fresh food except the small amount that they can grow in whatever space they aren't sleeping on, and only five flatmates can easily imagine what they are going to miss: more friends, family, sunshine, wind, flowers, pineapple, sushi, long walks in the woods, and tailgating at Cal games (go Bears!). If "What do you miss?" was a mystery, thanks to the power of Reddit, six crew blogs, and countless news articles, that mystery has been solved.

To my fellow journalists out there: there are much better questions to be asked and answered. For the record, the questions that were truly mysterious until I arrived on "Mars" and have never/rarely been asked by the media are:

What turned out to be replaceable? What foods were replaceable, or even better/easier to make? What new favorite food took the place of the old one that you can't have?
You can't talk directly to your family - how well do the other things that you can do compensate for that? And how well does your new family, your crew, compensate for it?
While nothing can replace sunshine and wind, how well do the new adventures that you get to have compensate for their temporary loss? How well does the new filter between you and the world function to give you a sense of peace and the ability to accomplish things that you would struggle to accomplish otherwise, with the world knocking at your door?
Now that you have been there for a year, what message do you have for the people of Earth about their planet?
What message do you have for the folks designing the human Mars missions?
Name one total disaster - suits, radios, experiments, food recipes - and how, if you were able to salvage something from it, you did.
Name an epic win and how you accomplished it.
How is human society going to have to change to survive and thrive on Mars?
What do you expect will be extremely challenging for you when you return to Earth and what's your plan for overcoming that challenge?
What do you think will be the thing that you remember most - the dreaded memory and the cherished memory?
What's the weakness that could have torn this mission apart? What's the strength, or strengths, that saved it?
Did you find all the media attention flattering or annoying? How weird is it to be a journalist inside a Mars mission?
Did any of you get sick or get hurt? If that had happened on Mars would you have been alright?
Do you think that six people will be enough - or too many?
Did you get enough support from the people of Earth? What else could we have done to help this mission?
Do you plan to drive right away, or will you be re-integrating back into the operation of heavy machinery slowly?
What advice do you have for choosing the next crew?
Would you have tried to vote from space? How do you think that future Mars crews should handle the political process?
We talk a lot about the science of these missions - what the role of art, music, entertainment during these long voyages?
In a place where there's no money and nothing to buy, what do you value?

When we ask the right questions, we get people thinking, challenging assumptions, and pushing the boundaries of what ought to come next. These are free from me to you. Go to!

We Martians are ready to meet the press. We've been getting ready all year. All that we ask in return for the time that we're giving you the minute we hit dirt - I have to let you photograph me before I can so much as hug my husband - is this: be journalists. Be the truth-advocates who held this country together for hundreds of years. Adventurers like us are always good for a story. We scientists have been keeping things interesting for the last few centuries. Astronauts - bright and shiny! - are the new kids on the block when it comes to popular coverage, and deservedly so. We've faced dangers and made sacrifices for twelve long months, and we thank you for your attention. So please, come one and come all to the show. And when you come, bring the right questions. When the hatch opens and we finally present ourselves to you, that's the signal: It's YOUR turn to be the hero. To write our way into the future. To find the facts, solicit the opinions, and frame the stories that will make the last year - our lives in service to science and Earth and all of humankind - meaningful. To make the fact that I waited 366 days PLUS 10 minutes to hug my husband worthwhile. So let's do this, people. We scienced the heck out of this. Now, let's write the heck out of this.

You ask. We'll answer. Make me proud.

Courtesy of Wikimedia commons, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197374

*Corrections were requested to all of these articles.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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What have you learned?
What do you miss?
What did you eat?
Have you seen The Martian?
How did it feel to not have the Sun and the wind in your face for a year?
What's the first thing you're going to do?
What's been the biggest challenge about being on Mars?
Do you guys argue? How do you deal with conflict?
What do you do if someone gets sick?
Have there been any disasters during the mission?
Do you really want to go to Mars?
Did this mission - do any simulations - help pave the way for the human exploration of Mars?
How is this simulation different from Mars?
How did your families react to your decision to go into isolation?
Did you always want to be an astronaut?
Have you ever felt like quitting?
What will be the hardest part about coming back to Earth?
Would you do it again?
Are any of you signed up for the one-way trip?

What turned out to be replaceable? What foods were replaceable, or even better/easier to make? What new favorite food took the place of the old one that you can't have?
You can't talk directly to your family - how well do the other things that you can do compensate for that? And how well does your new family, your crew, compensate for it?
While nothing can replace sunshine and wind, how well do the new adventures that you get to have compensate for their temporary loss? How well does the new filter between you and the world function to give you a sense of peace and the ability to accomplish things that you would struggle to accomplish otherwise, with the world knocking at your door?
Now that you have been there for a year, what message do you have for the people of Earth about their planet?
What message do you have for the folks designing the human Mars missions?
Name one total disaster - suits, radios, experiments, food recipes - and how, if you were able to salvage something from it, you did.
Name an epic win and how you accomplished it.
How is human society going to have to change to survive and thrive on Mars?
What do you expect will be extremely challenging for you when you return to Earth and what's your plan for overcoming that challenge?
What do you think will be the thing that you remember most - the dreaded memory and the cherished memory?
What's the weakness that could have torn this mission apart? What's the strength, or strengths, that saved it?
Did you find all the media attention flattering or annoying? How weird is it to be a journalist inside a Mars mission?
Did any of you get sick or get hurt? If that had happened on Mars would you have been alright?
Do you think that six people will be enough - or too many?
Did you get enough support from the people of Earth? What else could we have done to help this mission?
Do you plan to drive right away, or will you be re-integrating back into the operation of heavy machinery slowly?
What advice do you have for choosing the next crew?
Would you have tried to vote from space? How do you think that future Mars crews should handle the political process?
We talk a lot about the science of these missions - what the role of art, music, entertainment during these long voyages?
In a place where there's no money and nothing to buy, what do you value?

Courtesy of Wikimedia commons, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=197374

*Corrections were requested to all of these articles.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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15 ways you know you're in the Anthropocene
1. We've created enough concrete to make a full-scale replica of Earth 2mm thick.

"2016-04-23-1461443161-1271872-earthconcreteworld.jpg"

2. We've manufactured enough plastic to wrap Earth in a layer of clingfilm. On current trends, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. These and other manmade materials are creating "technofossils".

"2016-04-24-1461517843-854575-ScreenShot20160424at19.08.18.png"

3. We use an area the size of South America to grow our crops and an area bigger than Africa for our livestock. Humans and our livestock make up over 90% of all mammals on Earth by weight*.

"2016-04-23-1461441810-1881022-worldmapofcroplandandpasturelandsage0.png"

4. We are at the start of the 6th mass extinction. Species are going extinct at mass extinction rates - we've only had 5 mass extinctions on Earth and the last ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

5. We move more sediment and rock than all natural processes.

6. The nitrogen cycle hasn't changed this much in 2.5 billion years - and we are the cause - we've doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in circulation. And we are radically altering the carbon and water cycles causing the climate to change.

7. We're making Earth wobble a little. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting because of climate change caused by humans. This is changing Earth's wobble - Earth's spin axis drifts slowly around the poles - GPS signals are inaccurate if this is not included in the calculations.

8. Our first radio and television broadcasts have now reached 115 light years from Earth zooming past stars we now know have planets orbiting them, perhaps like our own. The signals will be too weak to detect, which is just as well because the first live television broadcast was the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games presided over by Adolf Hitler.

9. All recorded history - from agriculture to our global civilization - happened in the Holocene. This is what geologists call the last 11,700 years since the end of the ice age. The Holocene's climate has been remarkably stable, going up or down no more than about 1°C. In 2000, Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen looked at the evidence (the Great Acceleration) and declared Earth is no longer in the Holocene. He was at a loss for words for what we were in before deducing the "Anthropocene". (The link is to Crutzen's first article on the idea.)

10. As a scientific concept, the Anthropocene is as significant as Copernicus' discovery that Earth orbits the sun and Darwin's evolution.

11. In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) included the word "Anthropocene" for the first time. Other notable additions that year included "hashtag" and "wardrobe malfunction". But geologists aren't as wildly impulsive as the OED. The decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is the largest and oldest bit of the International Union of Geological Sciences created in 1961. In 2009, the commission set up an Anthropocene Working Group to investigate whether the evidence warrants a new epoch. The group has met a few times, published some papers in academic journals and now they've taken a vote and, yes, according to them, we are in the Anthropocene.

12. Enough with the "We". Who is this "We" anyway? Good point. Some are driving this change more than others. Historically, we cannot disentangle this enormous growth from the European empires, slavery, resource exploitation, globalization and inequality. "Our" most significant impacts, known as the Great Acceleration, occurred in the last half of the 20th Century - driven by wealthy nations. Some say the Anthropocene really the Capitalocene? It has also been called the Eurocene, the Manthropocene, the Misanthropocene or even the Obscene.

13. The precise moment Earth entered the Anthropocene, according to some, may be determined with pinpoint accuracy: 16 July 1945 05:29:45 am (local time) - when first atomic bomb was detonated in a remote corner on the Alamagordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or "Journey of Death," 340 kilometres south of Los Alamos in New Mexico, United States. This detonation released radioactive material into the atmosphere that will leave traces in rocks for millions of years. Anyone born after this date will never have lived in the Holocene. This seems a reasonable marker for future geologists and the Anthropocene Working Group is making the case that the 1950s mark a turning point in the trajectory of the Earth system. But not everyone agrees - some think 1964 makes more sense, just after the atmospheric test ban on nuclear weapons when atmospheric radiation levels peaked. And yet others say the dawn of agriculture marks the start, or maybe even 1610 when the collision between old world and new reached its most destructive height. Whichever date is picked, it will be politically, economically and culturally loaded.

14. Can we navigate the Anthropocene? There's room for optimism: we've reached peak child - birthrate is no longer rising, the ozone hole has stabilised and looks likely to recover, and in 2015 emissions growth of greenhouse gases seems to have stalled. Now we have the Paris Agreement on climate change to stabilise the climate well below 2°C. We have about 30 years, or one generation, to go from peak emissions of greenhouse gases to more or less zero. And the rest: we need to protect forests, halt biodiversity, use fertilisers more effectively and protect our oceans, ice sheets, atmosphere, land and diversity of life.

15. The remaining carbon budget for humanity to reduce risk of very dangerous climate change will run out in couple of decades. This is not a budget for the next few decades or centuries. It is the budget for humanity's remaining time on Earth. Subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are essentially crowd-sourcing catastrophe.

Members of the Anthropocene Working Group discussed their conclusions at the 35th International Geological Congress in Cape Town 27-4 September 2016.

Check out Anthropocene.info

Or, The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration (2015)

*South America: 18 million square kilometres
Permanent crops: 14 million square kilometres
Africa: 30 million square kilometres
Pastures: 33.5 million square kilometers

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Why is American Political Science Blind on the Right Eye?

"2016-08-29-1472495975-1845380-Trump.jpg"

This Thursday thousands of (mostly) American political scientists will descend upon Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). A plurality, if not a majority, of those scholars works exclusively on American politics. While the rise of Donald Trump will undoubtedly be heatedly debated in the hallways and panels, only a few papers are actually devoted to explaining the most important development in US politics this year. This (again) begs the question: why is American political science blind on the right eye?

Three of the most discussed political phenomena in American politics this century are of a radical right nature: neoconservatism, the Tea Party, and Trump(ism). All three developments took US political scientists by surprise and the discipline is still struggling with finding a convincing and comprehensive explanation for them- I could also include far right terrorism, which is considered to be "the most severe threat of political violence" by US law enforcement agencies, but is hardly studied by US political scientists. To be fair, while the situation is not much better with regard to the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter and particularly Occupy Wall Street have drawn much more interest from American political scientists (while they are much less relevant to American politics).

In 2008 I set out to write a review article on the political science literature on neoconservatism for the Journal of Politics. It was a response to the received wisdom that "neoconservatives" had dominated the Bush administration, most notably in pushing through the Iraq invasion. But while this alleged neoconservative influence was noted in many academic accounts, I was unable to find any political science study of neoconservatism. In the end, I had to broaden my review article to also include conservatism in general and rely almost exclusively on books by conservative activists and historians. Even today the main book on the US neoconservative movement is written by a French bureaucrat, and previous think tanker, Justin Vaïsse, and was translated from French!

Similarly, the rise of the Tea Party movement took the discipline by total surprise. This was even more surprising as the previous major right-wing social movement, the Christian Right, had been the subject of study of American political scientists, including some prominent scholars like Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. And while the Tea Party movement did inspire some original scholarship, including from prominent scholars like Theda Skocpol, its lessons seem to have been quickly forgotten, as they (and the Tea Party movement in general) hardly feature in the discussion of the third right-wing surprise: the rise of Donald Trump.

The rise of Donald Trump took almost everyone by surprise, and I was no exception. That said, I was more surprised by the rise of Trump than of Trumpism. After all, radical right politics have a long history in the US, dating at least back to the nativist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century, and recent developments, including the Tea Party and the right turn of the GOP, had awakened fires that the vast network of right-wing media were happy to stoke with more fuel. But as journalists looked for political scientists to explain the "Trump phenomenon" they found few scholars of the US radical right and instead turned to those of the European radical right.

Only in the past months, a year after Trump declared that he was running for president and more than half a year after he started to dominate the GOP primaries, are we seeing an increasingly lively debate on the reasons for Trump's success among American political scientists - importantly, this debate is largely taking place in the media. Still, little of the research is rooted in the study of the US radical right. Most is a reflection of well-established fields of study, i.e. on authoritarian personalities, "losers of modernization", or racial prejudice.

How can scholars of American politics time and again be taken by surprise by the rise of radical right movements? Moreover, why do scholars of American politics ignore the radical right, while those of European politics obsess over it? There is no doubt that the specific two-party system in the US plays a role - there are no clear radical right parties like the French National Front (FN) or the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) to be studied. In fact, even the United Kingdom, which also has a two-party system, has some (more or less) radical right parties, like the British National Party (BNP) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), that contest elections and have been studied in detail. But this is only part of the story.

A more important, and troubling, part of the problem is inherent in US political science in general, and the study of American politics in particular. Over the past decades US political science has become more and more (meta)theoretically and methodologically homogeneous, particularly at the more prestigious top research universities, which train a majority of the political scientists at other research-intensive universities.

At the (meta)theoretical level Rational Choice Theory (RCT) dominates much of the research, which (very simply stated) assumes that all politics is driven by individuals who are exclusively driven by economic self-interest. In this highly sanitized and simplistic world, ideologies and identities are secondary at best, and irrelevant at worst. In fact, politics as a whole is often reduced to a "logical" consequence of economic and sociological developments - in more academic terms, the focus is exclusively on the demand-side of (electoral) politics, while the supply-side is ignored.

At the methodological level, statistical methods are the gold standard, and the more advanced the method, the better the research. This has made the study of American politics, in particular, extremely data-driven. But data suitable for complex statistical analyses have at least two fundamental problems. First, they simplify the complex social and political world - think about one of the most used datasets of political regimes, by Freedom House, which has just three categories: free, partly free, and not free. Second, most elaborate datasets are only developed after a phenomenon becomes politically relevant, and hence significant funding can be secured. This means that quantitative political scientists are often many years behind the curve.

Finally, the study of American politics is significantly weakened by a very strong parochialism. While American politics is part of comparative politics in all other countries, it is almost completely separated from it in the US. Not only do many scholars of American politics study the US in isolation - yet consider their findings relevant to the whole world - but they don't even draw upon scholarship of similar phenomena in other countries.

Perhaps the rise of Trump will finally lead to some critical introspection and, wishful thinking, structural change within US political science in general, and the study of American politics in particular. It has already led scholars to draw upon examples of European politics, most notably Silvio Berlusconi and Marine Le Pen. It has also led to critical reflections on dominant thesis within the study of American politics, such as the crucial importance of money (Citizens United) or "the party" in US politics. Still, without a more methodologically and theoretically pluralistic approach, as well as a more comparative perspective, US political science will continue to struggle to anticipate and explain key developments in US politics.

(In a next post I will highlight the few important studies of the US radical right that can help better understand the rise of Trump and, particularly, Trumpism.)

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Scientists at work: Public archaeologists dig before the construction crews do

Nina M. Versaggi, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Armed with my sharpened trowel, 3-meter tape, shovel, shaker screen and peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I joined my first dig as part of Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility back in 1975. Crews of archaeologists were shovel testing the proposed route of Interstate 88 from Binghamton to Albany, New York. I was so excited at the prospect of discovering archaeological sites, and hoping one would become the basis for my master's thesis.

After eight weeks wrapped up with no significant discoveries, panic set in - I would never finish my degree! Then, on an overcast and hot day, with a mass of mosquitoes swarming around my bandana-clad head, I descended with my crew into a glade adjacent to a pristine bog. I rammed my shovel into the ground, poured the soil into the shaker screen and heard what sounded like coins hitting the metal mesh. It was hundreds of pieces of chert debitage, the flake by-products of stone tool manufacturing. I had discovered my first prehistoric site. Our whole team was elated, and I had my thesis topic.

The author among just some of the thousands of artifacts found by Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility digs.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

Fast-forward to now: I'm the director of the Public Archaeology Facility, a research center specializing in cultural resource management. Our mission is to identify, evaluate and preserve significant sites, train students to be professional archaeologists and share our results with the public. We can work on up to 100 projects a year. Since our inception in 1972, the center has discovered more than 3,500 archaeological sites.

Back when my 10-year-old self announced to my parents that I wanted to be an archaeologist, I was met with incomprehension and a little fear - what kind of career prospect was that? But thanks to the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, federal agencies must consider the impact of construction and development projects on significant cultural resources, and take measures to avoid those impacts. Developers with federal funding or permits hire legions of cultural resource management archaeologists to help them satisfy the law's requirements.

Binghamton University's Public Archaeology Facility staff working with community members on a dig.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

An archaeological specialty

People often ask how cultural resource management differs from traditional archaeology. There's quite a bit of overlap. Academic archaeologists train with mentors, specialize in a cultural region either in the United States or abroad and participate in grant-funded research. They pick the places where they work.

Cultural resource management archaeologists do not pick the places where we dig. Instead, we conduct archaeology in spots where developments or other ground-disturbing projects are planned. We never know where our next project will be. We could be on a nearby bridge replacement project one day checking for sites, travel 50 miles the next day to excavate a 5,000-year-old camp where a housing development is proposed, finish the week with client meetings, then head out the next week to an urban excavation of a 19th-century neighborhood.

Traditional archaeology usually tests a theory or method, or tries to replicate previous scientific findings. A cultural resource management investigation needs to answer questions like: Will this construction project damage or destroy a significant part of our nation's heritage? This heritage can take the form of archaeological sites hidden below ground, above-ground historic architectural gems and landscapes that hold special religious or ceremonial significance to Native Americans and other communities.

And this isn't just a small offshoot of mainstream archaeology. For instance, in 2013, more than 102,000 federal undertakings required some form of compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. This doesn't include the thousands of state-permitted projects that fall under the jurisdiction of state historic preservation laws. That year more than 135,000 cultural resources were discovered and evaluated for their historical significance as part of federal projects alone. Each of these sites or properties represents new knowledge about how people lived, worked and viewed their world hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Cultural resource management archaeologists go where they're needed - for instance, on the shoulder of Route 434 in Binghamton where a walking trail is planned.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

Finding objects from past cultures

Even though the origins of our projects are different, cultural resource management archaeologists make exciting discoveries just like our colleagues. For instance, the sites we found during that I-88 project (which I wove into my doctoral dissertation) showed us how seasonally nomadic hunter-gatherers from thousands of years ago lived in communities, moved across the landscape and used a changing assortment of stone tools for their everyday tasks. I-88 data continue to produce new knowledge even 40 years after my first dig; I've just published a new article on some of the sites.

Cultural resource management archaeology does not guarantee that you will make discoveries all the time. Probably less than half the projects we survey will locate a site. That's not a bad thing. After all, modern developments need to happen, and it is best that they are built where there are no significant sites.

But when you do make a discovery, you can almost feel the presence of people who lived here and called this place home thousands of years ago. There is a sense of humility in being allowed to meet the ancient ones through the artifacts they left behind, and this gift needs to be treated with respect. Cultural resource management archaeologists are tasked with finding ways to preserve the sites we find by working with developers and agency officials to see if there are ways to redesign a project to go around the site, thus leaving it undisturbed.

For instance, a proposed commercial development on the Chenango River near Binghamton, New York led to our finding a rare, information-rich camp with scores of stone bowl fragments and cooking hearths. We worked with a cooperative developer and the town board to shorten the width of proposed parking spaces. They also repositioned planned "green space" to allow for preservation of parts of the site. A nice balance resulted - the development moved forward and the site is preserved for future research.

Skills of a Ph.D. and an MBA

My job today is less about digging than it is about working with people in the present to build an understanding of the people who created the sites we find.

The author and staff talking with reenactors at the Newtown Battlefield, Chemung County, New York.
Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University, CC BY-ND

My academic knowledge is essential to my professional life; I could not analyze and interpret what I find within meaningful contexts without it. But I also needed experience in business management, negotiation, diplomacy and the ability to share our discoveries with the communities in which we work.

Much of my job today involves working with Native American Nations. I was fortunate to have a Native American chief mentor me in how to build mutual respect with First Nation peoples. What started as a conflict over a natural hill with no artifacts turned into a lifelong lesson on sacred places that are invisible to an untrained person. Once I realized that the past is not just about objects but about people (then and now), a whole new picture of heritage archaeology emerged for me.

I assist clients and federal or state agencies in complying with laws requiring that the descendants of the ancient peoples who created sites be involved in decisions about the preservation of sites in jeopardy of being destroyed. There is satisfaction in knowing that you can not only make discoveries that yield new knowledge, but that you have the ability to help protect these sites and share the reasons why preservation is important.

Cultural resources are fragile nonrenewable resources. Once they are destroyed, they cannot be recreated. This is not only a loss for our nation's heritage but a more personal loss for the living descendants of these past peoples. Cultural resource management is a specialized industry that employs thousands of archaeologists who are not just diggers but interpreters and preservation experts. The discoveries we make are windows through which we view the people who came before us. It's our responsibility to respect that heritage and the people who are connected to the sites we discover.

Nina M. Versaggi, Director of the Public Archaeology Facility and Associate Professor,Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Real Story Behind the Goldwater Rule
"The Presidency should not be used as a platform for proving one's manhood . . ."

"Inwardly he is a frightened person who sees himself as weak and threatened by strong virile power around him . . ."

"Since his nomination I find myself increasingly thinking of the early 1930s . . ."

"Unconsciously he seems to want to destroy himself. He has a good start, for he has already destroyed the Republican party . . ."

What sound like remarks that could have been made about Donald Trump were actually written by psychiatrists in response to a survey during the 1964 presidential campaign. This embarrassing incident led to the now-famous Goldwater Rule, which bars psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures long-distance. Yet in this election cycle physicians are commenting on what they regard as one of the candidate's medical problems without being sanctioned by the American Medical Association.

What explains this difference? For the answer one has to turn to the historical context of the Goldwater Rule.

The off-beat Fact magazine's September-October 1964 issue was called "The Unconscious of a Conservative." The editor-publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, opened the issue with a 19-page psychological essay that cited various facts, memoirs, and observations about Senator Barry Goldwater, followed by a number of excerpts from the survey results. In response to the question whether Goldwater was fit to be president, 2,417 out of 12,356 responded. Of those, 657 said he was fit, 1,189 said he was not, and 571 said they didn't know enough to answer the question.

Goldwater sued and won. Normally a public figure is not protected against libel. However, in this case the judge found that Ginzburg had malicious intent. For example, Ginzburg edited some of the supposed quotations from articles and from the psychiatrists.

So the Goldwater Rule was not a response to the legal case. Even before publication the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association had warned Ginzburg that the responses were not valid absent a "thorough clinical examination" of Goldwater. Six years later the American Psychiatric Association made that policy official, warning its members not to repeat that mistake.

But why did the American Psychiatric Association go beyond warning its members not to be malicious (something that shouldn't be necessary) and barring any comment on individuals' mental states without examining them? Why did the American Psychological Association not follow suit? And why has the American Medical Association not ruled that long-distance medical diagnosis by its members is also subject to sanction?

One reason for the difference is that there's still a stigma attached to mental illness that does not apply to "medical" conditions. But the backstory of the Goldwater Rule goes deeper than that.

To understand why the psychiatric association stands alone in its tough position, and why the Goldwater Rule is so unique, one has to appreciate the context of the 1960s and 1970s. At that time psychoanalytically oriented psychodynamic theorizing was the dominant style in psychiatry. In this period that gave rise to the young Woody Allen's neurotic character, sophisticates were far more obsessed with Freud and Freudianism than they are now. In the mid-1960s no one gave a thought to eliminating homosexuality from the diagnostic manual, as happened in 1980. Experimental neuroscience was vastly less developed and promising 50 years ago, especially in human beings. Other than some behaviorist therapy in massive mental hospitals psychoanalysis was the major game in town.

So psychoanalytic psychiatrists had serious clout in 1964, therefore they had much to lose by being embarrassed by association with amateurish psychological assessments and poor political prognostication - not to mention a scurrilous publication like Fact.

But there was yet another reason for professional psychiatry's reaction to the Goldwater debacle. For decades some psychoanalysts had dabbled in analysis of major figures, including those who were dead. Freud himself attempted to analyze Dostoevsky and da Vinci. In Moses and Monotheism he contended that Moses was really an Egyptian prince whose Jewish status was concocted by Jews, guilt-ridden about murdering their father figure.

Psychiatrists had long had mixed feelings about these practices. At the 1931 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association my father, the psychiatrist and psychodrama therapy founder J.L. Moreno, debated Freud's American representative, A.A. Brill, who diagnosed Abraham Lincoln as a manic schizoid personality whose depressive moods stopped short of mental illness. Turning the tables on Brill, my father questioned Brill's need to engage in the symbolic patricide of the Great Emancipator. A 2003 historical note in Psychiatric News said that "Moreno tore apart Brill's paper as being based on unproven and unsubstantiated conclusions."

The Lincoln episode made national news as other psychiatrists protested Brill's paper as unfair and even unpatriotic. What my father called "necroanalysis" was long a controversial practice in psychiatry. Three years after the Goldwater incident a former American diplomat and patient of Freud's, William C. Bullitt, published a psychoanalysis of Woodrow Wilson based on notes he made of conversations about Wilson with Freud. The book was roundly criticized by psychologist Erik Erikson in the New York Review of Books and by my father on national television.

Analysis of the dead is not a legal violation, but it nonetheless raises the question of fairness as the dead cannot defend themselves. To analyze a living person without data is not only bad practice, it also runs the risk of making the analyst look foolish if the individual later behaves in a way that the analysis didn't predict. If Goldwater had become president and didn't start World War III, more than a few psychiatrists would have had egg on their face.

Analyzing a political figure, living or dead, runs the risk of politicizing a whole field. In the Goldwater case, it was no surprise that many if not most psychiatrists turned out to be liberals who were ill-disposed toward Goldwater's tough rhetoric, but mixing politics with professional expertise was and remains toxic. On pain of inconsistency, the same standard should be applied to all physicians, regardless of their specialization.

Originally published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum.

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Weekend Roundup: Anti-Global Backlash Is Realigning Politics Across the West
The great sociologist Max Weber postulated that the birth act of modern capitalism was the secession of business from the household and thus the web of moral and ethical obligations that intimate form of human organization entailed. Zygmunt Bauman has called globalization the "'second secession'" in which unleashed capitalism has "'flown away'" from the constraints of the nation-state, in effect the larger household. Now, national households are clawing back their claims, reasserting sovereignty in an anti-globalization backlash that is profoundly realigning politics.

"Across the West," Nouriel Roubini writes, "establishment parties of the right and the left are being disrupted -- if not destroyed from the inside. Within such parties, the losers from globalization are finding champions of anti-globalization that are challenging the formal mainstream orthodoxy. Thus, the traditional distinction between center-right and center-left is breaking down." In the U.S. and Britain, he notes, working class voters traditionally aligned with the left, are joining the ranks of Trump and Brexit. In continental Europe, discontent with immigration and austerity has given rise to new parties on both the far right and the far left. "A new political alignment,' Roubini concludes, "erases the old left and right paradigms of labor versus capital, workers versus business, taxes and regulation versus free enterprise. Instead, the new alignment will be organized around pro and anti-global integration forces." As Roubini points out, support for globalization these days comes mainly from the emerging economies, which have largely benefited from foreign investment and access to global markets. While inequality has grown within the West, he notes, it has diminished on a global scale.

To the extent global integration has touched Brazil, pride rises with greater prosperity. As the Olympics wound down, Adriana Caitano vents her anger in an open letter from Brazil "to people who love to come here to enjoy the beaches and stare at women in bikinis, but disrespect the country that hosts them." She imagines what the "American swimmers [involved in the faux robbery scandal] must have thought: Of course it would be very possible for four foreign, white, tall, Olympians to be assaulted in Rio de Janeiro. Who would not believe it? This underdeveloped country can't even clean a pool the right way. They would never be able to find the truth. So we'll just go back to the American dream with our medals."

One can't speak these days of bikinis in Brazil without bringing to mind the controversy over banning the burkini in France, where local police this week forced a woman on a Nice beach to show more skin in her bathing wardrobe. Willa Frej reports on a man in France who has been paying the fines for women ticketed under the burkini ban. Nick Robins-Early examines what many regard as the weak reasoning behind the ban. And, indeed, by week's end, France's highest administrative court, the Council of State, suspended the ban in an initial ruling in a case brought by a human rights group. At the same time, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for office again, pledged he would implement a nationwide ban on the burkini if elected.

During a visit to the beach in Izmir Province, Turkey, Ilgin Yorulmaz surveys opinion in that Muslim-majority country with a modern secular history. "With historical ties to France," she reports, "Turks are divided over their opinions of the burkini both in France and in their own country." Despite Canada's historic links to France, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made clear his country doesn't share France's secular fundamentalism. "We should be past tolerance," he says, and move toward embracing diversity. In a post from HuffPost Maghreb, Akram Belkaïd calls for, "open debate about this implicit requirement of total assimilation" behind the burkini ban. Writing from Germany where a debate is underway about banning the burqa, Christian Democratic Union politician Ruprecht Polenz similarly argues that. "underlying the burqa debate is the fear that we can never eliminate the differences in our society."

The repercussions of the Turkish coup continue to roil the geopolitical landscape. As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Turkey this week in an effort to temper rising anti-Americanism fueled by a belated and tepid response by U.S. authorities to the failed coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan doubled down on the demand to hand over Fethullah Gülen, who lives in the U.S. and whom he sees as the culprit behind the attempted overthrow of the government. Reviewing these developments, David Hearst asks, "Is America losing Turkey?" Doug Bandow thinks that it would be a good idea if America did lose Turkey. "The growth of Putinism in Ankara today is a terrible embarrassment, with no corresponding security benefit for America as compensation," he writes. "The U.S. should change its approach to reflect changing circumstances. Turkey's membership in NATO no longer serves America's and Europe's interests." Farah Mohamed examines the impact of the coup attempt on the long-festering conflict between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Resolution of that conflict is seen by many as a key stepping stone in Turkey's bid to join the European Union, a relationship now even more fraught as Europe is deeply wary of Erdoğan's even sharper post-coup turn toward authoritarianism. As one Cypriot told Mohamed, some islanders, "feel caught up in a fight that does not belong to them."

In an essay titled "Why China Fears a 'Color Revolution' Incited by the West," I argue that the U.S. should appreciate the resonances of China's history as a unitary state present in today's one-party system. By recognizing that system's legitimacy, the U.S. would allay the suspicion of China's leaders that it is seeking to foment regime change through the promotion and support of human rights activists. I further argue that, for the first time in the long history of China's "institutional civilization," an autonomous civil society is emerging because everyone now has the same information as those who rule them. "Whether China ends up on the wrong side of history or not depends on its ability to find a balance between rule from the top and an emergent civil society from below," I conclude. "We in the West should encourage China's effort to forge a new equilibrium out of its own experience, not seek to project our legacy onto their future."

Writing from Beijing, Peiran Wei asks, "Why are Chinese companies, which have long been playing catch-up with their U.S. counterparts, now leading the way?"

Finally, our Singularity series this week looks at how Harvard scientists have "radically rewritten" the E. coli genome, heralding a major step forward in synthetic biology.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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Stop Being Ridiculous: We Agree On Animal Alternatives
While watching the games of 2016 -- not the Olympics, the U.S. presidential election -- I am reminded of the stare-down between drug companies and animal rights activists. Of this mounting conflict, you'd think the answer is simple -- that animals can and should eventually make their exit from so many labs and testing facilities. Alternatives are in the wings, if even in their earliest days.

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But as in politics, neither side is listening, and declaring moral victory seems more important than making progress. Like convention delegates, each side is being ridiculous. Here are a few reasons why:

ABSOLUTISM Animal rights activists don't tolerate ambiguity. The ethics behind captive orcas for theme park profits is somehow equivalent to, say, the use of macaque monkeys to develop life-saving vaccines. For this lack of clarity, they earn the wrath of serious scientists and are slapped with extremist and absolutist labels.

RATIONALISM By the same token, researchers who use animals to advance their work are imbued with an intellectual bias that conveys as conceit and a dismissal of pain and suffering. For this, they are packaged by activists as genocidal monsters. This is not an overstatement.

ENTERTAINMENT What activists NGOs, particularly The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), understand so well is that entertainment is core to their cause. They know, for example, that researchers are largely incapable of rebuttal in terms that are anything less than boring. I'm a scientist, not a media whore, their targets complain. They also know that inside corporations it's the legal department that trumps communications -- hence, the tone-deaf verbiage that accentuates the appearance of guilt. At BioDrug Corp we are committed to humane animal welfare... But you can't be committed when so much of the public sees you as disingenuous. And you can't credibly claim to be humane when your otherwise healthy animals don't fare so well.

INFORMATION Consumed by regulations and allergic to negative media, those of the pro-research persuasion embrace an out-dated model to push their point of view and best practices: Social Education. But because media are drawn first to fire and second to Smokey The Bear, the defenses that pharmas and their surrogates mount are ignored, out-flanked or exploited for their wooden corporate-speak. Despite their lobbying and support of biomedical research associations, animal research and testing is out-gunned, easily ten to one by my estimates. The odds might be evened were it not for the consistent refusals of the super association PhRMA to snuff out the long fuse that is sparking toward its pharmaceutical member companies.

Indeed, national surveys confirm that activism works and activists are winning. For almost a decade, public approval of animal research and testing has dropped year-to-year, all to suggest that critical species will leave the labs, beginning with chimpanzees then others that society judges most cuddly and dear. It's a win for idealism and a disaster for commerce and healthcare.

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Looking for answers, pharmas and universities have hit the panic button. After all, taking animals out of the equation is a seismic shift that threatens vital pipelines and requisite profits. Their first instinct has been to call on law firms and PR agencies to defend their freedom to operate and mollify the rising public upset. This is not to keep bunnies in lipstick labs; this is to preserve compelling and life-saving work that contributes to the cures, therapies and vaccines of ravaging disorders and diseases. Think polio, epilepsy, HIV, hepatitis. The list is long and an awesome demonstration of applied science, not only for humans but also animals.

You might think the status quo, habit or laziness are what keeps mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, lambs, pigs, primates and other species in air conditioned vivariums. But the costs to breed or buy, house and feed happy and healthy animals -- a necessity for sound research -- is exorbitant and a natural inhibitor to their use. What binds pharmas, academia and their networks of contract research houses to animals is the sheer effectiveness of non-human testing and, in recognition of this fact, the many legal requirements to use animals in drug discovery and trials. Consider the example of oversight committees, called IACUCSs, required in virtually every modern animal testing facility. By law, researchers and testers are mandated to apply and prove among other things a Three Rs standard to animal use -- Replace, Reduce and Refine. It's a logistical and costly requirement that ensures best practices and moves us incrementally toward animal-alternative research.

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Having stormed us with stunts -- some violent, even fatal to researchers -- activists are craftily now turning to supply chains and decision trees. They have easily gained the sympathies of shippers, particularly airlines on which researchers rely for safe delivery of their animals, and soft-hearted lawmakers who have produced what researchers regard as draconian, innovation-killing regulations.

Out of this handiwork have emerged two modes of strategy response by scientists and their employers:

-- Defensive, the default mode. This is the social education model, to inform and disseminate facts: Educate the public. Get into the classrooms. Issue PSAs. It's also the evasion strategy: Get to the legislatures. Find the work-arounds. Use trucks instead of planes. Start breeding. Start outsourcing. Start offshoring. And so it goes. But none of this is secret to activists who, again, are manifestly better mobilized, relatively unregulated, more focused, and simply better entertainers and storytellers. They are already lobbying, expertly. They are at work in China. And their cameras are everywhere.

-- Offensive, the counter-intuitive option. This requires vision, some courage and competitive instinct: Invest in alternatives. Ramp up synthetics (e.g., organs on chips). Focus on less sentient species (e.g., zebra fish). Tap big data and cloud computing to simulate outcomes. Partner with or fund in vitro and virtual medicine start-ups. It all sounds good, but ask any clear-eyed animal researcher and they'll tell you soberly that real progress to virtual testing and research is a lifetime away. Animals, they insist, will always be needed in some capacity and, besides, the human body is simply too sophisticated to ever accurately mimic.

But science surprises itself with unexpected regularity, particularly when pressure is applied or incentive is offered. Pick up your smart phone or take your morning pills for proof. My rebuttal, then, to the DVMs, PhDs and VPs who say we can't move that fast is this: You won't know until you really start trying.

Out of duty, I have detailed policies and competitive strategies that defend the forts of animal research and testing. But these are prophylactic, even unnecessary, because what underlies the animal research-versus-animal rights rivalry is in fact a shared value and vision: Quality of Life. Researchers are driven by curiosity and a unique delight in explaining and taming what is life-limiting. Activists are driven by compassion and a dream for a higher standard of humanity. In my experience, no researcher would rather probe than pet an animal. And no activist would rather lose their child to a disease than spare the mice and monkeys that help cure it.

PERFECT STORM, PERFECT OPPORTUNITY

Still, animal research and testing is treated as a crisis, never yet in my experience as an opportunity. It needn't be, because we all agree that the future in biomedical research is not in animals but in actual humans. Virtual humans, to be precise.

If activists and scientists agree that animal research and testing should go the way of strip mining and whaling, then why are corporations and institutions resisting the call? The answer lies in reputation, profits and pride, perhaps not in that order. Corporations have to perform, always to the satisfaction of investors. Investments to replace so-called animal models are expensive and their returns can only be trusted through experience and success. In the mean time, activists are determined to alienate customers from the brands whose benefits are ensured by lab animals. They test bunnies! They murder monkeys! The consequences are policies that manage and mitigate (mode 1 as described above) instead of lead and innovate (mode 2).

Like liberals and conservatives, each side is lead by a point of view that is inarguable because it's based on a world view. It goes to philosophy and a life's purpose. So when one party is framed as a Frankenstein, or Pollyanna as the case may be, the natural reaction is to recoil and resist the impolite accuser. Because no one is wrong, no one can be right.

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I describe the phenomenon as a battle for the back row and total anonymity. And as a prescription, I argue for a lock-step advancement of sheepish pharmas to mount a collective defense. No one need stick out their neck if they shuffle ahead together.

But this is an incremental play, and it only slows the progress of both activists and their targeted corporations. Again, the irony is that both sides want the same thing, but what they seem to value more than results is to progress on their own terms and most especially without the goading advice of their disdained detractors. As with party politics, they want to be the winner and the other guy the loser.

Inside this perfect business storm is in fact a perfect competitive opportunity. With drugmakers uniformly obscuring their animal research and testing activities, there is an obvious but counter-intuitive option to bolt the party. The risk is only temporary because while the pharma that steps out might draw activist fire it can simultaneously pledge its support of activists, declare a moon shot to produce animal-free drugs, and challenge others to follow. The pharma that flees the flock can become a darling of PETA and HSUS, not an enemy. And even better, it can gain a significant advantage over its cowering competitors.

By degrees, and particularly with our much-loved chimps and other self-aware species, a few pharmaceuticals have made this move though in far too tentative steps to exploit and disrupt the norm. Novartis is notable, so too is GSK, but on the whole the progress toward animal alternatives is halting and inhibited by the extreme caution and considerable fear of CEOs and their risk-averse legal and communications chiefs.

What has been treated as a problem by the businesses, institutions and associations that participate in and defend animal research and testing is, in fact, a chance to do great things. If we approach it more as a potential for innovation than an exercise in risk mitigation, we can step out of the back row and advance a kind of discovery that propels our collective success and defines a higher form of humanity. It's a way to be reasonable instead of ridiculous.

Photo credits: Trailers From Hell, Shawn the Sheep

Graphics credit: Gallup

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Proxima Centauri b: Earth-sized? Earth-like? Or Habitable?
Finally after decades of hope and hard work, astronomers finally discovered a planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun: Proxima Centauri. Describing it in human terms leads to some interesting problems!

The Alpha Centauri trinary star system, at a distance of 4.3 light years as the crow flies, has beckoned would-be interstellar travelers for decades with its golden sun-like star Alpha Centauri A, its orange star companion Alpha Centauri B, and the little red dwarf: Alpha Centauri C or 'Proxima'. Proxima, discovered in 1915, orbits A and B at a distance 300 times farther that Pluto orbits our sun, taking hundreds of thousands of years to complete its journey. Yet, despite its closeness to Earth, Alpha Centauri AB seem to be a celestial fizzle so far as planets are concerned despite decades of searches.

But suddenly things have changed.

For a long time the available data seemed to show there were no Neptune-sized or larger planets orbiting Proxima. It seemed doomed to be just as barren as its two brighter and more famous stellar companions. Then in 2013, astronomer Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire uncovered a hint that Proxima was wobbling slightly as it traveled through space. Today we have the announcement by a team of ESO astronomers that this wobbling has been confirmed, and it is caused by an orbiting planet with a minimum mass about 30 percent larger than our Earth. It was also in an orbit that kept it comfortably in the red dwarf's liquid water zone. With an 11-day orbit and at a distance 20 times closer to Proxima than our Earth is to the sun, the view from its surface would be spectacular, although the planet would be gravitationally locked so that it only shows the same hemisphere to its star for eons at a time. Now comes a problem. How do we describe this world compared to Earth?

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Artist's impression of the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. The Alpha Centauri binary system can be seen in the background. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Semantics problems.

The terms Earth-sized, Earth-like and habitable might sound very similar, but in fact they are not, and they are also not astronomically precise terms.

Earth-sized. Astronomers can certainly confirm that Proxima b has a mass slightly larger than Earth from the way that it wiggles the motion of its star. That is a mathematically precise statement. If we assume it is a rocky body similar to our Earth and the inner planets of our solar system, we can deduce that it probably has a radius about 10 percent larger than our Earth, and on its surface, gravity would be about 10 percent more, so a 150-pound person would weight 165 pounds. Again, the term Earth-sized can apply either to describe the mass of the planet or its radius. No problem so far. In fact, today we know of over 600 Earth-sized planets.

Habitable: To be habitable is more restrictive than to be merely Earth-sized. The presumption is that some kind of organic life has to be able to survive on its surface. Astronomers usually calculate for a star the size of the zone surrounding it where the temperature of a bare planetary surface can support liquid water. This is often called the liquid water-zone or the habitable zone (abbreviated 'HZ'). Being in The Zone, however, does not guarantee that liquid can exist on the surface if the planet actually has no atmosphere. Our moon is in the habitable zone of our sun but nothing can live there! So, to really be habitable, the planet needs to have an atmosphere that provides enough pressure to keep water in a liquid state. But when you look around our solar system, atmospheres can be anything from pure hydrogen and helium (Jupiter) to pure carbon dioxide (Venus, Mars). Too much atmospheric carbon dioxide or water vapor would turn even Mars and Earth into uninhabitable planets in the 'habitable zone' of our sun. A habitable planet has to toe a very narrow line by being in the right place, with the right mass/size, and the right amount of atmosphere so that something like extremophile bacteria could survive on their surface, though not necessarily a human. Today, we have identified 12 planets that are close in size to our Earth, and in their habitable zones.

"2016-08-25-1472155881-2843957-wasp39atmos.png"

The atmosphere of the Jupiter-sized planet WASP-39b showing water vapor, carbon monoxide, potassium and sodium.(Credit: WASP Planets )

Earth-like: This is the most restrictive classification of them all. It means that not only is the planet Earth-sized and in its habitable zone, but its atmosphere has just enough greenhouse gases to keep the temperature in the liquid-water state and at a pressure close to what we experience at sea level. But there is more. If you were to visit this Earth-like world, would you expect to be able to walk its surface without breathing gear? Would a truly Earth-like world force you to live out your entire life inside a sealed habitat? To be Earth-like seems to mean that you could walk around without a cumbersome suit and your habitat need not be sealed. But this is only possible if the planet has oxygen in its atmosphere. Oxygen is a product of living organisms, so any Earth-like planet will already have a living biosphere and a recognizable oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Although we have discovered Earth-sized and habitable planets (at least survivable on their surface with spacesuits and sealed habitats), we have yet to discover an Earth-like planet. For now, the terms habitable and Earth-like remain interchangeable without any penalty. You will see this yourself in the many articles to follow the announcement of Proxima b.

But in not too many years we may actually discover our first Earth-like world. When that happens, we will have even more cause to celebrate, and no semantic problems at all!

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Can Biotech Companies Save The Rhinos?
To help stem the tide of rhino poaching, some biotech companies such as Pembient are seeking to develop and manufacture synthetic horns that are biologically identical to the real thing. The thinking behind this is that the availability of bio-identical fake horns at a substantially lower price than wild horns would cause demand to shift towards the synthetic substitutes, which would reduce people's incentives to poach rhinos.

I have argued previously that--from the perspective of what would be most effective in curbing poaching--the synthetic horns should not be made to be perfect fakes, i.e., bio-identical. Instead, the synthetic horns should be engineered to be (i) difficult to distinguish from wild horns but (ii) undesirable or unappealing in some respect so that buyers would place little value on them. This proposal makes use of a phenomenon in economics known as adverse selection, which occurs when buyers in a market are unable to distinguish between high- and low-quality products, and their lack of information drives down demand--and, hence, prices--enough that high-quality products (which would be wild horns in the context of rhino horns) cease to be supplied by sellers.

For conservationists and others who are concerned about the fate of the rhinos, it is critical to understand why biotech companies would prefer making bio-identical synthetic horns--rather than undesirable fakes--because of the implications this has for conservation policies. Simply put, it would be more profitable to produce and sell perfect fakes rather than synthetic horns that would be considered undesirable. All else being equal, putting out undesirable fakes that buyers cannot distinguish from the real ones, by reducing demand for horns, would lead to lower prices in the horn market compared to the case with bio-identical synthetic horns. This, of course, would generate less revenue for the producers of synthetic horns.

Proponents of making perfect fakes could argue that bio-identical synthetics would be no less effective than undesirable fakes in bringing about adverse selection in the horn market and driving out sellers of wild horns. This is true if buyers view bio-identical synthetic horns to be significantly inferior to wild horns. However, as reported in The Guardian last year, Pembient's market research in Vietnam--one of the biggest markets for rhino horn trading--found that nearly half of the survey respondents who consume rhino horn for medicinal purposes would consider bio-identical synthetic horns to be suitable substitutes for wild horns. Moreover, a co-founder of Pembient suggested in the same article that perfect fakes could actually be better than wild horns due to their lack of contaminants. Therefore, bio-identical synthetic horns may not be undesirable or unappealing enough to drive out wild horn suppliers through adverse selection. In fact, if buyers consider perfect fakes to be more desirable than wild horns, the availability of synthetic horns could actually encourage more rhino poaching by driving up horn prices.

Advocates of making perfect fakes could also point out that--even if buyers do not consider bio-identical synthetics to be substantially inferior to wild horns--as long as there are enough bio-identical synthetic horns in the market, horn prices would be driven down to the point where wild horn sellers would be forced from the market. A rigorous theoretical analysis of this issue shows that it is not necessarily in the financial interest of synthetic horn producers to drive out all wild horn sellers; instead, they may prefer to prop up horn prices by keeping the production of synthetic horns at a relatively low level.

Rhino poaching numbers are climbing, and rising income levels in China and Southeast Asia--where demand for rhino horns is strongest--will almost certainly make matters worse in the near future if no significant changes occur. Economic principles tell us the availability of synthetic horns can decrease the supply of wild horns and reduce the amount of poaching. Since the development of undesirable fake horns or flooding the market with perfect fakes is incongruent with the profit motive, the real issue is just how big the effect of synthetic horns on poaching would be if the companies developing them are interested in profiting off of their products.

What policies can governments or conservation groups implement to ensure that the impact on poaching numbers is maximized when the biotech industry is ready to roll out bio-identical substitutes? To drive out wild horn suppliers using synthetic horns, the key would be to depress horn prices sufficiently. Here are a few suggestions for doing that. One is to subsidize the companies that produce synthetic horns--this would incentivize them to increase production and thereby drive down prices. Another option is to promote competition on the production side of synthetic horns. Financial incentives or policies that encourage more firms to enter the synthetic horn market would also put downward pressure on prices by raising the market supply. A third possibility is to make it easier or less costly for a non-profit organization to invest in or acquire the technology for producing synthetic horns since the non-profit entity could try to shut down the rhino horn market through adverse selection by making undesirable fakes.

The science and technology to produce high quality synthetic horns are within our grasp. Let us not, however, assume that the biotech companies with these capabilities, in pursuit of their own interests, would necessarily solve the rhino poaching problem. Let us keep in mind that steps may need to be taken to structure the market for rhino horns so as to fully realize the potential of synthetic horns to save the rhinos.

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The Weirdest Thing: One Week From Landing
Today was our last Sunday on sMars. In less than a week, the hatch will open and the six of us will rejoin the world. In some (obvious) ways, we never left. In many ways, we'll be aliens among our own kind.

"2016-08-22-1471852056-7599134-photo1.jpg"

When your whole world looks like this, your values change a bit.

It's easier than you might think to step out of the world - so easy, in fact, that people do it on accident. We spend a weekend in the woods; volunteer for a summer in rural Mexico; go for a long walk across Spain, moving from east to west, from the mountains skirting France to the edge of the Atlantic ocean. After the week, month, season or year away, we re-emerge into daily life in the developed world and suffer from a sort of shock. It happens all the time. It's happened to me dozens of times. In my experience, the magnitude and duration of the shock is generally proportional to the magnitude and duration of how far I stepped away and for how long; and regardless of duration, no sensory system is spared.

"2016-08-22-1471852174-7958942-photo2.jpg"

The littlest things get noticed up here.

Returning from my first trip to the mountains as a kid (age 11), I was struck by how loud Los Angeles was. It took several weeks not to feel like the city was actively trying to melt my brain. On coming back from a summer in Mexico (age 15), I remember looking around and thinking, "Where in the name of (your chosen deity) is everyone GOING in such a blinding hurry?" The pace of urban life struck me as bizarre and amusing - almost circus-like.

Speaking of blinding, having returned from West Africa (age 16), I couldn't believe how bright everything was. Nights in the Ivory Coast are thick and dark: like living inside somebody's lung. The brightest thing to pass you on the blackness is the moonlight reflecting off the whites of people's eyes - and, if they are smiling, their teeth. By contrast, the buildings in America are so aglow that, by contrast, the people walking the streets wear shadows.

Smells are muffled, too. When I returned from my last major trip abroad, the first thing I noticed is that, unlike the Himalayas, the US didn't have a single, distinct smell that accosts you as you're moving along. On the Annapurna, it was one sharp scent after another: hay and wet clay; a steaming dish of vegetables and lentils called dal bat; donkeys trailing bushy dust-cloud-tails behind them as they made their weary way back down the trail. Even the water in Nepal had a smell: it smelled like brightness, if that makes any sense - like the powerful reflection of high-altitude sunlight as it sloughed sleeping snow and ice from the gnarled faces of rugged gray slopes. By comparison, US-smells seemed muddled. Even in hospitals, the acrid scent of disease was always tinged with a motley of industrial cleaning products, personal perfumes, and several kinds of cuisine snuck onto the floors by patients' families.

Even with all that, nothing held a candle to the shock that awaited me and my crewmates after a "quick" two-week trip to an asteroid in April of 2015. While in our capsule, we saw only a field of fixed stars and our asteroid out the electronic portals. Starlight is ever so gentle at a distance. The up-close-and-personal variety proffered by our own dear Sun nearly fried me and my flight engineer when we stepped outside for the first time at the end of that short mission. It's shockingly easy to forget that we all live under the unblinking gaze of a giant nuclear fireball. That is, until you haven't seen it for a while.

So, now it's been a year. In that year, what haven't we seen?

"2016-08-22-1471852230-3366041-photo3.jpg"

You don't see much growing around here, but when you do, it's really exciting.

People come to mind - more than a handful at a time is unheard of in these parts, as are cars, traffic lights, streets, skyscrapers, shops of any kind, and direct contact with nonhuman life forms larger than a mouse. Given all that and my past experiences slipping into and out of various cultures, what do I expect the weirdest thing to be when the hatch opens in two weeks? TV? Telephones? Politics? Smalltalk? Currency - a monetary economy in general?

All of these things will no doubt be strange. Some of them already are when you think about it. In the main, the thing I expect to take the longest amount of time to adjust to won't be people in their nearly limitless perfusion of appearance and behavior. I am from Earth, after all. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations has been the rule in my life, not the exception. I don't believe it will be sights, smells, or sounds, either - not this time. No singular aspect of daily life or sensory experience can compare to the subtle yet undeniable force of the underlying current that drives a society's entire existence; that being: what we value.

"2016-08-22-1471852276-3291740-photo4.jpg"

When this is how you get your water, long showers are not a thing.

What we value on "Mars" stands in stark contrast to what is valued in much of the world today. Here, appearances mean very little. Fashion is nonexistent. Property is largely communal and, even when it is private, it's understood that any object in the vicinity may be pressed into service for the good of the mission. Time functions in much the same way. Any given day consists of hours, minutes, and seconds of activities that you would like to pursue such as eating, sleeping, exercising, running your experiments, writing emails home, working on your thrilling personal memoirs, etc. At best, all these take a backseat to keeping the lights on, the water flowing, storms from blowing in the roof, the communication channels glowing, and the food growing, which is why none of us have memoirs written - yet. They're buried in the trunk beneath the tools we're using to fix the water pump and the composting toilets.

In other words, Martians value the survival of both individuals and our mission above all else. As a result, waste - be it of food, water, power or time - is frowned upon. Effectiveness, efficiency, and willingness to pitch in are the gold standard. The ability to entertain is just as awesome as it is back on Earth, but it comes in second place to industriousness and mechanical aptitude. It's not that we don't, for example, love music. We do, very much. We enjoy movies as much as ever, if not more. Laughter, as it is wherever humans roam, is virtually priceless. It's just that on "Mars" - a land sans cocktail parties, banquets, and award ceremonies - carpenters, plumbers, and paramedics thoroughly outrank singers, actors, and comedians, and always will.

Those values drive our behavior. The first thing that I do when I wake up on "Mars" is check the weather and the power levels. Those set the tone for the day - not just my day but the crew's day; determine our ability to carry out the tasks that have been assigned to us by mission control. Then I grab some water, make sure mission control hasn't sent us an urgent message, and start exercising. In stark contrast, the first thing scheduled to happen when that hatch opens on 8/28 is a 45-minute press conference. That's good. Communicating the goals of our mission and how we accomplished them is very important. Helping people understand why we do what we do is an essential part of our job - and, I would argue, of all science. However, it is undeniably a different kind of important from the kind of important that has consumed our waking - and sometimes our sleeping - hours for the last 359 days.

Across a distance the width of a threshold, the scales upon which we measure importance will vary so profoundly that it's almost as if gravitational forces between the two worlds differ. In countless domains, that which carries weight on Mars barely dips the needle on your world. That which consumes vast amounts of time and energy on Earth may not even register on our radar. In the space between the two, there is no right nor wrong, only sensibilities. In the brief span of time it will take to cross from one world to the next, sensibilities will change drastically. Our values will not.

"2016-08-22-1471852330-4094760-photo5.jpg"

Beauty itself, on any planet, but especially in a place made mostly of rock.

I can imagine no sight, no sound, no smell, taste, or touch to equal the magnitude and duration of shock likely to be induced by the disparity in values between daily life in space and daily life in the spacefaring nations of the world. In those first moments back on Earth, the sight of my family, the piercing sweetness of a real pineapple, and the sensation of wind on my face will be golden beyond price; will defy of the very concept of value in the world standing before me; and also, in a completely different way, in the world standing just behind me.

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DSM-5 Made A Mistake Eliminating Substance Abuse
DSM-5 made a mistake when it joined together into one big, heterogeneous category ('Substance Use Disorder') what in DSM IV had been two quite different diagnoses ('Substance Abuse' and 'Substance Dependence').

In DSM IV, Substance Abuse described someone who gets into recurrent, but intermittent, trouble as a consequence of recreational binges.

In sharp contrast, DSM IV Substance Dependence described a continuous and compulsive pattern of use, often with accompanying tolerance and withdrawal.

The two DSM IV diagnoses have radically different implications for treatment planning and for prognosis. Artificially lumping them together in DSM-5 forces inaccurate diagnosis, loses critical clinical information, and stigmatizes as addicts, people whose substance problem is often temporary and influenced by contextual and developmental factors.

A college kid who binges occasionally on weekends can get into serious trouble and often requires an immediate intervention, but is very different from someone whose life revolves around drugs and who can't get through a day without them. The majority of substance abusers are in a passing phase, never become addicted in any meaningful sense of that word, and require a very different treatment approach than those who really are addicted. And lumping abusers with the addicted creates unfortunate stereotypes that jeopardize future marital and job prospects, legal status, and insurance eligibility.

The DSM-5 workgroup based its rationale for dropping Substance Abuse on studies suggesting that there is no bright line boundary separating Abuse from Dependence. The results of these studies are certainly not definitive and their interpretation was flawed by a basic DSM-5 misunderstanding of the nature of psychiatric diagnosis. All DSM disorders overlap with other DSM disorders and also frequently with normality. Fuzzy boundaries among near neighbors are ubiquitous and inherent to the entire diagnostic system in psychiatry and are not sufficient excuse to collapse distinctions that are clinically valuable. There was no problem that needed fixing or matter of principle at stake. The change was radical, creates obvious harms, and provides no apparent benefit.

What to do? My suggestion to clinicians is simply to ignore the DSM-5 change. It is perfectly appropriate and clinically preferable to continue making the valuable distinction between Substance Dependence and Substance Abuse. In what follows, I will explain why and indicate how appropriate and easy it is to retain Substance Abuse within the rules of the ICD-10- CM coding system.

Substance Abuse vs Substance Dependence vs Normal Use

There are cases that straddle the boundary between Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence, but much more often they are easily distinguished by marked difference in behavior, treatment needs, and prognosis.

In contrast to Substance Dependence, Substance Abuse is defined by its absence of tolerance, withdrawal or compulsive use. The typical substance abuser gets into recurrent but intermittent (often weekend) trouble as a consequence of episodic recreational binges. He goes through periods when he can take or leave the substance, use it in a controlled way, or abstain altogether. Then comes a binge with bad outcome, then another peaceful period, then another binge, and so on. The label Substance Abuse implies an intervention directed to the harmful consequences of the binges, how to avoid them, and the substitution of other less dangerous recreational activities.

The label Substance Dependence alerts the clinician to the importance, but great difficulty, of achieving abstinence and the significant risk it will trigger severe physiological or psychological withdrawal unless done under close medical supervision. Treatment and rehabilitation services will need to be much more intense, continuous, and long-term.

There is also a considerable difference in prognosis between Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence -while some go on from an early history of substance abuse to later dependence, the majority do not and are much more likely to have an early and permanent remission.

The differential diagnosis of Substance Abuse must also distinguish it from normal, recreational substance use. Substance Abuse is a mental disorder- a label that should not be applied casually to everyone who experiences an occasional episode of substance excess. A few binges does not a mental disorder make or else almost all of us would qualify as mentally disordered at some point in our lives. Binging is always ill advised, risky, and unfortunate, but does not indicate mental disorder unless and until it becomes part of a repetitive pattern that causes significant distress, impairment and/or legal consequences. The person doesn't learn from the repeated painful experience that a couple of drinks (or snorts or pills or joints) can lead to a binge and that a binge can, and often does, have serious (and sometimes even catastrophic) consequences.

In DSM IV, the definition of Substance Abuse is "a maladaptive pattern of substance use manifested by significant adverse consequences" in at least one of four different domains of trouble: 1) driving under the influence; 2) other legal problems (e.g., disorderly conduct, assault, etc.); 3) reduced performance at work or school, and; 4) problems with interpersonal relations and family life.

Prognosis and Risks

For some, Substance Abuse is a stably unstable life pattern- but most people either outgrow it or go on to Substance Dependence. The threshold between the two is crossed when the periodic bingeing turns into continuous use and the motivation switches from pleasurable recreation to needing the substance on a regular basis just to get by.

The risks of Substance Abuse must not be missed or minimized. It can be one of the most dangerous disorders in all of psychiatry- sometimes leading to DUI's and car accidents; raping or being raped; shootings; fights; other crimes; getting fired for using on the job; marital discord; neglect of parental responsibility; and/or spending excessively. Substance Abuse is perhaps the strongest indication in psychiatry for early identification and active intervention- both to prevent the risk of later substance dependence and to avoid the catastrophic harms that can arise from any given binge.

How To Code Substance Abuse

It turns out that including Substance Abuse is much truer to the official coding system than dropping it. All of the official diagnostic codes, used in the US and around the world, are provided by the International Classification of Disease (ICD). DSM codes are merely a subset derived from ICD codes. The editors of DSMs simply pick the ICD codes they feel most resemble the categories they have chosen to include in DSM. There is nothing sacred or official about the DSM-5 choices -- I know because I made the choices for DSM-IV. The ICD coding system is official; the DSM codes are just one groups' fallible adaptation of them.
It is of great significance that the official coding in ICD-10-CM does not follow the DSM-5 decision to eliminate Substance Abuse. Instead, ICD-10-CM retains the DSM-IV terminology and continues to provide separate Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence codes for each of the major classes of substances. Thus, the code for Alcohol Abuse is F10.10; Opioid Abuse is F11.10; Cannabis Abuse is F12.10, etc. with the 3rd character in each case indicative of the specific class of substance.

Also telling is the position taken by the ICD-11 workgroup currently revising the labels and codes that will be used in the next version of the international coding system. They have flatly rejected the DSM-5 change and will continue to separate Substance Dependence and Harmful Substance Use- having
concluded that these two separate categories are needed for both public health and clinical reasons. The DSM-5 mistake thus places it out of line with ICD-10, ICD-11, previous DSM's, and well established clinical practice.

Clinicians remain truer both to clinical reality and to ICD coding when they ignore the new DSM-5 lumping of substance use disorders and instead continue to distinguish Substance Abuse from Substance Dependence. DSM's are explicitly meant to be used only as guides, not worshiped as bibles. Clinicians are free to ignore DSM whenever it makes mistakes that go against clinical common sense and the International coding system.

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Understanding Trump's Use of Language

Note: This is a follow-up to my previous piece, "Understanding Trump." Please read that piece first.)

The Responsible Reporter's Problem

Responsible reporters in the media normally transcribe political speeches so that they can accurately report them. But Donald Trump's discourse style has stumped a number of reporters. Dan Libit, CNBC's excellent analyst is one of them. Libit writes:

His unscripted speaking style, with its spasmodic, self-interrupting sentence structure, has increasingly come to overwhelm the human brains and tape recorders attempting to quote him.

Trump is, simply put, a transcriptionist's worst nightmare: severely unintelligible, and yet, incredibly important to understand.

Given how dramatically recent polls have turned on his controversial public utterances, it is not hyperbolic to say that the very fate of the nation, indeed human civilization, appears destined to come down to one man's application of the English language -- and the public's comprehension of it. It has turned the rote job of transcribing into a high-stakes calling.

...

Trump's crimes against clarity are multifarious: He often speaks in long, run-on sentences, with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He frequently quotes people saying things that aren't actual quotes. And he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations, in the same sentence.

Some in the media (Washington Post, Salon, Slate, Think Progress, etc.) have called Trump's speeches "word salad." Some commentators have even attributed his language use to "early Alzheimer's," citing "erratic behavior" and "little regards for social conventions." I don't believe it.

I have been repeatedly asked in media interviews about such use of language by Trump. So far as I can tell, he is simply using effective discourse mechanisms to communicate what his wants to communicate to his audience. I have found that he is very careful and very strategic in his use of language. The only way I know to show this is to function as a linguist and cognitive scientist and go through details.

Let's start with sentence fragments. It is common and natural in New York discourse for friends to finish one another's sentences. And throughout the country, if you don't actually say the rest of a friend's sentence out loud, there is nevertheless a point at which you can finish it in your head. When this happens in cooperative discourse, it can show empathy and intimacy with a friend, that you know the context of the narrative, and that you understand and accept your friend's framing of the situation so well that you can even finish what they have started to say. Of course, you can be bored with, or antagonistic to, someone and be able to finish their sentences with anything but a feeling of empathy and intimacy. But Trump prefers to talk to a friendly crowd.

Trump often starts a sentence and leaves off where his followers can finish in their minds what he has started to say. That is, they commonly feel empathy and intimacy, an acceptance of what is being said, and good feeling toward the speaker. This is an unconscious, automatic reaction, especially when words are flying by quickly. It is a means for Trump to connect with his audience.

The Second Amendment Incident

Here is the classic case, the Second Amendment Incident. The thing to be aware of is that his words are carefully chosen. They go by quickly when people hear them. But they are processed unconsciously first by neural circuitry -- and neurons operate on a thousandth-of-a-second time scale. Your neural circuitry has plenty of time to engage in complex forms of understanding, based on what you already know.

Trump begins by saying, "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment." He first just says "abolish," and then hedges by adding "essentially abolish." But having said "abolish" twice, he has gotten across the message that she wants to, and is able to, change the Constitution in that way.

Now, at the time the Second Amendment was written, the "arms" in "bear arms" were long rifles that fired one bullet at a time. The "well-regulated militia" was a local group, like a contemporary National Guard unit, regulated by a local government with military command structure. They were protecting American freedoms against the British.

The Second Amendment has been reinterpreted by contemporary ultra-conservatives as the right of individual citizens to bear contemporary arms (e.g., AK-47's), either to protect their families against invaders or to change a government by armed rebellion if that government threatens what they see as their freedoms. The term "Second Amendment" activates the contemporary usage by ultra-conservatives. It is a dog-whistle term, understood in that way by many conservatives.

Now, no president or Supreme Court could literally abolish any constitutional amendment alone. But a Supreme Court could judge that that certain laws concerning gun ownership could be unconstitutional. That is what Trump meant by "essentially abolish."

Thus, the election of Hillary Clinton threatens the contemporary advocates of the 'Second Amendment.'

Trump goes on:

"By the way, and if she gets to pick [loud boos] -- if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

Here are the details.

"By the way," marks a parallel utterance, one that does not linearly follow from what was just said, but that has information relevant to what was just said.

"And" here marks information that follows from what was just said.

"If she gets to pick ..." When said the first time, it was followed immediately by loud boos. The audience could finish the if-clause for themselves, since the word "pick" in context could only be about Hillary picking liberal judges. Trump goes on making this explicit, "if she gets to pick her judges..."

"Gets to" is important. The metaphor here with "to" is that Achieving a Purpose Is Reaching a Destination" with the object of "to" marking the pick. The "get" in "get to" is from a related metaphor, namely, that Achieving a Purpose Is Getting a Desired Object. In both Purpose metaphors, the Achievement of the Purpose can be stopped by an opponent. The "if," indicates that the achievement of the purpose is still uncertain, which raises the question of whether it can be stopped.

"Her judges" indicates that the judges are not your judges, from which it follows that they will not rule the way you want them to, namely, for keeping your guns. The if-clause thus has a consequence: unless Hillary is prevented from becoming president, "her judges" will change the laws to take away your guns and your Constitutional right to bear arms. This would be a governmental infringement on your freedom, which would justify the armed intervention of ultra-conservatives, what Sharon Angle in Nevada has called the "Second Amendment solution." In short, a lot is entailed -- in little time on a human timescale, but with lots of time on a neural timescale.

Having set this up, Trump follows the if-clause with "Nothing you can do, folks." This is a shortened version in everyday colloquial English of "There will be nothing you can do, folks." That is, if you let Hillary take office, you will be so weak that you will be unable to stop her. The "folks," suggests that he and the audience members are socially part of the same social group -- as opposed to a distant billionaire with his own agenda.

Immediately after "nothing you can do," Trump goes on: "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.

"Although" is a word used to contrast one possible course of events with an opposite possibility. Trump has just presented a possible course of events that is threatening to ultra-conservative Second Amendment advocates. "Although the Second Amendment people" calls up the alternative for those who would act violently to protect their Second Amendment right.

"Maybe" brings up a suggestion. "Maybe there is" suggests that there is something the "Second Amendment People" can do to prevent Hillary from taking office and appointing liberal judges who would take away what they see as their Constitutional rights.

"I don't know" is intended to remove Trump from any blame. But it acts unconsciously in the opposite way. It is like the title of the book I wrote, "Don't Think of an Elephant." The way the brain works is that negating a frame activates the frame. The relevant frame for "Second Amendment people" is use of arms to protect their rights against a government threatening to take away their rights. This is about the right to shoot, not about the right to vote. Second Amendment conservative discourse is about shooting, not about voting.

The point here is that Trump's use of language is anything but "word salad." His words and his use of grammar are carefully chosen, and put together artfully, automatically, and quickly.

Trump never overtly used the word "assassinate." He says he was just suggesting that advocates of the Second Amendment vote, and was being sarcastic. A sarcastic invocation to vote would sound very different. A sarcastic invocation to vote might be, "The American way to change things is to vote. But maybe you care so much about shooting, you won't be able to organize to vote."

He didn't say anything like that. And he chose his words very, very carefully.

Believe Me! Some People Say...

People in the media have asked me about Trump's use of "Believe me!" and "Many people say" followed by a statement that is not true, but that he wants he audience to believe. Why does he use such expressions and how do they work in discourse? To understand this, one needs to look at the concept of lying. Most people will say that a lie is a false statement. But a study by linguists Linda Coleman and Paul Kay pointed out more than 30 years ago that the situation is more complex.

If a statement happens to be false, but you sincerely believe that it is true, you are not lying in stating it. Lying involves a hierarchy of conditions defining worse and worse lies. Here is the hierarchy:

1. You don't believe it.

2. You are trying to deceive.

3. You are trying to gain advantage for yourself.

4.You are trying to harm.

As you add conditions in the hierarchy, the lies get worse and worse.

Though this is the usual hierarchy for lies, there are variations: A white lie is one that is harmless. A social lie is one where deceit is general helpful, as in, "Aunt Susie, that was such a delicious Jello mold that you made." Other variations include exaggeration, flattery, kidding, joking, etc.

Lying is a form of uncooperative discourse. But most discourse is cooperative, and there are rules governing it that the philosopher Paul Grice called "maxims" in his Harvard Lectures in 1967. Grice observed that uncooperative discourse is created when the maxims are violated. Grice's maxims were extended in the 1970's by Eve Sweetser in a paper on lying.

Sweetser postulated a Maxim of Helpfulness:

In Cooperative Discourse, people intend to help one another.

She then observed that there were two models used in helpful communication.

1. Ordinary Communication:
If people say something, they are intending to help if and only if they believe it. People intend to deceive, if and only if they don't intend to help.

2.Justified Belief:
People have adequate reasons for their beliefs. What people have adequate reason to believe is true.

Though this model does not hold for all situations (e.g., kidding), they are models that are used by virtually everyone unconsciously all day every day. If I tell my wife that I saw my cousin this morning, there is no reason to deceive, so I believe it (Ordinary Communication). And since I know my cousin well, if I believe I saw him, then I did see him (Justified Belief). Such principles are part of our unconsciously functioning neural systems. They work automatically, unless they become conscious and we can attend to them and control them.

Trump uses these communication models that are in your brain. When he says "Believe me!" he is using the principle of Justified Belief, suggesting that he has the requisite experience for his belief to be true. When those in Trump's audience hear "Believe me!", they will mostly understand it automatically and, unconsciously and via Justified Belief, will take it to be true.

When Trump says, "Many people say that ..." both principles are unconsciously activated. If many people say it, they are unlikely to all or mostly be deceiving, which means they believe it, and by Justified Belief, it is taken to be true.

You have to be on your toes, listening carefully and ready to disbelieve Trump, to avoid the use of these ordinary cognitive mechanisms in your brain that Trump uses for his purposes.

Is He "On Topic?"

Political reporters are used to hearing speeches with significant sections on a single policy issue. Trump often goes from policy to policy to policy in a single sentence. Is he going off topic?

So far as I can discern, he always on topic, but you have to understand what his topic is. As I observed in my Understanding Trump paper, Trump is deeply, personally committed to his version of Strict Father Morality. He wants it to dominate the country and the world, and he wants to be the ultimate authority in this authoritarian model of the family that is applied in conservative politics in virtually every issue area.

Every particular issue, from building the wall, to using our nukes, to getting rid of inheritance taxes (on those making $10.9 million or more), to eliminating the minimum wage -- every issue is an instance of his version of Strict Father Morality over all areas of life, with him as ultimately in charge.

As he shifts from particular issue to particular issue, each of them activates his version of Strict Father Morality and strengthens it in the brains of his audience. So far as I can tell, he is always on topic -- where this is the topic.

Always Selling

For five decades, Trump has been using all these techniques of selling and trying to make deals to his advantage. It seems to have become second nature for him to use these devices. And he uses them carefully and well. He is a talented charlatan. Keeping you off balance is part of his game. As is appealing to ordinary thought mechanisms in the people he is addressing.

It is vital that the media, and ordinary voters, learn to recognize his techniques. When the media fails to grasp what he is doing, it gives him an advantage. Every time someone in the media claims his discourse is "word salad, " it helps Trump by hiding what he is really doing.

"Regret" or Excuse

One day after the above was written, Trump made a well-publicized statement of "regret."

"Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don't choose the right words or you say the wrong thing.

I have done that.

And believe it or not, I regret it.

And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.

Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues. ..."

He did not give any specifics.

What we have just seen is that he chooses his words VERY carefully. And he has done that here.

He starts out with "sometimes," which suggests that it is a rare occurrence on no particular occasions -- a relatively rare accident. He continues with a general, inescapable fact about being a presidential candidate, namely, that he is always "in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues." The words "heat" and "multitude" suggest that normal attention to details like word choice cannot operate in presidential campaign. In short, it is nothing that he could possibly be responsible for, and is a rare occurrence anyway.

Then he uses the word "you." This shifts perspective from him to "you," a member of the audience. You too, if you were running for president, would naturally be in such uncontrollable situations all the time, when "you don't choose the right words or you say the wrong thing." It's just a matter of choosing "the right words." This means that he had the right ideas, but under natural, and inevitable attentional stress, an unavoidable mistake happens and could happen to you: "you" have the right ideas, but mess up on the "right words."

He then admits to "sometimes" making an unavoidable, natural mistake, not in choosing the right ideas, but in word choice and, putting yourself in his shoes, "you say the wrong thing" -- that is, you are thinking the right thing, but you just say it wrong -- "sometimes."

His admission is straightforward -- "I have done that" -- as if he had just admitted to something immoral, but which he has carefully described as anything but immoral.

"And believe it or not, I regret it." What he is communicating with "believe it or not," is that you, in the audience, may not believe that I am a sensitive soul, but I really am, as shown by my statement of regret. He then emphasizes his statement of personal sensitivity: "And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain." Note the "may have caused." No admission that he definitely DID "cause personal pain." And no specifics given. After all, they don't have to be given, because it is natural, unavoidable, accidental, and so rare as to not matter. He states this: "Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues." In short, it's a trivial matter to be ignored -- because it is a natural, unavoidable, accidental mistake, only in the words not the thoughts, and is so rare as to be unimportant. All that in five well-crafted sentences!

Note how carefully he has chosen his words. And what is the intended effect? He should be excused because inaccurate word choice is so natural that it will inevitably occur again, and he should not be criticized when the stress of the campaign leads inevitably to mistakes in trivial word choice.

But there is a larger effect. Words have meanings. The words he carefully uses, often over and over, get across his values and ideas, which are all too often lies or promotions of racist, sexist, and other un-American invocations. When these backfire mightily, as with the Khans, there can be no hiding behind a nonspecific "regret" that they were just rare, accidental word choice mistakes too trivial for the public to be "consumed with."

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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The Zika Virus And Politicized Science
Science today is regularly distorted to serve other ends. The religious right, for instance, claims that "creationism" should be taught in public schools as a scientific alternative to the theory of evolution. The environmentalist left, for instance, claims that science reveals genetically modified foods to be harmful to one's health. Both groups subordinate the facts of science to other considerations, whether Biblical or ideological.

The same dishonesty is shaping the response to the Zika virus.

The Zika threat is causing great concern at the Rio Olympics, with some athletes having chosen to avoid the Games altogether rather than risk infection. Florida recently reported the first locally contracted cases of Zika in the United States. And the Centers for Disease Control is advising pregnant women not to travel to certain areas of Miami--the first time the agency has ever issued such a warning for the continental U.S.

But among the measures being taken around the world to combat this danger, one is notably absent: the use of DDT.

Zika is carried by mosquitoes, and DDT has been highly effective in eliminating mosquito-borne diseases. India, for example, had 75 million malaria cases in 1953, but only 50,000 by 1961, after DDT had been introduced. In Sri Lanka close to 3 million cases of malaria occurred in 1948; 15 years later, owing to DDT, the number dropped to 17. (Source.) The National Academy of Sciences stated in 1970: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.... It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria."

But strong opposition to DDT arose, spurred by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Environmentalists got DDT banned in the U.S. and, eventually, in dozens of other countries. Western nations, which fund anti-malaria campaigns throughout the world, largely refused to underwrite any efforts that employed DDT. As a result, DDT use shrank--and malaria surged.

In India the number of cases increased to 30 million in 1977. In Sri Lanka the number went to 2.5 million in 1969. (Source.) More recently, other forms of malaria control--such as installing bed-netting and reducing the presence of standing water--have lowered the incidence of the disease worldwide. But they are generally less effective than DDT. In South Africa, for example, after DDT spraying was halted in 1996, malaria infections rose from under 5,000 in 1995 to over 60,000 in 2000. At which point DDT was reintroduced--and six months later the number dropped by half. (Source.)

This hostility to DDT was not based on science. For instance, DDT was said to be carcinogenic, because of studies in which mice developed liver tumors--but only after receiving doses of DDT 100,000 times higher than what a person would typically absorb (source.) Further, the opponents of DDT ignored many facts contradicting their views--such as the fact that during the period of highest DDT use (1944-1972), deaths from liver cancer fell by 30 percent (source)--or that workers who regularly handled DDT were found to have no higher rates of cancer than the general population (source)--or that people who voluntarily ingested DDT daily for up to two years suffered no ill effects (source)--or that the amount of DDT (per kilogram of body weight) required to kill mice is greater than that of aspirin (source).

What, then, was the motive behind the anti-DDT crusade? It was based on the premise that the man-made is inherently suspect--that the natural is good and the non-natural is bad, that human "intervention" in nature is deleterious and that we have to protect nature from man, not for man. The millions of lives saved by our "non-organic" use of DDT--and the millions lost when it was not used--were disregarded. Instead, the thinning of the eggshells of the bald eagle was presented as an intolerable effect of DDT.

As explained by David Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service, environmentalists,

... value wilderness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or a free-flowing river or ecosystem to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value--to me--than another human body or a billion of them.

True, there is evidence that some mosquitoes are developing resistance to DDT. But even where DDT's toxicity has been diminished, its repellent properties still work. When house walls are sprayed with DDT, even resistant mosquitoes are repulsed and don't enter. More important, though, one's attitude should be: "If DDT's effectiveness is lessening, let's find some way to make it work better." Instead, the operating premise seems to be: "Man-made chemicals interfere with nature, so let's find some way to prohibit them."

Man survives and prospers, not by living "in harmony" with nature, but by reshaping it--by creating houses and roads and factories out of the wilderness, by transforming nature into a tool that serves human purposes. The problem with environmentalists is not that they have an ideology, but that it is an ideology with an inverted standard of value. It is an ideology that regards the very means of human flourishing as destructive. In assessing DDT, therefore, if your overriding concern is to restructure nature in order to promote man's well-being, then you will focus on whether DDT does in fact save human lives. If, however, your overriding concern is to preserve nature against human encroachment, then you will focus on the "evil" of injecting chemicals into nature's domain. And you will be drawn to any arbitrary claim about adverse consequences of those chemicals.

My primary aim here is not to argue for the use of DDT, but to underscore the need for objectivity is dealing with such issues. We should not uncritically accept the assertions of those who are hostile to technology and industrialization. We should not accept any allegations of some product's harmfulness--say, that DDT causes Alzheimer's, or that vaccines cause autism or that fracking causes earthquakes--without being certain they rest on genuine, unpoliticized science.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Weekend Roundup: What the Burkini Ban Reveals
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Nice and elsewhere in the country, several towns along the sunny beaches in the south of France where a scantily clad Brigitte Bardot once frolicked have banned the burkini. This ban on covering up reveals not only a cleavage between conservative Islamic norms and the liberal West, but between the concepts of secularism within the West itself as well.

Notably, sympathy with the ban has united the otherwise querulous left and right in France. The Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls says he sees behind fashion concepts like the burkini, "the idea that by their nature women are immodest, impure, that they should therefore be completely covered. It is not compatible with the values of France and the republic." The minister for families, children and women's rights calls the burkini, "profoundly archaic" and meant to, "hide to hide women's bodies in order to control them." And the right-wing National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, writes, "France does not lock up a woman's body, France does not hide half of its population under the fallacious and hateful pretext that the other half feels it will be tempted."

In this, they all agree with what the Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle has been saying for decades: "Islamist politics seeks to curb the free public space by limiting women's visibility through veiling, which is essentially an effort to control women's sexuality by regulating the social encounter between the sexes. ... Hence, in a Muslim context, the existence of a democratic public space depends on the social encounter between the sexes and on the eroticization of the public sphere."

In a contribution from HuffPost Maghreb, Ikram Ben Aissa takes the opposite view. "Citizens should be free to wear what they choose!" she exclaims. "When will Muslims in Europe be respected and treated as equal citizens? When will we stop marginalizing millions of European Muslim citizens, especially women?" In a contribution from HuffPost Germany, Austro-Egyptian journalist Menerva Hammad endorses that view. "It's 2016," she writes. "Can't we allow women the freedom to choose what to wear? Wouldn't that be the ultimate form of emancipation? Just because many female celebrities opt for revealing clothes and sing about feminism doesn't mean that they're free. Freedom starts inside your head, and not on top of it." She recalls a different experience in America, where she went swimming in a burkini. "I had a really good time swimming in Texas. No one gave me awkward looks or said anything condescending. Nobody cared who was wearing what." In pointing out the difference between French laïcité and American secularism, she touched on the cleavage within the West.

I discussed this dissonance in an interview with then-Turkish President Abdullah Gül during the Arab Spring in 2012 when then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had told the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood not to fear secularism:

What is unfortunate for the Arab and Maghreb countries is that their interpretation of secularism has been based on the French model, which is a Jacobin model of imposing a kind of irreligiousness. When you speak of secularism to Muslim communities of the region, it is misunderstood because of this French implication. In practice, the implementation of secularism in the Arab and Maghreb countries has meant fighting against Islam in the name of secularism. ... On the other hand if you use the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of secularism, as practiced in the United States or the United Kingdom, it is something that people should feel comfortable with. All it means is a separation of the state and religion, of the state maintaining the same distance from all religions and acting as the custodian for all beliefs. It is based on respect for all faiths and the coexistence of plural beliefs.

The French republic, and its secular fundamentalism, was born out of a revolt against the Catholic Church aligned with the monarchy. The American republic was born out of desire for religious freedom. So it is perhaps no surprise that modern France, which hosts a Muslim population of nearly 5 million, largely hailing from its former North Africa colonies, has become the sharpest edge, the prime battleground, of the clash of civilizations it seeks to avoid.

Writing from Berlin, Alexander Görlach rejects the notion that Europe has failed because it is run by out-of-touch elites, as populists on both the right and left argue loudly. "The EU has no elite problem, but rather a problem, particularly in Western Europe, with a thoroughly sedated, consumerist and apathetic population," he says. In an interview with HuffPost, Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz says the euro was flawed from the start.

Writing from Rio de Janeiro, Angela Almeida and John Surico chronicle events puts on by a group of artists protesting both the Olympics and austerity measures by Brazil's interim president, Michel Temer. The group, which calls itself Ocupa MinC because it occupies abandoned and defunded Ministry of Culture buildings, worries that the Olympics, "could end up costing Brazil well over the budget of $4.6 billion." "One poll," the authors report, "found that 50 percent of Brazilians were against the Games." The group's members, "argue that the mega-event exposed the vast inequality between the Rio that visitors see and the Rio that the government left behind for the people who actually live here ― a sentiment that has led to widespread protests during the Games."

The world continues to spin beyond all the attention focused on the Olympics. Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian says, "there is growing reason to expect a potentially seismic shift in Philippine foreign policy under the new administration." As the new president, Rodrigo Duterte, rapidly consolidates power, Heydarian argues he is, "in a strong position to introduce a significant foreign policy reset, particularly with respect to China and the United States. Unlike his predecessor, Benigno Aquino, he has extended an olive branch to China, deploying former President Fidel Ramos to conduct backdoor negotiations with the Asian powerhouse."

In an interview, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz says China's multi-billion dollar investment in Pakistan to link up trade routes to the Arabian Sea as part of its new Silk Road project is a "game-changer" for his country. Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden report this week that the quality and reliability of Chinese-built infrastructure in Africa defies the stereotype of "shoddy work." Ian Armstrong worries that the recent decision by the U.S. and South Korea to deploy a new missile defense system will provoke China, which sees it as a strategic threat that would make its defenses vulnerable, to develop more advanced weaponry to counter it, igniting a new arms race in Asia. In an interview, Li Zhifei, founder and CEO of Mobvi, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup, talks about the innovation ecosystem in Silicon Valley and Beijing, and why Chinese and U.S. tech companies can't seem to crack each other's markets.

In what seems like a rare positive development coming out of Syria, Rowaida Abdelaziz reports on the story of an 11-year-old boy suffering from pain caused by meningitis who was unable to get the treatment he needed in the besieged town of Madaya. Hours after she reported on his condition, the boy was evacuated and is now receiving help.

This week, WorldPost co-publisher Nicolas Berggruen talked with CNN's Fareed Zakaria about his investment in ideas, including a $1 million Nobel-type prize for philosophy that will be awarded for the first time this year. Finally, our Singularity series examines how IBM's artificial neurons are bringing us another step closer to powerful brain-like computers.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Turn Your Eyes To The Skies For The Latest Explorers

6 ways National Science Foundation-supported research is improving unmanned aerial systems for scientific and societal benefit

From strengthening wildlife conservation efforts to improving disaster response, researchers are finding new ways to use small, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) -- also known as drones or unmanned aerial systems (UAS) -- to gather data, improve communication, and explore environments where humans and larger aircraft dare not go.

These advances are due, in part, to improvements in UAV technology, as well as clearer ground rules that govern the many uses of unmanned aircraft.

Increased federal funding, too, including a recent $35 million commitment from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are helping to advance the basic research required to design UAVs that can save lives, improve safety, and enable more effective science.

"Designing and developing highly-capable UAS platforms requires basic research in the theoretical principles of UAS, including sensing, perception, control and communications," says Lynne Parker, NSF director of the division of information and intelligent systems. "Once these agile and robust UAS systems are developed, they can be extended to operate in a variety of challenging domains, such as serving as vital tools for scientific exploration."

Since 2010, NSF has funded dozens of UAV research projects related to computing, engineering, earth science and biology. NSF has supported UAV entrepreneurs through its Small Business Innovation Research program too.

The examples below demonstrate the potential for researchers to advance their scientific knowledge and provide benefits to society through the use of unmanned aircraft.

1. Wildlife conservation

With their ability to travel at altitudes and in environments where manned aircraft cannot, UAVs can study species in difficult-to-reach locations, and help researchers address a number of important questions about ecosystems.

"2016-08-17-1471460832-3311664-Shafer1.jpg"

Michael Shafer, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Northern Arizona University, is working on an NSF-funded project to better track wildlife -- particularly small animals such as bats and birds -- in non-intrusive manner. By developing low-cost, UAV-mounted radio telemetry systems that can receive radio signals from tagged wildlife, and by making the pre-engineered systems available to wildlife researchers via open source publishing, he hopes to significantly reduce the barriers to tracking animals in the wild.

Shafer's lightweight modules leverage the flight capabilities of UAVs to better detect signals from wildlife transmitters. This involves developing signal-processing algorithms to assist in detecting and localizing very high-frequency radio tags, and assembling a radio system capable of providing the required sensitivity. It also involves designing a system compact enough to fit on a UAV, along with special vehicles for field researchers and the radio-sensing modules they carry.

In addition to the technical development effort, Shafer and his team plan to work with the Upward Bound program at Northern Arizona University to guide first-generation, low-income high school students from the Four Corners region -- Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico -- toward successful college careers.

2. Increasing the accuracy of weather forecasts

UAVs are particularly well-suited for gathering data in the lower atmosphere (1,000-4,000 meters) where many weather phenomena begin and where manned aircraft are too dangerous or expensive to fly. Radar cannot always track conditions at this level and weather balloons have too short of a duration at these altitudes.

Through the $6 million, four-year Collaboration Leading Operational UAS Development for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (CLOUD-MAP) project, Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Nebraska are working together to develop UAV capabilities so meteorologists and atmospheric scientists can use unmanned aircraft as an everyday research tool.

The CLOUD-MAP project recently completed its first flight campaign, which resulted in nearly 250 unmanned flights of 12 separate UAV platforms over a three-day period -- one of the largest scientific unmanned aircraft operations ever. The effort, which brought together more than 65 researchers and students, collected important meteorological, climatological and operational data that will increase the accuracy of weather forecasts, ultimately saving lives and property.

3. Enhancing communications in a disaster

NSF CAREER awardee Yan Wan from the University of North Texas is developing aerial networking systems that use directional antennas on UAVs to deliver on-demand communication to first responders in emergency response situations.

Typical wireless communications have a range of only 100 meters, or just over the length of a football field. Wan and her colleagues, however, developed technology that extends the Wi-Fi reach of drones to 8 kilometers, or about 5 miles.

Wan and her team have worked with emergency agencies across Texas to test their system's ability to quickly establish emergency communications in disaster drills and exercises. In May 2015, working with researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Austin Fire Department, she demonstrated how UAVs can establish aerial communication in a search-and-rescue operation, providing emergency responders with the aerial views they need to direct robots to find victims quickly and to transmit video streams of survivors to control centers.

For this, and other activities, she and her colleagues won the Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex's 2015 Tech Titan Award.

4. UAVs in hurricane and nuclear disasters

Robin Murphy, the director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M University, has deployed UAVs to some of the worst natural and man-made disasters in recent memory.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Murphy directed UAVs to explore buildings along the Gulf Coast -- the first time an unmanned aircraft was used for emergency structural inspections. During the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, she was part of a team that flew UAVs to determine radiation levels and inspect damage at the reactors. And in the days following the 2016 floods in Texas, Murphy led a team that deployed UAVs to inspect the storm-ravaged area.

Murphy determined that one 20-minute drone flight generates roughly 800 photographs, each of which takes a minute to inspect. This led her to conclude that data analysis tools, deployed alongside unmanned aircraft, are necessary to make UAV technology useful in time-sensitive situations.

Working with collaborators and students, Murphy has developed software that uses computer vision and machine learning to improve UAV flight paths, as well as anomaly detection techniques to better locate survivors with UAVs.

Combining the capabilities of UAVs with tools that allow them to work in a targeted way is the secret to developing effective search-and-rescue UAVs, Murphy believes.

5. Sea ice mapping

Last year, scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel carried out two separate UAV trials as part of a research cruise in the Southern Ocean. The flights evaluated the aerial mapping capabilities of UAVs and their ability to determine the distribution of floating sea ice. [Watch a video of the flights.]

Researchers on the trip were exploring the vulnerability of Antarctic ice to melting due to the presence of relatively warm ocean water below it. Melting ice would drive glaciers into the sea faster and raise sea levels worldwide. This data will inform future integrated observation programs.

In separate research, scientists from the University of Kansas-led Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) are developing new technologies and computer models to measure and predict the response of sea level change to the mass balance of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

In remote and dangerous locations such as Antarctica, UAVs can help to gather critical information without endangering human pilots, which is why the NSF-managed U.S. Antarctic Program is developing a policy on the safe and environmentally sound use of UAVs in Antarctic research.

6. Safer, cheaper infrastructure monitoring

As U.S. infrastructure ages, its operators need more efficient and affordable techniques to monitor and assess bridges, railroads, power lines, dams and other large systems. UAVs enable innovative approaches for monitoring the health and stability of structures from above and below.

Ivan Bartoli of Drexel University leads a project that focuses not just on UAVs, but on what those unmanned aircraft look at. Using novel manufacturing processes, his team designs special surface coatings -- like paint -- that enable UAVs to rapidly collect multi-spectral imaging data. Advanced algorithms then analyze that data to find structural deformations, allowing engineers to quickly identify damage to critical components of monitored structures.

Scientists and engineers are already moving many of these technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace. Hung La of the University of Nevada, Reno is building on NSF-funded research to create low-cost UAVs and robotic systems that can efficiently inspect steel and concrete bridges.

La is part of an NSF Innovation Corps Team that has completed more than 160 customer interviews, helping him focus on customer uses as the research team finalizes their designs and thinks about the long-term commercialization of the technology. Their product has been tested and deployed in the field, and La is working with his university to patent the technology.

These and other new ways of thinking about infrastructure are leading to a safer, more stable future.

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Image credits/captions:

A low-level flight test by Michael Shafer and his team at Northern Arizona University. Credit: Michael Shafer

Oklahoma State University research engineer Taylor Mitchell launches a CO2-sensing UAV while the University of Nebraska student team tests in the background. Credit: CLOUD-MAP

At the Smart America Expo, Yan Wan from the University of North Texas exhibited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) she developed that are capable of providing wireless communications to storm-ravaged areas where telephone access might be out. Credit: NSF

CRASAR small UAS Assisted Fort Bend OEM with Determining Flooding (Apr 20, 24, 2016) Credit: Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station)

NSF-funded KU researchers successfully test unmanned aircraft system in Antarctica. Credit: Produced by Dena Headlee, NSF; Video courtesy of University of Kansas/NSF

Hung La of the University of Nevada, Reno is building on NSF-funded research to create UAVs and robotic systems to inspect steel and concrete bridges. His goal is to develop an efficient, low-cost and safe tool for inspecting bridges. Credit: University of Nevada, Reno

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Skeptical About Climate Deniers
Few concepts are more poorly understood or more abused than skepticism. The best example of this abuse is to attribute the moniker of "climate change skeptic" to those who ignore the overwhelming data concerning global warming.

The shortest definition of skepticism is "an attitude of doubting the truth about a claim or statement." Something a bit more meaningful would be "suspending judgment and applying systematic reservation about a claim or statement."

So why can't we rightfully call a denier a skeptic since he doubts or has reservations about the truth about climate change claims, which would at first glance meet the definition of skepticism? We shall see.

Michael Shermer, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, has rightfully noted that "skepticism is not a position, it is a process." It is the application of critical thinking to evaluate the validity of an assertion. Saying that "I am a skeptic" has little meaning because that is a stance; more meaningful is a statement like, "I am open to accepting a claim if presented with sufficiently convincing evidence."

What we are talking about here, even though everybody uses the term skepticism, is actually "ordinary incredulity." We are not including here what is technically "philosophical doubt" -- a more formal version of skepticism, an intellectual exercise to deny the validity of an entire class of claims by positing that certain knowledge is not attainable even in theory. Yeah, I know, that is a little opaque. But we really do need to understand the distinction between ordinary incredulity and philosophical skepticism before we can nail down why deniers are not in fact skeptics. The best way I've come across is a review of the Truman Show and the Matrix as put forth in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Truman is placed, without his knowledge, in a contrived environment so that his "life" can be broadcast on television. Truman comes across clues that something is wrong. In The Matrix, where everything is running as programmed by the machines, there is no possible way for the "people" in the matrix to determine that the world as experienced is only a "dream world" and not the real world (the world of causes and effects). The Truman Show is a depiction of a case of ordinary incredulity because there is some evidence that is, in principle, available to Truman for determining what's really the case; whereas The Matrix depicts a situation similar to that imagined by a typical philosophical skeptic in which it is not possible for the Matrix-bound characters to obtain evidence for determining that things are not as they seem (whenever the virtual reality is perfectly created). Put another way, the philosophical skeptic challenges our ordinary assumption that there is evidence available that can help us to discriminate between the real world and some counterfeit world that appears in all ways to be identical to the real world.

So from that we conclude that ordinary incredulity (what people typically call skepticism) arises when in principle doubt can be removed by discovering the truth of some claim or statement.

And here is precisely why climate change deniers do not have the high privilege of being called skeptics. No amount of data, no convincing evidence, and no degree of proof would ever convince a denier that climate change is real. Even in principle a denier's doubt cannot be removed because a denier is relying on faith rather than evidence to support his position. If doubt cannot be removed with new knowledge or advances in understanding, then that is not skepticism - it is just a form of religion.

Cynicism Is Not Skepticism

Offering a skeptical perspective is not cynical; in fact quite the opposite is true. Cynics doubt and mistrust not on the weight of evidence or lack thereof but on suspicions of underlying motivation. Cynicism can lead to the rejection of a claim but not to new discoveries, unlike skepticism which can lead to both.

Provisional disbelief is often mistaken as cynicism; the two are not equivalent. It is perfectly reasonable to start out unconvinced that humans are causing our climate to change. But that shifts to cynicism and faith-based opposition with the inability to modify that position in the presence of overwhelming evidence. What matters, independent of one's starting hypothesis, is the willingness to draw conclusions when a claim is confirmed "to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement."

Skepticism is fully embedded in the scientific method: the application of systematic observation, reproducible measurements, and experimentation in order to gain new knowledge about and a deeper understanding of our physical and biological world. The entire reason for applying systematic observation is that we are open to but remain skeptical of any claim's validity until observation, reproducible measurements and experimental confirm or reject the claim.

Climate change denial is a form of cynicism and as such is the antithesis of skepticism; it is the closed-minded pre-determined rejection of any and all data that might validate the claim that our climate is changing, and the blind credulous acceptance of any unsubstantiated assertions that support the denial. Here is the bottom line difference between a denier and someone currently convinced the climate is changing: if presented with convincing contrary evidence that demonstrates the earth's climate is not warming, or is changing by natural cyclical variation alone, one who temporarily accepted that the earth is warming because of human activity would modify his conclusion based on this new knowledge. In contrast, no mountain of data demonstrating that humans are causing a changing climate would cause a denier to modify his conclusion. Skepticism demands an open mind and allows for and encourages the advancement of knowledge by seeking explanations of phenomena anchored in the natural world; faith-based denial is immune to modification.

A denier may come back and say that in fact those who claim the climate is changing are the ones with closed minds since they openly reject what deniers believe. But no, that is false equivalency; deniers could indeed make headway if they could present convincing data but the inverse is not true.

Open Mind, Gullibility and Conviction

We must not confuse an open mind with gullibility. A mind open to change in the face of convincing data is not equivalent to credulous acceptance of a claim absent of evidence. Nor can we confuse an open mind with lack of conviction. Climate change experts are secure in their conclusions based on overwhelming evidence across multiple disciplines, confirmed independently by thousands of scientists in hundreds of countries. They have no less an open mind because they are firm in their conclusion. With overwhelming evidence in hand the threshold for modifying one's temporary acceptance becomes ever higher. The threshold for change is elevated on the basis of accumulating evidence, not faith. We can confidently conclude, without being accused of being closed minded, that atoms are a building block of nature, that DNA contains the genetic code, and that the earth orbits the sun. Being highly confident about these statements is justified by incredibly precise measurements, reproducible observations and extraordinarily refined experimentation performed by tens thousands of scientists over decades or centuries. Yes it would be possible to overturn these conclusions with sufficiently convincing contrary data, but given the history leading to our understanding of these aspects of the natural world, that is not likely to happen. That does not make us closed-minded; it makes us firm in our convictions but open to being convinced otherwise by overwhelming data. Climate change deniers in contrast can never be otherwise convinced.

Deep Irony

Climate change deniers bring to the debate a deep irony and terrible hypocrisy that add another disturbing element beyond the important difference between cynicism and skepticism. We know that deniers demand more proof that the climate is warming even in the face of a growing body of accumulating evidence. We know too that while they demand such proof no quantity of date would ever be sufficient because the denial is not based in skepticism but in cynicism and faith. And yet. And yet this same demand for proof is conspicuously and gloriously absent when the question turns to patently false claims about fat-burning foods or a host of bogus promises relating to diet and nutrition, or the link between autism and vaccines, or the economic viability of nuclear power, or clean coal, or alien landings, or the Bermuda Triangle, or virtually anything that is not climate change. Only with climate change is such proof demanded; meaning we have the circumstance in which deniers reject a conclusion for which we have overwhelming evidence but accept wild claims for which there is none. Some significant number of Republicans, even if not a majority as sometimes reported, believes that Obama is a Muslim; where is the demand for proof? Such is the dangerous brew of faith stirred with cynicism in the absence of reasonable credulity.

There are no climate change skeptics; only faith-based climate change cynics.

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Bridging a Gap between Scientists and the Public
By Travis J. Bernardo, Ph.D.

What do the following stories have in common?

According to the Centers for Disease Control, endemic measles was eradicated from the U.S. in the year 2000, the result of decades of vaccination efforts. But the last few years have seen a dramatic spike in the number of nationwide measles outbreaks, attributed in part to rising public fears over vaccination use.

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation together receive just under $40 billion in funding annually, less than 1 percent of a federal budget dominated by transfer payment programs, health insurance spending and military expenditures. Yet medical research projects, often misunderstood as wasteful spending, are routinely placed under the political microscope as a prime target for cuts.

Precise genome editing using the CRISPR/Cas9 system offers the potential to revolutionize scientific research and medicine. The prospect of directly modifying the human genome certainly has ethical implications, which are being openly debated by scientists. But any future groundbreaking therapeutics based on genome editing face strong headwinds due to substantial public opposition.

If the answer isn't clear to you, let me suggest the following: they highlight a significant perception gap between scientists and the public when it comes to important medical advances. Indeed, on a whole host of policy issues, the public simply sees things differently from the way scientists do.

An Obligation and an Opportunity
What is the appropriate response to this gap in perception? For those of us steeped in science and medicine, it's easy to forget that not everyone has the rich knowledge of subject matter and rigorous critical thinking skills ingrained in us by our training.

And perhaps it's just as easy to keep our noses to the grindstone, move our own research forward and survey the public mood with a sense of detachment.

But it is our responsibility to explain to the public why our work is valuable and deserves support. We are the ones who understand the depth and complexity of modern science. We have the ability to translate that information to nonscientists. And while it may sound like a burdensome obligation, it's really an opportunity, not only for personal growth but for securing the future of scientific progress. After all, it is the public and its elected representatives who ultimately determine the fate of funding for basic medical research.

What Can You Do?
Fortunately, there are many opportunities for scientists to engage the public and bridge the perception gap. Here are just a few ideas.

Blog your heart out. Is there a scientific issue near to your heart that doesn't receive enough attention? If you want to add your two cents to the national conversation, start a blog. With many free platforms to choose from, getting going is easy. While your audience will start out small, with a little persistence you may find your message catching on. You can also offer articles to established blogs that have a preexisting readership. For instance, I was invited to write this post by the editors of The Doctor's Tablet after they saw an earlier post I wrote for the ASCB Compass blog.

Edit a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is one of the most frequented sites on the Web. It is openly editable, relying on contributors to maintain quality. Many pages on scientific topics, however, still lack sourcing or do not meet Wikipedia quality standards, which may lead to incomplete or erroneous content. Given its reputation as the "first place to go" for many laypeople seeking scientific knowledge, consider editing pages in your area of expertise. This small, but significant, contribution can help eliminate the spread of misinformation online.

Practice communicating in a low-stakes environment. Communicating science effectively often means talking in public. If you have a shy streak or feel your public-speaking skills need honing, practice in a risk-free setting. Einstein, for instance, hosts a local Toastmasters chapter where members deliver impromptu speeches and receive constructive feedback from peers.

Poster presentations and conference talks are also good opportunities to practice, and will train you to communicate science to different target audiences. Even consider giving an elevator pitch about your research to family members and friends who aren't scientists.

Advocate for science. If you're comfortable in public forums, consider becoming a science advocate. Here, you'll have the chance to communicate directly with holders of the public purse strings. Advocacy includes a range of activities, such as writing to your local representatives, starting a social media campaign or participating in a Congressional Visits Day, during which you will speak directly to members of Congress or their staffers.

Recently an Einstein Science Policy Group has been formed to promote advocacy efforts on campus. You may want to look at starting such a group at your institution. Examples across the country can be found at the website of the National Science Policy Group, and a beginner's guide to getting started locally was recently published in Molecular Biology of the Cell.

Consider a career in communication. For graduate students and postdocs, finding a job that aligns with your interests and values is an important goal. If you're truly passionate about communicating about science, you might consider making a career out of it. Science communication is a diverse field, encompassing journalism, educational animation and everything in between.

There are many opportunities out there for scientists to bridge the divide with the public. It is up to us to step up and lay the planks.

"2016-08-15-1471300855-8618221-TravisJ.BernardoHuffpo.png"

Dr. Bernardo is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Arthur I. Skoultchi, Ph.D., in the cell biology department at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also an associate member of the Einstein BETTR-IRACDA program. Dr. Bernardo writes online about issues related to science policy, education, and communication.

***

This post was originally featured on The Doctor's Tablet, the blog of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

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The Vikings' Magnificent Flying Machine
Imagine having a job where you're tasked to accomplish the impossible. And you only get two chances.

For example, your assignment (should you choose it) is to build a martian spacecraft -- one that can land safely, scoop soil from the planet's surface, load it into an onboard chemistry lab to test for the existence of life. Oh, and it has to transmit data back to Earth, along with photos of the Red Planet. Put yourself back in the late '60s when technology and robotics were relatively primitive. No internet, smartphone, laptop, iPad. Data came in kB, not MB or GB. And, please, land it on July 4th, 1976, would you, because that's America's Bicentennial celebration, and how red-white-and-blue "far-out" awesome would that be!

Well, it happened - to a team of engineers, scientists and early computer specialists. No one considered it Mission Impossible, but the odds were certainly stacked against them. No detailed design, test, deployment or operational specifications existed; there were many unknown factors about the atmosphere and surface of Mars; there were worries about money to keep the program afloat. And yet they overcame all the barriers, they did everything they were tasked and more, except the July 4th part (a few days late so as not to set the robot down on a risky spot). And then, they did it again, landing a second machine a few weeks later, for backup.

Who were these incredible guys?

20th century Vikings, the best technical team that ever was. They were so good, killer precise, dead-on dedicated, they should have each gotten a Presidential Medal, or at least a vacation in Norway, home of the original Vikings.

Like the medieval Vikings, these were curious explorers and capable conquerors, but mostly they were inventors. They invented the Viking spaceship to sail and land in unknown realms. They were "imagineers" - designers of gadgets, experiments, solutions. They numbered about a thousand who gave their all to the NASA/Martin Marietta project over a decade, including scientist Carl Sagan, a public voice and unveiler of Viking.

One engineer was Bob Rodamer, a Cape Canaveral (then Cape Kennedy) launch operator who pushed the button to launch the Titan/Centaur rocket that sent Viking Mars-bound. He said "At T-minus 35 seconds when I initiated the launch sequence, it got tense and exciting. It was the last manual function that made all previous efforts, by so many, a reality." Imagine the sweaty finality of pressing that button!

A hundred gathered at the 40th Viking anniversary 2016 Reunion. The 'greybeards' looked a little different than they did four decades ago. No long hair, leisure suits, bell bottoms, sideburns or cigarettes. They were plenty happy to meet up - like a fraternity homecoming - and it was mostly men. Only a few women were technologists back then.

Tears were shed as the Viking era story was revived. (Although this roomful of rocket scientists had some trouble getting the slideshow going... ha, ha.) Viking had been the pinnacle of many people's careers; their academic training, their requisite rare knowledge, their shared achievement, all distilled into one enterprise. For many, the realization only came years later, when they contemplated the profound work ethic, the daunting sacrifices - people working around the clock, family time cut short, marriages collapsing. But personal pride and lifelong friendships developed, too. If ever a technical team needed to pull together, it was the Vikings. It took everyone's heart, sweat, tears, determination, and brains to produce those stunning long-lasting results.

A special highlight was, of course, the memory of their collective thrill when the first photos came back from Mars soon after touchdown - they had succeeded! It was real! There was the footpad of the machine, actually planted on the rocky surface millions of miles away. Then when the color photos arrived, they saw no little green men running around, just a bright red hue. Maybe redder than they thought possible.

"2016-08-16-1471306109-4431684-viking61stmarsimage.jpg"

The wife of Terry Surline, a Viking aerospace engineer fresh out of college, recalled asking him: "How the heck do you know how to do this?" (See, they had been in high school trigonometry together and she'd helped him out, so she was skeptical...) Terry said: "I don't know. We just do it! We do one step, then we figure out what the next step should be."

How many steps are required to get to Mars anyway? Gazillions! And every step has to be solid, correct, and work perfectly or subsequent millions of steps could be going down a blind alley.

The practical, straight-arrow engineers didn't much like the "pot-smoking soft weirds" at first. Any green men they might discover on Mars couldn't have been more alien. Engineers wore standard white shirts and ties, short haircuts and pocket protectors. Some had steel-toed shoes. They wondered, what were those casual, irreverent data muckers doing, constantly writing mysterious code? Code that had to interface with their electronics and hardware. Then there were scientists, a third brand. The visionaries! "Anything can be done!" declared the wild-eyed scientists.

The distinguishing force - the "super glue"- that held the Viking Lander Spacecraft team together was an over-arching sense of curiosity. A spirit of inquiry infused every discussion. "What's the toughest part to do?" "What d'you suppose we'll find?" "How will we know when we've succeeded?" "What if...?" "What if...?" "What if....?"

Ultimately there was mutual respect, and the confidence, that a hand-picked team could master any technical challenge the old Fourth Planet from the Sun could throw at them. "Can we make something that can do this? Damn right we can!"

Larry Perkins, who worked on the system test computer said, "No one asked, 'Is it worth it?' We all knew it would definitely be the hardest but most worthwhile thing we had ever done, and the results would definitely prove to be worth the risk, the cost and the commitment."

What's happened since? College students who worked on Viking - via an intern program - went on to be stars on future Mars programs. One lucky 14-year-old, Jim Duncan, who witnessed the landing from the Jet Propulsion Lab, was inspired to study engineering and ended up working the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program.

Cathy Rowe, a data specialist on the inorganic chemistry team, and one of the last to process the robot's final transmissions, was especially excited about the amazing Curiosity (large rover) landing in 2012. "I felt that all of us on Viking were pioneers and helped to make the Curiosity mission possible." Her husband, Jim Rowe, was instrumental in creating management strategies for the huge data streams. This led to the safekeeping of vital information that is still being used in current Mars programs.

The Viking findings were inconclusive about life on Mars. Sadly, the cameras revealed no little green men (or women). But Dr. Penny Boston, Director for NASA Astrobiology Institute, a 40th reunion speaker, reported that, since Viking, so much more knowledge has developed about what microbial life actually is. "What we knew about life wasn't enough then. Since the 1990s there's been an explosion of work done to show what organisms would have to be like to survive on Mars."

The Vikings of yore, when they landed on our East Coast, didn't stay long. The environment was too harsh and inhospitable. Maybe, for them, it was landing on Mars! But those explorers, too, took home lots of data about a strange, distant land, which later came in handy. What if... they hadn't come?

For more information: www.thevikingpreservationproject.org

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Adaptability: The True Mark Of Genius

Image credit: Eric Terrade/Unsplash.

Good grades, aced tests, high IQs -- we have lots of ways to approximate someone's intelligence. These indicators are undoubtedly good at getting a general understanding of a person's ability to retain information and solve problems, but are they useful for indicating whether or not someone is a real "genius?"

First off, there is no universally accepted scientific definition of "genius." It is simply a word used to describe someone demonstrating exceptional intellectual ability. Even this is a vague understanding of the concept, as "exceptional" and "ability" are somewhat relative -- ultimately in the eye of the beholder(s).

What then, is the universal signature of genius? Rather than trying to define it through the narrow band of human uniqueness -- the traits making our species special like literacy, artistic expression, and so forth -- it might be better to think of genius as a concept existing independently of humanity. On this new playing field, genius is not determined by taking tests or possessing a high IQ. Instead, genius is calculated by how successfully an organism can adapt to changes in its environment.

Strange changes

Very few businesses can operate long term without changes to various parts of the system. Name an enterprise which was in operation before the year 1990 and it undoubtedly had to make a significant shift toward computer technology and the internet. These demands never stop thanks to an ever-changing market and the increasingly sophisticated nature of technology.

For example, the previously mentioned enterprise may now be struggling to coordinate resource planning among its various departments. For 20 years, it relied on a DIY, seat of its pants method of managing this information. The time has come to shop for top Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software to reduce waste and inefficiencies. Its leaders now have to choose which of the dozens of possible solutions is right going forward.

Analysis paralysis

This is where the test of genius comes into play. Presented with a multitude of options for overriding a problem or set of challenges, it's very easy to become overwhelmed and unsure of what to choose. The basis for your ultimate decision -- the factors leading to leaning toward one particular solution -- are a product of how well you grasp the demands of change.

Faced with dozens of possible courses of action, it's common to be afflicted with analysis paralysis. This tendency to overthink a major decision often leads to people falling back on their worn-out playbooks for clues on what to do next. Whether we consciously or subconsciously do it, people desire the comfortable, the familiar, the routine. Among numerous choices, the common option stands out and holds appeal. In the face of changes, the "go-to" old ways of doing things are unlikely to prove advantageous.

Those with a gift for adaptability, on the other hand, are going to sever their emotional ties to the past and actively search for information regarding what to do next. Slowly but surely, the options get whittled down to a viable, practical array from which the final choice is selected.

What nature intended

Finding a specific way of doing things and sticking to it is human nature. In fact, it's nature across the board; the diversity of an animal kingdom sharing the majority of their DNA with one another is a result of millions if varying ways to survive. Being afraid or otherwise resistant to changes is instinctual, as we're hardwired to walk a relatively very specific path.

However, nature repeatedly challenged its own construct with mass extinction events, where over 90 percent of life on Earth would be eradicated. Dinosaurs are the most famous example of what happens when a successful species is thrust into a new environment and cannot cope with the changes. An established company incapable of making changes to evade destructive forces is not much different.

Free will vs. free won't

The stubbornness hardwired into us preventing successful adapting to cope with changes is perhaps the true seat of our "intelligence." There is growing evidence to suggest the concept of "free will" is an illusion and we are in fact driven by the desires of a subconscious, inner version of ourselves. This is why we so often do the things we "know" we ought not to do, and procrastinate with the things we "know" need to happen to achieve our clear goals.

A theory put forward by the late Benjamin Libet, a renowned pioneer of human consciousness research, suggests the persona we associate as our "self" is not the one leading the way. Rather, we are an executive of sorts, with limited direct control over how we react to change. Libet's ideas resulted in the concept of "free won't": we have the power to veto the courses of action taken by our subconscious, but are otherwise at the mercy of our nature.

Think of it this way: intelligence is that thing inside of us making all the decisions we mostly go along with; meanwhile, genius is the ability to know when these automatic choices are worth adjusting or switching up entirely.

Overriding the system

With all this in mind, a better understanding of "genius" starts to emerge. Can we take credit for the almost automatic way our brains take to making decisions? Calling someone a genius for test scores and grades is a bit like applauding software for doing what it was designed and programmed to perform. Predictable, routine paths of logic hinged on training and practice, while impressive, do not indicate a person's propensity for triumphing through change.

Rather, genius can be seen as the ability to break free from the predestined, comfortable route when all signs point to the need to change. It's the absorption of observations without precedent or plans. It's drawing conclusions and taking a new course of action to outmaneuver the inevitable drawbacks of staying on the same course. Everyone and everything alive today is a product of past genius and thus carries the potential for genius going forward.

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Yale-Trained Doctor Refutes Dangerous Misinformation Given by CDC's Dr. Paul Mead on Fox 5 Lyme Special

(Illustration: Laura Waldusky)

On June 30, Fox 5 New York aired a highly-rated thirty-minute TV special about Lyme Disease called "Lyme and Reason," in which I was interviewed with my doctor, Yale-trained internist and preeminent Lyme specialist, Steven Phillips. You can watch our segment here.

Also interviewed was the CDC's Paul Mead, MD, Chief of Epidemiology and Surveillance Activity of the Bacterial Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You can watch that here.

Many patients and clinicians expressed outrage on social media regarding what they considered to be dangerous, misleading information offered by Mead, and pointed out the CDC's pattern of giving preferential treatment to outdated IDSA Lyme guidelines instead of the more scientifically-supported, patient-centered ILADS guidelines.

Interestingly, The National Guidelines Clearinghouse, a federal database that provides treatment information to health care professionals and insurance companies, has removed the IDSA Lyme treatment guidelines from its website and only lists the ILADS guidelines.

To help chronic Lyme patients who feel that the CDC has once again turned its back on them, Phillips wrote a formal rebuttal to some of Mead's statements and Fox 5 posted it on their Facebook page.

Fox invited Mead to comment further but that request remains "under review."

See Mead's statements and Phillips' responses below and watch the TV special and all of the unedited interviews here.

Please join the conversation and add your comments below. We look forward to hearing from you.

Mead: "typically people with early stages of disease get a rash..."
Phillips: I don't actually think it's accurate to say that this is typical. The initial published findings by Steere documented that 25% of patients recalled a history of rash compatible with erythema migrans (EM). Other published research has pegged the rate of prior EM in late Lyme patients at 22%. Part of the problem with some of the research that demonstrates a very high rate of EM in Lyme disease is that it's part of the CDC reporting criteria as well as being a common diagnostic criterion. So the CDC's statistics on the rates of EM in early Lyme may be inherently skewed. It may be likened to publishing a study that 95% of people in prison have committed a crime.

Mead: "well, actually 'the great imitator' is a term used to refer to syphilis which is a different disease"
Phillips: Well, actually, although syphilis was a previous illness given this nickname, Lyme disease has also carried the moniker in the medical literature. A Pubmed search of 'great imitator' and 'lyme' returned 23 results. This is because Lyme can present in so many varied ways, able to mimic a broad array of diseases.

Mead: "there are really two parts to diagnosis, there are the clinical features of the disease that is what the physician can see, a large joint, a red rash, a fever, that sort of thing, and then there is laboratory testing."
Phillips: Most of the clinical features of Lyme disease are subjective, i.e., symptoms that the physician can't see. There is robust data in the medical literature which documents that in patients diagnosed with Lyme disease based on the presence of EM or of B. burgdorferi and/or its components obtained from body tissues and/or fluids, the subjective symptoms of Lyme disease outnumber the objective signs by very significant numbers.

So to restrict clinical diagnosis to those patients who have the several objective features included in the CDC reporting criteria would mean that a great many patients would go undiagnosed.

I don't think it's justified to exclude subjective symptoms from the reporting criteria just because such symptoms can't be seen. More alarming, in my view, is that this practice reinforces a medical paradigm of not believing the patient. When do we start believing patients again?

I see lots of patients in my office who come in with the 'not-Lyme diagnosis'. When I ask the primary care physicians further about this, I'm frequently told that they don't know what the patient has, but that it's not Lyme. The exclusion of this diagnosis is most often predicated upon failure to meet CDC surveillance criteria. I find it really sad and frustrating. It's like we're speaking different languages.

Mead: "So the recommended way of diagnosing Lyme disease in the laboratory is by the use of serologic tests primarily and in general we recommend a two-step process to this where the blood is tested essentially in two steps to identify whether or not the person has evidence of infection with Borrelia burgdorferi."
"If a patient has been ill for just a few days or weeks the test may in fact be negative. However if a patient has been ill for months or years, if the test is negative, that's good evidence that their illness may be caused by something other than Borrelia burgdorferi infection."
Phillips: It's interesting to me that CDC currently recommends laboratory surveillance criteria for diagnosis since they've historically been recommending it for standardization purposes as below, which is still listed on their website:

"This surveillance case definition was developed for national reporting of Lyme disease; it is not intended to be used in clinical diagnosis."
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5623a1.htm

Further, this is Dr. Mead's testimony excerpted from the State of Connecticut Department of Public Health Public Hearing on Lyme Disease January 29th, 2004:
http://www.ct.gov/ag/lib/ag/health/0129lyme.pdf
"Let me now say a few words about clinical diagnosis. The clinical diagnosis is made for the purpose of treating an individual patient and should consider the many details associated with that patient's illness. Surveillance case definitions are created for the purpose of standardization, not patient care. They exist so that health officials can reasonably compare the number and distribution of cases over space and time. Whereas physicians appropriately err on the side of over-diagnosis, thereby assuring they don't miss a case, surveillance case definitions appropriately err on the side of specificity, thereby assuring they do not inadvertently capture illnesses due to other conditions."

"...CDC has stated repeatedly that the surveillance case definition is not a substitute for sound clinical judgment. Given other compelling evidence, a physician may choose to treat a patient with Lyme Disease when their condition does not meet the case surveillance definition."

If Dr. Mead has previously stated that surveillance case definitions are not to be used for patient care, then why is Dr. Mead now recommending the opposite? I'm not aware of any groundbreaking medical literature in the past 12 years which should have radically changed the opinion of the CDC on this matter.

To the contrary, since 2004, there have been even more published medical journal articles demonstrating Lyme disease with negative Lyme antibody tests, further raising questions about the validity of CDC surveillance criteria for diagnosis. In fact, there are now over 50 medical journal articles documenting Lyme disease despite negative antibody tests. This research spans all stages of illness, including late stage disease, at which time Dr. Mead opines that Lyme antibody testing should be positive.

Further, as additional pathogenic species of borrelia are continually being discovered, the term 'Lyme disease' is being thought of more and more in a collective sense. It is logical to conclude that the Lyme ELISA would cross-react with at least some of these species. By restricting diagnosis to CDC two-tier serologic reporting criteria, a greater truth may be missed in that diagnoses of such patients with non-Lyme borrelial infections would not be possible in the absence of species-specific testing for the new species, which is largely unavailable.

Another important question regarding diagnosis relates to the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR is a very well-established and reliable technology that has been in continuous use for more than 30 years. It replicates DNA many times over so that it can be picked up on a test. If a PCR test is positive, this means that the DNA of a microbe is present and is considered definitive proof of infection for virtually every other infectious disease known in medicine. Yet for Lyme disease, it appears to me that there may be a double standard.

I recently saw a video from the CDC in which Dr. Christina Nelson advised against using Lyme PCR to evaluate Lyme disease. She spoke of its relatively low sensitivity in vivo presumably as a motivation to avoid its use. However, if this test is positive, then active infection is confirmed, which is exactly what's needed to clarify persistent infection in Lyme disease. So it's curious that she would advise against its use, even with a less than perfect sensitivity.

It should be further noted that PCR is a very specific technology, meaning that even small differences in the targeted snippets of DNA can result in a negative test. Coupled with strain heterogeneity and highly variable gene expression in B. burgdorferi in the tick vs. the mammal, it appears that some PCR assays be may going after the wrong target. It's not clear from the video to which Lyme PCR tests Dr. Nelson is referring. Newer PCR's using multiple targets and other improved technologies may have better sensitivities.

She also expressed concern that PCR tests might be falsely positive and represent dead DNA. However published data demonstrates that injection of dead borrelial DNA into dogs did not produce positive Lyme PCR tests in as little as even a few days after inoculation. This means that dead Lyme DNA does not remain in the absence of a continual resupply by a live infection. So I'd like to know from where this concern springs? And if PCR false positivity is so problematic, then why has PCR emerged as the cornerstone for diagnosing and monitoring a multitude of infectious diseases and where are the warnings from CDC about false positive PCR for these other infectious diseases?

Mead: "It's most valuable to order the test in people who have or who are likely to have the disease. If a person is unlikely to have the disease there's a chance that if the test comes back positive that it's more likely a false positive than a true positive"
Phillips: This statement appears to have its roots in Bayes' Theorem. Bayesian methods are one of the more controversial approaches in statistics, with the inherent limitations of being a closed system of logic. For example, who is likely to have the disease?

Everything depends on the initial assumption of probability based on clinical criteria that are under dispute. We know that the objective clinical signs described by CDC surveillance criteria are restrictive in that they do not capture the majority of Lyme diagnoses, which is echoed by CDC itself below:
"...the total number of people diagnosed with Lyme disease is roughly 10 times higher than the yearly reported number"nu
http://www.cdc.gov/me.../releases/2013/p0819-lyme-disease.html

So whereas patients having the objective clinical signs described by CDC surveillance reporting criteria are likely to have Lyme disease, it appears from CDC's own statement that these represent only the minority of patients. We'd therefore be missing the majority of diagnoses if we followed a Bayesian approach.

Mead: "CDC recommends that people rely on FDA approved tests for the diagnosis of Lyme disease"
"FDA approved tests are various forms of the two tier assay that I just mentioned, the serologic antibody testing"
Phillips: FDA approval for lab testing requires clarification as there are currently no FDA approved Lyme tests. States have Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) offices which ensure that labs adhere to certain standards.

FDA test approval is required when a test kit is sold across state lines in the US and does not, per se, indicate improved accuracy compared to CLIA approval. In the absence of a lengthy FDA approval process, tests can be cleared by FDA and given similar treatment if they are demonstrated to be roughly equivalent to a former comparator test.

The first Lyme Western blot to receive FDA clearance was the MarDx Lyme Western blot. A review of the FDA's database reveals that this test was compared to the Lyme Western Blot performed by Dr. Steere's lab at Tufts. It's not clear to me if the comparator test was ever FDA approved, but it appears from my interpretation of the data that it was not. Because most doctors don't know what this actually means, they view the lack of FDA approval or FDA clearance of a test as a bad thing. Lyme antibody assays offered by even the major universities that perform research in Lyme disease are not FDA approved. Historically, these tests have not even been cleared by FDA.

Mead: "The ILADS Guidelines advance two basic ideas: The first is that there really is not any adequate scientific information about the management of Lyme disease; and the second is that in the absence of that sort of information, healthcare providers should be free to do and treat patients in whatever way they see fit. Our concerns are that misrepresents or does not give full credit to the amount of scientific evidence there is about management of Lyme disease..."
Phillips: In response to the claim regarding the first basic idea, I think that this is a highly inaccurate statement. ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) is a multi-specialty medical society made up of physicians and researchers. Its members are well-published in the medical literature and the society holds large, very well-attended, CME-approved medical conferences annually both in the US and abroad.

ILADS Guidelines provide an evidence-based approach to the management of Lyme disease. They are published in the peer-reviewed medical literature and are presently the only Lyme disease treatment guidelines listed on Guidelines.gov, an agency which is under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.Guidelines.gov was created by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans, (which is now known as America's Health Insurance Plans) in order to provide physicians, other healthcare providers, and health plans with detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their use. Despite this, both CDC and insurance companies do not endorse or refer to ILADS Guidelines.

The ILADS Guidelines assess the medical literature on the topic of Lyme disease and associated infections. There are many shortcomings with the state of research in the field, but the purpose of the ILADS Guidelines is not to bemoan this fact but to improve the welfare of a suffering population who may be the most disenfranchised patients in medicine.

What is very clear is that B. burgdorferi has been isolated alive from both animals and humans despite administration of antibiotics that are deemed curative by IDSA and CDC. More alarmingly, this organism has also been isolated alive from humans after antibiotic therapies measured in many months to years, when the administered therapies are far in excess of what is declared curative by these same agencies.

Much of the medical literature in which B. burgdoferi was isolated from patients despite "appropriate" antibiotic therapy was penned by IDSA Guidelines authors. These medical journal articles were either not referenced in the IDSA Guidelines, or when they were, they did not specifically refer to the aspects that document persistent borrelial infection despite antibiotic therapy. Despite this, CDC gives preference to IDSA Guidelines and does not endorse ILADS Guidelines.

In response to the claim regarding the second basic idea, ILADS Guidelines provide a heuristic algorithm for optimal treatment of an extremely heterogeneous group of very ill patients given the best available published medical literature on the topic. Inherent to this, there must be a place for sound clinical judgment, which may be the freedom to which Dr. Mead is referring. I fear the day when individualized clinical judgment is replaced by medical guidelines of any kind. You simply can't rigidly standardize Lyme disease treatment due to strain heterogeneity, co-infections, and differences in immune system types among patients.

Mead: "...and perhaps more importantly, we are concerned about patients who are being treated with unproven therapies; with therapies that are sometimes harmful. There are case reports of patients who died as the result of long term therapies for Lyme disease when in fact there wasn't even necessarily evidence that they were infected."
Phillips: I think one thing that we can all agree upon is that we want to minimize risks to patients from treatments and maximize benefits, which is why ILADS has physician training programs.

Therapies for most serious diseases likewise have potentially serious side effects, but the risk of fatality from long-term antibiotic therapy is quite low. For example, far more fatalities have been caused by Lyme disease than by its treatment.

The risk of fatal outcomes in the treatment of inflammatory diseases with immunosuppressive agents and cancer with chemotherapy is far higher than that with antibiotic therapy, but the difference in those diseases is that they are well accepted by CDC as legitimate so that the risk is deemed worthy. I would further counter that in the rare case reports of patients who died during therapy for Lyme disease, there was indeed evidence of infection, albeit not meeting strict CDC surveillance reporting criteria in all cases.

Although it's correct that some therapies being used to treat chronic Lyme patients are of unproven efficacy, the high rates of treatment failures of even early, and most certainly late Lyme, are quite well-documented in the medical literature. It has been demonstrated in study after study without equivocation that short-term antibiotics are not effective in a great many cases. This, coupled with the documentation of microbial persistence despite such short term antibiotic therapies, makes the case for longer and better treatments. It's not uncommon in medicine for innovative therapies to be used in patients before well-designed trials document their utility. I see it all the time in other diseases.

Mead: "the reports of cases of Lyme being mistaken for other diseases are really quite rare"
Phillips: There are a great many cases in the published medical literature where Lyme disease has been mistaken for other diseases. Of course, in these cases the diagnosis of Lyme was eventually made, hence the ability to have the published reports. The natural question which follows is how many patients never get appropriately diagnosed with Lyme, never get treated, and remain in the category of 'other disease'.

In my clinical experience of treating over 20,000 patients, I see patients come in with diagnoses of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, various inflammatory disorders, cardiac symptoms, and MS on a regular basis. When I find evidence for Lyme and/or other zoonotic infection such as bartonella, the large majority of these patients markedly improve with antibiotic therapy.

Mead: "...patients who have been told they have Lyme and are then treated for Lyme, when in fact they have other things: pituitary adenomas, other types of malignancy, and some of those patients were seriously harmed by being given a diagnosis and long term therapy for Lyme disease when in fact their underlying condition went untreated."
Phillips: Medical mistakes will occur as long as the practice of medicine exists. Of that I'm certain. It's crucial for physicians in any area of medicine to pursue the correct diagnoses. But again, if we examine the published literature, there are relatively few reports of Lyme being diagnosed instead of another serious diagnosis which was missed.

Mead: "Why there seems to be so much controversy, I'm not really entirely clear."
"There is a lot of misinformation about Lyme disease, about basic facts about it that are spread a great deal on the internet."
"I fear that sometimes if people have heard something enough times, they come to really believe that it must be true."
Phillips: I very much believe that Dr. Mead is earnest in his statements. But then again, I'm conflicted because such statements appear to me to be myopic at best. How could this intelligent physician working at the highest levels of CDC not realize why there is so much controversy?

Bias blind spot in medical terminology refers to recognizing the impact of biases on the judgment of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one's own judgment. Published studies demonstrate that bias blind spot is pervasive in humans, begins in childhood, and is greater in individuals with greater cognitive ability. Confirmation bias in medical terminology refers to the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. Published evidence documents that confirmation bias is very common and can lead to implacable decision making.

I think that it's all too easy for intelligent individuals in large groups to fall prey to these biases.

Mead: "There have been a number of studies, including one just published recently in the New England Journal from the Netherlands, which have looked at longer courses of antibiotic therapy for these patients, and of course what they find is that when patients get that therapy that they improve. The problem is that the patients who got the placebo also improved at the same rate. So I think it's a little bit misleading to suggest that there's been no science done on this problem."
"We can't just dismiss out of hand the numerous studies that have been done."
"We certainly do recognize that there are patients who've had Lyme disease and who have been treated and who will have persistent subjective symptoms, as I mentioned fatigue, some difficulty with their sleep, and with thinking, and with muscle aches and pains.

Those patients we refer to has having 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome'. So we recognize that that condition exists. The fundamental question is what is the cause of that condition? Is it a persistent infection? Or is it a complication of prior infection? And what is the best treatment for it. Is it long-term antibiotics or not? On the first question, we don't know the answer. It's possible that it's either one of those. We do have data on the second question. As I mentioned, a number of placebo-controlled trials which have looked at patients with 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome' and given them various courses of prolonged antibiotic and the bottom line of those studies is that overall they do not seem to benefit those patients in the long run."
Phillips: The gold standard in microbiology for diagnosing an infectious disease has always been to culture the organism alive. Despite notorious difficulties in culturing B. burgdorferi, in about 30 studies this organism has been cultured alive from patients despite at least standard antibiotic therapy, and in many cases after antibiotics far in excess of what is deemed curative by IDSA and CDC.

If the pathogen that causes a disease is still present in conjunction with symptoms compatible with that infection, it would appear to me that these 'fundamental questions about the cause of long term symptoms' should have been answered a very long time ago. To add insult to injury, recent studies from Tulane, Johns Hopkins, and Northeastern University all demonstrate that we can't even kill B. burgdorferi in the test tube with the currently recommended antibiotics.

I cannot in good conscience use the term 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome' given the wealth of published information that this organism persists. It is, I believe, by its very definition, an illogical construct. What are the chances that a second disease of mysterious etiology but with the same symptoms as the first disease, would come and replace the first disease when there is published evidence that the pathogen which causes the first disease persists despite both short and long-term antibiotics?

There are numerous chronic bacterial infections which require long-term combination antibiotic therapies: Tuberculosis, leprosy, coxiella endcocarditis, brucellosis, Whipple's. Why should Lyme be different?

By referring to patients with persistent symptoms of Lyme disease after a short course of antibiotics as 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome' this may produce a de facto fait accompli, in that such patients, when desperately searching for answers on the CDC website, may feel that antibiotics can't possibly help them.

This may only delay their care further and increase the likelihood of subsequent antibiotic treatment failure. Because semantics guide patient care, I believe that the term 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome' is harmful.

In response to the second question, it's true that there have been a number of studies addressing the response to antibiotics vs placebo of patients with persistent symptoms after Lyme disease, but I think that it's very important to specify what that number is and what those studies showed. There have only been 3 NIH-funded randomized placebo controlled studies looking at this problem since 2001. New Lyme infections as estimated by CDC are over 329,000 cases per year, which is more than new diagnoses of invasive breast cancer and HIV combined, yet the NIH has only funded 3 studies on this topic, and two of those 3 studies have demonstrated responses to antibiotics, albeit imperfect responses, as explored in the following discussion.

The first study was by Klempner. This study evaluated antibiotic vs placebo. The study was terminated early due to the determined likelihood that a beneficial effect would not be found. When this was critically analyzed with biostatistical methods, an article was published which I believe demonstrates that Klempner's study was so poorly designed and analyzed that in order for a treatment effect to have been observed, the antibiotic treated patients would have had to improve to a level of health which was a full standard deviation better than the average health of the general population. It's a reasonable hope for antibiotics to return a patient to a somewhat normal life; it's not a reasonable hope that they would improve that patient's health status to better than average.

The second study was by Krupp. It showed a reduction in fatigue in patients treated with antibiotics and not with placebo. There was no improvement in cognitive functioning. A biostatistical analysis demonstrated that fatigue was the only outcome of the study for which it was properly designed.

The third study was by Fallon. This was, in my opinion, the best designed of the 3 trials. It demonstrated improved cognition in antibiotic treated patients and not placebo, but these patients relapsed when antibiotics were discontinued. There were also benefits to antibiotic treated patients in fatigue and body pain by subgroup analysis.

Another study was performed by Cameron, which demonstrated benefits to antibiotics and not placebo across quality of life assessments. However, this study may have had statistical issues with baseline randomization.

The PLEASE study from The Netherlands to which Dr. Mead is referring is, in my opinion, a study looking for a question to answer but failing to find one. When studies are designed, they must be designed thoughtfully to answer important questions. An important question which requires further study is whether longer and innovative antibiotic treatment regimens are superior to placebo in patients with chronic Lyme symptoms after a previous short course of antibiotics. The PLEASE study did not have a true placebo group in that all patients were treated with antibiotics. Further, the patient population was heterogeneous in that although most patients had been treated previously with antibiotics, some had not been previously treated.

The placebo aspect of this study was such that after 2 weeks of IV antibiotics, the patients then received further oral antibiotics vs placebo. There was no benefit to oral antibiotics piggybacked directly onto the IV antibiotics. Again, very little useful information, if anything, in my opinion, can be gleaned from a study using a heterogeneous patient population in which all of them received some form of antibiotic.

Mead: "We are very concerned about patients who are ill, both those patients with 'post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome as well as those patients who may have been misdiagnosed with it."
Phillips: The only way for real progress to be made is to consider a problem from all sides with, to paraphrase from Buddhism, the proverbial 'new eyes'. Abraham Lincoln famously countered confirmation bias by forming his cabinet with those that publicly disagreed with him. Why isn't the CDC doing something similar? Why isn't the IDSA?

IDSA physicians, assuming that they follow IDSA Guidelines, are not able to see the beneficial effect of following ILADS Guidelines because they don't treat in that way. However, ILADS physicians see the other side of the equation every day in the form of innumerable treatment failures after short term and limited range antibiotic treatment options.

I think it's very compelling that a study funded by CDC and published in 2015 demonstrated that the majority of US physicians polled treat Lyme disease with antibiotics for longer than 4 weeks, which is in excess of what IDSA Guidelines recommend.

If someone of a CDC/IDSA centric view were to have confirmation bias, they may interpret this data as a wake-up call to better educate physicians on the proper way to treat Lyme disease.

However, a more neutral approach might be to ask oneself if there is a reason that most physicians aren't following IDSA Guidelines. Perhaps it's because they don't work well in curing patients.

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These Charts Show What the Paris Climate Agreement Is Up Against
BERLIN -- There has been a heated debate over the last few years about if and how we can prevent the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. At the Paris climate conference last year, countries set out an even more ambitious goal -- keeping the world under 1.5C of warming. We know relatively little about the benefits, risks and challenges associated with reaching the 1.5C target, but our knowledge in the area is expanding rapidly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is now tasked with mapping out the state of the scientific knowledge on the 1.5C goal in a report due in the autumn of 2018 that is expected to inform future international negotiations. And first, at a meeting this week in Geneva, 60 experts and government officials are coming together to scope that study.

The 1.5C goal is elusive

There are many open scientific questions around the costs and benefits of keeping global warming below 2C versus 1.5C that will need to be addressed by this special report. Whether we can feasibly reach 1.5C -- and how -- will be the most important.

Many experts see a growing dissonance between the increasing ambitions of climate policy and the lack of success in achieving sustained emission reductions today. So far, there is no track record for reducing emissions globally. Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have been rising at a faster pace during the last decade than previously -- despite growing awareness and political action across the globe.

"co2

The remaining net amount of CO2 that can still be released to the atmosphere in order to keep temperatures rise below 1.5C is close to zero. Even in the most optimistic case, it will not take longer than five years to exhaust the remaining carbon budget at current rates of CO2 emissions. It will be, on the other hand, about 10-25 years before the world crosses the budget line for 2C.

So is reaching 1.5C goal still thinkable? The initial evidence in the last IPCC report points towards the (theoretical) existence of emission reduction pathways consistent with the 1.5C goal, but the technological, economic and institutional requirements are enormous. Take all of the most difficult features of individual pathways to 2C -- like fast and ambitious climate action in all countries of the world, the full availability of all required emissions reduction and carbon removal technologies, as well as aggressive energy demand reductions across the globe -- the feasibility of which were so heatedly debated prior to Paris. This gives you an idea of the challenge associated with the more ambitious 1.5C goal.

"solar

Solar panels in the village of Dharnai in Bihar, India, on July 9, 2015. (Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Keeping the temperature increase below 1.5C appears rather elusive -- the institutional challenge in mobilizing adequate action at the timescales required appears too big. Still, positive surprises, unexpected technological breakthroughs or rapidly changing attitudes and ambitions may well occur and keep the 1.5C goal within reach.

What kind of technologies we would need to meet a 1.5C goal? One prominent feature of 1.5C pathways is their fundamental dependence on the ability to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere through carbon dioxide removal technologies. Such CO2 removals buy us time, while we are reducing emissions towards a fully decarbonized world economy -- as with a bank loan, we overshoot our carbon budget in the short term and pay it back later, with interest. All 1.5C pathways to date are characterized by such an overshoot.

"climate

But the amount of CO2 we need to remove from the atmosphere is staggering: roughly speaking, every unit of CO2 we release around the globe from today onwards will need to be compensated for during the 21st century. In total, we would need to store 10-25 years worth of emissions at current rates under the Earth's crust.

Is that possible? We need a fine-grained exploration of all the ways to extract carbon from the atmosphere. These include biochar, afforestation, direct air capture, enhanced weathering or bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

"co2

Currently, all of these technologies seem to have stark limits: some are currently hugely expensive while others require large amounts of land and may involve potentially large risks to food security or biodiversity. It is therefore prudent to believe that a portfolio of carbon dioxide removal options will need to be established to stand a chance of meeting the 1.5C goal.

But there is widespread skepticism about developing and deploying some components of removal technologies. For example, in the case of BECCS, there is opposition both against wider deployment of bioenergy and carbon capture and storage. In fact, CCS has a track record of lagging behind the roadmaps laid out by the International Energy Agency. Understanding the possibilities of meeting the 1.5C goal fundamentally hinges on our ability to overcome roadblocks and learn quickly about the various technologies and their associated risks at growing scales.

So what will work?

Limiting our dependence on carbon removal technologies -- for whatever reason -- requires immediate and sustained emission reductions across the globe, another difficult feature of 1.5C pathways. But the emission reductions that countries have committed to as part of the Paris agreement are not sufficient to even modestly enter a new era of sustained emissions reductions. Unless this short-term ambition is ratcheted up substantially, global emissions growth will only be slowed down in the best case. By 2030, carbon releases will have exceeded the remaining budget for the 1.5C goal four times and used up most of the remaining budget associated with the 2C goal. If history plays out in this way, the challenge of meeting the 2C limit will be roughly the same as the one we face today for meeting the 1.5C goal -- and, by then, more vital.

The IPCC special report needs to address the questions of how to achieve sustained and substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions efficiently -- what works under what conditions and what doesn't. How can we end the renaissance of coal and initiate a global coal exit? What policies have been historically successful in reducing GHG emissions? What are the options to resolve distributional conflicts underlying the climate problem? By providing such a knowledge base for solutions to the climate problem, the IPCC special report could turn out to be of real value for policymakers as well as future international negotiations. The biggest threat is that it will exclusively focus on the long-term. This would risk diverting too many valuable resources away from what is needed now: jumpstarting a legacy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions towards a completely carbon-neutral world.

Also on WorldPost:

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Weekend Roundup: The Olympic Prism
The modern Olympics have become a global platform through which countries project their image to the rest of the world. They have become a prism that refracts geopolitical and geocultural realities and aspirations.

The most expensive Olympics ever, the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, showcased Russia's revival as a strong state under the guidance of President Vladimir Putin after the humiliation of losing the Cold War. As Tokyo's new governor Yuriko Koike wrote last week in The WorldPost, she intends to use the 2020 games there to rebrand Japan as the leading edge of Asian modernization.

The 2016 Summer Olympics that kicked off last weekend in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil reflect the very rich culture of a weak state with a global outlook. The opening ceremonies highlighted the planetary theme of climate change mixed in with Brazil's trademark samba and a catwalk by its iconic model, Gisele Bundchen. Even as the country celebrated its first gold medal triumph of this year's games -- by a 25-year-old woman athlete from one of Rio's most notorious favelas -- the Brazilian Senate moved to indict the elected president, Dilma Rousseff, and proceed with an impeachment trial.

Amplifying the climate change theme, the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, joins with the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to make the case that leaders of the world's megacities have the "capacity as local leaders to influence the course of the planet."

As a global platform, the rest of the world also projects its issues onto the games. South and North Korean gymnasts, Ron Dicker reports, unleashed a viral peace meme by taking a selfie together. Dean Obeidallah writes about a top fencing competitor who is also an American Muslim. "Ibtihaj Muhammad," he says, "is more than simply an Olympic athlete. With each lunge and parry, Muhammad is cutting through stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims."

Willa Frej notes that "photos from the Egypt-Germany women's beach volleyball game in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday paint a picture of two drastically different cultures ― one team wearing two-piece swimsuits and another revealing very little ― but attest to the way sports bring people together and promote acceptance."

"elghobashy

Doaa Elghobashy (EGY) of Egypt and Kira Walkenhorst (GER) of Germany compete. (REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)

She also reports on the unusual participation this year of a team made up of refugees -- "Team Refugees" and notes that, thanks to FilmAid, the Olympic games are being broadcast live in one of the world's largest refugee camps in Kakuma, Kenya, where some 200,000 people have fled, most from the violence in South Sudan.

This 360-degree video takes you to Rio without leaving home.

Behind all the hoopla, though, there are some disturbing realities. This photo essay shows the stark contrast of life in Rio outside the Olympics. "Circus Maximus" author Andrew Zimbalist worries that the substantial financial losses Brazil will suffer from hosting the Olympics will only worsen the country's dire fiscal crisis and dysfunctional public services. Looking back at the example of the Athens games 12 years ago, Joshua Ostroff similarly warns that taking on billions of dollars in debt will mean economic pain for Brazil and other future host nations in the years after the Olympics are over. He proposes rotating permanent sites as an alternative.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the Venezuelan crisis is on the brink of social explosion. Javier Corrales examines the latest discontent as lines to obtain staples grow longer and food riots erupt daily. "Polls reveal that even former supporters of the ruling party are intensely irritated with [President Nicolás] Maduro and blame him for their hunger," he writes. "Most want a recall referendum to remove the president. Food lines are both a symbol of the government's ineptitude and also the biggest trigger of political discontent."

Writing from Perth, Australia, Helen Clark reports on the controversy over yet another case of hacking. This time it is Vietnam suspecting Chinese hackers of breaking into airport flight information screens and posting "distorted information" about the claims of Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Richard Javad Heydarian hopes former Philippine President Fidel Ramos, who has been appointed as a special envoy to China by the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, can untangle the complex dispute between the two countries in the South China Sea.

Yavuz Baydar, a co-founder of the independent media platform Punto24, scores pundits in Turkey as downplaying the "drift to autocracy" in the wake of the recent coup attempt and instead focusing their hostility on criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Western media. Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden report that Gambian migrants are giving up on the dream sold to them by migrant brokers that they would find work and good pay in China. Now they are doing whatever they can to return home.

Tom Cohen ponders what Plato might think of Facebook. "To live and think well is based upon self-discipline, consideration and cooperation," he writes. "None of these tenets are antithetical to social media, only unutilized. ... People rarely come to new understandings based upon arguments read and shared over social media. They choose their micro-culture, their feed and they gorge intemperately from it."

Lest all the bad news suggest the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in an interview that things have gotten a lot better over recent centuries. "A shift in the summum bonum, or the highest good, towards loose humanism, where life is better than death, education better than ignorance, health better than sickness," he says, "is what I believe we are seeing currently."

Finally, our Singularity series this week looks at love and artificial intelligence. "As thinking machines become more integrated into our lives," Raya Bidshahri writes, "we must expect a transformation in how we define what it means to be conscious; what it means to live and to die; and ultimately, what it means to love a non-human being."

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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Voodoo Medicine: Time to Stop
The world's most celebrated athlete standing on the podium in Rio in honor of receiving yet another gold medal has something important in common with your lazy uncle throwing back a cold one in his Barcalounger. Yes, swimming powerhouse Michael Phelps, purple-spotted from cupping therapy, and your slovenly relative with a beer gut both share a bond - a weakness in succumbing to the allure of voodoo medicine. Modern-day snake oil salesmen hawking quick cures and TV doctors peddling the latest diet miracle with blatantly ridiculous claims are everywhere on the tube, social media, the supermarket and old-fashioned billboards. Anecdotes and celebrity testimonials have in many cases replaced evidence-based medicine in our popular culture. Diet, nutrition and medical claims are thrown together in an olio of nonsense of false promise and false hope.

Problems with Western Medicine

Let's pause here a moment. Before ripping further into the obvious drawbacks of voodoo medicine, that is, any medical claims absent substantiating data, let's first emphasize that of course evidence-based medicine (often called western medicine) has its own set of serious problems and significant limitations. Clinical studies can be and have been tainted by pharmaceutical company sponsors or by doctors with financial interests in the outcome; negative data can be buried or manipulated; drugs shown to be safe in small trials can turn out to have significant or even deadly side effects in a broader population; treatment can lead to addiction; and interactions among different drugs can be hazardous. Biology is complex, and our understanding of disease incomplete, meaning that treatments are often hit or miss or luck of the draw rather than based on first principles. Perhaps the biggest flaw with modern western medicine, though, is that we have created a false expectation that our ills can be cured with a pill when it fact the cure more often lies in making difficult lifestyle changes. Smoking, lack of exercise and overeating come to mind. But these flaws in modern medicine are, in theory, amenable to improvement because the foundation is evidence-based. With scrutiny and reproducibility comes an accountability that will eventually expose weaknesses to be addressed. Or at least that possibility exists, which is not the case for claims that are made with no attempt at rigorous evaluation - like cupping.

The Allure of False Hope

Cupping can be traced to ancient Chinese practices used ostensibly to treat a variety of ailments including arthritis and muscle soreness. There is no credible clinical evidence that cupping is anything more than a placebo - or one big hickey -- with no medical benefit at all. And consider this question - did you see any of the Chinese athletes doing cupping therapy? Think about it. Perhaps if this ancient Chinese treatment really worked over millennia we might see Chinese athletes partaking of its benefits?

Like their cousin cupping, faddish cryotherapy and chelation also offer an alternative to actual medicine. Chelation, which has a legitimate application in treating acute heavy metal poisoning, is sold instead as a cure or treatment for arthritis, hormone imbalances, and heart disease, which unscrupulous practitioners attribute to "heavy metal toxicity" or some other false claim about why chelation is beneficial. No scientific evidence supports this. All of these claims are unproven. The same applies to cryotherapy (or more faddishly whole body cryotherapy, or WBC), touted as a way to slow aging, improve sleep, enhance athletic performance and reduce various pains. There is not a shred of credible scientific support for these assertions. This list goes on and on: Ayurvedic medicine, aromatherapy, homeopathy, shamanism, naturopathy, Hopi Indian ear candling, Sekkotsu, Christian faith healing, stem cell therapy, probiotics, treatment for systemic "inflammation"...

These therapies and treatments all share the same fatal flaw; none has undergone rigorous clinical studies to determine safety and efficacy. In the absence of such trials, it cannot possibly be known if the drug or treatment is effective, if there will be serious side effects, if it will actually make the condition worse, or it will interfere with drugs or treatments that would otherwise help. Wishful thinking is not a viable treatment plan. In the absence of rigorous evaluation, you simply cannot know if your favorite treatment or supplement works no matter how many convincing testimonials you hear or how many anecdotes you may read. You or Grandma or Aunt Tilly or your best friend are just making it up based on lore and hearsay, no different than randomly going into a supermarket, picking out a package of peas and claiming that eating half a bag a day (but only if eaten at noon) will cure arthritis. The claim is convincing if the familiar face of a celebrity testifies that eating a bag of peas each day at noon will cure your ills or if an actor dressed as a doctor, removing a pair of glasses to simulate intimacy, solemnly attests to the benefits of pea eating. But testimonials and anecdotes do not make the claim any more valid. You might think chelating works because someone you trust told you so - but you are doing nothing different than picking out that bag of peas.

Intersection of Voodoo Diet and Medicine

Claims surrounding nutrition are equally noxious. Of all the voodoo treatments mentioned, my personal favorites are those meant to address the curse of "inflammation" because these claims are the perfect confluence between voodoo medicine and diet. Here is a typical claim:

"Inflammation controls our lives. Have you or a loved one dealt with pain, obesity, ADD/ADHD, peripheral neuropathy, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, migraines, thyroid issues, dental issues, or cancer? If you answered yes to any of these disorders you are dealing with inflammation."

Well, no, inflammation does not control our lives. Like many others, this author claims inflammation is responsible for a huge range of maladies, ranging from Alzheimer's to lupus to stroke to fibromyalgia; I counted 30 on this site. This is nothing but cringe-worthy. Yes, inflammation is terribly important, and is associated with disease. But the oversimplification and weak link to biology that we find on sites like these are misdirection from understanding what is actually happening in our bodies. Such misunderstanding leads to odd nutritional or medical recommendations that are useless at best or dangerous at worst.

We are awash in a sea of these crazy and exaggerated claims about inflammation that have taken root in popular culture, as even a quick Google search reveals:

"Chronic inflammation is the root cause of many serious diseases." No it is not; it is an important step, but one of many, in the progression of diseases generally caused by bad habits.

"Inflammation is the cause of nearly all disease." Wrong at every level; there are many diseases not associated with inflammation, and it is not typically the cause of disease. Rather inflammation is a pathway to pathology shared across many diseases.

"Ginger and turmeric have been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties." I love ginger and turmeric, but there is scant epidemiology to support the claim. It is just wishful thinking and the kind of bogus claim that distracts us from reality.

"Excess sugar intake will contribute to inflammation. It's not just the obvious sugar but also the hidden sugars." There is no such thing as hidden sugars; and sugar itself has nothing to do with inflammation, other than adding calories, which in excess we know can cause inflammation.

"Phytochemicals - natural chemicals found in plant foods... are also believed to help reduce inflammation." There is no evidence for this statement. Of course, eating plant rather than animal products would reduce saturated fat intake, which in excess can cause inflammation. Cyanide is a natural chemical found in plants so the endorsement here is not ringing.

"Inflammation has also been linked to unbalanced levels of certain hormones, such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. That's why chronic inflammation often inflicts menopausal women, causing conditions like osteoporosis, weight gain, and adult acne." This claim is not substantiated by any serious clinical research. None.

"Foods that combat inflammation include tomatoes, green leafy vegetables and nuts like almonds and walnuts." Well, no, that is not true at all. These foods simply do not promote inflammation, which is not the same as combatting it. Avoiding rotten food is not the same thing as treating food poisoning.

"Monica has done exhaustive research on the nutritional components of 1,600 common foods, and rated them according to scientifically validated factors related to inflammation." Well, scientists would be surprised by this since there are no "scientifically validated factors related to inflammation." Just foods with or without saturated fats, which we know in excess can lead to inflammation. This does not require "exhaustive research."

Voodoo Nutrition and the Curse of Supplements

Atkins, Dean Ornish, the Zone, South Beach, Glycemic Index... this list of fad diets too is nearly endless. Grocery stores sell magazines shouting out blatantly false claims that promise to help readers "lose weight like a teenager," "lose belly fat," "lose 11 lbs a week," and "fill up on fat-burning super foods." We are sold hormone supplements, told the benefits of "anti-inflammatory foods" and promised results if we only would take acetyl coenzyme A. These promises cannot be kept because they defy the simplest laws of biology and physics.

Dr. Oz has on his website a section entitled, "The Top 10 Fat-Burning Foods." This is what the FDA and nutritionists say about fat-burning foods: there is no such thing. Dr. Oz is conning you, feeding you pure nonsense, selling miracle cures no better than snake oil vendors of old. FDA says, "Consumers should know that there is no such thing as a fat-burning pill." Just to be clear, the FDA adds further about fat-burning foods that, "No substance has ever been shown to actually do this." It is a big lie, a scam.

People daily pop, drink and chow down on nutritional supplements with great abandon - without the slightest evidence that any of them have any potential benefit. But things are worse than that; not only do you not know if the supplement you take has any health benefit at all, you actually don't know if you are taking the supplement you intend. You may well be taking something detrimental to health or something potentially healthy but in unsafe doses. This from an expose in the New York Times:

Among the attorney general's findings was a popular store brand of ginseng pills at Walgreens, promoted for "physical endurance and vitality," that contained only powdered garlic and rice. At Walmart, the authorities found that its ginkgo biloba, a Chinese plant promoted as a memory enhancer, contained little more than powdered radish, houseplants and wheat -- despite a claim on the label that the product was wheat- and gluten-free. Three out of six herbal products at Target -- ginkgo biloba, St. John's wort and valerian root, a sleep aid -- tested negative for the herbs on their labels. But they did contain powdered rice, beans, peas and wild carrots. And at GNC, the agency said, it found pills with unlisted ingredients used as fillers, like powdered legumes, the class of plants that includes peanuts and soybeans, a hazard for people with allergies.

The Times is not alone in their summary findings, as we see from an article from Consumer Health Choices:

Supplement manufacturers routinely, and legally, sell their products without first having to demonstrate that they are safe and effective. Unlabeled ingredients found in many supplements are: bitter orange, chaparral, colloidal silver, coltsfoot, comfrey, country mallow, germanium, greater celandine, kava, lobelia, and yohimbe. The FDA has warned about at least eight of them, some as long ago as 1993. Of the more than 54,000 dietary supplement products in the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database, more than 40,000 have no level of safety and effectiveness supported by scientific evidence.

Next time you have an urge to take fish oil, ginger and ginkgo biloba, just pop some peas into your mouth; there is no evidence one is more healthful than the other.

There is no room here to debunk the ocean of nonsense we encounter daily; this small sample of crazy is not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. The voodoo surrounding probiotics and hormone supplements for example is each in itself a blog, or book. But understand that unless you restrict your intake of drugs and supplements to those proven to be effective and safe through rigorous scientific evaluation, you are just randomly putting stuff in your mouth. You should stop doing that. And Michael Phelps should stop cupping; it is embarrassing.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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The Freedom To Fail: Simulations And The Future Of Our Species
"Plans are useless. Planning is everything." - Dwight David Eisenhower

If all goes as planned, in 18 days the hatch will open and our one-year mission to simulated space will end. Thanks in part to this mission, if all goes as planned, a generation from now we'll be waist-deep in our first attempt to land humans on Mars. Between now and then, plans will accumulate: a plan for building a launch vehicle; a plan for getting our stuff there (hopefully, most of it in advance); a plan for how to select and train and feed and water a crew of four or more for three years. Sometimes, twenty years feels like enough time to make all this happen. Then, I remember how long it took to plan, design, build, test, launch, and land the Mars Curiosity Rover: ~2004-2012. When a robot's one-way trip was eight years in the making, twenty years to get people safely to Mars and back suddenly seems like a mighty tall order.

Fortunately, we've already started. Our mission is proof of that.

To be fair, it took ~8 years to build not 1 but 2.5 Curiosity Rovers: the one that went to Mars, the one that lived in the test bed on Earth, and the one that existed in pieces in a software and hardware testing lab. Credit: By NASA via Wikimedia Commons.

Simulations like ours are a critical part of any serious endeavor. The reason is simple: humans need to practice in order to get things right. Whatever we attempt - be it a geometry problem, a round-house kick, or an asteroid rendezvous - the odds of our success are inextricably linked to how many times we've tried that particular maneuver before. Entropy will always introduce unforeseen twists and turns. The more times we've simulated the scenario, the less likely we are to fall flat when our standing plans fail.

Sgt. Brian Matthews, scout sniper and Marine Corps Martial Arts Program instructor trainer, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, demonstrates a MCMAP technique as part of the martial arts demonstration during Marine Day in Times Square. Credit: Sgt. Jimmy D. Shea, MarineCorps NewYork via Wikimedia Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0).

Case in point: we planned July's water supply down to within a centimeter of our tank's low-water mark. Based on the last ten months of data, our chief engineer was able to make a call that accurate. His projections were dead-on. Nonetheless, our refill plan failed. When the appointed time came, no water 'bot arrived.

This was due to a mechanical failure on their end. On our end, there is an emergency water tank for just such scenarios. However, it hadn't been touched in years. Like a stubborn Schrodinger's box, the quality of the water in our tank was totally unknown, even after we opened it. Also unknown: when we would get more water delivered.

Fortunately, though our initial plan failed, we've been practicing water extraction and water restriction for nearly the entire mission. A a result, we had the power to SCIENCE our way out of disaster by distilling the emergency water: by boiling it and channeling the evaporated contents into a container. Within hours of us realizing that we weren't going to get our scheduled water delivery, we had just such a system set up and running .

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Thanks to water restriction days, which were an invention of this crew, we knew how much water we needed to produce to survive and by what margin. Experience also told us how much power we could spare to run the electric heaters that were boiling the water one pot at a time into steam that collected onto plastic sheeting, which then ran down until it gathered underneath the weight of a metal spoon and dripped into the bottom of the black storage bin in which the entire contraption was contained.

In this way, clean water collected slowly and steadily. Every so often, one of us would come along with a baster, suck the distilled water out of the bottom of the bins and add more water to the pots. This evaporation system produced liters of purified water: enough to keep us going, at least for a while.

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This crew dealt with that level of potential disaster without so much as breaking a sweat. We didn't even have to change the rhythm of our day much to do it. I'm not sure how a crew who had only been up here for only a month, or four, would have handled it, which brings us to a question we are asked fairly frequently: What would happen in a real emergency?

Let's say that we hadn't been up here for very long, or that the crew was inexperienced with water reclamation; let say there wasn't enough plastic sheeting to make such a system work, or there weren't enough clamps to hold the sheeting in place (we would default to duct tape, but let's just assume for now that we're running low on that, too). What would have been our fate?

In a real emergency, there are people on this land mass who could make their way up the mountain with bottled water. On Mars, not so much. Going forward, to be sure that crews can handle it both physically and psychologically, we should probably simulate water shortages, as well as food shortages, power shortages, and all the depravation-situations with which the six of us are now intimately familiar.

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It goes without saying: for most of us, becoming an expert in water purification was never the plan - nor was mastering composting toilet maintainence, repairing hiking boots with duct tape, or any of several dozen things we've taught ourselves over these last 11.5 months. The wonderful thing about our experiment is that we have the opportunity to learn and the freedom to fail - even, one could argue, the imperative. Now is the time to test out these scenarios; to try our hands at pushing limits and pulling ourselves back from the brink. Sometimes, we won't quite make it, and that's ok. We won't fall too hard or fall too far - for now.

Our relative successes and failures from the last 348 days - at growing radishes, conserving water and power, staying in shape, and getting along with each other - will become part of data that goes into planning the first human missions to Mars. Owing to successes and failures from this and other simulations, humankind will master the art and science of planning long-duration space missions. It's the only way we can acquire this skill in advance. In a generation or more, whether the actual plan succeeds as intended (they rarely do), mastery of interplanetary mission planning will sooner or later see us safely through to the next world. Of that much, at least, I am certain.

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Reinventing The Drake Equation

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The Drake Equation is a thought problem created in 1961 by Astronomer Frank Drake that contained a number of factors that taken together could produce a number meant to indicate how many intelligent and detectable civilizations may exist in the Milky Way galaxy which is our home in the Universe.

The classical equation looks like this where all the factors are multiplied together:

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

The factors break down as:
N = number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way

R = number of stars in our galaxy
fp = Fraction of stars with planets
ne = number of planets that where life as we know it can exist
fl = % of those planets where life arises
fi = % of those planets (fl) where intelligence develops
fc = % of those societies that develop electromagnetic science
fL = % of societies that emit electromagnetically into space for a long time

The Drake equation actually required guesses for many important factors. It also provided the means to quantify with a value the number of potential civilizations that emitted some form of intelligent signals that could be picked up by our current technology at the time. Drake had formulated this equation prior to any Exoplanet research and finds but as it turns out, those finds change everything...

As you can imagine and for those familiar with the equation, we dont have actual data for MOST of the Classical Drake equation factors, but they are guesses, based on human trends, human technology leaps, and so on. So with only one known life-bearing planet at the time, ours, the calculation of the ultimate value for the Drake Equation was always a conservative guess based on comparison to the progress of human civilization and the technologic precipices we faced. Naturally we dont yet know of any advanced civilization. We are all we know. We represent a single data point and only one such point is not sufficient to create a trend or an understanding.

With the most recent additions to the Exoplanet list however we at least have a way to make more educated guesses for some of the Drake factors using statistical sampling of known data. We still dont have the proof of extraterrestrial intelligent life yet but some of the Drake factors can be addressed with more accuracy. In our current Exoplanet count we puts the total number of Exoplanets somewhat north of 3300. This is very exciting. Originally the planet hunting results were more limited, providing us with the ability to find only the biggest Jupiter sized planets. But as techniques were honed to a finer art, we started to find smaller more Earth sized planets.

In the Exoplanet catalog of known planets a fair number of our confirmed planets are known as "Super-Earths". The term is the nomenclature applied to any planet that is under 10 Earth masses. Super-Earth implies Earth -like I know but the term doesnt distinguish between planets that are habitable or not. It just says that if its between 1 and 10 times Earth's mass, its a Super-Earth. Such a planet could be a massive paradise, a seething maelstrom of gases, or an airless rock.

The ability to find such planets however represents a significant improvement in planet detection capability. Currently it is theorized in some circles that as many as 10% of the stars in our galaxy may have suitable habitable zone planets, which is a number between 10 billion and 40 billion. There are more conservative estimates as well but these numbers are also in mainstream thought.

A number of factors in the equation have requirements not readily apparent. The planet must be in that habitable zone around its star. If you read my Huffington Post blog article on Habitable Zones you know that this zone is that not too hot not to cold region around any star where a planet could support liquid water and could manage to hold onto an atmosphere. In addition to the habitable zone requirement, a stable star is also a requirement. Such a restriction removes a number of hotter more energetic stars from our hunting list because the radiation and strong stellar winds emanating from those particular stars would likely have blown the atmospheres off the planets or irradiated their surfaces to sterility.

(You can read about this in Understanding Exoplanets : The Habitable Zone at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-dantonio/ )

Returning to the Drake Equation, we have to consider that when Frank Drake wrote up the thought problem that eventually became the Drake Equation, he did this THIRTY FOUR YEARS before Exoplanet searches started producing some candidates and confirmed results... We had no confirmed Exoplanets up until that point. Drake had to formulate the equation without a single planet other than the Earth as a starting point.

So as more data was obtained, analyzed and as more planets were added to the list, it became more obvious that the Classical Drake Equation no longer worked as the complexity of each term increased, Thus, the Drake Equation was reworked by a number of organizations and dozens of new papers were written addressing the new data and how it bodes for life in the Universe.

These days the Drake Equation two particular versions of the re-imagined Drake equation take front and center and produce different results between them. Both I am happy to say are more optimistic. One version linked below appears in Astrobiology magazine, and discusses the Drake equation from two separate trains of thought: The Classical Drake equation and the Statistical Drake equation. The Statistical version is a much more complex equation that takes into account various new potential paths that an alien civilization can traverse on its way to being a star faring society.

The second version, a similarly credible version postulated by an MIT professor changes some of the original parameters in the equation to better suit the known data. For instance, that version directly considers the stability of the star system, a key factor when trying to find long term suitability for life like us.

Looking at the Drake Equation with these new eyes and most especially with new data suggests a very DIFFERENT outlook than Frank Drake had postulated. New data brings us new outlooks and the new Drake equations showcase the new data and how it works for us to better understand the Universe.

One thing that the articles linked below dont directly address other than in passing is the capability of a civilization to utilize advanced propulsion such as the Alcubierre Drive which is a 'warp' drive of sorts. The reason is one of focus. The new formulations to the Drake equation care only about whether a civilization can be detected. It doesn't address interstellar travel. It is enough that they are detectable and that is what the equation is meant to help puzzle out.

Claudio Maccone who worked on one version of the Drake equation calls it more of a Statistical Drake Equation. That equation considers a statistical variation in the factors because of the many variables involved. Without considering any statistical variation the new formulation gives us 4590 potential advanced civilizations in the galaxy.

Considering the variations that MUST exist, formulating an answer to the statistical version of the Drake Equation indicates there are potentially between 0 and more than 15000 advanced societies in our galaxy alone.

In Addition, Sara Seager at MIT utilized the current finds in Exoplanet research and a new approach that doesn't make the Drake equation obsolete but creates another "new edition" that helps us predict the probability of detecting another civilization.

Her equation looks slightly different:

N = Ns x Fq x Fhz x Fo x Fl x Fs

Where the overall Number N is the number of planets that have a detectable atmospheric content that contains compounds known to support life. That number depends on these factors:
Ns: The number of stars in the sample that were used
Fq: The number of quiet stars
Fhz: The number of planets in the Habitable Zones around their stars
Fo: The number of actual observable systems we can see
Fl: The fraction of those many planets where life has arisen
Fs: The fraction of planets with detectable spectral signatures

Her calculations of a sample of 30,000 stars gives N=2. This means that in her sample of 30,000 stars there are potentially 2 star systems that are predicted to show detectable, active life on a habitable zone planet. 2 civilizations seems a bit pessimistic at first glance but that number conceals a vast probability when you consider all of the stars in the galaxy and extrapolate. Why?

Because our galaxy alone has between 100 and 400 BILLION stars. So on the low end of the estimate of only 100 billion stars her analysis predicts just over 6.5 million possible civilizations and at the higher end estimate of 400 billion stars in the galaxy, 26 million possible systems with intelligence are predicted.

What does this all mean? It means, significantly, that science is on the side of those who suspect that there is other reasonably intelligent life in the Universe. Whether it is space faring or not is beyond the scope of the equation as is a prediction of such a civilization's technological level. In my book "The Populated Universe" I discuss the many places we see the fundamental building blocks of life in the Universe.

The Universe makes these necessary items naturally without our help and we are here because of this process. So my supposition is that Life is the RULE not the exception. It is a big step to commit to that line of thinking because that position still depends on an expectation of scientific discovery that has yet to be made. But I am comfortable looking up on a starry night and mulling over the possibilities!

I hope you enjoyed this foray into the Drake equation and the children it has generated!

The links to articles that discuss the new Drake Equations are below

Claudio Maccone's research: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/at-last-how-many-alien-civilizations-are-there/

Sara Seager's research: http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-a-brand-new-equation-reveals-about-our-odds-of-fin-531575395

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Building a Pathway to Engineering for Our Daughters - Brick by Brick
By Ali P. Gordon
UCF Forum columnist

As a father of young elementary and middle school-aged kids, I'm also curious to know exactly how my undergrad students came to be interested in mechanical engineering. An exchange with a UCF student might go like this: "You did a great job on the exam. Congrats! By the way, how did you get interested in mechanical engineering, anyway?" I mentally log the answers for my kids' future benefit.

Any faculty member who is worth her or his salt will agree that teaching a class facilitates the instructor's learning just as much if not more than the students in the audience. When we give challenging problems to our engineering students, they never cease to periodically impress us by deriving solutions that are more elegant than our own.

Every lecture and every office-hour interaction with our students, for that matter, is also a chance for us faculty to incrementally advance our knowledge.

After teaching approximately 50 courses, the hundreds of idiosyncratic informal discussions that I reflect on with students are by themselves insignificant, but as a collection definitely worth noting. When kids spend a significant amount of their free time in the garage working on cars or home-improvement projects or working on model cars or most common of all playing with Lego sets, some of them develop a disposition for technology.

To the parents of kids who routinely and independently engage in these sorts of activities, you could very well have a budding mechanical engineer on your hands. Stay the course.

Minorities and women are underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. According to U.S. News & World Report, African Americans and Latinos comprise 5 and 6.2 percent of the engineering workforce, respectively. Depending on the source data, women comprise between 8 and 14 percent of mechanical engineers in the workplace. This gender imbalance in mechanical engineering classrooms is plain to see.

For parents of young daughters, we'll need to be proactive in maintaining their interests in engineering and building abutments to hold off social distractions.

As a personal note, I grew up building Lego sets just like many of my past and present students. Back then my interests were totally captured by the classic space-themed sets, and when I got a little older I could not be separated from the Technic sets featuring planes, cranes and automobiles designed for ages 11 to 16. Santa never delivered Lego Technic Space Shuttle (8480), but I still have hope.

Rather than just static structures, these more technically oriented sets feature gears, springs, pulleys, pneumatics, etc. They are abundant in their composition with the machine components essential to mechanical engineering design. Very frequently, I use gears, springs, and simple Lego constructions to help demonstrate concepts in classes and STEM summer camps.

In 2011, The Lego Group reported that 90 percent of its customers were boys; consequently, the following year Lego introduced the Lego Friends product line designed primarily for girls to relieve the gender imbalance. Think pink, purple, yellow and green hues with building sets featuring scenes in performing arts, animal rescue, camping, restaurants and the like.

They absolutely nailed it and won numerous industry and parents' choice awards. I was delighted and my four daughters have snapped up and snapped together nearly 135 Lego Friends kits. Other toy makers, like GoldieBlox and K'Nex Mighty Makers, have also tapped into this segment. These have been successful in getting more pre-teen girls thinking about engineering.

With an eye vectored towards maintaining and even enhancing our daughters' positive attitude concerning engineering, there needs to be more pre-engineering toys and games that continue to engage girls' free-time interests, especially in the early teenage years. The products that would help to facilitate this, however, leave a lot to be desired.

The Lego Group, for example, has made no compelling effort to expand the Technic product line beyond the race cars and dump trucks that it has had for decades. Visit your neighborhood Target or Walmart to see that STEM-oriented toy and game products only show up in the "boy" aisles. The implicit message in this gender-segregation is that technology is not for our daughters.

No recent Lego Design videos featuring Lego-employed master builders, showing their creations on YouTube, contain women or members of minorities groups. The consequences of this and numerous other idiosyncratic events are individually insignificant but collectively forceful in their contribution toward gender-filtration. The imminent challenges of our society's tomorrow compels us to begin formulating a diverse and capable workforce today.

Rather than merely highlighting the issue, here's some suggestions for candidate Lego Technic, K'Nex, etc. sets that would appeal across the aisles to those in their early teen years:

** Theme park rides: roller coaster, merry-go-round or pendulum
** Items for the home: cuckoo clock, multispeed oscillating fan or blender
** Mechanical animals that walk: dog, crab or spider
** Structures in the city: aerial tramway or stadium with retractable roof
** Space exploration: SpaceX rocket, satellite with retractable panels or remote-control Mars rover
** Medical devices: Mechanical prosthetic hand/arm or microscope
** Let me know if you need these products tested in class, at camp or at home.

Whether these things appear on the shelves is not something on which we parents should be fixated, however. If we want our daughters to have predilections toward technology, a "girl's" or "gender-neutral" version of a product isn't necessarily the best solution. The most elegant solution is helping her to identify problems in her world and then giving her the tools, materials, guidance and freedom to come up with her own solution.

Play well.

Ali P. Gordon is an associate professor in UCF's Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. He can be reached at ali@ucf.edu.

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ExxonMobil's Latest Campaign To Stymie Federal Climate Action

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ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson acknowledges climate change is a "serious issue," but he is still trying to undermine government efforts to curb carbon emissions.

Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax. If true, that's big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world's biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.

But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?

Let's take a closer look.

As I reported earlier this year, ExxonMobil has paid lip service to the idea of a carbon tax since 2009 but, all the while, has continued to fund federal lawmakers who resolutely oppose it. In March 2015, for example, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010 voted in favor of the prohibition. Meanwhile, in March 2013, 156 House members cosponsored a nonbinding resolution stating that "a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States." Ninety-three percent of the cosponsors were funded by -- you guessed it -- ExxonMobil.

OK, but that was then, and things can change, right? After all, last December, Ken Cohen, the company's outgoing vice president of public and government affairs, blogged about ExxonMobil's strong support for a carbon tax, noting that the company has been holding "countless private briefings with members of Congress on carbon tax policy options."

So how have the company's friends on Capitol Hill responded?

In June, the House passed a resolution stating "a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy" on a 237 to 163 vote. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013; 82 of them are documented climate science deniers. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution -- a measly 16 percent -- received ExxonMobil money.

The numbers are unambiguous: When it comes to a carbon tax, there's no escaping the fact that ExxonMobil still funds legislators who don't favor it and, by the same token, doesn't support many who do.

Disingenuous Origins

In his December blog post, Cohen traced ExxonMobil's support for a carbon tax back to January 2009, when company CEO Rex Tillerson endorsed it in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Cohen, however, neglected to explain the context for this pronounced break with ExxonMobil's long-held position against any policy that would curb carbon emissions: Tillerson was trying to derail momentum on Capitol Hill for a different approach.

Back then, Congress was seriously considering instituting a cap-and-trade system, modeled after the George H. W. Bush administration's successful plan to reduce acid rain, which would have set a cap on overall carbon emissions and established a regulated marketplace where polluters could buy and sell emissions allowances. The less carbon they emitted, the less they would pay.

The European Union had instituted such a system in 2005 and, although there were disagreements over the details, the idea of a U.S. cap-and-trade system had the support of a number of environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, and more than two dozen companies, including oil giants BP America, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Perhaps most important, the plan had the backing of President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who then controlled both houses of Congress.

Tillerson was having none of it. "A carbon tax strikes us as a more direct, transparent and effective approach" than a cap-and-trade system, he said in that January 2009 speech. "It is the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions, from investments made by companies to fuel and product choices made by consumers." Any carbon tax, he added, should be revenue-neutral, meaning it should be offset by reductions in income and corporate taxes.

But there was a major obstacle in the way of Tillerson's preferred solution: It had no political support. When California Rep. Pete Stark proposed a carbon tax just the year before, it attracted only three cosponsors.

Tillerson, who surely knew Congress wasn't about to pass a carbon tax, publicly conceded it faced long odds. "Right now, any talk of imposing new taxes would rattle the markets and individuals," he told E&E News, a trade publication, the same day he spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "...But probably later this year, I think they're going to get around to want to further investigate what their alternatives are."

As it turned out, the House narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill on a 219 to 212 vote in June 2009. In the Senate, however, it was a different story. The legislation never made it out of committee for a number of complicated reasons, but the fact that fossil fuel interests had plenty of friends in the upper chamber -- many of them longtime recipients of ExxonMobil political donations -- no doubt played a significant role. The bottom line? ExxonMobil ultimately got what it wanted by plugging a carbon tax: gridlock.

Beyond the Rhetoric

There has been some speculation about what motivated ExxonMobil to recently ramp up its pro-carbon tax rhetoric. First, with multiple investigations underway by state attorneys general of the company for misleading its shareholders and the general public about climate risks, it likely feels the need to polish its tarnished image. Second, the company knows that last December's historic U.N. climate meeting in Paris, where 195 countries committed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, means that it will be harder to maintain the status quo. Third, if and when Congress does seriously consider a carbon tax, ExxonMobil wants to position itself to influence the debate. And finally, ExxonMobil would likely benefit more than its competitors from a carbon tax, because such a tax would favor the cleaner-burning natural gas over coal and ExxonMobil has the largest natural gas reserves of any U.S. company.

These are all plausible reasons, except for one thing: The evidence suggests that the company is still doing what it can to obstruct policies to combat climate change.

Last fall, for example, California Rep. Ted Lieu -- who has not received any ExxonMobil campaign contributions -- met with the company's lobbyists in what was presumably one of the "countless private briefings" Cohen cited in his December blog. Lieu asked the lobbyists what they would do if he drafted carbon tax legislation. They replied that "they would take a look at it," Lieu told InsideClimate News. "They didn't say they wouldn't support it and they didn't say they would," he added. "It's clear that they are not going around championing their position. If they actually believe this internally, then they ought to do so in a much louder way than just quietly sticking it on a website."

In the Senate, meanwhile, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii have introduced a carbon tax bill, the "American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act." Has ExxonMobil endorsed it or lobbied on its behalf? According to Whitehouse and Schatz, no.

"Regarding ExxonMobil's alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we've seen no meaningful evidence of that," the senators said in a letter they sent to the company just yesterday. "None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil's management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation."

Conversely, House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, a climate science denier, explained to Fox News host Steve Doocy in December 2012 that he told ExxonMobil lobbyists a carbon tax was a "bad idea." "I sat down with the Exxon folks a couple of months ago," Upton said, "and let it be known that this is not a proposal that ... is going to be coming through in the House." Nevertheless, ExxonMobil donated more to Upton during the current election cycle than it did in either the 2012 or 2014 cycles.

Besides its political donations and lobbying, the company is still spending millions of dollars a year on think tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that dispute climate science and disparage climate policies, including a carbon tax. Just last month, ExxonMobil was a lead sponsor of the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) annual conference, which featured Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described free-market think tank ExxonMobil has been funding since 1998. According to one conference participant, Cass "absolutely eviscerated the case for conservatives adopting a carbon tax." Conference organizers also provided ALEC state legislator members with a sample resolution against the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to curb power plant carbon emissions.

ExxonMobil doesn't just rely on paid surrogates, however, to spread disinformation and block government action. Company executives may sing the praises of a carbon tax, but they still find time to misrepresent climate science and question the necessity of taking any action at all.

Climate Science Denial Starts at the Top

In March 2013 -- the same month 146 ExxonMobil-funded House members cosponsored a resolution against a carbon tax -- Tillerson appeared on on PBS's Charlie Rose, ostensibly to promote one. The CEO told Rose he preferred a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade system, but then he doubted whether scientists knew enough to warrant one. "The facts remain there are uncertainties around climate change, why it's changing, [and] what the principal drivers of climate change are," Tillerson claimed, repudiating the consensus among climate scientists worldwide. He also falsely claimed there is no scientific evidence of a link between global warming and extreme weather events.

Two years later, at ExxonMobil's 2015 annual shareholder meeting, Tillerson again argued that climate models are not accurate enough to justify a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels. "What if everything we do," he asked, "it turns out our models are lousy and we don't get the effects we predict?" He recommended continuing to burn fossil fuels and adapting to whatever happens, be it sea level rise or crop failures. "Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity," he said, "and those solutions will present themselves as the realities become clear."

Contrary to Tillerson's assertions, climate models have proven to be extremely accurate. A March 2013 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, for example, found that the models accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures over the previous 15 years to within a few hundredths of a degree. No matter. When given the chance to set the record straight at this year's shareholder meeting in late May, Tillerson would not back down. "My view on the competencies of the models," he said, "has really not changed."

Perhaps the most revealing statement demonstrating the depth of ExxonMobil's support for a carbon tax, however, came the day before the House resolution vote in June -- the one where nearly 90 percent of the ExxonMobil-funded House members casting a ballot voted yes, a carbon tax would hurt the U.S. economy. A Huffington Post reporter contacted ExxonMobil Media Relations Manager Alan Jeffers to find out what the company had to say. Given the company's supposedly heightened interest in persuading Congress to pass a carbon tax, one would have expected Jeffers to register the company's opposition. Certainly he would explain why the resolution was misguided and tell House members to vote no. It was what some would call a teachable moment.

So how did Jeffers respond?

"We're not commenting on the resolution."

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dave Anderson and Jayne Piepenburg provided research for this article. ExxonMobil federal campaign contribution data was supplied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Jill Stein's Dangerous Anti-Science Campaign

On July 28th, 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to ever be nominated for president on a major party ticket in the United States. Her primary battle was hard-won against democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who ran an insurgent campaign within the Democratic Party. He attempted to paint Clinton as a corrupt, corporate Democrat without the will or ability to work toward genuine political reform. He eventually endorsed Clinton for president and moved to nominate her by acclamation at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. But among his millions of followers, another candidate's name was beginning to circulate.

Dr. Jill Stein is a medical doctor and political activist who currently hails from Massachusetts. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University before going on to receive a degree from Harvard Medical School. Throughout the 1990s, she was known among environmentalists for her work fusing human health to environmental concerns. She also won the role of Town Meeting Seat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 2005 and was reelected to the seat once.

As Stein's influence grew, she earned the nomination of the Green Party and ran for President of the United States in 2012, garnering less than half of one percent of the popular vote and securing no electoral votes.

This year, once again the Green Party nominee, she hopes to change that through a populist appeal to Bernie Sanders voters. Stein laid the groundwork by essentially offering Bernie Sanders the option of running as the Green Party nominee in place of her when he lost to Clinton. It was a shrewd move, as she knew he was going to stick with Clinton. Her offer, combined with his rejection, would signal to less politically astute supporters that he wasn't serious about reform and caved to the Democratic machine.

Of course, this isn't even slightly true. Sanders dramatically altered the Democratic Party platform, which was a huge victory for his movement and would've been impossible had he defected to the Green Party before the election cycle was complete. Only through supporting the Democratic Party could he hope to see his reforms fully adopted during a Democratic administration, and he's shown himself willing to play ball, albeit begrudgingly.

Stein's plan to court left-wing voters disillusioned with the Democrats worked better than political watchers had anticipated. Her media stock rose as she engaged in pointed anti-Clinton rhetoric. In Stein's world, Hillary Clinton is irredeemably corrupt with an appetite for war and loathing for the environment. Never mind that Clinton's actual voting record doesn't support the caricature. Stein's barbs aren't meant to reveal truth, rather provoke. Her style is remarkably similar to Donald Trump in its vapidity. One of her nastiest tweets attacked Clinton as a mother.

Green Party pandering for media attention has begun to take a more dangerous turn as Stein winks at dangerous conspiracy theories. Her comments in seeming support of the anti-vaccination fringe raise alarm, especially because she's repeated variations of them in multiple settings.

Here's what Stein, a medical doctor, told the Washington Post:

“There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don't know if all of them have been addressed.”

Notice the Trumpian ending. Stein just doesn't really know if vaccines are totally safe. This is disturbing stuff, given a trend of vaccine skepticism being promoted by medically illiterate celebrities and known fraudsters like Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's been repeatedly warned by the FDA over federal law violations.

Stein was directly asked about the Green Party stance on vaccinations in a Reddit AMA and replied, “I don't know if we have an ‘official' stance.” She then continued with a paragraph full of conspiratorial fear-mongering about regulatory agencies, a favorite target of the anti-science homeopathy and “alternative medicine” movements.

Recently, Stein went so far as to suggest wireless signals are bad for children's brains and punctuated her reckless statement with this alarmist soundbite: “We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die.” (Apparently, for all Stein is vehemently against, casual references to animal testing doesn't make the list.)

The stunning lack of medical and scientific literacy, from a seasoned medical professional who certainly knows better, continues in her food policy. Her official platform states, “Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.” This is absurd, as GMOs have been repeatedly found to be safe. There's zero serious scientific debate on this point, because the evidence is in and results are clear. GMO crops could save hundreds of thousands of children's lives in a single year. Stein is trying to stop their development to satisfy anti-science extremists.

Her non-medical pandering often dips into comical absurdity, such as the time she suggested appointing fugitive Edward Snowden to her Cabinet if she won the election. I'm all for principled whistle-blowing, but the idea of nominating a guy who leaked government secrets to the media as Secretary of Homeland Security seems beyond ridiculous. Pardoning Snowden is probably the right thing to do, installing him in the White House is just frightening.

Another chuckle-worthy nugget related to national security, taken from her platform: “Ban use of drone aircraft for assassination, bombing, and other offensive purposes.” That's the whole statement. Would she rather send manned aircraft and put more of our military in harm's way? She's not for disbanding the armed forces, so maybe that's the case. Hard to say when her platform is little more than a talking points cheat sheet.

The whole charade of Stein's media-driven candidacy covers the fact that the Green Party has no ground game. This is a one-candidate show, not a genuine reformist party working to change a system from the local level. Unlike the Libertarian Party, the Green Party doesn't hold a single state house seat. If this was a party sincere about its mission, it would be building infrastructure from the local level.

Instead, we have what amounts to a celebrity campaign seemingly designed to foil the Democrats. In a year where our democracy is threatened by a terrifying demagogue, the Green Party is revealing itself to be reckless and full of hot air. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote that doesn't go to the only candidate who can realistically defeat Donald Trump.

Liberals deserve better than Jill Stein. Luckily, with the assistance of Bernie Sanders, they already have the most progressive Democratic Party platform in history. Hillary Clinton may not be an ideological firebrand, but she listens to voters and makes serious policy proposals informed by their concerns. That's what a democratic leader does, and that's why she has my enthusiastic vote.

Jill Stein needs to head back to the drawing board and reevaluate her priorities.

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I Have A DNAddiction

There is something heavy on my heart that I want to share. I have been in denial about it for two years and frankly I am embarrassed by the truth of the matter. So today I admit that I suffer from... TAA.

Terminal Ancestry Addiction.

There is not a morning, afternoon, or evening that I can resist searching, researching, or discovering information about my ancestry.

It began in 2010 when I was tasked to locate records on my 2xs great grandfather on Ancestry.com. The paper trails were only the gateway drugs to my addiction but DNA testing was the hard core stuff. It took me. I became full blown TAA in 2014 after taking 3 DNA tests. It started off innocently. I was only looking for one person, one connection.

Nobody told me this would happen.

There are days that I can go on binges, not eating, not bathing and not working. You will find me in a manic state, gaunt and disheveled, locked away in several TAA sites: AncestryDNA.com, 23&ME, Family Tree DNA, familyserach.org ― the crack houses of ancestry addicts. Other days I have not even seen my own face in the mirror while lost on Gedmatch.com. It's a den of obsession. A rabbit hole. I am possessed by the dead. Trapped in the snares of U.S. census, slave logs, Freedman Bureau records, wills and probates, passenger logs, and Dawes Native American Rolls.

I am the Walter White of family trees, always looking to build a better meth lab (That's a Breaking Bad reference in case you didn't get that).

One of the side effects of TAA is CO ― Cousin Overdose. Your life becomes overrun with cousins. I have three DNA tests, each with 50+ pages of 50 cousins per page. That's thousands of unknown relatives. Cousins all over the country. Cousins all over the world. Cousins of every different ethnicity. Cousins here. Cousins there. Cousins everywhere! I can't bat an eye without seeing a cousin. I can't pass a person on the street without wondering, “Are you my cousin? Please spit in this tube.”

I am guilty of neglecting my immediate and living family for the new and the dead. I wish my family would share in my excitement and manic ancestral discoveries. They don't. They don't want my drug. They don't care about their Neanderthal percentages or how much KhoiSan we are. They could care less about having more cousins and they sure in hell don't want their buried and dead secrets unearthed.

I am InDNA Jones and I must find the family jewels ― even if it means I journey alone.

I have even convinced some of my dearest friends and family into trying this DNA drug with me. I've shared the swab, passed the test tube, and begged them to just scrape for me. Just spit for me. Why? Because Ancestry loves company. So to them I apologize for my influence.

The ancestors made me do it.

TAA is curable theoretically, but practically as curable as the meaning of life is discoverable. The more roadblocks you hit, the worse the addiction grows. You will pull out your hair, grit your teeth, and bite your nails until the mystery is solved. A few other contributors and triggers to the persistence of the addiction are close DNA matches who keep their trees private ― or worst ― refuse to communicate or have no information at all.

Addicts spend hours and hours perseverating on why? Hours trying to find a way around their closed doors. Why won't they share their ancestors with me? They're my ancestors too! Why?!

I need more ancestors! Give me more ancestors!

The more ancestors you discover, the further you dig. I have dug until I unearthed Charlemagne from the tomb. He is now framed and on the family wall.

“That's not just a medieval emperor. That's my 39th great grandpa.”

I imagine being bounced on his knee as a little royal tyke as he tells me stories of his royal conquests.

My spouse thinks I've gone mad. Maybe I have. TAA is a Honey Badger and Honey Badger don't care. My soul can no longer rest until I know every last single great grandparent as far as history can record.

With TAA the world begins to close in on you, growing smaller and smaller, as everyone becomes... RELATED.

Maybe my cousin Stedman Graham could invite me over to his and Oprah's house in Santa Barbara and we can sit on the veranda for mint julep sweet tea and buttered scones in the Pacific breeze. Eat your hearts out world. Maybe I'll call up Blake Shelton, Lance Bass, and Barack Obama to invite them to our family reunion for 7th+ cousins. We can eat Barbecue and play dominoes and sing N'Sync songs.

Can you imagine the family photos? Now that's America.

“And Blake, don't forget to bring Gwen and the baby along. We'd love to see them.”

Did I just name drop. Maybe? I'm addicted. Don't judge me… and my family.

It is such a weight lifted to declare my truth and share my addiction. Acceptance is the first step to recovery. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms you may be suffering from Terminal Ancestry Addiction too. Well you are not alone. There are thousands of us like you ― likely your cousins. We even have television shows, Who Do You Think You Are? and Finding Your Roots that are dedicated to this addiction.

Sidenote: I am convinced that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Pablo Escobar of DNA.

I write this letter as I suffer from ancestry withdrawal while attempting to go cold turkey for just one day. I'm shaking like an ancestry.com tree leaf. I don't know if I can make it. I really don't know. They're calling me. Calling me. I need more of that double helix. Just one more ancestor hint.

Please pray for me… or at least open up your damn family trees.

Luv,

Quincy

(your 1st - 8th cousin)

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Stress Literally Shrinks Your Brain (7 Ways To Reverse This Effect)

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We all know that living under stressful conditions has serious emotional, even physical, consequences. So why do we have so much trouble taking action to reduce our stress levels and improve our lives?

Researchers at Yale University finally have the answer. They found that stress reduces the volume of grey matter in the areas of the brain responsible for self-control.

So experiencing stress actually makes it more difficult to deal with future stress because it diminishes your ability to take control of the situation, manage your stress and keep things from getting out of control.

A vicious cycle if there ever was one.

But don't be disheartened. It's not impossible to reduce your stress levels; you just need to make managing stress a higher priority if you want to reverse this effect. The sooner you start managing your stress effectively, the easier it will be to keep unexpected stress from causing damage in the future.

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." -William James

Luckily, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold, change, and rebuild damaged areas as you practice new behaviors. So implementing healthy stress-relieving techniques can train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects from stress in the future.

Here are seven strategies to help you fix your brain and keep your stress under control:

1. Say No

Saying no is indeed a major challenge for many people. "No" is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it's time to say no, avoid phrases such as "I don't think I can" or "I'm not certain." Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

2. Disconnect

Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email that will change your train of thought and get you thinking (read: stressing) about work can drop onto your phone at any moment.

Taking regular time off the grid helps you to keep your stress under control and to live in the moment. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even--gulp!--turning off your phone gives your body and mind a break. Studies have shown that something as simple as a weekend e-mail break can lower stress levels.

If detaching yourself from work-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend? Choose blocks of time where you will cut the cord and go offline. You'll be amazed by how refreshing these breaks are and how they reduce stress by putting a mental recharge into your weekly schedule.

If you are worried about the negative repercussions of taking this step, try first doing it at times you are unlikely to be contacted--maybe Sunday morning. As you grow more comfortable with this, and as your coworkers begin to accept the time you spend offline, gradually expand the amount of time you spend away from technology.

3. Neutralize Toxic People

Dealing with difficult people is frustrating, exhausting, and highly stressful for most. You can control your interactions with toxic people by keeping your feelings in check. When you need to confront a toxic person, approach the situation rationally. Identify your own emotions and don't allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. Also, consider the difficult person's standpoint and perspective so that you can find solutions and common ground. Even when things completely derail, you can take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring you down.

4. Don't Hold Grudges

The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When the threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when the threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you're holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.

5. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a simple, research-supported form of meditation that is an effective way to gain control of unruly thoughts and behaviors. People who practice mindfulness regularly are more focused, even when they are not meditating. It is an excellent technique to help reduce stress because it allows you to reduce the feeling of being out of control. Essentially, mindfulness helps you stop jumping from one thought to the next, which keeps you from ruminating on negative thoughts. Practicing mindfulness might even increase your score on an emotional intelligence test. Overall, it's a great way to make it through your busy day in a calm and productive manner.

6. Put Things In Perspective

Our worries often come from our own skewed perception of events. So before you spend too much time dwelling on what your boss said during the last staff meeting, take a minute to put the situation in perspective. If you aren't sure when you need to do this, try looking for clues that your anxiety may not be proportional to the stressor. If you are thinking in broad sweeping statements like "Everything is going wrong" or "Nothing will work out" then you need to reframe the situation. A great way to correct this unproductive thought pattern is to list the specific things that actually are going wrong or not working out. Most likely you will come up with just one or two things--not everything. The key to keeping your cool is to remember that your feelings are exaggerating the situation and the scope of the stressor is much more limited than it might appear.

7. Use Your Support System

It's tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To be calm and productive you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed.

Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insights and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as talking about your worries will provide an outlet for your anxiety and stress and supply you with a new perspective on the situation. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can't because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation. Asking for help will mitigate your anxiety and strengthen your relationships with those you rely upon.

Bringing It All Together

As simple as these strategies may seem, they are difficult to implement when your mind is clouded with stress. Force yourself to attempt them the next time your head is spinning, and you'll reap the benefits that come with disciplined stress management.

How do you manage stress? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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Many Commonly Used Drugs Are Useless
Some medications are life saving. I am so thankful for the trusty med that tames my atrial fibrillation.

Many meds are helpful -- demonstrating superiority to placebo in ways that are clearly clinically significant and life enhancing.

But many (perhaps most) drugs are probably no more than very expensive placebos. Patients get prescriptions from doctors when their symptoms are most severe and improve with time and positive expectation, not because the med is really effective.

Doctors and patients need independent, objective information on drug efficacy and risks.

The multibillion dollar pharma marketing machine can turn even the most useless and harmful drugs into financial blockbusters. Doctors and patients need independent, objective information on drug efficacy and risks.

This is the first of a series of blogs aimed at setting the record straight. Dick Bijl is President of the International Society Of Drug Bulletins (ISDB), a wonderful organization representing 53 national drug bulletins, each charged with presenting the best available data on the pluses and minuses of different medications. Drug bulletins are a source of truth to help patients and doctors see through the fudged misinformation generated by ubiquitous Pharma propaganda.

Dick writes: "Let's use the treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) as a typical example of why and how medication use has become so excessive."

Elderly men often experience problems urinating -- weak or intermittent urinary stream, straining, hesitancy, terminal dribbling, incomplete emptying, urgency, frequency, incontinence, nocturia and/or post-micturition dribbling. These symptoms, so common in aging, provide a lucrative target market for pharma.

In the past, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) was regarded as the most important cause of urinary symptoms. Nowadays, evidence confirming a link between LUTS and prostatic enlargement is regarded as weak. This hasn't prevented approval of many drugs for the treatment of BPH by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The bar for approval is set very low. Drug companies have only to show that their medication has a statistically significant advantage when compared to placebo. The FDA and EMA don't require that the med achieve what is ever so much more important- clinically relevant improvement as evidenced by patients actually also feeling and doing better when taking the drug. Small statistical blips are all it takes to get a drug approved.

There is a huge difference between statistical significance and clinical relevance. For example, the International Prostatic Symptoms Score is often used to quantify the treatment effects of urinary drugs. The IPSS scale goes from 0-35 with higher scores indicating more severe symptoms. A difference of ≥3 points = some effect; ≥5 points = moderate effect; ≥8 pt. = clear effect). In practice, it turns out that patients can't detect improvements if they are less than three points.

The results of clinical trials have shown that most drugs used to treat BPH are statistically more efficacious than placebo, but have no real clinical relevance. Because their improvement was less than three points, patients will not detect any difference between these drugs and placebo.

The same lack of clinical relevance holds for drug combinations. A combination of an alpha blocker and a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor or an alpha blocker and an antimuscarinic drug often results in statistically significant decreases in symptoms compared to placebo or to the individual drugs given alone. But here also, the differences were of such small magnitude that patients will not detect them.

Only in a small minority of clinical trials was the decrease in symptom score more than 3 points.
The lack of efficacy of BPS meds supports a policy of watchful waiting instead of starting drug therapy. The natural course of LUTS is quite favorable and in the majority of patients the severity of the symptoms will not increase.

Most (or all) of the relief patients feel taking the med is probably due to natural improvement or placebo effect, not to the med itself -- but they don't know this and will often misattribute benefit to the drug.

And almost all the drug studies have been performed in secondary and tertiary care. The results of these studies can't simply be generalized to primary care because it is not plausible that these patients have the same characteristics and therefore the same prognosis.

It's not rational to prescribe drugs that do not improve functioning more than placebo. Use of medication for LUTS should be discouraged since it is no better than placebo, but adds the risk of side effects. Counseling and re-assurance should be considered first.

Informed patients will be much less willing to take a drug that carries the risk of side effects, while offering at best only a very slight improvement in symptoms.

Whenever it is decided to start drug therapy, the best choice are alpha blockers. Side effects should be taken into account: fatigue, decreased vision, severe postoperative ophthalmological side effects or complications, orthostatic hypotension leading to headache and dizziness.
5-alpha reductase inhibitors should not be regarded as an alternative because of their small efficacy and side effects like gynecomastia, erection and ejaculation disorders, decreased libido, impotence, and breast cancer.

The antimuscarinics do not have a positive balance of efficacy and they have anticholinergic side effects (e.g., dry mouth, abdominal pain and constipation). Phosphodiesterase inhibitors have been introduced in recent years but studied insufficiently in comparative studied to give them a place. Combination-therapy should not be given because it does not have an added value related to clinical relevance but does add side effects.

We conclude that the natural course of LUTS in men is generally favorable; the pathophysiology of LUTS is not clear; the relation between prostatic volume and urinary complaints is weak; the mechanisms of action of meds is uncertain; and positive effects are small in placebo-controlled studies.

Therefore, primarily counseling and non-drug treatment are indicated and drug-treatment should be discouraged. In case a drug is needed only an alpha blocker is indicated, but this often just a very expensive placebo-therapy."

Thanks Dick for this illuminating analysis. Before considering any med useful, we should subtract placebo effect from reported efficacy- and also consider the considerable risk of med side effects and Pharma's ridiculously high prices.

In a rational world, people would be taking many fewer drugs, for much clearer indications, with benefits always balanced by consideration of risks, and with prices reflecting real value.

Medication use is now much more governed by pharma's commercial interest than by what is best for the patient.

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USA's First Olympic Gold Of The Summer, In Math
Did you know that the USA already won its first Olympic gold medal this summer? It was awarded a month ago in Hong Kong, rather than Rio. A team of six U.S. high school students won first place at the 57th annual International Mathematical Olympiad, their second consecutive win after a 21-year hiatus. This win not only brought home the top prize, but each team member captured a gold medal, two with perfect scores.

If this seems far afield from your own mathematical prowess, think of the Rio Olympics as a parallel. Every event contains stunning athleticism far beyond the ability of the average American. Still, a child imagines a goal on the playground basketball court as the winning shot for team USA. As the Olympics games are broadcast this summer, we can all live out our own Olympic-inspired dreams at community pools, volleyball courts and tracks around the country.

While we may not become Olympians during our weekly workouts, our physical training leads to stronger and healthier bodies. So too, does mathematical problem-solving for the mind. At Expii.com, a site with puzzles and problems for many levels of math training - from beginner to advanced, there is a gym, of sorts, to train for mathematics with a world-class coach. Hear it in his own words:

'After becoming the lead coach of the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, I started Expii as a way of raising the bar in math and science education,' said Po-Shen Loh. 'Instead of focusing my efforts on a handful of students, I wanted to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to become a math genius.'

Dubious about improving your math skills through general training? Interestingly, our U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team switched their training focus from solving mathematics competition problems to helping the team members maximize their mathematical abilities and problem-solving skills. This change in training led to back-to-back wins at the IMO and the gold medals.

While we may not all compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad, our training in math has important consequences. Our country is facing a tremendous opportunity to meet the forecasted demand for 1 million STEM-related jobs. The U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team was selected through a series of competitions organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the world's largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.

Like Expii.com and math educators, the Mathematical Association of America is dedicated to building our nation's next generation of problem solvers.

'For 350,000 American students each year, the MAA's American Mathematics Competitions is their opportunity to train like an Olympian, developing skills that reach far beyond these rigorous mathematics competitions,' said Michael Pearson, MAA Executive Director, 'I look forward to continuing to develop mathematical talent in our country with U.S. team members and coach, Po-Shen Loh and to witness the passion within these students for mathematical problem-solving,'

Let's jump right into training the mind with two Olympic-related math problems posed in this week's Expii problem sets.

Problem 1: (Level 2 difficulty) Risky Routine

As written in The New Yorker, Women's Gymnastics is a sport often contested in hundredths of a point, but Simone Biles is so dominant that she wins by whole numbers. The complex scoring system is based on a Difficulty Score (predetermined by the planned routine), and an Execution Score (out of a perfect 10.0, quantifying mistakes). There is a risk/reward tradeoff, as increasingly difficult routines bring higher chances of failure. Biles's dominance comes from her ability to significantly push up her Difficulty Score while still executing the routines with extreme reliability.

To get a feel for the game theory involved, suppose that you are a gymnast planning a routine where you need to perform 8 elements. For each of these 8 elements you can attempt at a C level (for 0.3 points) or an E level (for 0.5 points) level of difficulty. Your difficulty score is the sum of these 8 numbers, and you can mix and match between C's and E's. You are 100% confident of being able to execute every element at the C level, but for each element you attempt at the E level, you risk a 50% chance of a 0.5 point deduction in your Execution score.

You know that your opponents are extremely talented. What number of elements should you attempt at the E level in order to maximize your chance of achieving a Difficulty + Execution score of at least 13?

Ready for another?

Problem 2 (Difficulty 3) Strength in Numbers

Suppose that Country A has 400 million people, Country B has 100 million people, and each country always sends its strongest person to the Olympics for weightlifting. The strength of each person is an independent Normal random variable with a common mean and variance, which is the same across both countries. What is the probability that country A wins, rounded to the nearest whole percent?

Want more help? Visit the Expii site's posting of these and other Olympic themed problems.

Get ready for inspiring Olympic performances. If it inspires you to get off the coach and exercise, remember that you can also stay on the couch and train your mind in math. Do both and you'll be a healthier you!

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A Chat with Information Scientist Pedro Marijuán

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PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUÁN

While there is still no scientific consensus on what "life" is -- although that does not deter attempts to make life in the lab -- there is a growing conversation among scientists about life's "information" component. However, scientists also find it difficult articulating just what information is. So I phoned information scientist Pedro Clemente Marijuán in Spain to explore the subject. Marijuán's current research interests include "the nature of intelligence and the nature of information, at the molecular-cellular and organismic (brain) levels."

Pedro Marijuán is Senior Research Scientist at Spain's Aragon Institute of Health Sciences (IACS) where he heads the Bioinformation Group. He has also served as IACS Research Director (2011-2015).

In 1991, Marijuán co-founded FIS (Foundations of Information Science) with theoretical biologist Michael Conrad. Marijuán says one of the missions of FIS is "organizing a sound body of new thinking about the informational cohesion of the physical, biological and social realms" of science. He is also Vice-President for Protocol of the International Society for Information Studies (IS4SI).

Pedro Marijuán's professional career began as an industrial engineer in the 1970s in Spain, working with computers in "enterprise organization," after receiving his undergraduate degree in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Later inspired by John von Neumann's ideas, Marijuán began his own investigations into cognitive neuroscience, which led to his PhD (University of Barcelona, 1989): "On Natural Intelligence: The Evolution of Biological Information Processing." In the early 1990s he was a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Chicago, working with microbiologist James Shapiro, as well as at the University of Canberra.

Marijuán has taught engineering at the University of Zaragoza and is former SAMCA Chair at the Engineering School, University of Zaragoza.

Through the years Pedro Marijuán has organized and co-organized international conferences on information science in Madrid, Vienna, Paris, Beijing, Gothenberg (upcoming, 2017) and elsewhere, and a regular series of seminars in Spain on biomedicine and neuroscience.

He is author of the book, The Dual Brain and numerous other scientific publications, editor of "Cajal and Consciousness" (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences) and of special issues on FIS published in the journals BioSystems and Symmetry: Culture and Science as well as of "Selected Papers from 'FIS 2010 Beijing.'"

One of Pedro Marijuán's other principal interests is understanding the sound of laughter, its structure, and using that information as a diagnostic tool in biomedicine. Our interview follows.

Suzan Mazur: In between your careers as an industrial engineer and cognitive neuroscientist, you were a visiting research associate at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s, working with microbiologist James Shapiro. That's quite a range of expertise. What sort of research were you doing with Jim Shapiro in Chicago?

Pedro Marijuán: I was advancing an informational scheme of the prokaryotic cell in relation to James Shapiro's interest in developing new evolutionary ideas. At the same time I was learning real biology from James -- I personally thank him for his hospitality and patience. However, I realized I needed stronger insights into the molecular machinery of the cell and into enzymes and proteins, so I began collaborating with biophysicist and theoretical biologist Michael Conrad as well as with enzymologist John Westley.

Both were relatively close to James Shapiro's interests. Michael Conrad was especially influential; Michael pioneered molecular computing and adaptability in ecological information processes. He looked beyond science in his work to philosophy, art, and literature.

Suzan Mazur: Please tell me a little about your current research interests.

Pedro Marijuán: Here at the Aragon Institute of Health Sciences (IACS) in Zaragoza, I'm investigating cellular signaling systems, social bonding, and human laughter. I and my small bioinformation group -- Jorge Navarro and Raquel del Moral -- are interested in studying everything alive that communicates: cells, organisms, people, and the way human society is structured through social bonds, i.e., language -- talking face-to-face, by phone, texting, etc. Because it's through language that human society evolved, grew complex and interesting.

People do need to talk to one another. If we don't speak, we don't feel well. Isolation is the worst scenario for human beings. Language, which was at first instrumental in humans, eventually became a necessity.

How much do people need to talk? And to whom? I'm interested in how people and communities build and maintain societal bonds through conversation and what the consequences are when that natural communication process goes awry.

To thrive, humans need to immerse themselves in social layers: An intimate layer ("family"), close friends, work relationships as well as general acquaintances. These bonds form a person's "sociotype." We have not only a genotype and phenotype, but also a "sociotype."

Suzan Mazur: Is this layering a perspective from your background in engineering?

Pedro Marijuán: Perhaps. I was an industrial engineer here in Spain during the 1970s, working with computers, in the field of "enterprise organization." I got terribly excited about the possibility of similar information processes in the human brain and in society. Then I read John von Neumann's book comparing the human brain to a computer. I began to realize the informational scheme of the single cell was missing in the scientific literature. I began doing informal research and wrote some newspaper articles, which eventually led to my PhD ["On Natural Intelligence: The Evolution of Biological Information Processing"].

Suzan Mazur: IACS, where you're currently Senior Research Scientist -- this is an organization focused on biomedical research?

Pedro Marijuán: IACS and its germane organization IIS Aragon cover all areas of biomedical research for the main hospitals in the Aragon region. Until the political change last year, I was Director of Research in charge of organizing teams, and focused on the many problems biomedical research has. I was reassigned as IACS Senior Research Scientist.

Suzan Mazur: Information science research.

Pedro Marijuán: Actually our group looks to find ways to apply information science to biomedicine. For example, we use information science as a diagnostic tool to study changes in the sound of laughter of depressed individuals. We've used it with EEG records, and to look for objective markers in fibromyalgia. We've also designed a questionnaire to gauge the sensitivity of the individual state of the sociotype. It's particularly helpful for the elderly because they suffer a lot from loneliness.

Suzan Mazur: You first wrote on the informational patterns of laughter 10 or so years ago. What was the thrust of that paper?

Pedro Marijuán: I highlighted the social role of laughter and peculiarities of the structure of the sounds of laughter. We've written four or five scientific papers on laughter since then. Laughter is a very, very strategic way of communicating. It connects the physiological, psychological, cognitive, emotional and social. Laughter tells a lot about a person and their environment. It's highly personal.

Why is someone laughing? Laughter may be particularly beautiful -- or out of context. Why is that? What are the main sound components we instinctively scan when we laugh? What is the emotional code attached to laughter?

Suzan Mazur: It's interesting that comedy in America used to be spontaneous, quite funny, a healthy release of tension. We had comedy from the Borscht Belt, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, early Woody Allen, 1970s Saturday Night Live. Michael O'Donoghue -- the comedic genius behind SNL -- was a friend of mine. By the late 70s, Michael thought SNL was no longer funny. Roughly around the time he left the show. That's not a joke, by the way. Comedy now in America, at least, seems uninspired, a captive of its commercial sponsors.

Pedro Marijuán: Yes. I agree with you. I don't follow media much, but it's clear that individuals are now overloaded with new kinds of artificial information flows. When a person is systematically suffering information overloads, humor is a kind of canary in the mine, a barometer. Entering the mine, the canary dies or not. Humor, or lack of it, is an indicator of individual mental health and happiness, of a person's relationship to their social contacts and of societal health.

We are seeing a rise in the number of depressed patients. We see an amazing increase in the number of people living alone. We are witnessing the accelerated loss of what Robert Putnam calls "social capital."

The information revolution is contributing to these problems -- introducing surrogate bonds via new technologies that capture a growing portion of a person's time. People are alone, going from screen to screen, abandoning long-term rewards of face-to-face conversation, endangering their social bonds. Our very social nature is being denied, or mystified, and our sociotype is becoming dramatically flattened.

Suzan Mazur: I've interviewed Jaron Lanier, the "father of virtual reality" who has said regarding the digital world that humans may have taken a wrong turn for the right reasons and he predicts artificial intelligence ideology will reach a breaking point in Europe, but "the US will break first certainly, as we'll find out." His thinking is that human job displacement due to computerization and robotics will lead to a welfare state that can't be sustained.

Pedro Marijuán: Something similar happened with the first industrial revolution, with the second industrial revolution, and now we are suffering the consequences of the information and computer revolution. We have not developed the tools to successfully integrate all these artificial information flows with our natural information flows. The adaptability of our social nature, of our sociotype, has been pushed to the extremes.

In my info science parlance, the artificial flows of information that are reshaping the structures of our societies at tremendous speed are blind to the natural info flows to which our modest individual lives are upended. "No one to talk with? Do not worry, here's a pet robot that will fill your nostalgic needs of social bonding."

The power structure does not care about impoverishing people throughout the world through tremendous economic disruption and loss of intermediation structures; it pushes for even more disruption, impervious to the social crisis.

It is urgent that we provide a new vision for human society because this disruption and endangerment of our natural information flow touches us deep, into our cells. Science has been particularly influential in creating these strange new problems -- and in leaving them unchecked! Science must now help find the conceptual tools to address this social unease all around us.

Suzan Mazur: Would you talk a little bit about your role as chair of the Foundations of Information Science and would you define what you mean by the term "information"?

Pedro Marijuán: I co-founded the Foundations of Information Science with Michael Conrad more than 20 years ago -- we coined the name FIS in 1992. Michael Conrad was a very great man, enormously enthusiastic and engaging. Among Michael's many contributions to science, he was one of the first to attempt an evolutionary model of the "vertical information flow" in brain behavior. He passed away in 2000. Michael brought most of the specific scientific content to FIS, while the multidisciplinary vision of FIS was largely mine.

Suzan Mazur: What do you mean by the term "information"? I once interviewed physicist Sara Walker on the subject. She's a collaborator of Paul Davies at Arizona State University. Walker defined information as "events that affect and direct the states of a dynamic system." How do you define it?

Pedro Marijuán: The term is really undefinable because it's a relative term concerning the interaction between two entities -- the object and the subject. My favorite definition is "distinction on the adjacent." You cannot have an informational relationship with anything that does not "touch" you in some way. In order to make any distinction, something has to be "adjacent" to you.

This is biologically meaningful. I've based my informational scheme of the cell on this thinking of "distinction on the adjacent" -- where molecular recognition is the essential phenomenon over which biological complexity has been developed.

Myriad distinctions are factually created in the different adjacency relationships between biomolecules within the living cell, organized in informational architectures. There are dedicated informational detectors in the cellular membrane and the cell is open to directly communicate with the environment. Signals from the environment are treated quite differently from metabolic items.

This distinction is crucial and it has been not dealt with specifically in the literature except by John Gerhart and me (at least to my best knowledge). John Gerhart was a very good developmental biologist in the 1990s, he worked on signaling pathways and developmental toxicology, and rightly emphasized the difference between signals and metabolic inputs -- and seemingly nobody paid attention to him.

Suzan Mazur: Is biosemiotics part of this?

Pedro Marijuán: Not really. Most of biosemiotics follows more or less directly the central dogma of Francis Crick, i.e., that information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. And this is like basic mechanics. This is mechanical information that the cell has, of course.

But, again, the cell communicates with the environment via specific signaling pathways. This is the essence of all prokaryotic activity. And this is the essence of multicellular development.

The whole signaling system has enormous complexity, even in "simple" prokaryotes, as they have sophisticated signaling with the environment -- the "1-2-3 component systems scheme." But the whole of biosemiotics, so to speak, is not founded on the ability to distinguish signals from the environment, to transduce them, and to build their meaning -- biosemiotics is mostly focused on abstracting transcription-translation flows.

Almost everybody has taken a shortcut in applying information views to life. Most have followed communication engineering (Claude Shannon). Others have taken the Turing machine view. Others von Neumann's operating system. And biosemiotics also is taking a shortcut, Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce, "the father of pragmatism") -- though the generalization may be unjust for some biosemiotic works.

Nobody's doing the deep thinking about the central issue: How information pervades cellular self-production and cellular communication. How both aspects are elegantly intertwined in order to achieve a viable life cycle.

Suzan Mazur: You're doing investigations into the dozens of signaling pathways, Wnt, Hedgehog, Notch, etc.

Pedro Marijuán: Yes, absolutely. We've written a couple of useful articles devoted to prokaryotic signaling and eukaryotic signaling on "cellular intelligences," about how productive information flows and communicative information flows are handled intelligently, adaptively, around the essential core of the life cycle. . . .

Suzan Mazur: How large is your foundation, FIS? Has it grown a lot over the last 20 years?

Pedro Marijuán: It's a public place, and I'm coordinating and promoting the discussion sessions. There is a healthy plurality of views. We conference online, and we meet every two years or so.

Europeans, Americans and scientists from other countries are well represented in FIS. We have a remarkable representation of Chinese intellectuals and scientists, who are very involved in information science and who are doing interesting philosophical research as well as introducing information science into their educational and research systems.

One of the missions of FIS is organizing a sound body of new thinking about the informational cohesion of the physical, biological, and social realms. As a basis, a new vision of biological information is needed -- that's a personal concern of mine.

Communicative cells, and the cell cycle, are central to this. The living cell in an organism doesn't know what to do. It needs some specific signals from the environment to advance in particular directions, even to continue with the "inertia" of its own cycle. So, the cell in the multicellular system scans multiple environmental cues to be told what to do. "What should I do with my life?" -- asks the cell.

"Oh, you should stop growing, says the environment. Oh, you should reproduce faster. Oh, you should differentiate. Oh, you should kill yourself."

The cell continuously takes advice from the surrounding environment on what to do next, via its enormous multiplicity of signaling pathways. Like us via our own senses, and with all our conversation exchanges and social acquaintances around. . . .

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Can Mutual Gaze Get You A Forever Passionate Love?
By Joy A. Dryer , Ph.D.

I. INTRO. Do you believe that intense romantic love can last a lifetime? OR, alternatively, do you believe that love naturally develops through phases? General phases such as the 3 that Margaret Mead is said to have defined: apparently she thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children, and one for joyful companionship in old age.

August is a good time to ask such long view questions. August is a kick-back month for many. Fewer folks in the office. Many on vacation. I hope you've taken a little time off from daily routines - maybe a few long weekends when you can kick up your feet and look at .... well ...along with a colorful garden...some beautiful view...... to look really look at your partner.

I'm here to tell you that mutual gaze with your partner is one way psychologists and neuroscientists have found you can know your partner more intimately, and help your passionate love last a lifetime.

Mutual eye gaze between you and your partner can help you learn to read, to understand, and to know one another better. Mutual gaze can help you feel more connected because it's emotionally arousing: your pupils dilate, the 'feel good' oxytocin neuropeptide releases. Try this exercise [3 minutes a night?] : you can use it to fight well. To soothe. To repair.

Here's the Gazing Exercise developed by Stan Tatkin, PsyD,[1] founder of PACT [Psychobiologic Approach to Couples Therapy][1]. Gaze quietly into your partner's eyes. [Not meant to be a sexual activity.] You can lie in bed or sit in facing chairs, knee to knee. No need to talk or to touch: ok to laugh, cry, giggle, or have whatever emotion arises. Try not to control your face. You can avoid feeling self-conscious by pouring your attention over your partner's face: notice every detail ...changes in his/ her eyes, face, skin color, skin tautness, breathing, muscle tension. I.e. your focus is on the Other, not on your own internal shifts or feelings. Look and be seen, just as you are. Know and be known, just as you are.

No need to set a timer. But try to do at least 3 minutes. Afterwards, notice how you both feel. Closer? Or more distant? Uncomfortable at any point? Triggered by what? If discomfort resolved, how?

This exercise can be a constructive and fun tool to use in your relationship. Below I describe why mutual eye gaze is so effective in oh so many let-me-count-the-ways.

II. MUTUAL EYE GAZE: Here's lookin' at you Kid. Baby researchers since the 1970's [2] showed us how babies' intense gaze at their mothers [or fathers] is a crucial psychological process of finding out who they are, and how to be in relationship with another. Present day psychologists are using the same gaze to help couples to know and to relate better to one another.

III. OUR PUPILS: Consciousness and Our unconscious. Scientists say they can study consciousness by observing pupil size changes. I'd add, that pupillary action and mutual gaze reflects our unconscious too! because our pupils involuntarily respond to our emotions.

When we look at someone we love, the visual cortex at the back of our brain [occipital lobe] captures the actual image. An older part of the brain, the autonomic nervous system [ANS] , actually registers and responds to these incoming signals. Our ANS regulates, without our awareness or permission, the continuous tuning of our pupil size [along with other involuntary functions including our internal organs such as our heart rate, heart rate variation, and blood pressure].

Our pupil size reflects both the Sympathetic [the accelerator, the exciting] branch - dilating our pupils -- and the Parasympathetic branch [the brakes, the relaxing] - constricting our pupils - branch. In a healthy secure relationship, when we feel safe, we can regulate our arousal state, balancing between excitement and tranquility. This occurs when both these branches of our ANS are in a synchronized balance of movement and stillness, self-activation and self-control. When you do the exercise I describe above, you both will likely be in a balanced state of what Tatkin [1] calls "quiet alertness."

IV. PUPIL SIZE and OXYTOCIN: Gazing is exciting. In our social interactions with another, we need to make quick assessments whether we are in a safe or dangerous situation, or with a safe or dangerous person. It turns out that when your pupils dilate with interest, arousal, or excitement, oxytocin is released. This is the "feel good" neuropeptide, or hormone, that plays a central role in enhancing emotions, communicating, and socially approaching others.

A slew of studies used double blind methods in which they randomly gave either the placebo or Oxytoxin [ administered through the nose] to participants. Results significantly showed that compared to the placebo groups, the Oxytocin groups a) gazed longer and more frequently toward angry vs. happy faces [3]; b) showed increased number of fixations and total gaze time toward the eyes [4] ; c) showed increased ability to read emotion more accurately in the eyes in the RMET - Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test [5].[Google the RMET.]

V. ATTACHMENT and OXYTOCIN: We're connected. Using oxytocin as the positive indicator of attachment, neuroscientists have used fMRI techniques to show what parts of the brain are activated when a pair is gazing at one another. They've discovered that similar areas of the brain light up when studying mutual gaze between parent-infant pairs who are attached to one another, and adult pairs who are attached. Some of these brain regions, like the substantia nigra, globus pallidus, and thalamus showed a high density of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. [6]

Both oxytocin and vasopressin as "feel good" hormones flag these areas as dopamine-rich areas of the brain. In turn, dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter of the feel-good circuit in the brain, associated with reward, motivation, and wanting. You "feel good" while gazing at your partner. So you continue the same approach behavior. This feels good so it reinforces the continued positive loop.

VI. MUTUAL EYE GAZE: Start here. Go! So mutual gaze is the entry point into that feel-good circuit loop. We all can learn to read and to know our partners well. We can use this exercise to fight well. To soothe. To repair. Both Stan Tatkin in his PACT work with couples, and Helen Fisher and her research colleagues believe that romantic love c a n last a lifetime. And, mutual gaze is one way to keep curious and knowing, to keep your relationship feeling novel and exciting.

SUM. Thus we've come full circle to understand that gazing at one's partner is an exciting event. Our pupils dilate automatically, out of our awareness. Because the "feel good" neuropeptide oxytocin [a chemical communicator, or transmitter] is released when stimulated by mutual gaze, you "feel good" while gazing into the eyes of your partner. Thus, you can use mutual gaze in numerous positive ways. The kids can be clamoring at the breakfast table, and a minute gaze across the table at one another can be a quiet connecting moment. You might be in the middle of a fight, and if one of you can remember to slow down, touch the other's arm and say, Hey! Lookin at you, Babe ! Stay for a moment, you could change the emotional interaction.

So try this mutual gaze with your partner: kick back.... stop time... and be known by one another with a few minutes of gaze. Enjoy. Here's lookin' at you, kid.

REFERENCES. In the interest of space, and the general public audience nature of this blog, I have not included a Reference list of the studies I've read: [1] Tatkin, S. 2011; [2] Stern, D. 1985, Beebe, B 2016; 3] Guastella, JA., Carson, DS. et al, 2008; [4](Guastella, JA, Mitchell PB, Dadds, MR, 2008; [5] Domes, G. et al, 2007; [6] Fisher, H.,1992; Acevedo, BP, et al 2011. If interested in specific references, email me at jdryerphd@gmail.com. As always, I invite your comments to this blog. And follow me on Twitter @joydryerphd.

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A Closer Scientific Look at Antibacterial Soap Unearths Some Problems
Do antibacterial soaps do more harm than good? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Tirumalai Kamala, Immunologist, Ph.D., Mycobacteriology, on Quora:

Over the years, the consensus that the harm caused by antibacterial soaps outweighs the benefits has indeed coalesced. But to understand how antibacterial soaps could harm, we first need to understand how they differ from regular soaps. Also referred to as antimicrobial or antiseptic soaps, they contain chemicals that regular soaps don't.

Many liquid soaps labeled antibacterial contain triclosan, a synthetic compound, specifically a phenylether or chlorinated bisphenol. While the US FDA classifies it as a Class III drug, i.e., a compound with high solubility and low permeability, triclosan is also a pesticide. Triclocarban is another common chemical found in antibacterial soaps. Many of the concerns about triclosan also apply to triclocarban (1).

Since it appeared on the scene in 1972, triclosan has steadily permeated through the consumer landscape such that it's practically ubiquitous today (see lists below from 1 and 2).

"Screen

Triclosan is so ubiquitous it's even found embedded in medical devices such as catheters and sutures to prevent infections (3).

As for its beneficial effects, a 2015 study compared the bactericidal effects of plain versus triclosan-containing soaps in conditions that mimic hand washing, and found no difference in their ability to reduce bacterial numbers during a 20-second exposure (4). In other words, dubious benefit when used for routine hand washing under normal circumstances, i.e., only washing hands for a few seconds. After all, most of us don't scrub as though preparing to do surgery every time we wash our hands.

How Triclosan Inhibits/Kills Microbes

In vitro studies show triclosan can stop bacteria growing at low concentrations (bacteriostatic), and kill them at high concentrations (bactericidal). It also has some activity against some fungi (5) and even parasites such as those that cause malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, and toxoplasmosis, Toxoplasma gondii (6).

Triclosan is able to target many different types of bacteria by blocking the active site for an enzyme essential for bacterial fatty acid biosynthesis (7, 8). Blocking the enzyme enoyl-acyl carrier protein reductase, triclosan prevents bacteria from synthesizing fatty acids, which they need for their cell membranes and for reproduction.

Problems With Triclosan

I. Triclosan selects for antibiotic resistance

As widespread triclosan use increased, labs increasingly started finding cross-resistance to antibiotics. Under selection pressure from triclosan, bacteria mutate to develop resistance mechanisms to it, which end up bestowing antibiotic resistance as well. In other words, studies show triclosan selects for antibiotic resistance (see table below from 9).

"Screen

II. Discharged widely into the environment, triclosan can affect biomass such as algae and bacterial communities

Since it's widely used in such a diverse array of products, triclosan ends up in soil, ground water, and municipal wastewater treatment plants. Such plants require proper functioning of microbes to break down sewage. Triclosan can inhibit methane production in wastewater plant anaerobic digesters as well as select for multi-drug resistance in such bacterial communities (10). Triclosan's effects persist even beyond because it's discharged from wastewater treatment plants as effluent. Certain algae species in the vicinity of such plants have been found to be very sensitive to triclosan (11, 12). Triclosan also affects bacterial communities in rivers (13). Potential environmental risk of triclosan becomes even more relevant in areas of water scarcity where it doesn't get sufficiently diluted.

III. Triclosan can alter gut microbiota in fishes and rodents, potentially alter human microbiota, and even promote tumors in rodents

Triclosan could profoundly (14) and stably (12) alter fish gut microbiota as well as those of baby rats (15).
While so far triclosan doesn't appear to affect human gut microbiome, the data are far from conclusive, being based on just one study with 7 volunteers (16). On the other hand, a study on nasal secretions from 90 healthy adults found a positive correlation between presence of triclosan in nasal secretions and nasal colonization by Staphylococcus aureus (17). This suggests triclosan indeed has the potential to influence and even alter human microbiota.
One mouse model even found triclosan capable of promoting liver tumors (18).

IV. Triclosan can disrupt hormonal function

Triclosan was found to disrupt thyroid hormone-associated gene expression and altered the rate of frog metamorphosis (19). It could also disrupt thyroid (20, 21), estrogen (22), and testosterone (23) function in rats.

V. Triclosan bans

Given the increasing litany of concerns about triclosan's deleterious effects on the physiology of a wide variety of species, which may also increasingly include humans, several governments are either considering banning it or have already done so.

In March 2010, the European Union banned triclosan from any products that may come into contact with food (2).
On 16 May, 2014, the US state of Minnesota banned the sale of triclosan-containing cleaning products (soaps), giving manufacturers time until early 2017 to phase them out (24).
As of 2015, Health Canada was considering banning triclosan. It's estimated that ~1730 products, including cosmetics, health, and personal care products containing triclosan were available in Canada in 2011 (1).
The US FDA is mulling its regulation (25), with a report due in September 2016.

Bibliography

1. Dhillon, Gurpreet Singh, et al. "Triclosan: current status, occurrence, environmental risks and bioaccumulation potential." International journal of environmental research and public health 12.5 (2015): 5657-5684. Triclosan: Current Status, Occurrence, Environmental Risks and Bioaccumulation Potential

2. Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. "Triclosan." White Paper prepared by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) (2011). http://emerald.tufts.edu/med/apu...

3. Stickler, David James, G. Ll Jones, and Allan Denver Russell. "Control of encrustation and blockage of Foley catheters." The Lancet 361.9367 (2003): 1435-1437. http://carambola.usc.edu/Biofilm...

4. Kim, S. A., et al. "Bactericidal effects of triclosan in soap both in vitro and in vivo." Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (2015): dkv275.

5. Vischer, W. A., and J. Regös. "Antimicrobial spectrum of Triclosan, a broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent for topical application." Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde, Infektionskrankheiten und Hygiene. Erste Abteilung Originale. Reihe A: Medizinische Mikrobiologie und Parasitologie 226.3 (1974): 376.

6. McLeod, Rima, et al. "Triclosan inhibits the growth of Plasmodium falciparum and Toxoplasma gondii by inhibition of Apicomplexan Fab I." International journal for parasitology 31.2 (2001): 109-113. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

7. McMurry, Laura M., Margret Oethinger, and Stuart B. Levy. "Triclosan targets lipid synthesis." Nature 394.6693 (1998): 531-532.

8. Levy, Colin W., et al. "Molecular basis of triclosan activity." Nature 398.6726 (1999): 383-384.

9. Schweizer, Herbert P. "Triclosan: a widely used biocide and its link to antibiotics." FEMS microbiology letters 202.1 (2001): 1-7. http://femsle.oxfordjournals.org...

10. McNamara, Patrick J., Timothy M. LaPara, and Paige J. Novak. "The impacts of triclosan on anaerobic community structures, function, and antimicrobial resistance." Environmental science & technology 48.13 (2014): 7393-7400. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

11. Reiss, Richard, et al. "An ecological risk assessment for triclosan in lotic systems following discharge from wastewater treatment plants in the United States." Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 21.11 (2002): 2483-2492.

12. Lawrence, J. R., et al. "Resilience and recovery: The effect of triclosan exposure timing during development, on the structure and function of river biofilm communities." Aquatic Toxicology 161 (2015): 253-266. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

13. Ricart, Marta, et al. "Triclosan persistence through wastewater treatment plants and its potential toxic effects on river biofilms." Aquatic Toxicology 100.4 (2010): http://www.clipmedia.net/galera/...

14. Narrowe, Adrienne B., et al. "Perturbation and restoration of the fathead minnow gut microbiome after low-level triclosan exposure." Microbiome 3.1 (2015): 1. Microbiome

15. Hu, Jianzhong, et al. "Effect of postnatal low-dose exposure to environmental chemicals on the gut microbiome in a rodent model." Microbiome 4.1 (2016): 1. Microbiome

16. Poole, Angela C., et al. "Crossover Control Study of the Effect of Personal Care Products Containing Triclosan on the Microbiome." mSphere 1.3 (2016): e00056-15. http://msphere.asm.org/content/m...

17. Syed, Adnan K., et al. "Triclosan promotes Staphylococcus aureus nasal colonization." MBio 5.2 (2014): e01015-13. Triclosan Promotes Staphylococcus aureus Nasal Colonization

18. Yueh, Mei-Fei, et al. "The commonly used antimicrobial additive triclosan is a liver tumor promoter." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.48 (2014): 17200-17205. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/...

19. Veldhoen, Nik, et al. "The bactericidal agent triclosan modulates thyroid hormone-associated gene expression and disrupts postembryonic anuran development." Aquatic Toxicology 80.3 (2006): 217-227. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

20. Crofton, Kevin M., et al. "Short-term in vivo exposure to the water contaminant triclosan: evidence for disruption of thyroxine." Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology 24.2 (2007): 194-197. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

21. Zorrilla, Leah M., et al. "The effects of triclosan on puberty and thyroid hormones in male Wistar rats." Toxicological Sciences 107.1 (2009): 56-64. The Effects of Triclosan on Puberty and Thyroid Hormones in Male Wistar Rats

22. Stoker, Tammy E., Emily K. Gibson, and Leah M. Zorrilla. "Triclosan exposure modulates estrogen-dependent responses in the female wistar rat." Toxicological Sciences (2010): kfq180. Triclosan exposure modulates estrogen-dependent responses in the female Wistar rat

23. Kumar, Vikas, et al. "Alteration of testicular steroidogenesis and histopathology of reproductive system in male rats treated with triclosan." Reproductive Toxicology 27.2 (2009): 177-185.

24. SF 2192 Status in the Senate for the 88th Legislature (2013

25. Kuehn, Bridget M. "FDA pushes makers of antimicrobial soap to prove safety and effectiveness." JAMA 311.3 (2014): 234-234.

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Politics, Propaganda, And Perspective: How Preventive Medicine Pertains

In any political campaign season, fidelity to facts is often sacrificed for the persuasiveness of propaganda. In this campaign season of roiling discontent, that is only all the more so. In particular, the identification of every act of terrorism or violence as a systemic failure of the current power structure is as specious as it is seductive. Preventive Medicine can lend some very relevant perspective.

As a board certified Preventive Medicine specialist, I know full well the major liability of my field. No one gets much credit for what doesn't happen.

There are no tears of gratitude from family members because father or mother, sister or brother did not have a heart attack. There are no cards on your office wall expressing abiding thanks for the stroke that never occurred. No crayon drawings of adulation from children who grow up without type 2 diabetes because of some policy or program. There are no philanthropists eager to support you in any way you ask because you saved their life, or the life of someone they love. Perhaps you did just that, but if you did, they certainly don't know it happened, and you may not even know it yourself.

Such is the thanklessness of prevention, but it's a price well worth paying. The field of Preventive Medicine has brought us cancer screening programs that save thousands upon thousands of lives, and immunizations that save millions. Luminaries in this field are why we need no longer fear such one-time ubiquitous perils as smallpox, and polio. And, of course, in the modern era the relevant efforts continue to address immunization and infectious disease, cancer screening and interdiction, while shifting ever more to an emphasis on lifestyle as medicine in the prevention of cardiometabolic and other chronic, degenerative diseases.

There is a direct analogy between such efforts and their often-unrecognized utility, and the work of homeland security, with all of its reverberations into the current, noisome political campaigns.

Let's revisit immunization. You have surely heard the false contention that vaccines cause autism, and have likely been tempted to believe it. You have doubtless heard the true indictments of the 1976 swine flu vaccine, one tainted batch of which caused cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome. But can you say how many lives have been saved with the MMR vaccine, or the flu vaccine? Can you even hazard at a guess at the ratio of infections prevented, or lives saved, over a given recent decade, to unintended adverse effects?

I am guessing you can't, because I can't, and it's my purview. I could look up the figures, but I don't know them off hand. What I do know is that those ratios are enormously favorable. They are likely in the general domain of millions to one, and reliably well into the many tens-of-thousands to one.

And yet, it's the “one” that makes headlines, and grabs our attention. The number of cases of measles prevented by that vaccine does not make news. The discredited claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism makes news again, and again, and again.

Similarly, we are unlikely to have any idea about most threats of terrorism that never come to fruition. Every now and then we hear about such a threat, interdicted when near to full maturity. But given the nature of prevention, most such crises are surely averted at earlier stages, entirely unconducive to drama. There is no drama, there are no headlines, and we are none the wiser.

We are, of course, unlikely to live in a world where no acts of terrorism take place, now that there are sizable entities with considerable resources dedicated to the perpetration of just such acts. It might be possible to achieve perfect interdiction in a fully militarized state, but the loss of liberty would be far too high a price to pay.

Similarly, we are unlikely to live in a world where civil liberties and privacy are fully unfettered. There are real dangers to contend with here. Were we to renounce all security for the sake of unmitigated liberty for all, we would be taking our lives in our hands at every gathering we attend.

In health and security alike, we are seeking the sweet spot. We are aiming at a ratio of effective prevention to occasional lapse that rightly balances the advantages of interdiction with the costs, sacrifices, and inconveniences with which we are willing to purchase them.

But ratios and balance and realistic compromises are not the stuff of campaign bravado. Nor are they the stuff of headlines, and there are papers to sell and air time to fill every day. Failure of preventive efforts unfailingly gets the spotlight; success is consigned to the shadows.

Consequently, we will certainly know about every act of violence and terrorism that makes it through the existing filters, just as we will know about every screening test or vaccine gone awry. How easy, then, for anyone inclined to demagoguery to point an accusing finger at any evidence of current failure, blame it on those currently in charge, and promise us a world free of it- although invariably without any cogent explanation as to how.

In politics, this is how we tend to roll, and everyone seems to accept it. No doubt far too many are actually persuaded by the captivating combination of misdirected blame, and unsubstantiated promises.

But imagine for a moment if medicine worked this way. With every case of colon cancer, there would be an argument to abandon colon cancer screening altogether since, obviously, it had failed! The occurrence of breast cancer would propagate arguments to abandon mammography, rather than efforts to improve it. Opposing medical factions would blame bad outcomes on one another, and make vague promises about alternative approaches that would provide perfect results. We, the people, would favor first one group, then another, only to be disappointed by each in turn.

Whether in defense of the human body, or of our collective security, the best we can do is the best we can do. It involves tradeoffs between protection of life and limb, and protection of comfort, convenience, and civil liberties.

If inclined to think that someone else should be in charge because those who have been haven't prevented everything bad, ask yourself what you actually know about how much bad stuff has been prevented. The answer, inevitably for those of us without high-level security clearance, is: we don't know much. We might well be living in a world of six-sigma security, yet only know about the one failure in a million.

In my field, news not made by things that haven't happened tends to be what matters most of all. In a troubled, complicated world of terrorist organizations, much the same is apt to be true of our security.

Preventive Medicine invites us to consider the importance of what does not happen, along with that of what does. In so doing, it might help us see past the distortions of political propaganda and false promises of perfect success, to a balanced perspective about balancing priorities, and the best we can do with that reality.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital
President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

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The Midas Throne Row
There is some furor over an exhibit now at Philadelphia's Penn Museum: "The Golden Age of King Midas," showcasing the art of Turkey's ancient Phrygia, a kingdom ruled by Midas in the first millennium BC and known for its superb artistry. Particularly at issue is the curator of the show, C. Brian Rose, suggesting that one of the pieces on display, an ivory statuette known as the "lion tamer" could have been part of the "Midas throne" Herodotos mentions (but never describes) as Midas's gift to Delphi (the Greeks). To date, not even the remains of Midas have been found, although lots of exquisite Phrygian art has been recovered from the so-called "Midas Mound" at Gordion (present day Ankara) and from five tombs to the southwest near the village of Bayindir, with some of the most spectacular objects now on view in Philly through November.

"2016-08-03-1470244392-6214847-masterofthebeast.jpg"

Lion Tamer

Actually, two pieces in the show that I know of -- there may be more revelations to come -- are now being disputed by archaeologists. And getting it right matters because such objects help us to understand human history. The other object, whose image opens and closes the Penn Museum show catalogue, is a silver statuette thought to be of a "eunuch priest." Phrygian priests traditionally emasculated themselves to honor the Phrygian goddess, Matar Kybele.

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Silver Priest

The eunuch priest had its public debut in America 27 years ago in a story I wrote with Turkish journalist Özgen Acar for the December 1989 issue of Connoisseur. The magazine (now defunct) at the time was run by Tom Hoving following his other famous run as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A little background. . . The art we presented in our above Connoisseur story, experts dated between late 8th century BC and early 7th century BC -- and we interviewed a variety of experts. The pieces were found near present day Bayindir village (ancient Lycia), outside what once were the known borders of Phrygia. But there was a Phrygian presence in the region, including places for travelers and pilgrims to worship Matar Kebele, and Phrygian pottery and metal artifacts had been found in the area prior to the Bayindir discoveries. The Bayindir tombs were also adjacent to a stretch of meadow, considered a resting place for assorted ancient caravans en route to the Mediterranean Sea or making passage over the Taurus Mountains.

As we reported, the Bayindir art was largely considered by experts to be Phrygian in design -- and still is. And because the find was so far to the southwest, the story suggested that the map of ancient Asia Minor might have to be redrawn.

Özgen Acar and I both stand by what we reported then. Özgen has recently emailed me reaffirming:

"I think the Bayindir finds are Phrygian."

I did not have an opportunity to physically examine the Bayindir objects for Connoisseur in the hands-on way I had the Euphronios vases for an Economist magazine story the following year, prior to my coverage of Sotheby's sale of the Bunker and Herbert Hunt collection. Instead, I worked from slides of the artifacts found at Bayindir and from my taped conversations with scholars both here and in Turkey. Frankly, I was astonished by the brilliant artistry upon first seeing the silver pieces showcased in Philly.

Particularly dazzling in design is a belt made of one continuous sheet of metal incised with a four-square repeating pattern that was found in Tumulus D wrapped around the waist of the remains of a 20-25 year old woman (per pelvic bone analysis). The Phrygians loved geometrical design in art, some patterns meant to honor the Phrygian goddess and others intended as puzzles, mazes.

The current row over the two objects mentioned at the top of this story is largely a stylistic one, but, again, one that impacts history. And again, the pieces in question -- both in the Philly show -- are the two statuettes pictured above: (1) an ivory figure known as the "lion tamer" on loan to Penn Museum from the Archaeological Museum, Delphi, Greece, and (2) a silver eunuch priest on loan from the Antalya Museum.

The Penn Museum actually does indicate in its press that the silver priest is from Lycia (Bayindir) even though the object is the star image opening and closing the King Midas Phrygian show catalogue.

Lycia was a culture that was subject to both Near East and Greek influences, and was located in what is now southwest Turkey. It was the home of Sarpedon, the legendary prince depicted both in Homer's Iliad and on the Euphronios krater and wine cup auctioned at Sotheby's for the Hunt brothers (now returned to Italy).

The Penn exhibition also includes pieces found in other ancient cultures that had relationships with Phrygia: Lydia, Urartu, Assyria, Persia, Greece -- perhaps because art historians increasingly take the perspective that art of this period reflects diverse cultural influences as a result of trade, war, marriage and other associations.

But Dietrich von Bothmer, for one, chairman of the Met's department of Greek and Roman art, told me for the Connoisseur article that he clearly thought the silver eunuch priest and other objects found at Bayindir were "purely" Phrygian:

"This is a fabulous discovery. I have never seen anything like it. Each and every piece is of purely Phrygian type."

Oscar White Muscarella, who was early on part of the Gordion excavation team and for decades an Ancient Near East (ANE) expert at the Met, dated the Bayindir tombs at the time of our story late 8th to early 7th century BC -- in concurrence with a 2,000-page computer analysis of fibulae (ancient pins), some of which were found with the remains of the young woman in Tumulus D wearing the silver belt.

Muscarella has more recently told me: "Von Bothmer knew nothing about Phrygian art," saying further that he plans to review the objects presented in the Connoisseur story, claiming pieces may be East Greek. He has already expressed doubts in print about the silver eunuch priest being Phrygian.

We await Oscar Muscarella's further analysis. . .

However, it is the ivory "lion tamer" about which scholars are most divided and the reason is this. The claim has been made by Brian Rose, who also heads the Gordion excavation in Tukey for the University of Pennsylvania, that the piece is Phrygian, late 8th century BC. And in a 2012 article: "The Throne of Midas? Delphi and the Power Politics of Phrygia, Lydia, and Greece," which is based on an unfinished paper by University of Pennsylvania professor and museum curator Keith DeVries, Rose establishes his claim that the lion tamer may be a piece of the Midas throne Herodotos mentioned.

Brian Rose recently emailed me from Gordion, where he is digging for the summer, saying that he stands by the 2012 story:

"Thanks Suzan. I've written about this with Keith DeVries in 2012, and we still stand by that."

Other ANE experts say the link between the Midas throne and the ivory lion tamer seriously lacks evidence and is a distortion of history as well as commercial hype, partly to sell tickets to the Penn Museum show, which has been ongoing since early February.

There was, for example, a black tie "Golden Age of King Midas Gala" six months ago at Penn Museum where (tax deductible) tickets sold for $50,000 (premier sponsor), $25,000 (prime sponsor), $10,000 (sponsor), VIP ($1,500), $500 (individual).

However, the Rose/DeVries perspective is supported by Athanasia Psalti, director of the 10th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Delphi, Greece -- even though a web site that seems to belong to the Archaeological Museum of Delphi indicates that the lion tamer it calls "Master of the Beasts," is from a "workshop in Asia Minor, but is the work of a Greek artisan as indicated by the meander on the base (7th century B.C.)."

A. Psalti recently emailed me saying that she stands by what she wrote when the lion tamer was part of the Met show "Assyria to Iberia," that is, she thinks DeVries/Rose "convincingly" make the case that the piece is from a workshop in Phrygia (also, in said Met show was an ivory statuette probably depicting Kybele, that made its American debut on page 2 of our above Connoisseur article, although neither the Met nor Penn Museum cites our story in its literature):

"Dear Suzan, you may consult the catalog entry of the exhibition Assyria to Iberia, at the Dawn of the Classical Age, edited by Joan Aruz, Sarah B. Graff and Yelena Rakic, New York, 2014, p. 308, nr. 180 with previous references as well as the attached article on the same subject. Should you need any further help, do not hesitate to contact me.

Athanasia"

The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue says the following:

"Initially attributed to a Greek artist under strong Near Eastern influence, more recently the figurine has been convincingly suggested to have originated from a Phrygian workshop. It has also been proposed that this unique object was made as a decorative attachment for the magnificent throne of Midas. . . ."

Those experts contesting the Rose/DeVries claim were all once part of the Gordion team: Oscar Muscarella; Ken Sams -- one of three archaeologists who Rose acknowledges as being "responsible in some way for the content" of the current King Midas exhibition and pictured in the Penn Museum show catalog; and Elizabeth Simpson -- a professor at Bard Graduate Center who is director of the Gordion Furniture Project as well as a consultant to Penn Museum.

Muscarella points out in a recent article, "An Ivory Statuette from Delphi---Not from King Midas's Throne," that DeVries's claim that the object was part of the Midas throne was made in January 2002 in articles in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor (in that chronological order) and in Voice of America, February 2002. DeVries has since died.

Muscarella told me he questions why those news organization would publish the DeVries claim, didn't they do their own assessment of the piece? He's also told me that he contacted the Times about its coverage but got no response.

In his above-mentioned article, Muscarella notes further that the facial features, in particular, of the lion tamer are clearly not Phrygian:

"Although it could be argued that stylistic analysis is in the end largely subjective, even a cursory look at the items compared shows no components of the Delphi figure's face (mouth, eyes, etc.) or hair reflect Phrygian features."

I did spend some time examining the hair on the ivory lion tamer while in Philly because the room was dimly lit. Muscarella is right about the lion tamer's hair not have the interesting texture depicted on other Phrygian art from Gordion and Bayindir.

Ken Sams, who is now a professor of classical archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recently emailed me commenting:

"The ivory piece from Delphi, currently on display at the University Museum in Philadelphia, is assuredly not Phrygian [emphasis added], in my opinion, but the product of a west Anatolian or East Greek workshop. The meander is found in Phrygian furniture, but it came to be such a widely used motif that one cannot use it to determine origin. It is a strange piece that I have wondered about for years. The lion, for whatever reason has an erection, for which I know of no parallels."

Muscarella further advised by phone regarding the lion:

"That is not an erection!"

Elizabeth Simpson emailed these salient points to me regarding the lion tamer:

"Have you read Brian Rose's 2012 article in The Archaeology of Phrygian Gordion? His comparanda is not convincing[emphasis added], and it is generally acknowledged by colleagues that there is no evidence [emphasis added] that the ivory Lion Tamer statuette is Phrygian in style per se.

The Delphi Museum's posted description [you emailed me] is much more accurate than Rose's contention. Do you know if the Delphi Museum post is official? Is this what the museum label for the Lion Tamer says? Can you please let me know? I am curious.

In terms of the meander design on the base (which is published upside down in Rose's article), this exact pattern is not found on any Phrygian furniture that I know of, and the cross-within-a-square is particularly unusual in that regard.

In terms of form and joinery, the piece was recovered in fragments and has been restored; not all of it is preserved, and I have not seen the bottom of the base. There is a mortise (square cutting) in the back of the figure, but it is shallow, suggesting that the Lion Tamer was not a structural element but decorative. I am not sure how or where the Lion Tamer would have been attached to whatever it once belonged to.

Apart from the style of the ivory figure, the pattern on the base, and its form and joinery, however, one must consider whether the Lion Tamer is from a piece of Phrygian furniture at all -- and whether there is any evidence that it "is" or "may be" from Midas's famous throne.

1. First, a large collection of Phrygian royal furniture survives from the tombs at Gordion, and none of it has carved figures as elements, let alone ivory figures of this sort. You can see what the Gordion furniture looks like from my publications, particularly my 2010 Brill book on the furniture from Tumulus MM (in the MMA library, the Bard Graduate Center library, and elsewhere). A brief summary and bibliography can be found in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordion_Furniture_and_Wooden_Artifacts

Although there are no "thrones" from the Gordion tombs, there was a small chair in Tumulus MM, but it has no carved human figures -- only a crest with small animals in panels carved in relief.

There were ancient Near Eastern thrones that had carved human figures (or deities) as elements, but there is no evidence of this from Phrygia. Such figural elements occur initially in the third millennium B.C., and they are found later in Assyria, Urartu, and elsewhere in the first millennium B.C.

Ivory attachments of various types are well known from the second and first millennia in the ANE [Ancient Near East], but ivory attachments are not found on the royal furniture from the Gordion tombs. Several small, square ivory plaques were excavated in association with wood fragments from Megaron 3 on the City Mound at Gordion, but the figures carved in relief on these plaques are Phrygian in style, like those on the crest rail of the chair from Tumulus MM -- and bear no stylistic resemblance to the Lion Tamer from Delphi. You can read about ANE furniture in my article, "Furniture in Ancient Western Asia," here attached.

Rather, the design and decoration of Phrygian royal furniture involved the abstraction of three-dimensional forms, and elaborate inlaid geometric patterns with complex symmetry, including mazes, apotropaic and religious symbols, and "genealogical patterns." Phrygian furniture seems to be completely different from its eastern counterparts. The examples we have are made of wood, typically boxwood inlaid with juniper and walnut, which survived in relatively good condition in several tombs at Gordion.

So, the ivory Lion Tamer is in no way characteristic of Phrygian furniture, in terms of extant evidence. In fact, it looks completely unrelated in this regard.

2. Second, might the Lion Tamer have come from the throne that Midas dedicated in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi? Although I suppose it is remotely possible, there is absolutely no evidence for this contention. As already discussed, there is no evidence that the statuette is actually Phrygian, although it may have been made somewhere in Anatolia. And carved figures of this type are not found on Phrygian royal furniture as we know it.

But let's just imagine that Midas did have a throne with carved figures on it. Maybe he imported it from Urartu or Assyria. Even if that were the case, there is no evidence that this particular carved figure came from it [emphasis in original]. Indeed, the Lion Tamer does not look either Assyrian or Urartian, and it is hard to tell exactly where it was made or what it was once attached to.

I do not doubt that Herodotus saw a throne at Delphi that he believed was dedicated by King Midas [Herodotus 1.14). Unfortunately, he does not describe it.

I gave a lecture on April 2, 2016, at the Penn Museum at the conference, "The World of Phrygian Gordion," in which I said all these things. Brian Rose was in attendance, as the convener of the conference. He heard what I said and appeared to acknowledge the cogency of my argument. Nonetheless he continues to stand by his 2012 article.

Oscar[Muscarella]'s source article on the Lion Tamer is very good on the various issues. I also plan to write an article on "Midas's Throne," as it is important that Rose's article not stand unchallenged."

Following is one bronze object found at Bayindir in Tumulus C and now at Antalya Museum that has been suppressed, except for mention on page 2 of our above Connoisseur story, where we describe it as "a ring of phallus-shaped knobs probably made as a fertility symbol":

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Phrygian or East Greek?

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Why Women Are Smarter Than Men
Trying to compare intelligence and gender doesn't typically yield much in the way of productive discussion, but sometimes research comes along that's worth opening this particular can of worms.

Decades of research show unequivocally that men and women are equal in general intelligence (IQ), but that isn't the case when it comes to emotional intelligence (EQ). There are subtle, and not so subtle, differences in men's and women's expression and understanding of emotions that must be explored and understood.

Gender is a common place for people to assign labels around emotion. Such generalizations have pegged women as everything from the "fairer sex" to overly emotional, and men from emotionally aloof to explosive. You'll find that none of these platitudes are true.

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." -Timothy Leary

TalentSmart has tested the emotional intelligence of more than a million people and it's clear that women have the upper hand. While women's overall EQ score is just a couple of points higher than men's, this is a statistically significant difference that shows that women have greater skill in using emotions to their benefit.

It just doesn't answer the pressing question: why?

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To understand why women outscore men, we have to look at scores for each of the four emotional intelligence skills by gender. There's a reliable pattern in the data that points to some interesting explanations for the gap.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is how well you understand your own emotions in the moment, as well as how well you understand your tendencies--the people and situations you handle well and those that push your buttons. This is the one place where men and women have perfectly equal scores. It's also a place where men have been given a bad rap. People often assume that men aren't tuned in to their emotions or don't understand them. Clearly, that isn't the case. Of course, men also have a tendency to hop on this bandwagon--by feigning to have no awareness or understanding of their emotions--in the hope of avoiding any accountability for their actions. Now we know better.

Self-Management

Self-management is what you do with your emotions once you're aware of them. Since you can't make emotions disappear, effective self-management requires channeling your emotions into producing the behavior that you want. This is the one area where men outscored women. I believe that the best explanation for gender differences in emotional intelligence is how we are socialized growing up (reinforced by societal gender pressures we experience as adults). In the case of self-management, men are often expected to be emotionally "strong" and in control of their emotions, which may explain why they outscore women slightly.

Social Awareness

Social awareness is how well you understand the emotions and experience of other people. This requires the ability to tune in to body language and other unspoken signals, since people don't usually come out and say what's going on with them. This is an area where women outscore men by a fairly large margin (statistically speaking). This is also a skill that women are socialized to practice and possess from childhood in ways that men aren't. Right or wrong, women are expected to take care of other people (and are rewarded for doing so). This gives them an upper hand when it comes to social awareness. Men, to their detriment, aren't rewarded for social awareness in the same way that women are, and this carries over into adulthood.

Relationship Management

Relationship management is the pinnacle of emotional intelligence. It requires that you use self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness in concert to better your relationships as you interact with other people. You cannot hope to get the most out of your interactions with other people until you understand your emotions, cue in to their emotions, and use this knowledge to adjust your approach on the fly. Women have a slight edge in relationship management for reasons described in the social awareness section above.

The Advantage

Emotional intelligence presents a significant advantage for women in the workplace. Whether you're a man or a woman, don't just sit back hoping that you're one of the high-EQ types. EQ is a flexible skill that you can improve with effort. To that end, here are a few things that you can do to improve your EQ today:

Limit Your Caffeine Intake

Drinking excessive amounts of caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline, and adrenaline is the source of the fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response to ensure survival. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you're responding to a curt e-mail. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. Caffeine's long half-life ensures you stay this way as it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body. High-EQ individuals know that caffeine is trouble, and they don't let it get the better of them.

Get Enough Sleep

It's difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence. When you sleep your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of neural activity when you're awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you're asleep. So when you don't get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think. Skipping sleep impairs your brain function across the board. It slows your ability to process information and problem solve, kills your creativity, and catapults your stress levels and emotional reactivity. High-EQ individuals know that their self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when they don't get enough sleep. So, they make sleep a top priority.

Stop Negative Self-Talk in Its Tracks

The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that--thoughts, not facts. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain's natural tendency to perceive threats (inflating the frequency or severity of an event). Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts in order to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook.

Appreciate What You Have

Taking time to contemplate what you're grateful for isn't merely the right thing to do; it also improves your mood because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It's likely that lower levels of cortisol played a major role in this.

Why do you think women outscore men in emotional intelligence? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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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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More Coca-Cola Ties Seen Inside U.S. Centers For Disease Control
In June, Dr. Barbara Bowman, a high-ranking official within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unexpectedly departed the agency, two days after information came to light indicating that she had been communicating regularly with - and offering guidance to - a leading Coca-Cola advocate seeking to influence world health authorities on sugar and beverage policy matters.

Now, more emails suggest that another veteran CDC official has similarly close ties to the global soft drink giant. Michael Pratt, Senior Advisor for Global Health in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC, has a history of promoting and helping lead research funded by Coca-Cola. Pratt also works closely with the nonprofit corporate interest group set up by Coca-Cola called the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests show.

Pratt did not respond to questions about his work, which includes a position as a professor at Emory University, a private research university in Atlanta that has received millions of dollars from the Coca-Cola Foundation and more than $100 million from famed longtime Coca-Cola leader Robert W. Woodruff and Woodruff's brother George. Indeed, Coca-Cola's financial support for Emory is so strong that the university states on its website that "it's unofficially considered poor school spirit to drink other soda brands on campus."

CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben said Pratt had been on a "temporary assignment" to Emory University but his work at Emory "is completed and he is now back on staff at CDC." Emory University websites still show Pratt as currently assigned as a professor there, however.

Regardless, research by consumer advocacy group U.S. Right to Know shows Pratt is another high-ranking CDC official with close ties to Coca-Cola. And experts in the nutrition arena said that because the mission of the CDC is protecting public health, it is problematic for agency officials to collaborate with a corporate interest that has a track record of downplaying the health risks of its products.

"These alignments are worrisome because they help provide legitimacy to industry-friendly spin," said Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and founder of Dietitians for Professional Integrity.

One key message Coca-Cola has been pushing is "Energy Balance." Consumption of sugar-laden foods and beverages is not to blame for obesity or other health problems; a lack of exercise is the primary culprit, the theory goes. "There is increasing concern about overweight and obesity worldwide, and while there are many factors involved, the fundamental cause in most cases is an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended," Coca-Cola states on its website.

"The soda industry is keen on deflecting the conversation away from the well-documented negative health effects of sugar-sweetened beverages and onto physical activity," said Bellatti.

The messaging comes at a time when leading global health authorities are urging a crack-down on consumption of sugary food and beverages, and some cities are implementing added taxes on sodas to try to discourage consumption. Coca-Cola has been fighting back in part by providing funding for scientists and organizations who back up the company with research and academic presentations.

Pratt's work with the industry appears to fit into that messaging effort. Last year he co-authored a Latin America health and nutrition study and related papers funded in part by Coca-Cola and ILSI to investigate the diets of individuals in Latin American countries and to establish a database for studying the "complex relationship existing between energy imbalance, obesity and associated chronic diseases..." Pratt also has been acting as a scientific "advisor" to ILSI North America, serving on an ILSI committee on "energy balance and active lifestyle." And he is a member of the ILSI Research Foundation Board of Trustees. He also served as an advisor to an international study of childhood obesity funded by Coca-Cola.

ILSI's North American branch, whose members include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo Inc., Dr Pepper Snapple Group and more than two dozen other food industry players, states as its mission the advancement of the "understanding and application of science related to the nutritional quality and safety of the food supply." But some independent scientists and food industry activists consider ILSI to be a front group aimed at advancing the interests of the food industry. It was founded by Coca-Cola scientific and regulatory affairs leader Alex Malaspina in 1978. ILSI has had a long and checkered relationship with the World Health Organization, working at one time closely with its Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and with WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer and the International Programme on Chemical Safety.

But a report by a consultant to WHO found that ILSI was infiltrating WHO and FAO with scientists, money and research to garner favor for industry products and strategies. ILSI was also accused of attempting to undermine WHO tobacco control efforts on behalf of the tobacco industry.

One April 2012 email exchange obtained through a Freedom of Information request shows Pratt as part of a circle of professors communicating with Rhona Applebaum, then Coca-Cola's chief scientific and regulatory officer, about difficulties getting cooperation on a study in Mexico from that country's National Institute of Public Health. The Institute would not "play ball because of who was sponsoring the study," according to an email Peter Katzmarzyk, a professor of exercise science at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, sent to the group. Appelbaum defended the integrity of the research and expressed anger at the situation, writing "So if good scientists take $$$ from Coke - what? - they're corrupted? Despite the fact they're advancing public good?" In the email exchange Pratt offered to assist "especially if these issues continue to arise."

Emails show Pratt's communication with Applebaum, who also served a term as ILSI's president, continued through at least 2014, including discussion of work for "Exercise is Medicine," an initiative launched in 2007 by Coca-Cola and for which Pratt serves as an advisory board member.

Applebaum left the company in 2015 after the Global Energy Balance Network that she helped establish came under public scrutiny amid allegations that it was little more than a Coca-Cola propaganda group. Coca-Cola poured roughly $1.5 million into the establishment of the group, including a $1 million grant to the University of Colorado. But after Coca-Cola's ties to the organization were made public in an article in The New York Times, and after several scientists and public health authorities accused the network of "peddling scientific nonsense," the university returned the money to Coca-Cola. The network disbanded in late 2015 after emails surfaced that detailed Coca-Cola's efforts to use the network to influence scientific research on sugary drinks.

Coca-Cola has been particularly zealous in recent years in working to counter concerns about consumption of beverages with high sugar content and links between sugary beverages and obesity and other diseases. The New York Times reported last year that Coke's chief executive, Muhtar Kent, admitted that the company had spent almost $120 million since 2010 to pay for academic health research and for partnerships with major medical and community groups involved in curbing the obesity epidemic.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of "Soda Politics," said that when CDC officials work so closely with industry, there is a conflict of interest risk the CDC should consider.

"Officials of public health agencies run the risk of cooptation, capture, or conflict of interest when they have close professional ties with companies whose job it is to sell food products, regardless of the effects of those products on health," said Nestle.

Pratt's ties to Coca-Cola and ILSI are similar to those seen with Bowman. Bowman, who directed the CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, worked early in her career as a senior nutritionist for Coca-Cola and later while at the CDC co-authored an edition of a book called Present Knowledge in Nutrition as "a publication of the International Life Sciences Institute." The emails between Bowman and Malaspina showed ongoing communications regarding ILSI and beverage industry interests.

During Bowman's tenure, in May 2013, ILSI and other organizers invited Bowman and the CDC to participate in a project ILSI was engaged in with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a "branded foods database." Travel costs for Bowman would be paid by ILSI, the invitation stated. Bowman did agree to participate and the CDC provided funding, at least $25,000, Harben confirmed, to support the database project. The 15-member steering committee for the project held six ILSI representatives, documents show.

Both Bowman and Pratt have worked under the direction of Ursula Bauer, director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. After U.S. Right to Know publicized emails about Bowman's ties to ILSI and Coca-Cola, Bauer defended the relationship in an email to her employees, saying "it's not unusual for Barbara - or any of us- to correspond with others who have similar interests in our areas of work..."

Still, Bowman announced an unexpected retirement from CDC two days after the emails were made public. CDC initially denied she had departed the agency, but Harben said this week that was only because it took some time to "process" Bowman's transition to retirement.

The relationships raise fundamental questions about how close is too close when public officials collaborate with industry interests that can conflict with public interests.

Yoni Freedhoff, MD, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa and founder of the Bariatric Medical Institute, said there is a real danger to when public health officials become too close with corporate players.

"Until we recognize the inherent risks of conflicts of interest with the food industry and public health, there is near certainty that these conflicts will influence the nature and strength of recommendations and programs in ways that will be friendly to industries whose products contribute to the burden of illness those same recommendations and programs are meant to address," Freedhoff said.

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Weekend Roundup: This Election Is About Defining America
Most presidential elections in America have been contests over different policy solutions and approaches but rooted in a commonly agreed reality. This time around, as the back-to-back Republican and Democratic conventions have demonstrated, the dispute is over what constitutes reality itself. More than anything else, this election is about defining what America is.

Nominating conclaves used to be mainly about gritty political tradeoffs among factions in order to reach consensus on a candidate. These conventions were Hollywood-style orchestrations, replete with celebrity testimonials and musical performances, aimed at convincing the larger public of which reality to believe. Donald Trump and company argue we should be afraid, very afraid, because de-nationalized cosmopolitan elites have lost the will to protect the safety and economic well-being of Americans in a dangerous and ruthlessly competitive world. Climate change, which they recklessly deny, doesn't make their list of concerns.

Hillary Clinton and company argue that President Obama has set America on the right course, disengaging from a war footing and celebrating diversity as the nation's greatest strength. For them, the real danger is not Trump's Mexicans or Muslims but intolerant and divisive nativism. And for the Democrats, in the end it is the chastised establishment insiders, not disenchanted outsiders, who are the most competent to implement incremental change that will reduce inequality and curb the inordinate influence of the one percent.

The contest over defining who we are seems to have come about for two reasons. First, the consciousness of most Americans now dwells in media silos that are echo chambers of their own worldview and not objective platforms that establish a common grasp of the facts. Second, America, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a Great Transformation in which the established institutions that sustained stability and progress for decades are ill suited to face the social upheaval of rapid technological change and globalization that is creating new classes of winners and losers. Caught in the purgatory of no longer and not yet, a clear path to salvation eludes the unsettled body politic.

The left-populist filmmaker Michael Moore lays out several reasons he is convinced that Trump will win the presidency. As Moore sees it, the Republican candidate will triumph in the key economically depressed Midwestern states, an outcome he calls America's "Rust Belt Brexit." Further, white men full of resentment at being left behind in an ever more diverse society will vote in Trump's favor. Hillary is just too unpopular among the general public, says Moore, while the reluctant stance of disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters will translate into a weak showing for her at the polls. Lastly, Moore expects the mischievous "Jesse Ventura effect" of voters who want to upset the applecart "to make Mommy and Daddy mad."

An even more bizarre overlay in this year's election is the apparent strongman sympathies between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, compounded by the "high confidence" judgment of American intelligence that the Russian government hacked into the Democratic National Committee emails.

Writing from Moscow, Anastasya Manuilova says that while it is "not implausible to say that such government-backed hackers do exist" in Russia, most of her colleagues at the Kommersant newspaper found the allegations "too far-fetched" or lacking enough proof to make such an elaborate scheme believable.

Russian chess champion and thorn in Putin's side, Garry Kasparov, is not surprised by alleged Russian meddling in American politics on behalf of "the extraordinarily disruptive and unpredictable" Trump. "Putin wants to stoke chaos and discord in the West," he writes.

Writing from Armenia, Armine Sahakyan says she is "convinced that not just Putin but also every other dictator in the former Soviet Union would love a Trump presidency. That way the United States would stop harping on their corruption, human rights abuses and other shortcomings -- and let them kill and imprison political opponents and subjugate neighbors with impunity."

Continuing terrorist attacks in Europe, including the brutal throat slitting of an elderly Catholic priest in France by terrorists who claimed allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, are leading to a more urgent reverberation of the divisive American debate. Writing from Paris, Frederic Sicard argues against the state of emergency declared by President Francois Hollande. "Faced with barbarity, can't our democracies choose not to seek safety only by sacrificing the very foundations of our society of law and freedom?" he asks. "By muting our deepest aspirations, are we not playing into the hands of terrorism?"

Writing from Germany, Roland Tichy reflects on the recent string of terror acts in his country. "The stark political divisions on display in the U.S.," he says, "now appear in Germany as well. Germany is becoming more colorful, thus becoming more American: It is also growing more violent in its hostilities, more unforgiving. This divide will increase along the ethnic and social fault lines."

As a pervasive sense of insecurity spreads across Europe, it is also about to be hit with a new financial crisis over Italy's insolvent banks. Despite EU rules against bailouts, Steve Hanke argues that "an Italian state rescue" is the most sensible way to recapitalize the troubled banks. Europe's tough and powerful commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, lays out why and how markets must work for citizens.

Wikileaks is not only roiling the U.S. election through the release of internal DNC emails. It also helped publicize the so-called "Erodgan emails" in the wake of the recent coup attempt in Turkey. Zeynep Tufekci slams Wikileaks and the hackers behind the data dump for irresponsibly publicizing documents that shed no light on the regime but which instead included the identities, addresses and contact details of women who belong to the ruling Justice and Development Party. "Their addresses are out there for every stalker, ex-partner, disapproving relative or random crazy to peruse as they wish," she writes. As a result of our post, the uploaded files to which Wikileaks linked have been removed.

James Dorsey scores the anti-Gulenist purge underway in Turkey as strengthening militants and jihadists in Pakistan as the Turkish government demands the closure of the "PakTurkey" schools run by Gulenists there that teach science and moderation instead of extremism. In an interview, sociologist Joshua Hendrik explains what we need to know about Fethullah Gulen and the Hizmet ("service") organization over which he presides. WorldPost correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Istanbul on a major demonstration this week by opposition groups to show solidarity against the recent coup from across the political spectrum.

As the Olympics are about to get underway in Brazil, Yale's Joseph Lewnard contends that the fear of the Zika virus spreading as a result of large numbers of people gathering at the Games is highly exaggerated.

Criminologist John Carl takes a critical look at the prison system in America, which has the world's largest incarcerated population per capita, tracing its origins to the unforgiving Puritan culture from which it was born.

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden examine China's growing military presence in Africa, ranging from greater engagement in United Nations peacekeeping missions to anti-piracy patrols to its nearly completed navy outpost in Djibouti.

This interactive world map reshapes countries and continents if we look at the factor of wealth instead of geography and population.

Our Singularity series this week looks at a new bio-robot shaped like a stingray and made of heart cells that can be controlled by light.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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What To Do When Treatment Doesn't Work
At the very dawn of modern medicine, 2500 years ago, Hippocrates made its most important and robust finding: 1/3 of patients get better without treatment; 1/3 don't get better even with treatment; and only 1/3 actually benefit from treatment.

The ratios do vary depending on the type of disease, it's severity and chronicity, and the power and specificity of the available treatments. Whenever a disease is chronic and/or severe, spontaneous recovery is less likely, treatment will more likely be needed, and full response to treatment is less likely. But on average, Hippocrates' "rule of thirds" stands up remarkably well to systematic study and has been medical lore for hundreds of generations of doctors.

One of my early papers (written more than 35 years ago and titled, "No Treatment As A Prescription of Choice") reflected Hippocrates' caution that mindlessly piling on treatments often benefits little and instead can add a substantial burden of side effects to the patient's already heavy burden of illness.

Unfortunately, Hippocratic humility has increasingly been replaced by the hubris of modern medicine. Many clinicians hold the unconscious and unwarranted assumption that there is a cure for every illness and recklessly add on new treatments whenever previous ones have failed.
Careless polypharmacy prevails throughout medicine and is particularly prevalent and dangerous in the elderly. Doctors rarely follow the Hippocratic dictum to "First do no harm."

Peter Tyrer is the former editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry and a leader in the development of the UK's NICE psychiatric treatment guidelines. He will describe his effort to restore Hippocratic humility and common sense to psychiatric practice.

Professor Tyrer writes: "We are prone to trumpet our advances in medicine and slow to acknowledge where we have made little progress.

Treatment of mental illness started from an almost non-existent base 200 years ago and perhaps it is not surprising that we still have so much left to learn.

If we take the whole range of mental illness, from common disorders such as anxiety and depression, to severe disorders such as schizophrenia, and the hinterland of other conditions such as personality disorder and intellectual disability, then approximately 50% of all patients with mental illness either have no satisfactory treatments available or often fail to respond to existing ones that may help others.

What do we normally do about this in psychiatry? We use terms like treatment-resistance and treatment-refractory, but this is merely an admission of our failure to have a solution.
The problem is that, in our therapeutically enthusiastic age, we do not admit failure as readily as we should. We persist in treatment, usually by giving whatever has failed previously in more dosage or by adding new treatments that have little chance of success, but a high risk of side effects.

The sad conclusion, still denied by some, is that in the most severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and the autistic group of disorders, we have made no real advances in treatment efficacy for 50 years.

What I call "nidotherapy" is a way of adapting optimally to this impasse. The term is derived from 'nidus' (the Latin name for nest). The idea is to undertake a collaborative and systematic manipulation of the person's environment to make for a better fit to minimize the negative impact of untreatable mental illness on both the individual and others.

Patients with persistent mental illness take to this intervention well and usually love the idea. When asked if they would rather than have more treatment or change aspects of their physical, social and personal environment, they almost always embrace the latter option with enthusiasm.
As therapists we often fail to realize how important the environment is in both maintaining and reinforcing mental illness. When it is altered in mutual collaboration with a therapist, there are often dramatic changes. General social functioning and mental symptoms often improve, and treatments that never worked before now seem to provide benefit. Clinical trials have also shown nidotherapy to be remarkably cost-effective.

Many environmental changes can be effected at low cost and may replace much more costly health interventions.

So how is this treatment given, and can it be mastered easily? In brief, it can, but some people are natural nidotherapists and others, no matter how much training they receive, are hopeless. There are four components - person understanding, environmental analysis, preparation of the nidopathway (the plan for environmental change), and, finally, the monitoring and adjustment phase.

The first is often the most difficult. One of the essentials of nidotherapy is genuine collaboration ending with a joint plan that is supported equally by therapist and patient. This cannot be done without a really good understanding of the patient and their problems, achieved by exploring how they arose, getting a feel of personality features, probing hidden corners of difficulty often unexpressed, and allowing a free and open discussion of hopes, aims and goals.

Environmental analysis takes over at this point, and looks at all the factors in the physical, social and personal that may be preventing life satisfaction, and the changes that might be possible to change these for the better.

Once this has been done, the planned program for environmental change (the nidopathway) is prepared with an appropriate timetable. This has to be both realistic and feasible. Often the nidotherapist is needed to be an advocate at this point. Many people with persistent mental illness are not very good at putting their points of view forward, and because they are faced with a wall of opposition from professionals, often retreat into passive discontent. But their views about environmental change may well be right, and if they are supported in nidotherapy by appropriate advocacy the opposition can be overcome.

The final phase involves review and monitoring of the pathway. Often adjustments need to be made to the original plan, and sometimes it may be changed radically, but always the changes need to be owned by the patient.

It will not escape the reader that this whole process can be carried out by people themselves or by their friends and relatives. Some input from health professionals is needed for guidance, but not too much except in those with more severe mental disorders. So the option of widespread adoption of this treatment is possible, and this could include whole populations.
If you wish to know more about this exciting treatment please look at the website www.nidotherapy.com. There is now greater interest in this development, and it is being thought of in dementia, added to the management of personality disorder, and also in autism and intellectual difficulty. It may sound corny to say that it offers hope to so many who feel in despair, but it does."

Thanks, Peter. Hippocrates also said: "It is more important to know the patient who has the disease than the disease the patient has." True even more today than when first proclaimed 2500 years ago. Knowing the patient means also knowing how he interacts with his family and within his social context.

Sad to say, common sense is too often one of the first casualties of medical training. The focus on learning the details of complex technical interventions distracts from responding to the obvious, understanding the personal, and finding simple practical solutions.

A patient's psychiatric symptoms often provoke vicious cycles reverberating in his relations with others- social rejection and symptom exacerbation interacting and amplifying one another. We can't always effect significant reduction of the patient's symptoms- but we usually can, by altering the environment, substitute virtuous for vicious cycles. Relationships are often much more flexible and amenable to change than are people.

Thanks again, Peter, for reminding us that giving up on curing the illness doesn't mean giving up on helping the patient.

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Did Arabic Scholars Discover Evolution in the Ninth Century?
One thousand years ago, when the United States of America did not exist and Oxford and Cambridge were backwaters of ignorance, the light of human reason shone brightly in places like Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad. During the Abbasid caliphate for much of the 8th through middle 11th centuries, and also sporadically thereafter, tolerance of certain non-Muslim groups was enshrined in law. This was not as extensive as the constitutionally guaranteed religious (and non-religious) freedoms we enjoy in the West today, but it did mean that non-Muslims such as Musa Ibn Maimun (also known as Maimonides), Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Yuhanna Ibn Bukhtishu, could not only practice their Judaism or Christianity, but could also make enduring contributions to the social and intellectual life of the then-dominant Muslim culture.

It may not be a coincidence that many aspects of our understanding of the world have roots in this age. Arab and Persian scholars (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) not only translated the writings of the Greeks, but also made original contributions about mathematics, medicine, and social science (among other topics). Regarding biology, one of the more interesting claims that surfaces from time to time concerns evolution:

The theory of biological evolution in its complete form was presented by a great early zoologist, al-Jahiz in the ninth century.

wrote the Turkish theologian Mehmet Bayrakdar in a 1983 issue of the London-based Islamic Quarterly.
But in its complete form?

Not quite. There are indeed some tantalizing quotes that evoke evolutionary ideas from medieval Arabic scholars. The Englishman John William Draper famously referred to "The Mohammedan Theory of Evolution" in his 1874 book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, probably in reference to the Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in his 14th century The Muqaddimah,

creation ... started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The last stage of minerals is connected with the first stage of plants, such as herbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish ... the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the next group.

And 500 years before Khaldun, al-Jahiz articulated a kind of biological selection in his Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals).

In 1930, the Spanish scholar Miguel Asin Palacios translated one such passage from al-Jahiz:

In sum, no animal can survive without nourishment. The hunting animal cannot escape being hunted. Every weak animal devours those that are weaker; every strong animal cannot avoid being consumed by those that are stronger.... God, in sum, made some beings the cause of life to others, and in turn made these the cause of death to yet others.

These two observations--- continuity of existence across different forms of life (and indeed non-life) from Ibn Khaldun, and a struggle for existence among individuals from al-Jahiz--- are indeed relevant to the contemporary theory of biological evolution. However, this is a far cry from "biological evolution in its complete form". First of all, the goal of al-Jahiz's Book of Animals was, according to the German historian Herbert Eisenstein, "not actually the study of animal species, but a proof of the existence of the Creator that is evident from his creation" (p. 122 in Einfürung in die arabische Zoographie). Moreover, al-Jahiz was a gifted philosopher and theologian interested in biology, not vice-versa. He saw free will and the autonomy of God's creation as the reason why animals were "created" with the means (e.g., claws, fangs, spines) to attack others and defend themselves. According to Einsenstein (continuing the passage quoted above), al-Jahiz wrote that

when you see an animal ... of great danger, and concerning whom Man must be very careful, such as snakes and wolves provided with fangs ... thus may you know ... that God--- sublime and powerful is He--- gives to the steadfast, those who understand that free will and rational experience could not exist if the world were purely evil or entirely good.

Whether or not you think this argument is convincing (and it remains a key part of modern religion's approach to theodicy), the point is that al-Jahiz was less interested in the natural mechanisms by which life became diverse over time than he was in understanding nature in the context of monotheistic philosophy.

Another difference between modern biology and the natural philosophy of the Arab-Persian golden age was, ironically, the reality of the species. The notion that a group of interbreeding animals is thereby distinct from other such groups is not evident in pre-modern Arabic literature. Al-Jahiz was fascinated with hybridization and adaptation, and contemplated if and how environmental factors may have had an influence across generations of humans and other animals. According to another German translation of a passage from al-Jahiz, he wrote that maybe eels arose by cross-breeding fish with snakes. Maybe people from the western Caliphate (what is today Morocco and Algeria) look different from Arabians because of differences in the food and air. These were the kinds of discussions one can find in the prolific writings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Qutaiba, and others of their time. Were they more informed about nature than Europeans in the 9th century? Yes. Did ninth-century Arabs discover biological evolution? No.

As summarized by the Iraqi-British physicist Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders (and echoed by writers such as James Montgomery and Rebecca Stott), al-Jahiz articulated a mix of natural theology with Lamarckian evolution, in which behaviors and environmental influences of a given animal could have a direct influence on its offspring. This was more than just quoting Aristotle, and Europeans didn't get this far until many centuries later. However, although the Abbasid caliphate played a key role in upholding and advancing human reason, no one there or anywhere else during the middle ages discovered the major principles of contemporary evolutionary biology.

This well-corroborated theory about the mechanisms behind biological diversity recognizes that, in general, what a given animal does over the course of its lifetime (stretch its neck to reach leaves in the treetops, exercise its arms hammering horseshoes) does not directly influence its offspring. Yes, epigenetics and lateral transfer can make detours around the barrier of generational inheritance, but the essence of evolution is about variety, heritability, selection, and constraint. Evolutionary biology is not a static discipline, and in years to come there will be many more discoveries that shake up our understanding of how the mechanism behind biodiversity works. One such recent discovery is that physical laws underpinning cell growth may have a far stronger influence on certain aspects of anatomy than adaptive selection, as demonstrated in 2013 by a study of scale development in crocodiles. This discovery, and many others over the past 150 years, improves (not disproves) our understanding of evolution.

Eager proponents of today's monotheisms sometimes appear very keen to see in their cultural history and holy books indications of modern scientific discoveries. However, it seems to me that the real take-home message of golden age of the Middle East is not its contributions to modern science (and there are many), but the fact that some of its rulers valued ideas at least as much as ideology. Give scholars the resources to be able to study and write, and encourage curiosity about traditions besides your own. Scientific and civil advancements will happen (and have happened) for the same reasons in the 21st century as they did in the ninth.

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The Limits of Google: How Patients Can Find Out What Works In Medical Care
When you feel sick, even before you go to the doctor, where do you look for information? Many go to Google or other search engines, but that information isn't always reliable. Besides, it is often downright scary. And how can anyone trust TV advertisements that promise fields of flowers and happiness to anyone who takes the medication, all while a dispassionate voice-over lists terrible side effects.

We are all supposed to be "engaged patients". We are supposed to research our symptoms and diagnoses. But "patient engagement" is one of the most overused and least understood terms in health care discussions today. Everyone talks about the need for it, but few know how to really use patient input. Some doctors welcome an informed patient; others not so much. Some organizations will put one patient on their board or advisory committee and consider patient engagement done.

As someone who has served as a consumer representative on boards that evaluate new treatments, I can tell you that patient engagement is critically important to assessing what really works in terms of treatment and care, and what research is needed to inform decision making.

Yet few opportunities for this exist.

In fact, special interests and those frightened of change, are challenging evidence-based efforts to evaluate health care system innovations and high-cost drug treatments. Instead of fighting these efforts, they should be demanding more of them and insist that patient voices are part of the discussion.

You may have heard that less than 20% of what physicians do has solid medical research to support it. That's kind of astounding when you think about it. Doctors do something because that's the way they were trained to do it, and until new information comes to light, they will continue to do it the same way. Take the treatment for ear infections in kids. Doctors prescribe or parents demand tubes, antibiotics, anything to stop the pain. But good research shows that too many antibiotics have negative outcomes. As a result, treatment for ear infections has changed appropriately over the past several years. Same for tonsillectomies, the third most frequent surgery for children.

Fortunately for patients, there are two places where their voices will be heard and where they can find good, evidence-based information. One is a non-governmental nonprofit program called PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute); the other is a nonprofit called ICER (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review). PCORI was funded in 2010 by the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act (one of the many aspects of "Obamacare" most don't know about). The Institute's money comes from the government and fees assessed to private insurance and self-insured employer-based plans, but PCORI is completely independent and conducts its business in public. PCORI's mission is "to help people make informed healthcare decisions, and improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, by producing and promoting high-integrity, evidence-based information that comes from research guided by patients, caregivers, and the broader healthcare community." PCORI meetings are public and patients are heavily involved in deciding what research should be done and by whom. PCORI's research has included how to best manage side effects of cancer treatment, how to help people recover from strokes more rapidly, and how to pull specialists together to more effectively treat lung cancer. These research projects were all selected and guided by patient input.

Patient voices are also being sought in the evaluation of drugs for conditions like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, high cholesterol, or psoriasis. Many of these drugs are advertised constantly on TV with little helpful information for patients about which of the side effects is most prevalent or serious, how effective the drug is or how much it costs. ICER provides this information. Seventy percent of ICER's funding comes from nonprofit foundations (70%) with the remaining coming from life science companies and health insurance companies. ICER is "dedicated to improving patient care by providing independent, completely transparent evaluations of how new drugs compare to existing treatments". ICER differs from the FDA by looking at the cost of treatments as well as their effectiveness in two ways - in comparison to no treatment (as the FDA does) and in comparison to existing treatments (as the FDA does not do). This is helpful for patients making their decisions when their insurance does not cover the drug or when deductibles or coinsurance may be very high.

ICER works through three independent review bodies of practicing physicians, methodology experts and patient advocates that meet three times a year in New England, the Midwest and California to look at the evidence for the effectiveness of new treatments or drugs. I was a consumer member of the California panel, CTAF (California Technology Assessment Forum) for many years, so I know how challenging it is to integrate a non-clinical voice in the decision-making. The issues are complex and the information is often incomplete or highly technical. However, patients or consumers can bring a practical focus to the discussion, especially when we try to define terms such as "quality of life" or question the value of a drug that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and extends life by only a few weeks.

PCORI and ICER are great resources for patients and their providers. The reports they issue are more reliable than what any internet search can provide. ICER is the only independent national resource that offers credible information about the real elephant in the room--the cost of a new drug, particularly as it compares to existing drugs for the same condition. And ICER involves patients in making those determinations.

ICER's process first assesses how well a drug works, the side effects it produces, and how it compares to similar drugs and treatments. Only after this analysis does ICER look at cost. Will a medication reduce future costs by keeping you healthier? Does it offer benefits that no other medication on the market can? Or will it lead to escalating and unsustainable costs for you and for the entire health care system to the point where no one will be available to afford the innovative treatment? For example, ICER recently issued a report that concluded that Entresto™ does offer excellent long term value to treat patients with Congestive Heart Failure. Some payers were concerned that the drug was too expensive and so were hesitant to approve it. The ICER report found that its price, when normal discounts were factored in, represented a good value. This report increased the likelihood that patients who might benefit from the drug will have it covered by their insurance.

ICER calculates a fair benchmark price to the manufacturer, the payer, the patient and the overall health system, so that these decisions can be made collaboratively in full view of you, the patient. These decisions have always been made behind closed doors, so the fact that cost is being addressed and discussed openly provides patients with a significant advantage.

Still, when it comes to considering costs, some patient advocacy groups get nervous when the subject comes up. I would not be fair if I did not address some of the key questions many patient advocates worry about, perhaps the biggest one being "will the consideration of cost mean I lose access to a drug or treatment I need?"

Why should cost be considered if a drug can significantly improve my health? The most important question you should ask is whether or not a treatment or drug actually works for your individual condition. But the cost of that treatment is also important. You may have a very high deductible to pay, and if the treatment is of questionable effectiveness, that cost factor may be very important in your decision making process. Looked at more broadly, it would be irresponsible for a physician to recommend treatments without any assessment of value or the budget impact over the long-term. Is the cost so high that it will strain state health budgets, force cutbacks in other community services or generate unaffordable increases in insurance premiums?

How much influence do the drug manufacturers or insurance companies have over decisions made by PCORI and ICER? PCORI's Board of Directors is selected by the Comptroller General of the United States and is mandated to include at least three patient representatives, along with physicians, researchers, and insurance companies and other payers. ICER's Governance Board has fiduciary responsibility for the overall operations of ICER, and provides important strategic counsel to ICER's leadership team. The Governance Board represent a broad range of stakeholder perspectives, including patient and consumer groups, health plans, manufacturers, and other national leaders in health policy. In fact, two new members were recently elected to ICER's Governance Board - Ellen Andrews, PhD and Frances Visco, JD. Both have extensive experience in patient and consumer advocacy.

Don't insurance companies dominate these organizations? Actually, insurers are not in the majority of decision making of either organization. They are at the table because they have a huge stake in deciding what to pay for, since they must distribute resources fairly to all patients who are members. Researchers and medical personnel are much more heavily represented on these boards and panels, because the complexity of research design is something that even insurance companies don't always understand. And ICER seeks direct input from patients and clinicians on what they feel is important to their care, what outcomes they seek, and what evidence should be assessed. For example, multiple myeloma patient groups told ICER that it was very important to them to have options for oral medication given how often they have to go to clinics for IV administration.

If drug prices are questioned, will that stall innovation? Innovation is essential to improving patient health. We are fortunate to have a drug manufacturing industry that is producing a burgeoning pipeline of new promising drugs for a range of medical conditions. But many of these drugs are landing on the market with hefty price tags that are out of range for many people. There is no point to innovation if no one can afford the new drugs or benefits that they offer.

Why do we need a PCORI or ICER anyway? Most patients would not want to take a drug if they didn't know it worked, yet we do it all the time. The FDA assesses drugs for safety but does not compare one drug to another or look at the cost of a drug. We need organizations that are objective, not dominated by one type of stakeholder or another, and that operate in an open environment where patients can voice their preferences and ask questions.

Bottom line? An internet search can get you started when you need information. But as a patient, you need to know that there are places you can trust to give you the whole story. The more organizations like PCORI and ICER that we have, the faster we will get to a place in medicine that gives us information we can depend on.

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The Science Behind Hillary Clinton's Problems With Trust
By Jillian Jordan, Yale University and David Rand, Yale University

Large swaths of the American public want Donald J. Trump to be their president - maybe even a majority, according to an analysis from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight in late July.

Many people - Democrats and Republicans alike - find this shocking.

Trump made his name as the "You're fired" guy. He has never held political office, has arguably failed to generate concrete or realistic policy proposals, regularly changes his positions on issues and consistently gets the facts wrong.

This stands in sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton, who has served as secretary of state, senator from New York and first lady of the United States. In his endorsement of her, Barack Obama described Clinton as the most qualified presidential nominee in U.S. history. Presumably experience with, and knowledge of, the system and issues are qualities that make for a good president - so why is this race even close?

How to build trust

Research, including new work from our Human Cooperation Laboratory at Yale, suggests Trump may be successful precisely because of his hotheadedness and lack of carefully thought-out proposals. Being seen as uncalculating can make people trust you.

Hillary Clinton is the opposite of hotheaded. She is careful and calculating - which, despite being a strong asset in actually carrying out the duties of public office, has become a liability in her presidential campaign by undermining the public's trust in her.

In a recent paper, we found that if you take an action that people like, you come off as much more trustworthy if you decide to act without doing a careful cost-benefit analysis first: Individuals who calculate seem liable to sell out when the price is right.

What's more, the desire to appear trustworthy motivated participants to act without too much forethought.

Our research didn't focus on perceptions of politicians, but rather looked at behavior in a more abstract context. We conducted a series of experiments involving economic decisions between anonymous strangers on the internet. Our goal was to create a scenario that would capture the classic trade-off between self-interest and helping others. This is something that comes up in a lot in politics, but also in all sorts of social interactions, such as in our relationships with friends, coworkers and lovers.

Our experiments occur in two stages, with participants assigned to specific roles.

In the Helping Game stage, "Helpers" are given some money and have the opportunity to give some of it away to benefit another participant.

The second participant is a total stranger who is assigned to the "Recipient" role, and not given any money.

Helpers know that helping the Recipient out will come at a cost - sacrificing a predetermined, but undisclosed, amount of money.

We then give Helpers a choice. They can decide whether to help the Recipient without "looking" at the cost (i.e., without knowing how much money they'll be giving away). Or, they can choose to find out how much money they'll be giving away and only then decide whether to help.

Next, in the Trust Game stage, Helpers engage in a new interaction with a third participant. This person is called the "Truster." The Truster learns about how the Helper behaved in the first interaction, and then uses it to decide how much the Helper can be trusted.

To measure trust, we give the Truster 30 cents. He then chooses how much to keep and how much to "invest" in the Helper.

Any money he invests gets tripled and given to the Helper. The Helper then chooses how to divide the proceeds of the investment.

Under these rules, investing is productive, because it makes the pot grow larger. But investing pays off for the Truster only if the Helper is trustworthy, and returns enough money to make the Truster a profit.

For example, if the Truster invests all 30 cents, that amount is tripled and the Helper gets 90 cents. If the Helper is trustworthy and returns half, they both end up with 45 cents: more than the Truster started with.

However, the Helper may decide to keep all 90 cents and return nothing. In this case, the Truster ends up with zero and is worse off than when he started.

So the Truster bases his decision of how much to invest in the Helper on how trustworthy he thinks the she will be in the face of a temptation to be selfish - that is, how much he trusts her.

We found that Helpers who agree to help the Recipient without "looking" at the cost are trusted more by Trusters. Moreover, they really are more trustworthy. These "uncalculating Helpers" actually return more money to Trusters in the face of the temptation to keep it all for themselves.

Somebody is watching you

We also found that Helpers are motivated by concerns about their reputation.

For half of participants, there were reputational consequences of calculating: The Truster was told whether the Helper looked at the cost before deciding whether to help - and thus Helpers could lose "trust points" by calculating. For the other half of participants, Trusters found out only whether Helpers helped, but not whether they looked at the cost. Our results showed that Helpers were less likely to look at the cost when they knew it would have reputational consequences.

This result suggests that people do not make uncalculating decisions only because they cannot be bothered to put in the effort to calculate. Whether this strategy is conscious or not, uncalculating decisions can also be a way to signal to others that you can be trusted.

Uncalculating cooperation in daily life

Our studies demonstrate that there are reputation benefits to seeming principled and uncalculating.

This conclusion likely applies broadly to social relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbors and lovers. For example, it may shed light on why a good friend is someone who helps you out, no questions asked - and not someone who carefully tracks favors and remembers exactly how much you owe.

It may also reveal an unexpected reason for the popularity of rigid ethical guidelines in philosophical and religious traditions. Committing to standards like the golden rule can make you more popular.

To trust Trump or Clinton?

Our studies may also help to shed light on Trump's appeal. One of his greatest advantages appears to be the authenticity that he conveys with his emotionally charged behavior.

But it's important to understand uncalculated decisions will benefit your reputation only if the actions you end up taking are perceived positively. In our experiments, Helpers who decided not to help without calculating the costs seemed especially untrustworthy - presumably because they seemed committed to be selfish no matter what. Similarly, Trump's impulsiveness may be a plus for those people who support his values, but a huge turnoff to those who do not.

In contrast, Clinton's persona is often unattractive even to those who support her values - because it suggests that she may not stand by those values when the cost is too high. This may shed light on why she does not inspire more enthusiasm among some liberals, despite her experience and progressive record.

However, there's an important nuance to what it means to be "calculating." One sense of "calculating" is self-interested: Before you agree to adhere to your ethical principles, or to sacrifice for others, you consider the costs and benefits to yourself - and you follow through with doing the "right" thing only if you conclude that it will be best for you.

Another way to be "calculating" is to carefully consider what's right for others. Instead of acting on her gut, a policymaker could conduct a complex analysis to figure out the best way to implement a policy to maximize its benefit to the population.

Our theory and experiments apply only to the first sense of "calculating": They suggest that engaging in self-interested calculations is what undermines trust.

But in what sense is Trump uncalculating - and in what sense is Clinton calculating?

Of course, there's room for debate, but a common argument in support of Clinton is that her calculations reflect her ability to effectively play the game to deliver the most progressive policies possible, given the constraints of our two-party system.

To win, Clinton needs to convince voters that her calculations have their best interests at heart - a major goal of this week's Democratic National Convention.

Jillian Jordan, Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, Yale University and David Rand, Associate Professor of Psychology, Economics, Cognitive Science and Management, Yale University

"The This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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NASA Cuts Feed!

"2016-07-24-1469380129-4987126-052516Anomaly1.jpg"

I have spent much time in postings discussing the anomalous objects seen on the International Space Station feeds and I think its time to put it into an article so I can stop repeating myself. I have been asked to analyze many such images and video so I want to clarify some information about these feeds before addressing the objects seen on the feeds.

It seems that any article on the feeds from the ISS inevitably start with "NASA Cuts Feed! ..." or something similar. This points out how little people who write such garbage actually know. The feeds are not "CUT" as if they are hiding something. If you are reading this article because the title grabbed you then congratulations. You were the victim of needless sensationalism. Sensationalism with a point for once.

The feeds are transmitted to the ground from the ISS of course. The ISS is moving at over 17000 mph in orbit and the orbit changes slightly with each pass such that the station doesnt go over the same spot with each successive orbit. The ground stations and satellites that relay the signal are occasionally out of range. The coverage network has all kinds of Swiss cheese holes in it where the coverage momentarily drops out or is lost.

Having watched these feeds for two years now almost daily I have come to be able to predict when they will go down based on the known holes in the feeds' groundstation network. I can usually tell where the ISS is roughly located by simply seeing if the feed is UP. Then consulting a sat mapper I can confirm that no it wasnt over Iran but over the Southern Indian Ocean for example. Both locations among others are known 'holes' in the feed.

Here is the point: If NASA were cutting feeds at "critical times" as many articles dramatically claim, then WHY would we EVER see feeds from space that are live? Why would "NASA" ever take that chance? This is a simple "Oh yea...." moment you should be feeling right now. If UFOs were always seen in orbit as a matter of course, then "NASA", if intent on keeping it from us, would NEVER have allowed a live feed that could catch such an activity in the act of happening.

Speaking of NASA, the other very important point that the conspiracy folks like to ignore is that the ISS crew is an INTERNATIONAL crew consisting of Japanese, Russian, and American astronauts. the ESA (European Space Agency), JAXA (Japan Space Agency) and Roscosmos (Russian Federal space agency) would all have to fully agree to such a coverup. And lets not leave out all the folks in DLR (German Space Agency) and the University of Bonn who are using the High Definition Earth Viewing Experiment (HDEV) data for their purposes. What is perplexing to those of us who remain logical about this is that the Russians are the ones from whom we have always traditionally wished to hide our technology from and a visit from a wayward alien in an UFO would certainly be one of those hidden items.

Further, the feeds are not all managed by NASA. The downlinked feeds are picked up by hundreds of locations around the world and processed or passed on by many people who would ALSO have to be in on the big secret. Jet Propulsion laboratory, JAXA, Roscosmos, and a large international team of monitoring staff watch the feeds all day and all night when they are up. Saying "NASA Cuts the Feed!" is embarrassingly ignorant and short sighted of those who report such. It shows all at once the incredible LACK of knowledge on the part of the reporting organization. I guess we can call it sheer ignorance right?

You can routinely hear Russian controllers talking to Russian crew members on the station The more you look at it the more sinister of a coverup it has to become for the conspiracy for to work. It approaches absolute nonsense at some point. Why hide a secret UFO visiting the ISS? Well if it was a strictly NASA station it would make more sense unlikely as it would be. In such a case the USA would remain in control and in communication with an alien species that no other nation has access to.

But that is NOT the case on the ISS considering its INTERNATIONAL nature... (The "I" in ISS remember) So NOW what is the reason that several countries would hide the technology? If you try to argue that they want it for themselves, it falls completely flat. By default the Russians, Japanese, and Americans would have it... There IS NO OTHER space faring people of substance right now. The Chinese Tiangong station is the equivalent of our 1970s vintage Skylab, and here is no other contender at the moment. We are the only ones with the Russians and Japanese. So what benefit would hiding a UFO visit to the ISS generate? NONE.

I would caution against the urge to play the "world panic" card too because an alien presence on Earth would probably generate peace between warring nations not war or panic. It would be a comfort to most people on Earth to know there was a race that has been visiting us for a long time and now making contact.

It would be CELEBRATED not FEARED.

On the tech side we can easily figure out what we are seeing on the feeds. This includes a number of astronomical objects that are visible in the live video from the ISS. One such object is of course the Moon. The Moon as on Earth shows up day or night. Now night on the ISS is simply being on the backside of the Earth from the Sun. Astronauts are treated to 15 sunrises and sunsets per 24 hour period. An easy test to determine if an object is astronomical in nature or otherwise is to calculate how long it takes to move from place to place and determine which direction it is heading.

One recent sensationalist article that went around the world claimed that an object appeared to be entering the Earth's atmosphere as seen from an ISS feed... And oh yes, "NASA Cuts Feed!" of course. The object was none other than the Moon setting as seen from the ISS and a simple calculation showed the object just happened to be setting at the same rate that the station was moving around the Earth. A remarkable coincidence wouldnt you say?

But it is not just the Moon that can be seen on the feeds. Bright stars and Venus show up plenty of times. On Earth during daylight the Moon is a familiar visible object to most people besides the Sun of course. Keen eyes can spot Venus if you know where to look. On the ISS however, Sun or no Sun, astronomical objects can be seen. There are no Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules in a sky to scatter the blue light from the Sun in a phenomenon called Rayleigh Scattering. This molecular content is the reason we have a blue sky on Earth and the corresponding lack of molecular content on orbit is the reason that the "sky" that the astronauts see is always black.

Lets look at an example that is related to one that I analyzed for this upcoming season of NASA's Unexplained Files. It was called out as an anomaly near the station in the sky seen around the ISS and of course the notion that the "feed was cut" was trotted out because that adds drama. But here is that image:

"2016-07-24-1469383102-1165710-SecondAnomaly.jpg"

Looks interesting doesnt it? But, to borrow their own conspiratorial language, what you DIDNT get to see and what the authors of the many articles didnt want you to know was that moments later the image looked like THIS:

"2016-07-24-1469383344-6186181-20160526Anomaly22explalined.png"

Here we can clearly see that it is just an artifact from the bright rising Sun hitting the clear camera cover on the UStream Live ISS feed. You can see many other artifacts as well and this is due to particles that are floating around in space that adhere to the window or due to micrometeorite strikes that pit the glass covering the cameras. So read the articles if you must, provide click income to the purveyors if you want, but see these artifacts for yourself and watch them come and go like clockwork with every rise and set of the Sun as seen from the ISS.

You can follow the ISS via http://www.isstracker.com/ or UStream's live ISS view or looking up the live feeds for the High Definition Experiment (HDEV) ... Be informed!

See you next time!

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Ectoplasm -- Ghostbuster To Science At The Fringe

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"He slimed me!" Peter Venkman spits out in disgust, writhing in sticky ectoplasm in a memorable scene from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Ectoplasm, the mysterious stuff of the supernatural world has long intrigued some of the world's greatest scientific minds. The goo is claimed to permit the spirit world to interact physically with the world of the living. But it is not always easy to separate fact from fiction in science that probes the fringe of what is known.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the paragon of analytical reasoning, was a firm believer in ectoplasm, having touched the clammy stuff in a séance and finding it hideously revolting. Other great minds have grappled with what the editors of Scientific American in 1922 called "this new science -- if it really is a science" of ectoplasm and psychic phenomena. H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley investigated ectoplasm and the mystical wonders it enables -- communicating with the dead, spirits levitating objects and leaving imprints on the physical world. H. G. Wells is the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and other great works of literature. Huxley was a celebrated evolutionary biologist and science writer.

In their comprehensive book on biology, The Science of Life, published in 1931, H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley devote an entire section to ectoplasm, describing it quite vividly without the advantage of special effects available in Ghostbusters:

"2016-07-21-1469116185-3566770-ectoplasmfigure.jpg"

"Usually but not necessarily, the exudation occurs by mouth and nose; it may sometimes come out of the head and neck, the ears, or from other orifices of the medium. It has a quantitative abundance like the foam of bottled beer when the beer is "up". . . This ooze presently takes on forms and, it is asserted, organic structure also. . . Hands, feet, grotesque bestial forms and at last these crumpled paper-bag faces emerge from the accumulating stuff" (p. 1426).

Who ya gonna call?

Well, if you are scientifically minded you will turn to an authoritative source, such as the widely respected journal Nature. Quoting from Dr. R. J. Tillyard's 1928 paper in Nature, "Scientific proof of survival [of the spirit beyond death] has at last been obtained." In his Nature paper Tillyard describes one medium, Mrs. Crandon, who was able to communicate with her dead brother, Walter Stinson via ectoplasm. Tillyard presents the experimental data he obtained during these séances in his Nature paper and concludes definitively: "My own conclusion is that Walter Stinson, who died in 1912, has fully proved in a scientific manner his claim that his personality has survived his physical death."

Consider, for example, data in Figure 1 of that paper:

"2016-07-21-1469116088-9043041-NatureFigSeance.jpg"

There are five more figures with equally compelling data in this Nature paper.

Wells and Huxley caution that a scientist must never use the word "impossible." "Highly improbable," is the appropriate term to use, they insist. [Best said with a British accent.] "We do not hesitate to find Walter [Stinson] "highly improbable," they conclude.

Interestingly, six years earlier, in 1922, Scientific American had accepted a submission by James Black, denouncing ectoplasm as fakery. Black cited several vivid examples of ectoplasmic exudation and associated supernatural phenomena during séances, but he exposed them all as trickery. Chemical analysis revealed that ectoplasm consisted of "50% water, some sulfur and albumin, and gives the chemical formula of something resembling C120 H1134 N218 S5 O249." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, was unimpressed with such experimental evidence. He complained that scientists were taking a "scandalously skeptical" attitude toward ectoplasm, and that psychic research may be beyond the reach of verification by the scientific method.

The Scientific American editors quickly got cold feet. Black's article had been set up in type for printing when the editors received word of new scientific research from Dr. Richet, concluding that ectoplasm could not be the result of simple fraud. "To be frank," the editors wrote in their introduction to the September 1922 edition, "we spent several uneasy days, feeling that we might be on the wrong side of the fence."

Just as the issue was about to be mailed to subscribers, a letter reporting the results of another scientific investigation into ectoplasm conducted at the Sorbonne University in Paris reached Scientific American. The report concluded, "The experts declare that they see nothing except a substance that had been produced after prolonged efforts that could only be physiologically described as efforts to vomit and that the substance had no mobility of its own and was swallowed again almost immediately."

Fringe Science

The intrigue of psychic phenomena is strong. For hundreds of years, for example, there have been reports of people who can "see" with their fingers -- especially blind people. In 1966, Martin Gardner, the editor of the "Mathematical Games" column at Scientific American, published his investigation into "dermo-optical perception" in the journal Science. He concluded that the purported ability of some extraordinary people to see and even read text with their fingers while blindfolded was fraud. He ascribed all the reports to cheating by peeking in various ways around the blindfold. That Science paper put an end to dermo-optical perception.

But I know he was wrong.

Recently a colleague of mine analyzed a congenitally blind woman in an fMRI brain imaging machine. When images were flashed to her eyes through goggles, no activity at all registered in her brain. However, when the young woman scanned postcards with her fingers, some of which had images on them and some of which did not, the woman's brain lit up with activity when her finger tips scanned a card with an image on it. Interestingly, "seeing" with her fingers strongly activated her visual cortex. The woman demonstrated her ability to "see" with her fingers when I visited her in her home and handed her an 8X10 color photograph.

There is nothing supernatural about this dermo-optical perception ability. The woman illustrates the dramatic plasticity and untapped potential of the human brain, in her case to utilize imperceptible tactile cues -- slight differences in temperature or texture associated with pigments -- that the majority of us ignore. One third of the cerebral cortex of blind people has nothing to do, so the brain rewires itself to take whatever information it can extract, sound and touch for example, and process it using the enormous information processing capability that is normally devoted to vision, giving the person extraordinary perception abilities. She, like many blind people, can also discern speech sped up three to five times faster than a sighted person can possibly comprehend. "Highly improbable," but true, and explained by natural, not supernatural phenomena.

Research on ectoplasm seems ridiculous now, but only with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight. Given that these scientists and intellectuals applied the scientific method and used the best available techniques of the day, how did they fail? Cutting edge research at the boundary of what is known or that enters into new frontiers will always confront this problem. If it was so obvious, why did editors at Scientific American and Nature at the time find the matter so agonizing? I do not think they were less intelligent or deliberate than we are. "Ectoplasmic" research is published in major journals today -- "ectoplasmic" in the sense of work that nibbles at the edge of what is currently understood and will not stand the test of time. Still, it is important to keep an open mind.

Judge Wexler: I want to make one thing very clear: The law does not recognize the existence of ghosts, and I don't believe in them either. So I don't wanna hear a lot of malarkey about goblins, spooks, and demons. We're gonna stick to the facts in this case. Leave the ghost stories to the kiddies, understood?

Winston: Wow. Sounds like a pretty open-minded guy, huh?

Bias and prejudice inflict editorial decisions at journals in the same way bias undermines scientific research. You can't fool an fMRI, but don't expect to read about our dermo-optical research in a scientific journal. Journals are not interested, and conducting research on dermo-optical perception could be a "career limiting move."

References
Fields, R.D. (2010) Why Can Some Blind People Process Speech Far Faster Than Sighted Persons? December 13, 2010. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-some-blind-people-process/

Tillyard, R.J. (1928) Evidence of Survival of a Human Personality, Nature August 18, Vol. 122: 243-246.

Gardner, M. (1966) Dermo-optical perception: A peek down the nose. Science 151: 654-657.

Editors (1922) With the editors, Scientific American, September 1922, p. 147.

Black, J. (1922) Ectoplasm and ectoplasm fakers. Scientific American, September 1922, p. 162.

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Climate Change And The Complexity of Science
One of the most successful environmental treaties of all time was the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, an ozone-depleting substance mainly used in refrigeration and air conditioning. The ban was made feasible by the development of new refrigerants that would not deplete the ozone layer. According to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry:

In the 1980s, I remember that many scientists feared that ozone depletion was irreversible and the headlines in many newspapers declared that nations were powerless to stem the growing loss of ozone - the great hole in the ozone that threatened us all. But the Montreal Protocol proved that the pessimists and the naysayers were wrong. Virtually all the parties have met their obligations under the accord. Nearly 100 of the most ozone-depleting substances have been phased out. And as a result, the hole in the ozone is shrinking and on its way to repair. It's why we're here today... Now, that's the good news. The bad news is that in too many cases, the substances banned by the Montreal Protocol have been replaced by hydrofluorocarbons - HFCs - which are safer for ozone, but are exceptionally potent drivers of climate change - thousands of times more potent, for example, than CO2.

The diplomatic debate about phasing out HFCs has been underway for seven years, but the technology of refrigerant coolants appears to have finally caught up with the need for replacement technology. Once replacement technology is available, diplomacy becomes possible. According to Coral Davenport of the New York Times:

The Montreal treaty allows nations to amend it to ban substitute chemicals that have negative environmental effects even if they do not harm the ozone. And American chemical companies such as Dow, DuPont and Honeywell have already begun to patent climate-friendly HFC substitutes.

In many ways, this is a repeat of what happened when the Montreal agreement was reached. New chemicals can replace important chemicals that are dangerous to the environment as long as time, effort, and resources are devoted to developing those effective substitutes. Businesses are willing to cooperate and take advantage of the new business opportunities that are presented. Everyone is happy when they make money and protect the planet at the same time.

Even the precautionary principle might not have prevented this problem; testing technologies or drugs before they are used wouldn't have helped. When we test new technologies to understand their main side effects, we are dependent on the current state of scientific knowledge to gauge that impact. HFCs protected the ozone and were better to use than CFCs, but later on we found that HFCs caused global warming. At the time we adopted HFCs, we were ignorant about their impact on global warming. Had we known, we might have still decided back in the 1980s that protecting the ozone layer was more important than global warming, but our ignorance made such a choice unnecessary.

The technological world we live in inevitably creates impacts we can't predict. By definition, not all the dimensions of new, cutting-edge technology are well understood. As we struggle to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy technology, we should be prepared for the unanticipated impacts of solar cells, batteries, wind generators, smart grids and all the rest. Having stepped down the path of technologically based economic development, we should not expect a pristine planet. But we can expect and work toward an environmentally sustainable earth. There is no excuse for willful disregard of the facts and every reason to listen closely when someone finds that your breakthrough invention has some negative effects.

We should approach the introduction of new technology and our analysis of environmental impacts with care and humility. The ozone hole was an urgent crisis that perhaps pushed other considerations out of our mind as we focused on the problem at hand. The climate crisis is today's high priority crisis. What other challenges are we setting aside as we focus our attention on the urgent crisis of the moment?

What is key is that we integrate a concern for environmental impacts into the development and implementation of new technology. Human ingenuity fashions our technology to respond to the problems of human survival and wellbeing. The goal is to make products that transform our lives. The success stories are all around us: the air conditioning that comforts us during the current heat wave, the computer and wireless internet that carries this blog piece to you, and countless inventions that make our way of life possible.

But today we are seven billion humans and before our growth peaks we will hit nine billion. It's a big planet, but our lifestyles have still managed to transform it. We've lit it up, carved it up, built it up, and travel everywhere to see all of it. We need to understand that impact if we are to continue to ensure that the natural systems that provide us with air, water, and food remain viable. While our species is ingenious, we make mistakes and our learning process is far from perfect.

The process of negotiating this treaty amendment has been difficult with both China and India agreeing to a transition from HFCs, but arguing for a longer period of transition than desired by climate advocates due to cost. The transition will not be without financial cost, and while the costs are relatively low, for developing countries they may be significant. The compliance deadlines could be influenced by the development of newer, lower-cost substitutes. If the price of transition is lowered, then the time scale issue will become less important.

Both China and India are seeing greater environmental awareness among their young people, particularly the youthful elite. This is something we already saw in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Once environmentalism takes hold among young people in China and India, we can expect to see less opposition to aggressive global environmental agreements and hopefully, less need for them in the first place. The key will be to connect future economic growth the health of the global ecosphere. Since the connection is true, the argument will be made with great impact.

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Weekend Roundup: The Last Gasp of Atatürk
If the aim of the coup plotters was to derail Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's march toward autocratic rule and restore the country firmly on the secular path envisioned by its modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, their failure achieved the opposite result. The last gasp of Atatürk has breathed new life into Erdoğan's troubled and troubling tenure.

Oxford scholar Azeem Ibrahim credits the development of Turkey's vibrant civil society and economy to the secular Kemalist vision and the stability secured over the years by the military and judiciary. "But the failed coup ... marks an end to all that," he writes. "And this may very well be the end of the Kemalist Turkish Republic."

In an interview, Yusuf Muftuoglu, a top advisor to former Turkish President Abdullah Gül, explains the forces behind the coup and the resistance to it. He notes the critical importance of social media, of Istanbul as a new power center for Islamists and the key role of the police in fighting the armed forces. "Erdoğan is the biggest victor" of the coup "and quite deservedly," he concludes. "Honestly, had there been another person at the same post, the coup might have succeeded. Erdoğan not only has shown the strong leadership to mobilize the masses against the coup plotters, which is unprecedented in Turkish history, but also, and more importantly, did so while he himself was physically targeted. ... This whole process also confirmed once again Erdoğan's seamless contact with his constituency and beyond."

In another interview, one of Turkey's leading novelists, Elif Shafak, sees her country "heading into a Kafkaesque world" in the wake of the coup, where everyone is suspect. "The question hovering in the air," she writes, is, "Are you one of us or are you one of them?" She also worries that her country is now on the path to becoming an "illiberal democracy." "A true democracy," she argues, "needs separation of powers, rule of law, freedom of speech, women's rights, LGBT rights, free and diverse media and independent academia. Without all these institutions and values you can only have 'majoritarianism.' And majoritarianism is not the same thing as democracy." Another Turkish novelist, Kaya Genc, describes a night of both high anxiety and relief as he roamed the streets of Istanbul with anti-coup protesters. Writing from the Menemen District far from Istanbul, Ilgin Yorulmaz talks to people about the failed coup and says her, "pro-democracy friends support neither the coup nor autocracy."

Reporting from Istanbul, WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones takes the pulse of everyday life on the streets among the city's unsettled residents. Some are angry at the military, some at Erdoğan, she writes. "Anything can happen at any time," one resident tells her. She also reports on the choice Greece faces over whether to extradite eight alleged Turkish coup plotters seeking exile in that neighboring country. Also writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan slams the "kamikaze coup attempt" that he thinks was bound to fail, but says, "Turkey is now in the midst of a national security crisis" and that Erdogan's tactics for holding on to power by, "forming temporary, strategic alliances cannot solve" it.

In an interview, Can Dündar , the persecuted editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, fears the post-coup backlash. Speaking of Erdoğan's comment that the coup was "a gift from God," Dündar says, "He will make good use of this 'gift' and start a witch hunt against all opposition by accusing them of being coup perpetrators and thereby increasing his oppression."

Turkish authorities have blamed the cleric Fethullah Gülen and his followers for fomenting the coup and demanded his extradition from exile in the U.S. James Dorsey tries to answer the question of whether Gülen is an Islamist modernizer or "a wolf in sheep's clothing." Graham Fuller, a former vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council once stationed in Istanbul, and whose security assessment (written in a personal capacity) helped Gülen to obtain status as a permanent resident in the U.S., offers his take on the Gulenist movement. He sees the political battle in Turkey between the AKP ruling party and Gulenists as a power struggle among two of the Muslim world's more moderate movements. And he seriously doubts Gülen had anything to do with the coup attempt. Fuller concludes that, "Erdogan is planting the seeds of his own destruction" through the ongoing purges aimed at the Gulenist and liberal forces. "The country itself," he writes, "is now his primary victim."

Writing from Germany, Christoph Asche says that the restoration of the death penalty in Turkey "could kill relations" between the two countries since European Union nations reject executions on a human rights basis. Foreign Affairs Reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed and others explore the complex history of relations between NATO and the various democratic and military governments in Turkey over recent decades. Ahmed also writes on Donald Trump's recent NATO controversy. Referring to the backlash against Trump's remarks that Europe should share more of NATO's burden, he says, "key anti-Trump forces are offering evidence for the Republican standard-bearer's argument ― that U.S. elites are so hung up on past commitments that they can't embrace fresh thinking." Tunisian blogger Ramzi Houidi compares the failed coup in Turkey to the successful military coup in Egypt in 2013. The difference, he says, is that "in Turkey, the opposition chose to democratically stand against the coup, putting the interests of the country before the party's."

France is once again reeling, this time after the Nice attack by a Tunisian immigrant that killed scores of people on Bastille Day. Former Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey argues that many "losers" in society, like the Tunisian attacker, turn to terrorism so they can become "heroes." Islamic scholar Akbar Ahmed argues that more attacks on the self-proclaimed Islamic State won't end terrorism in France or Europe as a whole. Only an affirmative policy of integration of Muslims will make a difference, he says. Writing from Stuttgart, Germany, Daniel Koehler brings common sense to the fight against terrorism. "Mothers may be the first, last and best approach to stopping militant recruiters," he writes.

Turning to the political drama in the U.S., the Republican Party convened in Cleveland this week to nominate Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Dean Obeidallah writes that a recent proposal by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a key speaker at the convention, to vet American Muslims over whether they believe in Sharia is a glimpse into the "inquisition" to come if Trump wins the presidency. Reflecting on the theme of Trump's acceptance speech Thursday that "we should be afraid, very afraid," Obeidallah also lends skepticism to the nominee's credentials on security issues. "For Trump to justify scaring us, he needs to be able to deliver on his promise to keep us safe," he writes.

In his own assessment of Trump's speech from Cleveland, Howard Fineman thinks the American Founding Fathers would be turning in their grave. He writes that, "they knew the history of Rome, where tribunes ― in the name of the people but often for their own purposes ― wielded vast power. They didn't think anyone had a direct pipeline to the voice of the people except the people themselves. The founders feared both the mob and the monarchy, but most of all feared an alliance of the two."

Turning to Asia, Helen Clark looks at what the recent ruling by a U.N. tribunal against China and for the Philippines means for Vietnam, which has similar territorial claims against China. Vietnam is being cautious and not celebratory, she writes, because, "what happens next in the South China Sea won't change: it is still up to China." Looking into the not-too-distant future when robots will be creating new wealth, but displacing jobs, Moises Naim argues we should be open to the idea of a guaranteed minimum income for all.

Some things in the world are working. Google is using its DeepMind computing capacity to more efficiently regulate the flow of energy to its servers, which constitute 5 percent of the cloud.

As Saudi Arabia's top clerical body renewed its fatwa against Pokemon, our Singularity series this week reports that the "Pokemon Go" craze is only a foretaste of our augmented reality future.

But not everyone loves "Pokemon Go." Cavan Sieczkowski reports on what director Oliver Stone said about the game at Comic-Con this week. "It's everywhere," she quotes Stone as saying. "It's what some people call surveillance capitalism ... You'll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society where they will know how you want to behave, and they will make the mock-up that matches how you behave. It's what they call totalitarianism." Nathalia Ramos disagrees, arguing that "Pokemon Go" nostalgically takes millennials back to an "innocent" era before 9/11 when they played a similar game as children. In yet another twist, some Syrian children are tapping in to the "Pokemon Go" craze to ask the world to help rescue them.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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The Nature Of Consciousness: Resonance Between Ancient Philosophies And Current Science

What is consciousness? Is it an essentially human characteristic or a fundamental characteristic of the universe? Questions about consciousness have intrigued philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. Neuroscientists, like myself, are asking questions about the essential characteristics of consciousness, and the extent to which it is dependent on activity in the brain. In the laboratory, I have studied consciousness through my research on meditation, and more recently the phenomenon of near-death experiences.

Authors of the many ancient philosophical texts of India have also explored the nature of consciousness through careful observation of their own experience. One tradition that I have studied is that of Kashmir Shaivism, a philosophy that flourished in the north of India in about 900-1000 CE. One of the early texts of Kashmir Shaivism is titled the Shiva Sutras, and is credited to the sage Vasugupta. As I have studied this text, I have been surprised to see how, in its very short aphorisms or sutras, it unfolds for the reader key principles to understanding the nature of consciousness. These principles resonate with emerging scientific theories about the nature of consciousness and my own research in the areas of meditation and near-death experiences.

Shiva Sutra 1.1 states: chaitanyam atma. In translating this Sutra from the original Sanskrit, we find that the word chaitanyam means consciousness, and atma describes who we are, each one of us, at the deepest and purest level. Atma is our own highest self, and the nature of all of reality. So, the sutra states that consciousness is what we are; we are consciousness. In addition, it is the substance of the universe.

What does research have to say about the nature of consciousness? Though scientists have differing views about the nature of consciousness, research on near-death experiences (NDEs) provides some of the most compelling data to suggest that consciousness is our essential nature. NDEs are experiences people report about a time when the body--including, the brain--is judged by medical professionals to be non-functioning, to be dead.

One of the first extensive studies on NDEs was done by Pim van Lommel and his colleagues, MDs in Cardiology in a network of Netherlands Hospitals, and published in the Lancet, ranked #2 among all medical journals. The researchers designed a prospective study (the gold standard of this type of study) in which they examined all the cardiac arrest survivors (344 patients) in the hospital network over a specific period. They found that 12% reported a core near-death experience. And of those patients about 24% said they had been able to watch and recall events happening around them during their cardiac arrest, events which were verified. A second prospective study in 2003 by Bruce Greyson, MD, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, included 1,595 patients with cardiac arrest, with 10% reporting NDEs. Greyson summarizes the characteristics of NDEs during cardiac arrest with this observation:

The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a period of impaired cerebral perfusion raises particularly perplexing questions for our current understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function. As prior researchers have concluded, a clear sensorium and complex perceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.

In the book Irreducible Mind, University of Virginia researchers Edward Kelly and his colleagues summarize the evidence from many peer-reviewed studies on NDEs. They conclude that there is evidence of conscious awareness when the brain is not functional in NDEs, adding this statement:

NDEs seem instead to provide direct evidence for a type of mental functioning that varies "inversely, rather than directly, with the observable activity of the nervous system." Such evidence, we believe, fundamentally conflicts with the conventional doctrine that brain processes produce consciousness, and supports the alternative view that brain activity normally serves as a kind of filter, which somehow constrains the material that emerges into waking consciousness.

This research suggests that an active mind actually inhibits levels of expanded consciousness. I believe this is what ancient texts such as the Shiva Sutras have been saying for thousands of years. As discussed, Shiva Sutra 1.1 states, chaitanyam atma, the essence of who we are is consciousness. This sutra, like the experiences reported in NDEs, suggests that consciousness is primary, not secondary to, or dependent on, activity within the functioning brain.

One of the characteristics of NDEs that supports this view of consciousness is the experience of persons seeing their body from a point outside itself in space. Kelly and his colleagues note that 48% of the persons who they have studied reported having this experience, including seeing and hearing events that happened nearby, such as the medical team's attempts to revive them. These observations were later verified.

A second characteristic of NDEs supporting this view of consciousness is the experience of unity awareness, timelessness and spacelessness, and a direct experience of divine love, which often occurs during the out-of-body experiences of the NDE.

Kelly and his colleagues propose a nonmedical or "transcendent" model to explain the NDE, in which there are aspects of reality not normally accessible to our senses. Our normal consciousness is considered to be a part of a transcendent and expanded conscious awareness. In an NDE persons access these more subtle levels, in which consciousness functions independently from the nervous system. Kelly also notes that these characteristics of NDEs are seen in mystical experiences related to most meditation traditions, including out-of-body experiences, enhanced mental functioning, and heightened perception.

These scientific studies on NDEs give strong evidence that the essence of the human being is consciousness, chaitanyam atma. Though our conscious awareness may appear limited or contracted in our normal waking state, it has the potential to transcend these limitations, allowing us the experience of infinite consciousness, infinite awareness. According to the Shiva Sutras, infinite awareness is our essential self. It is a fundamental characteristic of the universe.

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Drunk Driving Laws Don't Match The Research
By Brad J. Uren, University of Michigan

Emergency physicians learn to be prepared for anything thrown at us in the clinical arena. Personal life is a different story. Last year a drunk driver with multiple prior offenses and no valid driver's license smashed a truck through the wall of my son's daycare.

Fortunately, the children and staff were in undamaged areas. But just minutes before, my son and I had walked through the exact spot in the art room where the truck came to rest in a pile of debris.

Having worked in the ER for years, I've seen the aftermath of drunk driving often enough before, but that was the first time I had seen an accident caused by a drunk driver up close.

Drunk driving is a major public health problem in the U.S. In 2014 nearly one-third of the nation's 32,675 traffic fatalities were alcohol-related. This means a completely preventable death happened every 53 minutes in this country.

My brush with a drunk driver made me wonder about what practices and policies can help prevent accidents and fatalities. Research suggests lower blood alcohol concentration limits and interventions like ignition interlocks can make a big difference.

Jefferson County Sheriff Deputy Kevin Schwindt tests a driver to see if he is under the influence of drugs or alcohol in Golden, Colorado in 2008.
Rick Wilking/Reuters

Think you're OK to drive?

When drunk drivers come to the ER they often express surprise, disbelief or denial about their blood alcohol concentration (BAC) or their level of impairment. They often are drunker than they think they are.

Higher blood alcohol levels, no matter how "sober" you feel, can have a real impact on your ability to perform tasks that require concentration, such as driving. While people who drink more often may feel the effects of alcohol less acutely than someone who does not, their reflexes and judgment can still be impaired. And the more you drink, the harder it is to judge how intoxicated you are.

At least one study involving college students has shown that higher BACs are associated with an underestimation of an individual's level of intoxication.

Studies have also shown that increasing BAC is also associated with a decreased reaction time.
For instance, one study pointed to an average decreased reaction time of 120 milliseconds, just over a tenth of a second, associated with a blood alcohol content (BAC) level of 0.08, the legal limit. Traveling at 70 miles per hour, a drunk driver would travel for an additional 12 feet before reacting to a roadway hazard.

Legal limit for blood alcohol is pretty high

In 2000 Congress passed legislation making 0.08 the national standard for impaired driving in the United States. Under the law, states that did not adopt 0.08 as the standard by 2004 faced cuts in federal highway funding. By the time the law was passed many states had already adopted the 0.08 standards, but some states used 0.10 as the standard.

The lowering of the limit was in response to a 1992 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report to Congress recommending this action as a way to reduce highway deaths. Implementation of these lower BAC laws has been associated with a decrease in alcohol-related highway fatalities. But 0.08 is still a fairly high BAC level compared to other developed countries.

Among the largest industrialized countries, only the U.S., United Kingdom and Canada permit BACs as high as 0.08. France, Germany, Italy and Australia currently set their BAC limit at 0.05. Japan has the lowest requirement of this group at 0.03. European countries in particular have sought lower BAC requirements in the past decades as part of an effort to decrease traffic deaths

When the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, made its recommendations to change EU laws to recommend a BAC of 0.05 as the per se limit for impaired driving, they included supporting data, including fatality reductions, from countries with existing 0.05 BAC laws.

There's a big difference between 0.05 BAC and 0.08

It might not take as many drinks as you think to slow your reaction time and make safe driving harder.

For the purposes of standardization, a drink is defined as 12 ounces of 5 percent alcohol beer, five ounces of 12 percent alcohol wine or one and a half ounces of 80 proof (40 percent alcohol) liquor. To account for an individual drinking over a longer period of time, subtract about 0.01 percent for each 40 minutes of drinking time.

How many drinks does it take to get to the limit?
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a 160-pound man, two alcoholic beverages can bring about some loss of judgment, decreased ability to rapidly track a moving target and result in decreased ability to multitask. Women generally weighing less than men, would see a higher BAC per drink.

Three alcoholic drinks will bring a person's blood alcohol level to a level of approximately 0.05 percent, which can impair the ability to rapidly focus vision, lower alertness, and decrease coordination to the point that steering becomes difficult and response to driving emergencies becomes blunted.

After approximately four alcoholic drinks, balance, vision and reaction time are often affected. It becomes harder to detect roadway dangers. Reasoning and information processing are often measurably impaired. This corresponds most closely to a BAC of 0.08 percent, the limit set by most states for legal operation of a vehicle.

A blood alcohol of 0.10 percent is generally associated with a clear loss of reaction time and control. There will be reduced ability to maintain proper lane position or brake appropriately.

Not surprisingly, as the BAC level climbs higher than 0.10 percent, it is associated with the progressively deteriorating ability to drive a vehicle safely.

Studies going back to the 1960s have demonstrated the correlation between BAC and accident risk. The relative risk of being in a crash is 1.38 times higher at a BAC of 0.05 than 0.00. At 0.08, the risk is 2.69 times higher. At 0.10, the crash risk climbs to five times higher.

When you consider the medical evidence, including the physiological effects, and the relative risk of crash, you can understand why some countries set the legal limit at 0.05 and why in 2013 the NTSB recommended that 0.05 become the new limit in the U.S.

Ignition interlocks could stop drunk drivers

Drunk driving is a tough problem to solve. One solution is to focus interventions on those who have a prior alcohol impaired driving arrest because they are at higher risk of doing it again. The reasons for this are not clear, but many drunk driving episodes are linked to binge drinking and not simply social drinking.

Ignition interlocks, which are essentially breathalyzers connected to the vehicle's ignition system, could also make a difference. These devices ensure that the vehicle can only be started by a sober driver. They've have been around for many years and modern versions have features to resist tampering, and require intermittent rechecks to ensure the driver doesn't drink after starting the vehicle.

All states use ignition interlocks to some degree, but as of January 2016, only 23 states require interlocks for all DUI offenders, which are sometimes called universal ignition interlock laws. The NTSB recommended the use of ignition interlocks for all first time offenders in 2012.

A 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health, found that states with these laws have fewer alcohol involved crash deaths. Researchers compared data for 18 states which implemented universal ignition interlock laws to 32 states that had not. In those 18 states, universal interlock laws saved 918 lives, a 15 percent reduction in deaths related to drunk driving.

It is every driver's responsibility to understand that there is no "safe" BAC level. It's simple: The more you drink, the less you are able to drive safely, and the higher the likelihood of an accident. For those who ignore the evidence and the law, at least there is a technical solution that could help stop further loss of life to this preventable problem.
"The

Brad J. Uren, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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"It's A Scandal" -Daryl Hall on Doctors Denying Chronic Lyme

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Growing up a musically-obsessed child in the 80's, Daryl Hall was one of my biggest inspirations. A masterful, inventive songwriter with an ocean of soul, he set me on the path to being an artist, to never waste a word, and to sing because I mean it.

With six number ones and five additional top ten hits throughout the 70's and 80's Daryl Hall and John Oates are the number one duo in music history. Still at the top of his game at 69 years old, Daryl has won legions of new fans with his hit MTV Live show Live From Daryl's House.

In February of 2015, at my very sickest from chronic Lyme and Bartonella, after it was missed by eleven NYC doctors, I was homebound and in heart failure. On one of those terrifying, bleary days I caught the last half of a Dan Rather interview with Daryl.

Near the end, Rather asked, "What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you?"

Daryl exhaled, "Getting Lyme Disease is no fun, I'll tell you that right now."

"I have to speak with him," I thought. "He looks so good! I need to know how he got better."

So, here is my conversation with Daryl and with Dr. Richard Horowitz, Daryl's esteemed Lyme specialist, Board Certified Internist and Director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center, in Hyde Park, New York, and New York Times best-selling author of Why Can't I Get Better. His forthcoming book, How Can I Get Better, will be out later this year.

Daryl, thank you for going on the record; many celebrities don't want to talk about this and I don't know why.
I don't either. I don't know why anybody would want to hide this, there's no stigma against it. It's something that's happening to everybody.

How and when did this all start for you?
About ten years ago, I started getting tremors, especially in my left hand and arm, with twitching, and I didn't know what that was. I've always had food allergies and spring allergies but then I got this very serious celery allergy. And that came out of the blue. And then finally I came down with this raging fever and really stiff neck and body.

What was the timeframe for all of the symptoms to surface?
This took place over the course of about a year.

I assume you were seeing doctors- what were they saying?
They told me it was the summer flu and all this nonsense. So I started talking to my family about it and my ex-wife, who has Lyme, said it sounded to her like Lyme. So I went to another doctor who finally did test me, and found I also had ehrlichia. He gave me two weeks of Doxycycline only, and of course, old story, nothing happened. Except that the bull's-eye suddenly appeared. But I was not getting any better.

And then my sister found Dr. Joseph Burrascano for me, who was one of the few Lyme doctors practicing, and he was out in the Hamptons. He was the first Lyme-literate doctor that I went to and he gave me my diagnosis and started proper treatment. That went on for about a year.

What was the treatment?
I was pulsing oral antibiotics. I did not do an IV. I cycled through many different antibiotics, and slowly I started feeling better. Dr. Burrascano actually assessed me for Parkinson's because of my tremors, but thank God, I did not have it. It was Lyme.

Dr. Horowitz, is there a way to distinguish between Parkinson's and Parkinsonism? How common are tremors with Lyme and other tick-borne disease, and which infection seems to cause it?
Dr. Horowitz: Parkinson's disease is a clinical diagnosis, and the one common denominator underlying most chronic illness, especially neurological diseases like Parkinson's, is inflammation. We now know that different neurological diseases, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, as well as the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease are all influenced by inflammation, which can have multifactorial etiologies.

For example, inflammation could be due to different infections (like Lyme and Bartonella), autoimmune processes, environmental toxins, unhealthy bacteria in our colons (dysbiosis), an improper diet and/or nutritional deficiencies, as well as a lack of sleep.

I call these multiple overlapping medical problems keeping Lyme patients sick, MSIDS. It stands for Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome and it is a comprehensive map to identifying the factors that keep people sick so that they can achieve wellness. Infections and toxins on the MSIDS map drive inflammation, and in the case of tremors, Lyme combined with mercury toxicity and pesticide exposure, can all increase inflammation in the central nervous system, leading to amyloid production, which damages our nerve cells. This causes memory problems and tremors. If we want to control the symptoms of Lyme disease and decrease these neurological manifestations, we have to address all of the above overlapping causes of inflammation.

Daryl, did you continue on treatment after the first year?
Yes, Joe moved into research and I began treatment with Dr. Richard Horowitz, and I have been with him ever since. He is an extraordinary doctor, incredible.

Dr. Horowitz, how was Daryl when he first came to you and can you be specific about how you got his symptoms under control?
Dr. Horowitz: Daryl had intermittent symptom flares of fatigue, pain, sweats, palpitations and mild cognitive problems, that were keeping him from functioning at his full capacity, but he was a trooper, and always pushed through when he was performing and touring.

He responded to combinations of antibiotics that addressed the cell wall, cystic and intracellular forms of Lyme and co-infections (Babesia played a role in keeping him ill, as it does in many), and we found multiple abnormalities on the MSIDS map contributing to inflammation and sickness.

For example, apart from the infections, he would get hypoglycemic from time to time, because his diet was off with low adrenal function, especially when he was on the road touring for extended periods of time. We had to intermittently go in with antibiotics for symptom flares, although oftentimes, Daryl did fine with low dose herbal therapies. This was once the load of the bacteria and parasites were sufficiently knocked down.

Daryl, how are you now?
After treatment with him all these years, I am pretty much fine, except for occasional flareups. This spring, I had one and it was lengthy and it mimicked my original symptoms of stiff neck and aches and pains and arthritic feelings and heart palpitations, all the typical Lyme symptoms.

Dr. Horowitz, why do patients seem to complain about springtime flares?
Dr. Horowitz: Sometimes it's due to a new tick bite, but Lyme and associated tick-borne infections tend to have a cyclical nature. For example, women who have been adequately treated may only flare around their menstrual cycle.

We see people with healthy immune systems that can be fine for extended periods of time (which is the case in those who have beaten down the majority of the infections with treatment), but then get a relapse with the change of season, or any new stressor, like an accident, having a family quarrel, or lack of sleep.

Daryl, do you think you were re-bitten?
No, definitely not. This just tends to happen to me about once a year.

What does Dr. Horowitz do for you when you have flareups?
He knows me pretty well at this point and knows to give me double doses of Omnicef. That seems to knock it back down for me.

Dr. Horowitz, as I know you treat with many different drugs and herbs, how did you come to choose Omnicef here?
Dr. Horowitz: Everyone responds differently to treatment. You have to take a careful history and see how people respond to different medications.

Some do well with cell wall drugs like Omnicef, implying that a certain percentage of the bacteria are in cell wall forms, causing illness. Others do well with intracellular drugs like doxycycline, Zithromax, rifampin or Dapsone, because intracellular bacteria are causing inflammation, making them sick.

Once you've figured out a patient's wiring, and the overlapping factors on the MSIDS map causing inflammation, you can get people better by addressing the specific abnormalities.

Daryl, how many doctors did you see that missed this?
Not that many because my ex-wife intervened pretty quickly, but probably about three, who did absolutely nothing for me. That was in a very short period of time and I was very lucky I started the proper regimen very soon. God knows, so many people go on like this for years.

Dr. Horowitz, how many doctors and over what span of time is the average for people to find you?
Dr. Horowitz: The average patient who is sick for a long time tells me that they have seen at least between ten and twenty doctors over many years before seeing me. They are usually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, an autoimmune illness like rheumatoid arthritis and MS, dementia or a psychiatric illness, and told that its all in their head. When they see me, I confirm that it IS in their head. Infections and toxins in their brains are making them chronically ill.

Daryl, what do you say to the CDC, Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and other doctors who deny that chronic Lyme exists?
It's mystifying to me. When something is impossible to understand, then conspiracy theories crop up. And you start asking why; what is all this virulent opposition to the reality of chronic Lyme disease? And I don't know what the truth of it is- why they're denying it-- but I can certainly tell you that it is hurting a lot of people. It is hurting a lot of doctors and it is hurting a lot of patients that should be treated properly. It's a scandal, really.

It is very disturbing. I refer people to the brilliant documentary, Under Our Skin, to get a handle on the corruption at play here. Do you want to weigh in on your feelings about this, Dr. Horowitz?
Dr. Horowitz: Daryl is, of course, right. There is a lot of denial going on here. We are in the middle of an epidemic where many people are getting sick and becoming disabled. I regularly hear stories that patients lose their jobs, families are torn apart, and they can't find anyone to help them.

Although the scientific literature clearly shows that the present diagnostic testing is inadequate with persistent infections causing chronic illness, there is a divide among doctors about how best to diagnose and treat these patients, and it has led to a virulent healthcare debate. The fall-out is that some doctors have lost their licenses for trying to help these sick patients, and many are also scared to treat them because of ramifications from the health insurance companies. We need to get everyone to the table quickly to sort this out. Lyme and associated co-infections are a major healthcare threat for our country.

Daryl, do fans come up and talk to you about Lyme disease?
They do, all the time. They ask me what to do and what doctor to go to and I refer them to the ILADS website. I tell them I go to Richard Horowitz and I reassure them that yes, I believe that you are truly sick. This is not a lie. You're not crazy, you're not a hypochondriac, because a lot of people are accused of that.

Did you ever have neuropsychiatric symptoms from Lyme?
Yes, not severe, but yes. I had cognitive issues and I still do when I get these occasional flareups. I get a little brain fog and I can't think as sharply as I normally do. Luckily, it does not last long for me. But yes, I went through a period where I was very disassociated, having issues with writing and things like that, hand-eye coordination.

Dr. Horowitz, what are the most common neuro-psych issues you see with Lyme and TBD and what is the best treatment for them?
Dr. Horowitz: Many of my patients complain of neurological symptoms like a stiff neck, headache, light and sound sensitivity, dizziness, memory and concentration problems, as well as symptoms of depression and anxiety.

We can even see a sudden onset of OCD and psychosis/schizophrenic-type symptoms. That's usually the case if someone is co-infected with multiple infections, like Babesia, which makes Lyme symptoms three times more severe; Bartonella which increases many underlying neuro-pscyh symptoms; and/or if someone has been exposed to environmental toxins like heavy metals and mold. The best treatment is to find all of the underlying infections making you sick, and detoxify from inflammatory cytokines and neurotoxins.

Daryl, did you have any anxiety, depression, or insomnia?
I had occasional insomnia. My ex-wife who has Lyme had horrible insomnia, she didn't sleep well for years. Luckily, that passed for me.

Dr. Horowitz, for patients with Lyme-induced insomnia, can you explain why this happens, what you recommend to treat it, and tell us how to treat it?
Dr. Horowitz: Sleep disorders are due to inflammation with tick-borne diseases, but you have to do a differential diagnosis to see if there are overlapping causes of insomnia.

For example, someone could have Lyme, causing a delayed sleep phase syndrome, where it takes them hours to fall asleep, and they get up in the late morning or afternoon, but they also could have other things interfering with sleep like drinking too much espresso late in the day (I wouldn't know anything about that), having an overactive bladder, being on stimulant medication with a long half-life, having sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, hormone abnormalities, such as low estrogen seen in menopause, or having elevated adrenal hormones at night keeping them up at night.

Others might have a chronic pain condition or do stimulating activities on the computer, interfering with their melatonin production. The key is to diagnose any and all overlapping causes of insomnia, and treat the tick-borne disorders, while using both medications and herbs to get people to sleep. Then the insomnia usually gets better over time.

Daryl, what do you make of the IDSA notion that four weeks of antibiotics is curative for Lyme?
I think it's a lie! Simple as that. It's a lie. And for some people, if they only have borrelia, maybe they are cured in that short of time. But a large number of people are not, and it becomes chronic, and there are usually co-infections involved, and then they remain sick. Anybody who says otherwise is giving false information.

Dr. Horowitz, what are your thoughts here? How long does it take you, on average, to get people either into remission or, at least, under control?
Dr. Horowitz: It is individualized and varies from person to person. If it is an acute case of Lyme, without associated co-infections, it an be relatively quick.

Those with chronic Lyme, who are very ill and have been sick for many years with multiple abnormalities on the MSIDS map, may require years of treatment to get better and/or get into remission. We have had some recent breakthroughs in treatments based on research coming out of Johns Hopkins University and Kim Lewis's lab at Northeastern University showing that Lyme is a "persister" bacterium.

We recently published two new studies on the use of mycobacterium drugs (Dapsone and pyrazinamide) for Lyme, which are normally used for other persister bacteria (mycobacterium infections like leprosy and TB). They are turning out to be very helpful in a certain percentage of people who have failed all traditional therapies.

I just had one women from Maine, sick for over 15 years, who finally got off of all of her antibiotics after using both of these drugs. I just spoke to her, and she is getting better off antibiotics for the first time in nearly two decades! These new therapies look very promising. They will be discussed in detail in my new book coming out, "How Can I Get Better? An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme and Chronic Disease".

Daryl, did you have Herxheimer reactions during longterm antibiotic therapy?
Oh, yeah. I was getting them every three weeks on treatment at first. Lyme creates such roving symptoms. I'd feel arthritic in my hipbone, then tremors, then stiff neck, and sometimes a slight headache, or heart palpitations, and these things would all rove around my body. They are these intense but vague symptoms that move around, that's the best way I can describe it.

Dr. Horowitz, what are your top recommendations for getting through herxes/ detoxing?
Dr. Horowitz: Herxheimer reactions result from killing off the Lyme bacteria, with inflammatory molecules produced called cytokines, which are not being adequately removed from the body. The rule of thumb is to turn off the faucet and shut down the production of inflammatory molecules, and open up the drain, improving the functioning of the detoxification pathways of the body, to get rid of the toxins.

This can usually be accomplished using medications that control inflammation like low dose naltrexone (LDN), Plaquenil, and IVIG (immunoglobulin therapy), but also using natural approaches like doing a trial of giving up gluten and grains, avoiding allergic foods and nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and peppers), or doing an alkaline diet with lots of healthy fruits and vegetables, while using phytochemical supplements that also turn on anti-inflammatory genes in the body.

Tumeric (curcurmin), green tea extract (EGCG), resveratrol (the red wine/grape extract), and broccoli seed extract (sulforaphane), combined with omega 3 fatty acids, can all help lower inflammation. We also have had success decreasing Herxheimer reactions by alkalizing (drinking lemons and limes in water, or taking Alka Seltzer Gold) while taking liposomal glutathione and/or clay/charcoal, which helps remove toxins from the body.

If you do all this while properly detoxifying, it helps the majority of patients. However, if you are on an antibiotic or herbal treatment that is causing a sustained Herx, and the above therapies do not help, you may need to take a break and rotate treatments.

Daryl, roving symptoms is a great way to describe Lyme and will help a lot of people who are going from doctor to doctor as each system of their body feels off, yet they get no answers. Hopefully, the lightbulb will go on and they will realize they need to be checked for Lyme by a Lyme specialist.
Exactly. Lyme is many things. One day you can feel like you have arthritis in your leg and the next day it feels fine and the next day you have brain fog. If you have any one of those symptoms and they are moving around your body, that is a big clue that you could have Lyme disease.

I know you live in Dutchess County, NY, which is a highly endemic area. Why don't you move to Hawaii?
I know people who do! One of the saddest things, and I used to be a hunter and a woodsman, is that I love the outdoors. I love nature. But it's been denied me. I can't walk in the woods anymore, my home is surrounded by a super-enforced deer fence so that even rodents don't get in, because mice and chipmunks carry ticks as well. I think one of the weirdest legacies of all this is that it's like a prison.

I share in that sentiment with you. But given that, you don't consider moving?
No, I live where I live. I figure it out. I am careful, I am aware of it, I wear protection, I don't go wandering around in the woods anymore. I deal with it, it's a reality that I face.

I know you had to take a break from touring because of your Lyme disease. How long was that and how did you get back to being on the road?
It wasn't that long, maybe a month or so. But it was sheer willpower that I got back on the road. I just worked being sick. If I don't feel well, I let my adrenaline kick in and it pushes the symptoms down. I am used to dealing with this and also I feel that I am lucky. It never hit me so hard that I was totally out of action, my cognitive symptoms of brain fog were never intense enough or lasted long enough to cause me to stop completely. I was able to write and do the things I normally do.

Daryl, what was your lowest moment with Lyme?
Worrying that I would never get better, that this was going to stop my life. That was early on. Another low moment was when I was walking down the street in this little village near me in Dutchess County and it felt like there was a glass window between me and the world. I felt separated from the reality that I was in. It was a very disconcerting feeling, I felt totally disassociated and I thought to myself, "where is this going?" It was a very bad moment.

What has Lyme taught you?
It taught me to not trust the government and not to trust doctors. Most of them don't know what they're talking about. I hate to say that, I have a lot of friends who are doctors, specialists. But they tend to buy into the party line and they are not paying attention to what patients are saying and what's real. I really learned that. And in my younger days, I was always a bit body-sensitive, and the Lyme completely knocked that out of me. I know what it's like to actually have something. So, in some ways it was a growing-up process. I really learned how to deal with the things that happen in life.

Lyme teaches you about being in the moment.
Yes, exactly. And how to work under adversity, how to do my job no matter what. No matter how I felt, I am up on stage, nobody knows the difference and pretty soon I don't know the difference. I guess you could look at it, in one way, that a some good came out of it.

I really get that. Now I'm like, "I'm alive and I feel really good and I am so lucky."
Yeah, you learn to appreciate what you got.

Can you give some hope to people out there who are suffering from Lyme disease or who think they might be?
First of all, find a Lyme-literate doctor. Do whatever it takes to find them and be diligent about it. And don't listen to any doctor who tells you your symptoms are imaginary, get to the bottom of it. Follow the regimen as prescribed by your Lyme-literate doctor, most of them know what the most effective protocol is for dealing with this, and be optimistic because it gets better. You will improve, for sure.

Agreed. I would add that whenever patients get an auto-immune diagnosis like RA, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, MS etc, that they ask their doctor what the root cause of this is. If they give no reasonable answers, I recommend patients seek a second opinion from a Lyme specialist, since Lyme can mimic all of these diseases.

Dr. Horowitz, what do you say to those suffering with Lyme?
Dr. Horowitz: There is definitely hope for those who are still sick and not getting better. I have seen over 12,000 chronically ill Lyme patients in the last 28 years, and by diagnosing and treating all of the abnormalities on the MSIDS map, the majority of people get better.

For some, its using a different combination of antibiotics and antimalarial medications. Many have Lyme and persistent co-infections like Babesia, Bartonella and Mycoplasma and need all of the infections properly treated, or they won't improve.

That was the case with my wife, who is finishing up 12 months of a Dapsone protocol, and it's the best she has been during the 20 years of our marriage. For others, the key might be treating hormone abnormalities, getting them on an allergen-free diet, getting them to sleep, or detoxing more (my wife also needed to do all of that to feel better). Everyone is different, but if you work with your healthcare provider and go through diagnosing and treating all of the 16 points on the MSIDS map, you should definitely see improvement. Do not give up!

For more information about Lyme and other tick-borne illness, visit Lymedisease.org, Lyme Disease Challenge, and Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

To find a referral for a Lyme specialist near you, visit: Global Lyme Alliance or ILADS.

Daryl Hall & John Oates are on tour all year long. Check here for tour dates.
Check out Daryl's restaurant and live music club, Daryl's House.

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From Apollo To Frontier

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On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing -- to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.

Meanwhile, here on Earth we convulsed in racial and political turmoil. Our streets were filled with anger, hatred and violence, and the very institutions of our government faltered. And yet, always moving forward and rising above it all, our quest to put humans in space punctuated the news like a shooting star in the darkness, offering a constant glimmer of hope in the night of Vietnam and the storm of Watergate.

Today we are there again. Now as then, America faces threats both internal and external. Today we are fighting another rigid, authoritarian system that wants to destroy us and sees the very existence of our liberal democratic technological society as an anathema. Internally our political system is a mess, and trust in our system of government at new lows. We are threatened by long unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, everyday less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.

At the same time our environment is teetering on the edge of a dangerous slide into global disaster, fed by ignorance and lack of appreciation that there are no walls in the sky or oceans, and one country's pollution is necessarily the responsibility of all.

It is time to raise our eyes again. It is time to come together and do something important, if not magnificent. It is time to set a unifying goal that calls out the very best in us and our friends around the world, a goal that is hard to achieve and yet when achieved catapults us to a new level of knowledge and prosperity, time to turn the machines and minds of war outwards and upwards. It is time to begin the opening of the High Frontier. Space.

Timing is everything. And now is the time. After the sad and pathetically low moments in American and world history we have witnessed this year, whichever new leader arises has the chance to lift the nation up to a new level by declaring the frontier open and clearing the way for we the people to exercise our right stuff and our space rights, and to step out and up to the greatest challenge in human history.

This revolution has already started, with wealthy citizens building their own space programs and entrepreneurs building spacecraft on relatively tiny budgets. This new space generation stands on the shoulders of the giants who got us out there the first time and is applying their technology in new ways to create low cost, easy access to space, allowing us to use space resources, and to make it pay. All of them, to a person, share the dream of opening space to human settlement. If a new leader were to bring these citizen pioneers together with the explorers of our government space program, we could launch this nation, and indeed the world, out into the solar system within a decade.

This time it must be about people, not governments. Rather than a centrally controlled quasi-military government race to space by two superpowers, we must enable the people themselves to go where they want to go, to do there what they want. If governments decide to return to the Moon -- as seems to be the case -- it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community. Thus, with both public and private players doing what they do best where they want to do it, we can make it happen far faster than many might believe.

After all, wherever we go between here and Mars, the challenge this time is not as daunting as going from the Earth to the Moon was in 1961, when we went from knowing almost nothing about space to walking on the Moon in eight years. Since then we have 50 years of experience operating in space. And while we foundered for many years in the waters just off shore in Earth orbit, we've learned a lot, developed a vast tool kit and honed our ability to get there, keep people alive and get them back. Opening the new worlds of space is not a technological challenge, so much as it is psychological. It is a matter of decision.

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The Frontier offers us new ways of living, new ways to save our world and new ways to work together. It is an anathema to the ideologies of ignorance and hate espoused by those who attack us, as it literally rises above such wars. Even as we roll up our sleeves to defeat those who would push us back into the dark ages we can be creating the age of light. We can look at our children and tell them they need not be afraid. Instead we can share with them a new dream of people working together to achieve something incredible.

It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise. From all we know by those who have gone so far, the very act of being up there, helps shift your relationship to life down here. And the more minds who have access, who move out there, the more transformation they will enable.

As it eventually became the first time, space will not only be a bridge to the future, but a bridge between people, ideologies and cultures. Ironically, while the human space program started as a tool of a technology and propaganda war, even as cold and hot wars between governments raged below, hands have reached through airlocks in warm embrace, and opponents have literally been able to rise above their differences. We led the way once, we can do it again. Ours is a frontier nation and heritage. It is this psychology that made us who we are, and while we may have lost our way as a nation, we can get back on track -- with the right leadership.

Our system works. Free people in a free economy who are free to exercise their dreams can do anything. WE can do anything. It is time to return to the Moon, open Free Space and go to Mars. It is time to open The Frontier.

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Bracing For Fire
By Rodman Linn

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A photo from space of the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos, N.M. just after its start at 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 2011. On the first day, driven by strong and unpredictable winds, the fire burned 43,000 acres--a rate of about an acre per second. By the time the fire was controlled, it had burned more than 150,000 acres. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

How Computer Modeling Might Help Us Better Understand--and Better Manage--Wildfires

This summer, throughout the West, higher temperatures and decreased precipitation brought on by climate change have ramped up the frequency of wildfires -- big, catastrophic fires -- while a century of fire suppression feeds the flames with a thick tangle of fuel in our overgrown forests.

We can't stop all fires -- and we shouldn't. Healthy ecosystems depend on them. But understanding what drives big fires and predicting their behavior helps the fire community prepare for the next blaze through appropriate land management, emergency plans and firefighting strategies. Beyond those benefits, a deeper understanding of wildfires prompts important insights into tactics for using prescribed fire as well as insight into larger regional environmental issues, including how fires change river flows and the availability of water for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

For scientists studying wildfire, the challenge is predicting the seemingly unpredictable. A wide range of conditions -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, larger weather patterns, available fuel, fuel conditions and terrain --influence the behavior of fire. Figuring out details such as the movement of hot gasses coming off a raging forest fire or the combination of convective and radiative heat transfer that ignite unburned fuels, for example, seems impossible at first. There's so much to consider, from how the fire front interacts with the atmosphere that drives it forward to the feedbacks of the fuel's structure on the fire and winds to the impacts of the topography and regional meteorology.

Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory is well suited to address this kind of multidisciplinary, ultimately physics-based problem -- and the lab has a stake in wildfire prediction and management. As the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires demonstrated, the laboratory and neighboring communities are equally vulnerable to runaway conflagrations on our doorstep. Furthermore, Los Alamos' mission includes addressing energy security and national security, both of which can be affected by wildfires.

Modeling wildfires exploits the lab's unique capabilities in physics, computational modeling and high-performance computing. For decades the lab has built computer models of complex systems that move and change through time. That work includes hot gasses -- fire -- and the atmosphere. The laboratory's supercomputers make it possible.

When a team of atmospheric scientists, computational physicists and mathematicians in the laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences division, collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Southern Research Station, set out to simulate the interacting processes that make up a wildfire as a basis for predicting its behavior, they leveraged a wealth of expertise and experience that had been developed partially through the laboratory's weapons program.

A research effort initiated by Laboratory Fellow Francis Harlow, a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics, and Andrew White, a visionary figure in the national high-performance computing community, led to the development of FIRETEC. It was the first wildfire model to simulate the interaction among many of the physical processes that determine the continuously shifting dance between fire and its surroundings. FIRETEC, which is now developed in collaboration with U.S. Forest Service, simulates three-dimensional interactions among fire, fuel and the environment at landscape scales. By coupling FIRETEC with an atmospheric-dynamics model called HIGRAD and using real-world data, the team can represent the interaction between fire and atmosphere and the way fire adjusts to terrain, vegetation, fuel and the dynamics of fire itself.

FIRETEC presents a new way of studying fire and learning how to better manage and cope with it. The model provides additional scientific input for decisions by policymakers working in land management, water resources and energy. The team hopes it will eventually assist fire and fuel management operations. Currently the team is partnering with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to study the combined influence of wind and slope on heat exposure in firefighter safety zones, with the Air Force Wildland Fire Center to study the efficiency of various prescribed fire tactics and with INRA of France and the Canadian Forest Service to study the effects of fuel breaks for fire management.

But there's more research to be done to further improve wildfire modeling for practical use in the field during a fire. FIRETEC's complexity and the massive amounts of data involved require enormous high-performance computers such as those available at Los Alamos to perform simulations. The laboratory-led team is now working with the Forest Service to apply what it learns from FIRETEC to assist in developing and refining less detailed but faster-running tools that incident fire commanders could run on their laptops to predict fire behavior over the next few hours. This is a short enough time frame to deploy firefighters in anticipation of the fire's next move or help keep firefighters out of harm's way. This faster-running tool could also benefit decision-support tools such as Simtable, which is currently used in the laboratory's Emergency Operations Center.

On another front, as part of a larger Los Alamos study on the impact of climate-driven changes on watersheds, laboratory researchers are working toward using FIRETEC to potentially spin off simplified models. One model can explore, for example, how the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the Colorado River system might alter flows in the San Juan River. That's important locally because the San Juan supplies drinking water to Santa Fe and cools the Four Corners Generating Station, a major regional energy source. How will climate-driven changes to vegetation alter the pattern of fires and the severity of the effects in that watershed? What can be done to minimize those impacts? Research underway now should answer these questions.

Providing those answers is an appropriate endeavor for Los Alamos for several reasons. While the Los Alamos community has had more than its fair share of encounters with wildfire, the research is more than personal: it fits the laboratory's mission to enhance energy security and national security. Additionally, the required expertise in the combination of multi-phase fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, computational modeling and computer science are optimally aligned with many of the laboratory's other mission areas. "Science serving society" is a catchy phrase, but in the case of wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, it couldn't be more apt.

Rod Linn is a senior scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies and models a wide range of atmospheric phenomenon using computational physics. Linn has led much of the development and application of the FIRETEC computer program for predicting wildfire behavior, but the breadth of work using this tool is accomplished through a broad set of Los Alamos investigators as well as domestic and international collaborators.

More about how Los Alamos National Laboratory prepares for wildfires:

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Moments Of Silence, Broken: Thoughts About Nice From 'Space'

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Dirt is awesome. Hurting people is not awesome. Let's help each other through this.

Wednesday night over dinner we argued about soil. Not argued so much as batted ideas around the way that scientists sometimes do. "That's not soil -- that's bedrock." One of us will say, "Even ground-up, it's not soil unless it can act as a nutrient source." Someone else will say, "Is the sea floor soil? It provides nutrients for ocean life." "That's a sediment, not a soil, per se," a third person will add. "Soils are a subset of sediments. As is muck," will answer that question, while opening the floor to muck-raking of a whole different kind. Soil, radiation, lava flows, orbital trajectories -- it's what's for dinner conversation. Lunchtime in the cafeteria at NASA or in the break room at Space Science Labs is very much the same.

Thursday night, instead of feasting upon ideas, we asked our French crewmate, "Have you had heard from all your loved ones back home?"

"It's night time there now," he answered. "So probably in the morning." Without another word, he turned a hard gaze to the glowing face of his laptop, willing it to fork over news about the attack in Nice.

The rest of us were silent, too. What is there to say in these moments? We cleaned up from dinner and went back to work. While I wrote this, two people repaired the hab. Another toiled away at a geology task. The fourth member of the crew coaxed a computer into running software it REALLY didn't want to run. The last of my crew is hoped that the people he knows are alive and unharmed. We were all terribly, terribly sad for his country and for the planet we call home.

One of the many great things about space is that taking life for granted becomes blessedly difficult. Every breath you take here is precious. Every morsel of food you get to consume is precious. Every person on your crew is precious whether or not you happen to like them in that moment or in general, because we all depend on each other to make it through this. The same is true on Earth. Only on Earth, our interdependence is obscenely easy to dismiss; to deny; to disregard to the point where revoking the right of other humans to breathe and eat and be there for those who depend upon them becomes a valid option. That is something we can't be silent about, now or ever. So what do we say?

We could start with something like: Hurting people is not, has not ever been, and will never be acceptable.

It's true, at least in principle. In practice, people get hurt accidentally. When that happens, we need to forgive ourselves and each other. So we specify:

Hurting people on purpose is not, has not ever been, and will never be acceptable.

This states the problem. Important people repeating this phrase over mass media would be a great step in getting all of society on the same page. We need to hear these words from our leaders and we need to say them to our kids, or co-workers, and our leaders: hurting people is not acceptable. We don't condone it or wish to live in a world where injuring others is a way of life. Let's say it out-loud and often: hurting people is not acceptable. It may dent the ratings of our more lurid reality TV shows, but let's face it, that's a good thing.

Even saying, "Hurting people is not acceptable," to myself while alone on the ground floor of a dome on simulated Mars makes me feel better -- stronger and more capable of taking positive action towards a resolution of the problem. Speaking of which: how do we resolve this problem?

A million specific things would help avoid situations like this: providing more resources to mental health; reducing poverty; increasing in regional stability; strong, non-radical leadership, and so on. Most of these are, if not complicated, hard to come by. The attainable, more general thing that we can all do is help each other through this. By this, I mean everything. Life. The old man struggling to get his groceries home in 100-degree heat or 2-foot snowbanks. Help him through this. The neighbors setting up for a party that will probably keep you awake until 2 AM. Want the social capital to ask them to turn it down? Help them set it up and you'll be that much closer. When I lived in South Central LA, I brought the nice Mexican family across the street some beer and never had to ask twice. The person stranded on the side of the road? Help her or him through this.

Is there a chance that any of these things could go horribly wrong? Sure there is. On the other hand, we don't want to live in a world where we don't help each other through this, so we have to try. It needn't be something against your nature. Whatever your nature is, whoever you are, you struggle with life. If you look around for others who are similarly struggling, you will see them. Help them through this. At least make the offer. Do it for yourself as much as for them and for everyone else on the planet. Help us through this.

I'm going to have to keep saying this, because the silence is killing me. It's killing us. In space, no one can hear you scream, or type. Fortunately, through the wonders of the Deep Space Network, people can be read and heard no matter where they are in the solar system. So let's hear it. Let's say it. What don't we do? Hurt people. What do we do? Help each other through this. Wherever we are, whatever we believe -- if we believe this, everything really will be OK.

Being human is remarkable. We have the way. All that's needed is the will. The will to help each other through this and not hurt people. How do we find the will? Someone once wrote that all things began with a word. I can get behind that. Words are all I have at the moment, anyway. Words and the will to use them over and over until we will the words into a world we want to live in -- one where hurting people is not acceptable.

So let's help each other through this thing in Nice, and whatever comes tomorrow and the day after that. Let's start our reports with, "Hurting people is not acceptable -- and now, the news." Let's talk about the terrible, unending messes as if we have the power to end them -- because we do and because anything, even fantasies of a better world, even muck, outshines silence and sorrow.

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Dirt, like helping people, gives us a world worth having.

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The Real-Life Ghostbusters of the Brain
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

By Yasmin Tayag

"In a sense, we are absolutely the ghosts we are sensing," Giulio Rognini, Ph.D., a senior scientist at EPFL's Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, says.

Rognini is part of a team of researchers at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne that might be best described as the real-life ghostbusters. The team is attempting to understand what makes our brains want to believe that apparitions are ghosts.

While he's more than willing to admit that ghostly sensations are completely real, he'll be the first to point out that they're not actually caused by ghosts. In his work, he's discovered that many such "encounters" are actually caused by a series of brain malfunctions, which trick us into attributing our movements and sensations to someone else.

Rognini's particular line of research focuses on a particular type of ghost encounter referred to by scientists as the feeling of a presence. "Typically, people report the type of apparition that they see," Rognini says. "Our kind of apparition is more the sensation that someone is nearby when no one is actually present." These kinds of encounters are most often reported by people with neurological disorders, like epilepsy and stroke, but they're also common in people who do extreme, exhausting sports, like long-distance cycling or mountain climbing. If ghosts aren't real, then what's triggering these experiences? Rognini and his colleagues -- who specialize in investigating the body's role in subjective experience and self-consciousness -- have spent the last decade looking for the source.

In 2006, Olaf Blanke, Ph.D., Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, was implanting electrodes into the brains of epilepsy patients to investigate the source of the disease. Unexpectedly, he discovered that zapping a specific area of the brain triggered a feeling of a presence in his patients. As he investigated further, he found that the movement of the presence always corresponded to what the patient was doing. If the patient was standing, the presence was standing. If the patient was sitting, the presence was felt as sitting. "There were correspondences between movement and posture between the patient and the presence, showing what we call the sensorimotor aspect of the phenomenon," Rognini explains. "What was happening was that the patient was misattributing his own signals -- his own posture -- to the presence."

In essence, the "ghosts" the patients were sensing were really just echoes of their own movements. When our brains function normally, we have a strong sense of who we are and where we are in space. Processing touch, motor cues, and proprioception -- that is, understanding the stimuli our own bodies produce and perceive -- all goes smoothly, giving us a firm understanding of how our bodies exist in physical space. By studying people whose brains couldn't integrate their body's sensorimotor signals, Rognini and his team concluded that lesions in the parts of the brain crucial to generating the experience of "self" -- the temporoparietal, insular, and frontoparietal cortex regions -- were the root cause of the feeling of a presence.

An engineer by training, Rognini began a follow-up study by devising a robot to trigger the feeling of a presence in healthy patients. As participants manually controlled the robot's movements, the robot, in turn, reproduced those movements on the patient's back, either with or without a small delay. "When there was this small delay, in a way replicating the conflict that is present in neurological patients with brain lesions in areas that integrate body signals, the patient no longer attributes movements and touch to himself," he explains. Unable to figure out where the movements are coming from, the patient has no choice but to attribute them to someone -- or something -- else.

Some of the patients in this study, which was described in a 2014 paper in Current Biology, were too freaked out by the robot's ghostly presence to participate for its entirety and asked to stop the experiment. But the study successfully showed what Rognini was hoping to prove: Ghosts are all in our heads.

"We take for granted that we have a solid representation of our body in space and time," he says. "I think this feeling of a presence study is a nice example of the fact that when you trick your own bodily signals and you trick your brain at interpreting them, then you can have very very weird, strange sensations." His next move will be to test his robots on patients inside an MRI scanner in order to pinpoint the specific parts of the brain that are chasing phantoms.

Of course, Rognini is aware that his model can't explain all of the different ghosts humans have claimed to encounter. "The literature on ghosts and apparitions and hallucinations is huge and also highly influenced by culture," he says, explaining that his experiment provides a scientific account of only a small sliver of the supernatural. Can science suggest an explanation for everything else? Even Michael Shermer, notorious science cynic and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, has admitted he's been forced to consider the existence of the supernatural. If you ask Rognini, he'll admit that his work only goes so far.

"We cannot, of course, explain out all the apparitions that have been reported."

MORE FROM INVERSE:

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Alien-Hunting 19 Years After "Contact"
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

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By Sarah Sloat

One of the most realistic parts of Contact is the blatant sexism that the brilliant young astronomer Eleanor Arroway encounters throughout the 1997 extraterrestrial-hunting film. The rumored inspiration for Arroway -- Jill Tarter -- said in 1999 that author Carl Sagan, who wrote the novel the movie was based off of, "included many of the 'character-building' experiences that are common to women scientists studying and working in a male-dominated profession, so Ellie seems very familiar to me."

"Character-building" in this scenario is being a prominent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomer who has to deal with backward dudes who think your scientific expertise is laughable science fiction and won't take you seriously because you're a woman. Great.

But for a movie that ends up with our protagonist on an intergalactic pseudo-beach chatting with an alien posing as her father, you may be surprised to know that what Contact nails doesn't stop there. Contact's realism is a reflection of the fact that Sagan knew what he was talking about. Until her breakthrough, Arroway lives a convincing life as a scientist -- working out of the same observatories as real SETI researchers, fighting for funding, and hunting for alien life by listening for radio signals between 1,200 and 3,000 MHz from systematically selected stars.

But what makes Arroway's discovery of alien-transmitted communication from the star Vega awesome material for a Hollywood blockbuster is that it's sold as a fantasy. Sagan knew the real science going on behind the fiction he created, but people who bought movie tickets didn't. People in 1997 didn't believe in SETI initiatives any more than the antagonists Arroway encountered.

If Contact was to get a remake today (but seriously, no) it wouldn't be able to instill the same sense of bewildered wonder. And that is a very good thing, namely because the work that Arroway portrays in the film is finally getting its due as a respectable field of science. Contact has proven to be prescient in 2016 (save for the actual we've-gotten-a-message-from-aliens part).

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Ellie reachers for a cracker-jack compass during her journey to Vega.

Take billionaire Yuri Milner: In Contact, Arroway's work (and eventual voyage to Vega) is saved by the financial intervention of Dr. Hadden Suit, whose wealth seemingly has no bounds. Suit works from the shadows, moving the pieces in Arroway's life, without the public knowing of the alien-hunting science going on behind closed doors. Comparatively, Milner is a real life financier who has made his intentions to help find evidence of extra-terrestrials extremely public.

In 2015, Milner announced his Breakthrough Listen initiative in collaboration with the SETI program at the University of California, Berkeley -- a $100 million project that uses telescopes to listen for extraterrestrial radio signals and search for laser signals. In January, he announced another $100 million dollar project with Breakthrough Starshot, an enterprise that plans to send laser-powered lightsails to the star system Alpha Centauri with the eventual goal of encountering life in deep space. That line, in any other year, would seem straight-up ridiculous.

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A Breakthrough Starshot solar sail.

But things are a bit different in 2016. Arroway probably would not need to patiently break down how radio signals work to suits in the U.S. government when they begin to investigate her work; they'd probably already know what's going on. Just look at the development of the FAST telescope being built in China, which Zheng Xiaonian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says will have "the potential to search for more strange objects to better understand the origin of the universe and boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life."

But mainly, a scientist of Arroway's caliber wouldn't have to take the same sort of inane criticism. SETI researchers are increasingly aware that they are no longer fringe weirdos. SETI communications director Seth Shostak told Inverse in January that, "I think there may be truth to SETI being taken more seriously by the public and it may be a consequence of the discovery of exoplanets filtering down to the public."

And while funding for exploratory science continues to be a struggle, SETI has been able to continue -- and even increase -- its programs. While it continues to monitor radio waves, sometimes with the help of public laptops, SETI is also able to use optical instruments to look for lasers and light patterns that could signify the presence of aliens.

In fact, on Thursday, SETI's Institute Director of Research Nathalie Cabrol published a proposal arguing for further developing alien-hunting techniques, specifically through the establishment of Virtual Institute with "new detection strategies."

"To find E.T., we must open our minds beyond a deeply-rooted, Earth-centric perspective, expand our research methods, and deploy new tools," said Cabrol in a press statement. "Never before has so much data been available in so many scientific disciplines to help us grasp the role of probabilistic events in the development of extraterrestrial intelligence. These data tell us that each world is a unique planetary experiment."

Cabrol's words are comparable to that of Arroway's, who praises the "acquisition of technology" as the catalyst for finally making contact probable. The good news for us: Cabrol is real, and one day, contact with aliens might be too.

MORE FROM INVERSE:

Photos via Giphy, Wikimedia Commons, IMDB

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Sexting Might Actually Be A Sign Of A Committed Relationship
By Rob Weisskirch, California State University, Monterey Bay

Why do people sext? Why do they send racy or naked photos or videos and sexually loaded texts?

For a short-term hookup, sexting might seem like a direct way to get what you want - or at least try to. But according to my research, sexting is actually most likely to occur within a committed relationship. Some research suggests that people often engage in sexting after being coerced by romantic partners or to avoid an argument with their romantic partner. So perhaps anxiety and concern about what your romantic partner thinks about you promote behaviors like sexting.

As a human development researcher who studies how technology influences relationships, I wanted to understand if people who are anxious about dating or about what their partner thinks of them are more likely to sext.

So where does this relationship anxiety come from?

One of the major theories regarding relationships is called attachment theory. It suggests that the way you related to your caregiver as an infant (and vice versa) shapes how you come to view relationships later in life.

If your caregiver was attuned to your needs and responsive, you will develop a secure attachment. That means you are comfortable with close relationships because your experience paid off - Mom or Dad was there when you were distressed or hungry or cold. From that experience, you learned that relationships are safe and reciprocal, and your attachment anxiety is low.

But if your caregiver was not so attuned to your needs, was intrusive or inattentive, you might develop what is called an insecure attachment. If something you wanted emotionally or physically (like comfort) went unfulfilled, you might end up anxious about relationships as an adult. You might realize that relationships may not be trustworthy, not invest in close relationships, and avoid intimacy all together.

Do people sext because of relational anxiety?

My colleagues, Michelle Drouin and Rakel Delevi, and I hypothesized that people who were afraid of being single or had dating anxiety and who were, at the same time, anxious or insecure in their attachment style would be more likely to sext. We also thought these singles would be more likely to sext their romantic partners, even when their relationship wasn't very committed.

We gave 459 unmarried, heterosexual, undergraduate students an online questionnaire to learn more about how relational anxiety influences sexting behavior. It covered questions measuring their sexting behaviors, relationship commitment needed to engage in sexting, their fear of being single, their dating anxiety and their attachment style (secure or insecure). Half of the people who took the survey were single, and about 71 percent were female.

Commitment counts.
Man texting via www.shutterstock.com.

We found that people in romantic relationships -- whether of long or short duration - were more likely to have sexted than those who did not have romantic partners. There were no gender differences for engaging in sexting, except that males were more likely than females to have sent a text propositioning sexual activity.

We also found that, generally, dating anxiety from fear of negative evaluation from the romantic partner (basically, worrying about what your partner thinks of you) and having a more secure attachment style (i.e., comfort with intimacy and close relationships) predicted if someone had sent a sexually suggestive photo or video, a picture in underwear or lingerie, a nude photo or a sexually suggestive text.

We expected to find that anxiety would prompt people to sext but were surprised that comfort with intimacy related to sexting behaviors. We also expected to find that sexting would occur in relationships without a lot of commitment, meaning that we thought that sexting would be part of the wooing.

But it turns out that people who are comfortable with close relationships (a secure attachment style) and also worry about what their partner might think of them are more likely to engage in sexting, but only if there some level of commitment in the relationship.

So our hypothesis was only partially confirmed.

What's dating anxiety got to do with it?

What this tells us is that people may be concerned with pleasing their partner's desire -- or perceived desire -- to engage in sexting and that it is the comfort with intimacy in relationships that may allow sexting to occur. And, when there is greater relationship commitment, this continues to be the case.

It appears that there is less stigma and greater comfort with sexting, provided that one perceives that his or her partner wants to sext and if there is a degree of relationship commitment.

So, a little sexting within a relationship might not be too bad.

Rob Weisskirch, Professor of Human Development, California State University, Monterey Bay

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Weekend Roundup: Global Rifts Harden Between the West, Russia and China
The military uprising in Turkey and the attack in France signal a world in turmoil. Events elsewhere this week also mark an ominous historic turn of events. From two ends of the globe, geopolitical rifts have hardened. NATO recently announced the deployment of a missile shield and four new battalions in the front line states bordering Russia, prompting former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to say the West is preparing for a "hot war." A U.N. tribunal on maritime disputes declared on Tuesday that China has no legal basis for claiming sovereignty over shoals in the South China Sea also claimed by the Philippines, prompting Beijing, which sees the U.S. maneuvering behind the scenes, to react in anger and defiance.

"It will certainly intensify conflict and even confrontation," China's ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, warned.

Both China and Russia decried America-allied South Korea's planned deployment of a new anti-missile defense system, also announced recently, as a strategic threat to their national security. We may not yet be in a new Cold War, but we have definitely entered a period of hot peace.

Writing from Moscow, Fyodor Lukyanov is blunt: "The spirit of the Cold War is back -- full scale." From Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin sees America's policy of "dual containment" of China and Russia continuing to "push[ ] them together to form an anti-Western quasi-alliance and, possibly, even recreating some conditions that, a century ago, led to World War I."

Writing from Beijing, He Yafei lays out China's view that the tribunal ruling has no binding authority. "The international standards of law and rules embodied in the U.N. Charter," he argues, "clearly stipulate that any disputes on sovereignty should be settled by disputants through consultation and negotiation based on international law and practices while respecting historical facts." In easy to understand graphics, this video produced by the Shanghai-based website Guancha similarly explains why China rejects the U.N. panel's ruling. Harvard's Graham Allison is not surprised that Beijing is ignoring the arbitration ruling. "None of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have ever accepted any international court's ruling when (in their view) it infringed on their sovereignty or national security interests," he says. "Thus, by rejecting the court's decision, China is doing just what the other great powers have repeatedly done for decades." Referring to the island disputes, Jennifer Harris argues that "China's entire strategy is predicated on the belief that exercising a military option in the next decade would simply prove too costly," and thus the only way for the U.S to stop Beijing's "belligerence" is through economic pressure.

Looking at the larger issue of China's role in the region, Richard Javad Heydarian writes from from Manila that, "the verdict puts into question China's claim to being a peaceful, responsible and law-abiding power, which also seeks leadership and respect in Asia and beyond. It now risks being branded as an outlaw." Also writing from Manila, Rommel Banlaoi suggests a bilateral agreement between China and the Philippines may be in the works. "While the ruling may give the Philippines the moral and legal victory on the arbitration," he notes, " the Duterte administration believes only in improving bilateral ties with China can the Philippines enjoy political victory."

Turning to the ongoing implosion of the European Union, Will Hutton writes from London that any Brexit negotiation by the new prime minister, Theresa May, that gives Great Britain access to Europe's single market "will require May's government to accept the freedom of movement of people as the quid pro quo -- precisely the opposite of the referendum result." Citing "Connectography" author Parag Khanna saying, "the EU countries are functionally inseparable, an egg that cannot be unscrambled." And he notes that, already, London's property market is crashing. HuffPost Reporter Daniel Marans explains how Brexit has unleashed new financial jitters across Europe, especially concerning the solvency of Italian banks.

In this video report, HuffPost Reporter Willa Frej joins an EU rescue mission off the coast of Lesbos, Greece that saved 26 people from drowning. Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden report on how African migrants, once numbering as many as 200,000 in Guangzhou, China, are returning home -- both because of stricter immigration laws and because it has just become too expensive to live in China these days. Mercy Corps' Deepmala Mahla pleads for the world not to forget Sudan as other crises overshadow it. "The international community must sustain its interest in South Sudan, " she writes from the capital, Juba. "The headlines will fade, but the needs will not. South Sudan is a country on a precipice, and all of our help and attention is needed now, and in the months to come, if this new country is to realize its bright future."

From Istanbul, WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones looks at the deteriorating condition of journalist John Cantlie, a captive of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, as he appeared in another one of the group's propaganda videos Artists around the world have responded to the terror attack in Nice. See their works below and here.

Une lectrice du @lemondefr nous envoie ce dessin après l'attaque de #Nice. Dire que l'été était arrivé... pic.twitter.com/mJdliTpDGX
-- Clément Martel (@martelclem) July 15, 2016

As part of our continuing series offering a platform for candidates aspiring to the post of U.N. Secretary General, Christiana Figueres, who shepherded the recent U.N. climate summit in Paris to a successful conclusion, presents her case. "People have lost trust that their lives can get better and that institutions are on their side," she writes. "This in turn is leading to apathy, depression, despair and in some cases to the development of radical views. This cycle must be stopped, before it consumes our collective future."

As the U.S. presidential race heats up with Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by only four points in a new national poll, some of America's leading tech entrepreneurs signed this open letter saying "Trump would be a disaster for innovation."

HuffPost's Senior Tech Editor Damon Beres reports on the bizarre case of "Pokemon Go" enthusiasts heading to the remote South Korean town of Sokcho, on the North Korean border, because it is apparently the only place in South Korea where the mobile game works. These 360 degree photos of swimming with dolphins in Bimini, Bahamas to touring the Portage Glacier in Alaska immerse you in a virtual vacation without leaving home. Finally, our Singularity series this week shows how a 3-D bioprinter can make artificial bones from scratch.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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What Should I Do With My Life? A Scientist's Perspective
You were born. You grew up, learned how to survive in a complicated and altogether bewildering world, learned a few things in school, maybe some more in college. And one day you face the challenge of your existence:

What should I do with my life?

First, let me assure you: you should be asking this question. Anybody who has ever achieved anything has asked themselves that exact question. (This last statement, by the way, is not supported by any data that I know, but it could be basically true anyway).

Before I will tell you what to do with your life (even though I don't know you), let me first tell you about your purpose.

You have no purpose.

OK, I should have defined "your purpose" more accurately. If we understand "your purpose" as your role in a grand design of things, you should know that there is no grand design of things. (For this there is data, but this is not the blog post to get into this issue. Just trust me here: "No Grand Design".)

Consider the purpose of a blade of grass. You've seen one of those. What do you think the purpose of the blade of grass is? Granted, it can't think like you and I can, but it is alive, and you share about a quarter of your genes with grass. Is its purpose to be eaten by a cow? To be shortened by a lawnmower? To give a nice green feel to the front lawn (in a cooperative quest together with its closely related brethren?)

"2016-07-14-1468467578-7365808-bladesofgrass.jpg"

You do of course realize that this thinking is absurd. The blade of grass just "is". It grew from other blades of grass, just like you grew from your parents. You had no choice in the matter, nor did your parents know what they were producing (beyond the obvious: "one human child"). Speaking from the vantage points of molecules, you're the result of some other molecules.

But compared to the blade of grass, there is something special about you. You can learn. (You can move also, something that the blade of grass will eternally be jealous about). When you learn, you take past experience into account to change how you will do things next time around. You can learn about the world in which you happen to be placed, and you are even free to ponder whether there could be other such worlds beyond the one you currently inhabit, populated with other beings that ask themselves what to do with their life.

"2016-07-14-1468467768-3282770-kpw9s01csvccut7vnugy.jpg"

This ability you have, to understand your place, your position if you will, within the entire grandiose universe, is something grandiose in itself. You can actually think about what it means to be alive, unlike the blade of grass, which just is. (And still has so many of your genes). Only you can actually ask yourself the question "What should I do with my life?"

We already established that you have no purpose. What you should do with your life is to give yourself a purpose. You see, as you are freed from some sort of grander design, it turns out that what you become is entirely up to you. You are the one who gets to choose your purpose. And when you begin to think about what purpose to give to yourself, look no further than your own dreams.

Dreams are curious things: we control them and don't control them at the same time. There is something in them decidedly from us, and sometimes stuff that isn't exactly how we thought we were. But we all dream, whether at night or during the day. But in our dreams, we often are what we long to be. This is the key:

Your purpose is to be what you long to be.

It's really quite simple. Granted, some people long to be King or Queen, when in fact they are not anywhere near the line of succession of any Royal Family. This is not the longing I am talking about. "I long to be rich", I often hear. Big deal, who doesn't. I'm talking about the longing that is based on something you experienced, something you learned, something inside of you that made you think: "This is what I want to do all the time". When you identify this, you know what to do with your life: to become the person who does precisely that. Imagine your best self, the one that has achieved all their dreams, and strive to be that person. That is the purpose of your life, in fact anybody's life.

"How do I do that?" is the next obvious question, and this one does not have a simple answer. Generally speaking, your life's path is determined (to a large extent) by many small decisions that you make, and perhaps a few big ones. If you don't pay attention, others may make those decisions for you.

Don't let them. This is your life, not theirs. They had their chance. This one is yours.

It is often the myriad of small decisions that nudge you closer to where you want to be, and those are the decisions that can be corrected if you realize that you are not moving where you want to go. Major decisions (getting married, accepting a job overseas, etc.) are more difficult to correct should you realize that they are not helping you reach your goals, but almost all decisions can ultimately be corrected. The trick in making more correct decisions than incorrect ones (because let's face it, that is the best one can hope to achieve) is to keep in mind the person and the life that you dream to attain. If this is the life that you want, then you must do what is necessary to get there, sparing no effort, fearing no obstacle.

Tell yourself: "So you want it. Are you prepared to work to get it?" Nothing is for free, at least not the things that are worthwhile. To achieve what is worth your while requires work. But work is easy if you really want the rewards. Find what you cannot live without. Find what is your passion. Working towards that will not even feel like work.

What if you have no passion? Then you have not lived enough, or experienced enough. One way to remedy that is to read about the passions of other great people. Not because you should be just like them, but because they might inspire you. Read about adventurers, scientists, leaders, artists. Read about their struggles, their passions, and their failures, and you will find your own. But by all means, read. Let me, for the sake of emphasis, repeat that. Read as much as you can.

There is a reason our civilization has started an exponential boom after we figured out the printed word. Inspiration is passed on from one person to another. If one dream can infect thousands of others, an exponential amplification is inevitable.

If you are asking "What should I do with my life?, you have already taken the first step to do something with your life. Take the next step. Find out about your passions by studying other people's passions. There is no doubt in my mind that you will come across a singular experience, written down by someone who used to be just like you, that makes you realize: "This is what I want. This is how I want to spend the rest of my life."

You see, you have only one life, and you're pretty lucky to have gotten one anyway. Use it wisely, because there are no do-overs. According to my view of the universe, when you're done you're done. So make it a life you (and your offspring) can be proud of. Strive to live the life that you were meant to live if there indeed had been a "Grand Design". I think you've got it now: you are the "Grand Designer".

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Green Chemistry Is The Path To Chemical Safety
Co-authored by Glynis Lough

On June 22nd, the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act was signed into law, bringing the first legislative reform to chemical management regulation in 40 years! From car seats to zippers, nearly every product in and out of the home has the potential to change because of this bill - meaning your favorite toy or cooking pan could be reformulated because chemicals toxic to human health are used in the production. And the bill also includes special protections for women's and children's health. Sound great? Sort of. The reality of the bill is that it's a mixed bag - only twenty chemicals of the thousands and thousands that are actually used in consumer goods are required to be tested per year, and there's a 64,000 backlog - but with increased authority, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can prevent new problems from entering the market.

That means that real effort is needed to make this bill more than just public relations. To be sure, there are some good things in this bill, such as setting new safety standards for chemicals with ties to cancer, mental health, and infertility and allowing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to obtain more information about a chemical before approving its use. We need more action to pollute less.

What this really means is that we need to find other ways to protect people and the environment from the chemicals that we routinely use, like dry cleaning solvents, and this is exactly what green chemistry aims to do. One important way to do this is to promote green chemistry. This is a movement to create products that reduce pollution without sacrificing function. While a nod to green chemistry is hidden at the bottom of this bill (about a Sustainable Chemistry Initiative), in reality, it does not do enough to either raise consciousness or change practice. This rule does present opportunities to really benefit from better integration of a discipline called green chemistry, and we must do more to capitalize on this.

But if education, industry, AND government simultaneously work to integrate green chemistry into our daily lives, then change is possible.

If we practice green chemistry, our daily lives will change and make our kids and the world safer. Food packaging will necessarily change because instead of Styrofoam, which isn't biodegradable but does release cancerous by-products when burned, we can use mushroom-based packaging that's non-toxic and compostable! From how we use transportation (ethanol) to the shoes we wear (thanks, Nike!) green chemistry is already touching our lives. It's time for consumers and the federal government alike to highlight green chemistry! Here are the two key reasons why we should focus more on green chemistry.

First off, green chemistry makes and saves money.

Green chemistry industry is expected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2011 to $98.5 billion by 2020 while saving industry $65.5 billion according to one often-cited study.

Businesses care...

Because businesses tend to emphasize forward-looking, streamlined processes, businesses already implement green chemistry into the production of many of their goods, and even more could be on the way with greater pressure from consumers. Individual businesses and coalitions like the American Chemical Society (ACS) Green Chemistry Institute and the industrial sectors drawn into it (e.g. pharmaceuticals and chemical manufacturers) have begun to respond to their main driver, consumer pressure, and are becoming more competitive by incorporating green chemistry - their gains in productivity are likely to offset any potential costs of reducing their environmental impact.

To fully incorporate the benefits of green chemistry throughout society, what should we change?

Industry is already poised to go big time into green chemistry. That innovation and the effects of green chemistry will be magnified across society if we are better educated about it, and if all sectors - industry, consumer and government - are better connected.

Education - The next generation of consumers should pressure even more

Because green chemistry principles are just now emerging as part of chemistry education in the United States, students, who are the next generation of practitioners and consumers, do not understand the scientific and economic relevance of green chemistry to their lives. We need to leverage increased awareness and funding concurrently because this will lead to more and better sustainable products and processes and funding opportunities.

Better-equipped citizens make informed decisions about green and sustainable technologies, products, and industries that affect their lives, and this Act begins that process. Integrating green chemistry into school curricula will connect chemistry curriculum to students' everyday lives allowing benefits of real world contexts to motivate learning about chemistry. For example, leveraging the popularity of environmental sustainability among youth is a great way to connect chemistry concepts with issues we are passionate about. Imagine encouraging students to use chemistry to develop alternative cosmetics or toys that are more sustainable?

In green chemistry, innovation and education can happen concurrently. Society does not have time to wait for innovation before educating the next generation. Using real world issues as a starting point to introduce science concepts contextualizes environmental and sustainability issues, improves decision-making, and helps to create a scientifically literate citizenry. This approach will also improve consumers' understanding of the products they buy, which has the potential to create a positive feedback where educated consumers demand more sustainable products and processes and where scientists are literate in green chemistry and can employ its principles broadly.

Connect Industry, Government, and the Public

While the EPA has supported many important projects, green chemistry is multi-disciplinary and can support cross-agency efforts from the EPA to the Department of Energy to the US Department of Agriculture. A new model for interagency coordination - modeled after the Sustainable Chemistry Initiative suggested at the very bottom of this Act - would coordinate green chemistry research, development, technology transfer, education, and training across federal agencies and in support of larger US national efforts. This kind of mega effort supported by a green chemistry curriculum can make our use of chemicals more sustainable.

While the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act is a good step forward, let's make sure that our government doesn't forget about the Sustainable Chemistry Initiative tucked away at the very bottom of the bill. The more green chemistry is used and understood, the closer we get to fulfilling our legislators' promise to make the chemicals in our lives safer. A coordinated and integrated effort across education, industry, and government can make this Act a truly effective reality.

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An Open Letter From Technology Sector Leaders On Donald Trump's Candidacy For President

We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership.

We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not. He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline. We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation. His vision stands against the open exchange of ideas, free movement of people, and productive engagement with the outside world that is critical to our economy—and that provide the foundation for innovation and growth.

Let's start with the human talent that drives innovation forward. We believe that America's diversity is our strength. Great ideas come from all parts of society, and we should champion that broad-based creative potential. We also believe that progressive immigration policies help us attract and retain some of the brightest minds on earth—scientists, entrepreneurs, and creators. In fact, 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Donald Trump, meanwhile, traffics in ethnic and racial stereotypes, repeatedly insults women, and is openly hostile to immigration. He has promised a wall, mass deportations, and profiling.

We also believe in the free and open exchange of ideas, including over the Internet, as a seed from which innovation springs. Donald Trump proposes “shutting down” parts of the Internet as a security strategy ― demonstrating both poor judgment and ignorance about how technology works. His penchant to censor extends to revoking press credentials and threatening to punish media platforms that criticize him.

Finally, we believe that government plays an important role in the technology economy by investing in infrastructure, education and scientific research. Donald Trump articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements. His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation.

We stand against Donald Trump's divisive candidacy and want a candidate who embraces the ideals that built America's technology industry: freedom of expression, openness to newcomers, equality of opportunity, public investments in research and infrastructure, and respect for the rule of law. We embrace an optimistic vision for a more inclusive country, where American innovation continues to fuel opportunity, prosperity and leadership.

*DISCLAIMER: The individuals listed below have endorsed in their personal capacity and this does not reflect the endorsement of any organization, corporation or entity to which they are affiliated. Titles and affiliations of each individual are provided for identification purposes only.

Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Hyperloop One
Adrian Aoun, Founder/CEO, Forward
Greg Badros, Founder, Prepared Mind Innovations; Former Engineering VP, Facebook
Clayton Banks, Co-Founder, Silicon Harlem
Phin Barnes, Partner, First Round Capital
Niti Bashambu, Chief Analytics Officer, IAC Applications
John Battelle, Founder/CEO, NewCo, Inc.
Ayah Bdeir, Founder/CEO, Little Bits
Piraye Beim, Founder/CEO, Celmatix
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
John Borthwick, Founder/CEO, Betaworks
Matt Brezina, Co-Founder, Sincerely and Xobni
Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO, TaskRabbit
Brad Burnham, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder/CEO, Slack
Troy Carter, Founder/CEO, Atom Factory
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Founder/CEO, Joyus
Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer
Amy Chang, Founder/CEO, Accompany
Aneesh Chopra, President, NavHealth; Former US CTO
Patrick Chung, General Partner, Xfund
Tod Cohen, General Counsel, StubHub
Stephen DeBerry, Founder/Managing Partner, Bronze Investments
Peter Diamandis, Entrepreneur; Author, Abundance and BOLD
Barry Diller, Chairman, Expedia and IAC
Esther Dyson, Executive Founder, Way to Wellville; Investor
Amy Errett, Founder/CEO, Madison Reed
Caterina Fake, Founder/CEO, Findery; Co-Founder, Flickr
Christopher Farmer, Founder/CEO, SignalFire
Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group; Co-Founder, Techstars
Josh Felser, Co-Founder, Freestyle Capital & ClimateX
Hajj Flemings, Founder/CEO, Brand Camp University
Natalie Foster, Co-Founder, Peers
David Grain, Founder/Managing Partner, Grain Management, LLC
Brad Hargreaves, Founder/CEO, Common
Donna Harris, Co-Founder/Co-CEO, 1776
Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder/CEO, Meetup
David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital
Terry Howerton, CEO, TechNexus
Reed Hundt, Former Chair, FCC
Minnie Ingersoll, COO, Shift Technologies
Sami Inkinen, Founder/CEO, Virta Health; Co-Founder, Trulia
Craig Isakow, Head of Revenue, Shift Technologies
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., President and Founder, Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Irwin Jacobs, Founding Chairman/CEO Emeritus, Qualcomm Inc
Paul Jacobs, Executive Chairman, Qualcomm Inc
Leila Janah, Founder/CEO, Sama & Laxmi
Sujay Jaswa, Former CFO, Dropbox; Founder, Witt Capital Partners
Mark Josephson, CEO, Bitly
Sep Kamvar, Professor, MIT
David Karp, Founder/CEO, Tumblr
Jed Katz, Managing Director, Javelin Venture Partners
Kim Keenan, President/CEO, Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council
Ben Keighran, Entrepreneur; Former Design Lead, Apple
William Kennard, Former Chair, FCC
Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures; Co-Founder, SUN Microsystems
Ron Klain, Executive Vice President, Revolution LLC
Walter Kortschak, Former Managing Partner and Senior Advisor, Summit Partners
Jared Kopf, Founder AdRoll, HomeRun, Worldly
Joseph Kopser, Co-Founder, Ridescout
Karen Kornbluh, Former US Ambassador, OECD
Othman Laraki, Co-Founder/President, Color Genomics
Miles Lasater, Serial Entrepreneur
Jeff Lawson, CEO, Twilio
Aileen Lee, Founder/Managing Partner, Cowboy Ventures
Bobby Lent, Managing Partner, Hillsven Capital
Aaron Levie, Co-Founder/CEO, Box
John Lilly, Partner, Greylock Partners
Bruce Lincoln, Co-Founder, Silicon Harlem
Ruth Livier, President, Livier Productions, Inc.
Mark Lloyd, Professor of Communication, University of Southern California - Annenberg School
Luther Lowe, VP of Public Policy, Yelp
Nancy Lublin, Founder/CEO, Crisis Text Line
Kanyi Maqubela, Partner, Collaborative Fund
Jonathan Matus, Founder/CEO, Zendrive
Josh McFarland, Vice President of Product, Twitter
Andrew McLaughlin, Head of New Business, Medium; Venture Partner, betaworks
Shishir Mehrotra, Entrepreneur & former VP of Product & Engineering, YouTube
Apoorva Mehta, Founder/CEO, Instacart
Doug Merritt, CEO, Splunk
Dinesh Moorjani, Founder/CEO, Hatch Labs; Co-Founder, Tinder
Brit Morin, Founder/CEO, Brit + Co
Dave Morin, Entrepreneur; Partner, Slow Ventures
Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder, Asana; Co-Founder, Facebook
Amanda Moskowitz, Founder/CEO, Stacklist
Alex Nogales, President/CEO, National Hispanic Media Coalition
Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder, Reddit
Mike Olson, Founder/Chairman/CSO, Cloudera
Pierre Omidyar, Founder, eBay
Felix W. Ortiz III, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Viridis; Board Member of The NYC Technology Development Corporation
Jen Pahlka, Founder/Executive Director, Code for America
Barney Pell, Founder Powerset, MoonExpress, Locomobi; Founding Trustee, Singularity University
Mark Pincus, Executive Chairman and Founder, Zynga
Shervin Pishevar, Co-Founder/Managing Director, Sherpa Capital and Co-Founder/Executive Chairman of Hyperloop One
Brandon Pollack, Director of Global Affairs, 1776
Amy Rao, Founder/CEO, Integrated Archive Systems, Inc.
Eric Ries, Entrepreneur & Author, The Lean Startup
Justin Rosenstein, Co-Founder, Asana
Alec Ross, Author, The Industries of the Future
Javier Saade, Venture Capitalist; Former Associate Administrator, SBA
Chris Sacca, Founder/Chairman, Lowercase Capital
Dave Samuel, Co-Founder, Freestyle Capital
Julie Samuels, Executive Director, Tech:NYC
Reshma Saujani, Founder, Girls Who Code
Chris Schroeder, Venture Investor; Author, Startup Rising
Jake Schwartz, Co-Founder/CEO, General Assembly
Robert Scoble, Entrepreneur in Residence and Futurist, Upload VR
Kim Malone Scott, CEO, Candor, Inc; Former Director, Google
Tina Sharkey, Partner, Sherpa Foundry & Sherpa Capital
Clara Shih, Co-Founder/CEO, Hearsay Social
Shivani Siroya, Founder/CEO, InVenture
Steve Smith, Executive Director, Public Policy Institute, Government Relations & Telecommunications Project, Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Jonathan Spalter, Chair, Mobile Future
DeShuna Spencer, CEO, kweliTV
Katie Stanton, CMO, Color Genomics; Former VP of Global Media, Twitter
Jenny Stefanotti, Co-Founder, OneProject; Board of Directors, Ushahidi
Debby Sterling, Founder/CEO, Goldiblox
Seth Sternberg, Co-Founder/CEO, Honor
Margaret Stewart, Vice President of Product Design, Facebook
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp
Michael Stoppelman, SVP, Engineering, Yelp
Baratunde Thurston, Former supervising producer, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; Co-Founder, Cultivated Wit
Stephanie Tilenius, Founder/CEO, Vida Health; Board of Directors, Seagate Technology
Richard D. Titus, Entrepreneur; SVP, Samsung
Anne Toth, VP of Policy & Compliance, Slack
Bill Trenchard, Partner, First Round Capital
April Underwood, VP of Product, Slack
Max Ventilla, Founder/CEO, AltSchool
Tabreez Verjee, Co-Founder/Partner Uprising; Board Director Kiva.org
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Hunter Walk, Partner, Homebrew VC; Former Director of Product Management, Google
Tristan Walker, Founder/CEO, Walker & Company Brands, Inc.; Founder/Chairman, Code 2040
Ari Wallach, CEO, Synthesis Corp.
Padmasree Warrior, CEO, NextEV USA; Former CTSO, Cisco
Laura Weidman Powers, Co-Founder/CEO, Code2040
Kevin Weil, Head of Product, Instagram
Phil Weiser, Hatfield Professor of Law, University of Colorado and Executive Director of the Silicon Flatirons Center
Daniel J. Weitzner, Principal Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Emily White, Entrepreneur; Former COO, Snapchat
Ev Williams, Founder/CEO, Medium; Co-Founder Twitter, Blogger
Monique Woodward, Venture Partner, 500 Startups
Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder, Apple
Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia University
Andrew Yang, Founder/CEO, Venture for America
Arielle Zuckerberg, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

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Ever sat on a beach and wondered what's across the ocean? It may not be what you think.

Have you ever sat on a beach on wondered what's across the ocean?

If you think you can answer this question just by looking at a map, read on. You may be surprised.

To ask the question more concretely, what's across the ocean from New York? It doesn't really matter what beach in New York you choose, but just to be specific, let's go with Montauk, NY. It is at the tip of Long Island and has a clear, unobstructed view of the Atlantic ocean.

To figure out what's across from New York, the first thing you might do is take out a map, follow a straight line eastward, and conclude that the answer is Europe, or more precisely Portugal.

Of course there is not just one answer. When looking out across the ocean, there are any many directions you could choose, each of which would lead you to a different location. But in this case, surprisingly, Portugal is not one of them.

Europe is not across the ocean from New York... but Australia is

"2016-07-12-1468362077-8663249-whatsacrossthesea1.png"

When you stare across the ocean from a beach in Montauk, or anywhere in New York, this map shows what's on the other side (excluding some smaller countries that unfortunately did not fit).

No matter which direction you look, you're not facing Europe.

That's partly because the coast of Long Island is angled southward. But there is also something else going on.

If you stand on the beach and turn your head all the way to the left, the direction you're facing is north east. Common sense would seem to dictate if you sail in that direction (north east), you should end up somewhere north east of where you began. Namely, you should end up in Europe.

In reality, if you were to point your ship north east from New York and sail straight ahead without turning, you would land in Morocco, which is to the south of New York.

Stranger still, when you stand on a beach in New York, one of the countries directly across from you is Australia.

If you were to sail through the orange Australia section in the map above, without ever turning the ship, you would eventually hit Australia's southwestern coast. And as you land, you would be approaching from the south.

Sailing from New York to Australia in a straight line

Because we're used to looking at the world on a flat surface, our perception of Earth's geography is distorted in many ways. In this case, it is the concept of straight lines that throws us off.

Technically, there are no straight lines on a globe, since the surface itself is curved. The shortest distance between any two points, the closest thing to a straight line, is known as a great circle arc.

Over short distances, straight lines on a 2-dimensional map are the same as great circle arcs on a 3-dimensional globe. But over long distances, the relationship breaks down as the Earth's curvature comes into play.

If you've ever followed the path of a long international flight, you already know the shortest distance between two points on the Earth's surface looks curved. The same effect applies here.

"2016-07-12-1468362275-1251985-newyorkacrosstheocean.png"

Though the lines in the map above appear curved, all of them are actually straight lines (great circles) on the 3D globe.

Looking at it from a different perspective

I spent a good while looking at this on Google Earth convincing myself it was correct.

If you have any doubt whether it's possible to sail from New York to Australia along a straight line, the video below shows what it looks like in 3 dimensions.

There is also a 2-dimensional way of looking at these lines that clears up what's really going on. The image below shows the Earth from a top-down perspective, using an azimuthal map projection, with New York in the center.

From this view, you can see the lines do appear straight.

You can also see clearly that the U.S. East Coast as a whole does not face toward Europe at all.

What's really across across the Atlantic ocean?

If you were to stand on a beach on the U.S. East Coast and look directly east, here's what's really across the ocean.

"2016-07-12-1468362671-2304406-acrossatlanticocean.png"

Credit

Inspired by this map from the Washington Post, which shows what's across the ocean based on lines of constant latitude. For an even more precise look at what's across from every individual beach, see these maps by Andy Woodruff.
All 2D maps were made with QGIS using imagery from Natural Earth. The 3D globe is from Google Earth

This post originally appeared on Metrocosm

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Artist Kindra Crick Remembers Her Grandfather, Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick

Francis Crick, shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discerning the structure of DNA. It was perhaps the most important biological discovery of the past century. But then Crick became fascinated with the nature of consciousness, an imprecise and controversial field at the time, and moved from England to La Jolla, CA, to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His granddaughter Kindra Crick, a cell biologist and artist who created the DNA sculpture called "What Mad Pursuit" for the billion dollar Crick Institute in London, recalls those heady times of early science on La Jolla's Mesa, "The Miracle Coast."

Intellectual Capital: How did you come to the Salk?

Kindra Crick: The summer after my freshman year at Princeton University I was trying to decide my major so my granddad, Francis Crick, arranged for me to be an intern in a neuroscience lab where he worked. This was so I could to learn the nitty gritty of research. In Dr. Martyn Goulding's lab, I helped perform experiments running DNA gels and watching neural tube development (cells that ultimately form the brain and spinal cord) under the microscope.

Intellectual Capital: What was the Salk like then?

Coming from Seattle the Salk was bathed in sunshine. The labs seemed busy even during the summer and there were a number of stimulating lectures. One was on a computer-learning program that could determine the gender of both chimps and humans from a photograph. After training it would even rate a face on how masculine or feminine it was. There was good camaraderie and the labs surrounding mine would get together on Fridays for drinks and barbecues on the weekends. I played on the lab's softball team.

My granddad had made the move to the Salk in 1976. With this came a shift in the focus of his own research from work in molecular biology in England at the Medical Research Council to the brain and consciousness at the Salk in California. Then 60 years old, he wanted to tackle a problem that had been a lifelong interest, the brain. He wanted to move the field that treated the brain like a black box, where one only gained insight from resulting actions, to a field that would uncover the mechanism and functions that lead to how humans perceive the world, what happens during sleep and the elusive actions inside our skull that constitute our conscious world upon waking.

Intellectual Capital: Which scientists impressed you?

I vividly remember a long lunch with Dr. V.S. Ramachandran who spoke enthusiastically about his work with patients with phantom limbs who sometimes experienced excruciating pain in a hand or arm that was no longer present. He had discovered that with the use of a simple mirror he could instruct amputees to look at the mirror image of their working hand, which appeared to take the place of the missing one, and unclench it to relieve their phantom pain. My granddad was an attentive listener and would occasionally probe with a targeted question, but I realized a few years later when reading Dr. Ramachandran's book 'Phantoms in the Brain' that we had discussed many of the central themes and imaginative experiments in that book.

Another scientist that made a lasting impression was my granddad's long-time collaborator, Christof Koch. He would come by the house often while I was there, and they would discuss and debate the way the visual system worked in the brain. A conversation that stood out was how one perceived the blueness of blue. At first, I didn't understand the question, although it seemed like such a simple one. We walked through the basics of wavelength and the mechanisms of the eye with its cones and rods. And then we jumped into the visual cortex and the more abstract part of the question which was why at a particular wavelength our perception changes and we have a name for this color and there is a quality to that color that is a sensation separate from its name and the objects that we perceive to be blue. A quality missing, for example, from something outside our realm of seeing, like ultraviolet. One can describe everything about ultraviolet, but with our naked eye it does not possess a sensation of color like blue does, in our mind.

Intellectual Capital: What was it like living with Francis and your grandmother Odile Crick?

My grandparents lived in a quiet cul-de-sac near the top of Mount Soledad in La Jolla. I stayed in a large guest room which had its own entrance with French doors opening onto the deck and pool. People came over for dinner and lunch, but there were no large parties at the house that summer, as my granddad had been having slight heart problems. We did attend a few parties that summer, the most memorable being the one to celebrate the 85th birthday of Bradley Smith, the noted Life magazine photographer. Intellectual musings tended to be at smaller gatherings and over leisurely lunches by the pool, and most of the guests my grandparents entertained were photographers, painters or scientists.

Intellectual Capital: Do you visit the Salk now? How have things changed?

Not only did Francis end up tackling the problem of consciousness himself, collaborating with Koch, but he was slowly and deliberately recruiting some of the best and brightest to unlock the black box of the mind. For example, my granddad gathered with a small group of scientists who called themselves the Helmholtz Club. This group brought together scientists from various research fields as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, psychophysics, computer science and engineering. All had an interest in the study of the visual system and of higher cognitive functions relying on visual perception such as visual consciousness. I believe one of the reasons San Diego and The Salk have become a hub of neuroscience research today is based partly on the work and vision of the scientists who attended those monthly meetings. The study of the brain is a burgeoning field and we are right in the middle of it. I have been told by many of my granddad's peers, that he was a tremendous inspiration and influence.

Intellectual Capital: And talk of your own art, its roots or themes--

At Princeton, I embraced the study of molecular biology but balanced it with my passion for drawing and painting by developing visuals and materials for campus theater. Biology itself is a visual subject, rich with a tradition in observation and communication through art. I still enjoy research, but I feel most driven when I am making art. My early experiments with the marriage of art and science came while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In my paintings, I incorporated imagery from my observations under the microscope in the lab where I had worked on [breast cancer genes] BRCAI and BRCA2. Cancerous fibroblasts would envelop my canvas in layers. The birth of my daughter and my obsession with the new research on the biological basis of love fully crystalized my passion for merging science and visual expression. A series of prints and paintings questioning the science and symbolism of one of our most basic drives, love, soon followed. Now I create work that gives visual expression to the wonder and process of scientific inquiry.

Intellectual Capital: And your approach to your new sculpture--

I was invited to paint 'What's in My DNA?' on a seven-foot double helix-inspired sculpture.
This sculpture was part of Cancer Research UK's campaign to raise awareness for the soon-to-be-finished Francis Crick Institute in London. Twenty-one sculptures were created by world-leading artists and designers, including Ai Weiwei, Zaha Hadid, and Benjamin Shine, based on what's in their DNA.
My sculpture, What Mad Pursuit, explores the creative possibilities achievable through the intermingling of art, science and imagination in the quest for knowledge. The piece is inspired by my grandparent's contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA. My grandmother, Odile Crick, was the artist who first drew the iconic image of the double helix molecule.
Half of my double helix sculpture is a chalkboard layered with the patina of science. I christened the chalkboard by writing, erasing and rubbing in the dust the words from some of my favorite scientists, including Oliver Sacks. What I left visible for the viewer to discover are handwritten notations from my granddad's letters and his many chalkboards. The complementary helix strand is a flourish of vibrant blue bordered by a golden helix. The abstracted growing forms that spread and mutate up the sculpture can be seen as cellular life or as a metaphor for infectious ideas.

Intellectual Capital: Why "Mad Pursuit?"

I took the title 'What Mad Pursuit' from the title of my granddad's 1988 memoir and essays on scientific discovery. My granddad chose that title from a line in the Keats poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It is a nice banter between art and science and speaks to the mad pursuit of both, and sold earlier this year at Christie's London, at an auction that raised $500,000 for the Francis Crick Institute, a leading center of biomedical research and innovation due to open in 2016.

Cold Spring Harbor,100th Anniversary of Francis Crick's Birth. Clockwise from bott. left, Mike Crick, Anne Churchland, Kindra Crick, Bob Olby, Jim Watson (original Nobel,) friend, Liz Watson, Ludmilla Pollock, Yours Truly. I had the salmon.

TO VIEW THE MAKING OF KINDRA CRICK'S SCULPTURE, "WHAT MAD PURSUIT," PLEASE CLICK: http://www.kindracrick.com/dna/

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Can Science Help You to Become Wise?
By Jenara Nerenberg

Krista Tippett explores the scientific inquiry into what makes us wise.

Krista Tippett is the creator and host of the award-winning radio program and podcast On Being, which features a combination of scientists and spiritual leaders taking on today's biggest and most pressing questions.

Tippett was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the BBC in Berlin in the 80's before studying divinity at Yale and launching On Being for NPR. In 2014, the White House awarded her a National Humanities Medal for "thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence."

Her new book is called Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living:

The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other. We have riches of knowledge and insight, of tools both tangible and spiritual, to rise to this calling. We watch our technologies becoming more intelligent, and speculate imaginatively about their potential to become conscious. All the while, we have it in us to become wise. Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobled consciousness, and advances evolution itself.

We talked with Tippett about her book and how scientific research can help us all understand the ancient roots of wisdom in an age of information.

Jenara Nerenberg: There are clearly boundaries and things scientists can't always touch. But do you see progress in the scientific understanding of wisdom?

Krista Tippett: It's a great advancement to simply take a concept like wisdom into the laboratory and study qualities that are in the ecosystem of wisdom, like empathy, mindful attention, implicit bias, generosity, gratitude, and forgiveness. And to me the big picture, the good news, is that we're interrogating ourselves in our fullness, the fullness of our humanity.

So much of this is a young frontier. We're just learning things about our brains and about our bodies that we never guessed before and the interaction between our physicality and emotions and what we could call spirit and consciousness, and so I really feel that the great advance is just that we got to this place.

JN: How is talking with a theologian different from talking with a scientist?

KT: This is a kind of demoralized moment for theology, I'd say. It's a confusing moment of flux for the established traditions where, until now, our investigation of things like awe and mystery and compassion have resided. I think of these traditions as these containers that have carried forward conversation and rituals across time and space.

In fact, compassion is now, I think, an urgent practical necessity in the 21st century globalized world. So, ironically, in this very moment the fruits of these traditions seem reasonable in a way--while the traditions themselves are struggling, just like every big institution, because the forms don't work anymore. They don't make sense. There is an evolution underway and it's not clear where we're headed.

But at the very same time, I think the scientific enterprise is in a renaissance. When I first started interviewing scientists 10 years ago for my program, many would at some point make this impassioned plea for seeing science as a human discipline, and they longed for the larger culture to see the value of the scientific enterprise and to celebrate it and enjoy it, in the way we enjoy music and literature. What many of them said is that people are able to enjoy music even if they couldn't have written it and wouldn't be able to read it.

In the last 5-10 years, I've seen this incredible cultural shift. Things like the Human Genome Project and the Hubble telescope, which brought amazing images of the galaxy into our living rooms, have contributed to our sense of awe. We're morphing to this place where science and scientists and scientific ideas are much more celebrated at the heart of our lives together and everyone's intrigued by them.

So there's this exuberance and this delight that scientists have and this great hope and this real excitement at being heard and a real adventurousness in this discussion and in these studies--so in fact they are the really robust voices. And I feel like the theological voice is much more muted, culturally, which is very interesting to observe.

JN: Sounds like there's been a lot of great work you're excited about related to meaning and wisdom. Is there an area where you'd like to see more scientific exploration?

KT: I'm not sure the question of wisdom is really being taken head on. We come close to it, we move in the direction of it. But we know more--and explore more--about becoming intelligent and mindful.

To me the definition of wisdom is it's not merely a possession or an action like intelligence or compassion. It is measured and experienced in terms of the effect a life has on the world.
It's not just about intelligence and it's not just about being smart. It's about being discerning, it's about figuring out what's good for us, it's about caring about what's good for others, and those are all on the path of becoming wise.

I wrote a line in my book --"Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobles consciousness, and advances evolution itself"--but I didn't know if it made sense from a scientific perspective. I called up an evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson, and asked him, "Is it true?" He said, "Yes, wisdom advances evolution--but we have to make it true. It doesn't automatically happen."

So I think all these amazing research projects and all these scientists are moving in the direction of that question. But they're not quite putting their arms around that question. They're not quite using this knowledge that is a form of power--all these things we're learning about ourselves--to in fact find new ways to flourish and to be invested in the flourishing of others. The optimal move in a human life is to not merely grow old, but also to grow wiser.

Beyond that, I'm so interested to see how the inquiry unfolds about what consciousness is. I think that field will potentially open up a whole new complicated and interestingly uncomfortable conversation between spiritual life and science.

JN: How do you think significant hardship is related to wisdom?

KT: You know, we have this weird American thing where we somehow decided that life wasn't supposed to be hard. People in other places and at other times haven't had that luxury.

Of course, it's not all Americans, but the cultural narrative we've all assented to says that life is not supposed to be hard. The American dream is about everything always going up and up and up collectively--and that was never rooted in reality. It is still a devastating thing for a dream to die, and I think, collectively, in our generation that's what's happening and that human dynamic is behind a lot of the most disturbing things that are happening now.

Wisdom emerges through the raw materials of our lives--and a great puzzle about human life is this fact that things will go wrong. It is a promise. The things that we worry about are not the things that will go wrong. And when those things go wrong, we will suffer. At any given moment all kinds of people are suffering.

People who become wise are shaped by how they walk through that suffering. What happens to them, what goes wrong for them, and the growth that comes out of it--it becomes part of their wholeness on the other side. They take it in, they don't deny it, they don't avoid it; they let it be and they let it be part of their wholeness--and that's something like compassion, a gentleness, a tenderness. As they go through the ordinary and profound suffering of human life, they let that be a bond, part of their gift to the world. They are present to the suffering of others in a new way--because of the way they have inhabited their own suffering.

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ExxonMobil Is Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups

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ExxonMobil officials may hem and haw when reporters ask them if the company still funds climate science denier organizations, but the numbers don't lie.

The company says it acknowledges the reality of global warming and claims it supports a carbon tax, but its recently disclosed list of 2015 "public information and policy research" grantees shows it spent nearly $2 million last year on more than a dozen think tanks, advocacy groups and associations that dispute climate science and disparage renewable energy.

That's significant from both a legal and political perspective.

There are legal implications because ExxonMobil is currently under investigation for allegedly misleading investors and the general public about climate risks. Its scientists, who were conducting cutting-edge climate research as far back as the 1970s, cautioned top management that continuing to burn vast quantities of fossil fuels could be catastrophic. Instead of heeding those warnings, the company stressed scientific uncertainty to protect its long-term profitability and bankrolled denier groups to spread disinformation.

Likewise, it is politically significant because, by sowing doubt about climate science and the potential of carbon-free energy sources, denier groups provide cover for elected officials to stand in the way of progress.

Two Decades of Duplicity

Shortly after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol international climate treaty, Exxon went on a spending spree to block federal efforts to address global warming. The company, which was outed by a 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), spent $18.62 million from 1998 -- a year before it merged with Mobil -- through 2005 on a network of more than 40 groups. From 2006 through last year, it spent another $14.35 million, for a total of $33 million.

That's just what can be gleaned from the company's tax filings and statements, however. Corporations are not required to disclose all of their political spending, and there is reason to suspect ExxonMobil has spent quite a bit more on its climate disinformation campaign. A former ExxonMobil executive who wishes to remain anonymous told UCS that the company secretly allocated as much as $10 million annually for what insiders called climate "black ops" from 1998 through 2005.

In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.

So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations -- $1 million -- went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.

The Chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.

Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science, and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the EPA convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."

Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector, and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.

Manhattan Institute: ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.

Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax -- ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy -- as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending U.N. climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."

The institute's longtime point man on energy, Robert Bryce -- who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research -- says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918, federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.

American Legislative Exchange Council: ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998, and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses, and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.

One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore -- founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation -- declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states, "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."

With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation -- all former ExxonMobil grantees.

While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

National Black Chamber of Commerce: From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil, and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel.... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."

Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.

More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.

ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic

Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.

A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.

During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding, or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.

When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.

Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."

The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.

"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."

But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.

On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.

"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists, and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."

Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud -- or at least "far from settled" -- they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system, or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS staff members Dave Anderson and Jayne Piepenburg provided research for this article.

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Stem Cell Partnership: Patient Advocates And Scientists At The International Society For Stem Cell Research Convention
STEM CELL PARTNERSHIP: Patient Advocates and Scientists at the International Society for Stem Cell Research Convention

By Don C. Reed

This year's International Society for Stem Cell Researchers (ISSCR) conference was enormous, three vast floors of San Francisco's magnificent Moscone West convention center.

As a watering hole brings animals together, the ISSCR concentrates the world's top stem cell scientists. From around the world they came, four thousand of them this year, representing almost sixty countries. Interspersed with them were patients and patient advocates, those who would benefit most from scientific advances, and those who make the science possible-- by fighting the endless battles for funding.

For instance, Dr. Henry Klassen of UC Irvine spoke on his struggle to end a form of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa. Klassen is an acknowledged leader in the field.

But what made the condition real for me was Kristin MacDonald, legally blind due to retinitis pigmentosa, who had to be helped up the stairs to the speaker's platform. An articulate speaker, she reminded us all why the fight must go on.

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And the money required to do the research?

Klassen is funded by a grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) , the $3 billion stem cell program made possible by patient advocates. Let no one forget; it was a citizen's initiative, Proposition 71, led by patient advocate Bob Klein, which made that money available. Without patient advocates, the CIRM would literally not exist.

Recognizing the importance of patient advocate-scientist partnerships, the ISSCR previously honored Klein with their advocacy award, but also featured patient advocate panelists in their media briefing sessions throughout the conference.

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Importantly, the conference offered free admission to a public briefing session, at which several top scientists discussed their breakthroughs in straight-forward, comprehensible terms. (All scientists wishing support from the public-- should keep track of the size of their words!)

A favorite speaker was Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, who spoke on the ten years since he developed an advanced stem cell research called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. His talk included some humor, which helped.

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But what I remember most about Professor Yamanaka is his personal warmth. Years ago, he was about to speak at the Japanese consulate, when my paralyzed son Roman pulled up in his adapted van. I arranged for some strong people to lift Roman and carry him in, but he would not hear of it. But Dr. Yamanaka came out specifically to meet Roman, outside the non-accessible building. This year, when I saw him in the hallway at the convention, I approached and greeted him. He was polite, but I could tell he was struggling to remember who was this ancient advocate--until I mentioned my son. Then he said, "Ah, Roman Reed, Roman Reed!" His face lit up and he bowed and shook my hand.

Below are a few more of the patient advocates present, along with the disease or condition for which they seek a cure:

Huntington's Disease: Frances Saldana and her husband David, Daniel Medina, and Kim Bailey;

Spinal Cord Injury Paralysis: Richard Lajara and Lane Edwards;

Liver Failure: Bill Remak;

Parkinson's Disease: Bart Narter, Jennifer Raub, Joe and Debbie Burger;

Peripheral Vascular Disease: Arsenia Harrison;

Sickle Cell Anemia: Adrienne Shapiro.

A dinner hosted by the Americans for Cures Foundation (A4C) gave patient advocates the opportunity to get to know one another and think about the future . A4C began as the campaign to pass Proposition 71, leading to the California stem cell program.

Coordinating our presence at the convention was Mary Bass, A4C's hard-working director of Public Policy. Mary comes by her advocacy naturally, being the daughter of famed naturalist/author Rick Bass of Montana.

Americans for Cures is leading a "Report Back to the Public" to share the progress made by the California stem cell program, and our hopes for its future.

For more information, drop an email to info@americansforcures.org.

Pioneering researcher Irv Weissman shared his latest publication--a children's picture book on stem cells! "Stem Cells Are Everywhere" combines accurate science in elementary school language with full color manga illustrations, and is available at Amazon.com:

For scientists interested in biomed commerce, the conference offered: "A Practical Guide to Starting a (Biomed) Company". This presentation included a chance for scientists to practice "pitching" their hoped-for new company in front of experts.

Understanding cancer stem cells, the hard-to-kill "evil twin" of positive stem cells, may provide an answer to the devastating condition. The ISSCR presented the man who may have been first to discover the deadly cancer cells: John Dick of Toronto, Canada's University Health Network.

Want to know "How to Make a Neuron (nerve cell)?" Marius Wernig of Stanford is your man. I remember seeing him at a formal dinner, and he wore a beautiful black tuxedo--and white tennis shoes.

What if the gene that causes sickle cell disease could be removed? Several scientists spoke about gene editing, which aims at removing the dangerous mutations which cause so much pain and suffering.

Aging disorders? Guanghui Liu described a disease (Werner's Syndrome) which imitates the symptoms of aging. Could that be used to make all aging less painful? At age 70, this is of great interest to me!

Nerve stem cells and spinal cord injury? Mark Tuszynski was there, talking about cells which leaped across the gap in a severed spine.

Stem cells and solid cancers? Israeli champion Nissim Benvenisti.

Disease model in a Petri dish? George Daley of Boston's Children's Hospital.

Next year's President of the ISSCR?

Sally Temple-- who is not only a scientist, but a champion patient advocate herself, having raised millions of dollar to build the Neural Stem Cell Institute in New York.

When cures come, it will be from folks like these.

Don C. Reed is the author of "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond", available from Amazon.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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The Triabrain And Answers Unleashed
Have you ever thought about someone and they emailed seconds later? Can thoughts heal your body? Is the brain able to predict new technology? When I first wrote my HuffPost Lucy movie review, people around the globe commented about what I shared regarding the human brain's power. But that article was simply the "tip of the iceberg." I first became knowledgeable about the brain when my mother was in a catastrophic accident, and she required emergency brain surgery to survive. After the surgery, she was tasked with relearning how to eat, walk, talk, and remember again. And I have been by her side ever since. And through years working with neurologists, neurosurgeons and therapists, I discovered how the human brain reshapes and heals itself.

During my mother's major recovery, I was completing my master's degree in mathematics, and I was working as a rocket scientist, helping launch NASA's Space Shuttle and vehicles to distant planets. It took every ounce of my strength and sanity to endure my mother's ordeal while working. Through these life-altering experiences, I realized that Space and the human brain were nearly identical. And as I learned many things about Space that amazed me, I became equally in awe about the brain's phenomenon. The same applications of Chaos Theory mathematics that allowed engineers to find superhighways in space with limited fuel, is the same way that the brain builds superhighways to rewire itself. I was further amazed when I recognized that Albert Einstein's famous Theory of Relativity equation did not just deal with Outer Space. It also deals with our "Inner Space," the true power that we harness within our brains' structure. My epiphany allowed me in helping my mother's brain heal faster. Through it, I discovered a new structure to the brain and how energy is characterized through it.

Image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of the scattered remains of an exploded star. Picture courtesy of NASA.

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Image credit: Olympia LePoint

Through my personal experiences, my understanding of mathematics, neuroplasticity, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, I have discovered the TRIABRAIN, and the Triabrain Theory of Relativity. A Triabrain refers to the brain operating in three main modes. And a person's brain energy from the Triabrain translates itself into both mass and light. Brain energy from its interior particle collisions and neuron synapsis forms both interior and exterior mass structures to the brain, and this is multiplied by the speed of light squared. Light in this case is characterized by the neurons' brain fire in milliseconds, which triggers conscious awareness. I will breakdown this concept with more clarity.

Nearly twelve years after my mother's accident, the unthinkable happened. This May 2016, my older sister went through a medical accident that required emergency brain surgery for her survival. Painful history seemed to repeat itself. However difficult both my mother's and sister's brain surgeries were to witness, I was inspired. These were opportunities to share the life-changing knowledge that I acquired through their ordeals.

The TRIABRAIN: Everyone Has It

The TRIABRAIN is composed of three main sectors. As long as humans are alive, the brain naturally reshapes. But in some, it reshapes faster. It reshapes the fastest when a person consciously uses their full three sectors: the left (scientific logical) side, the right (emotional and creative) side, and a newly discovered third side I call the faith (foreseeing) side that connects itself. Unlike the common knowledge of the left and right side operation, the faith side of the brain is the third sector that connects both the brain's left and right side together, as well as connects itself to the outside world. When the brain is linked through all three sections, the brain reshapes, unleashes answers and regrows. And this faith sector operates independent of the constraints of time and space.

During my sister's ordeal, I was teaching as a college mathematics professor and hosting live on my Radio show Answers Unleashed. The talk show was originally designed to encourage college students to overcome situations by reshaping their brains with science and faith to find the answers in front of them. I share more information about the "The Triabrain" in the first episode. But little did I know that my talk show information would contribute to a new dimension of neuroscience.

Olympia LePoint executive produces and hosts the talk show Answers Unleashed. Picture courtesy of Olympia LePoint and Michelle Manley.

The Triabrain's Faith Sector

The third side of the Triabrain is the faith sector. When people think of the brain, they typically think of a series of connections separated by a left side and a right side. All the connections, pathways and their housings that communion the brain's ability to communicate fully with itself are what I call the faith sector. This part of the brain connects the left and right sides. It helps people overcome major obstacles, and inspires people to create new technology. Plus, it appears to initiate significant body healing.

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Image courtesy of Olympia LePoint.

I am witnessing that highly innovative and triumphant people use this third faith side of the brain to do great things, independent of time and space. Let's consider some examples. Olympic athletes often envision themselves winning the gold medal before the games begin. Inventors have visions of new technologies before they are created. People who miraculously heal are often the ones who knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would recover. And in my TED x talk, I speak of how I overcame life challenges despite every odd against my favor.

For a scientific example, according to the October 27, 2013 Medical Press article, "Neuroscientists discover new 'mini-neural computer' in the brain," dendrites which are the branch-like projections of neurons, were once thought to be passive wiring in the brain. However scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are showing that these dendrites are more powerful than once believed. They relay information from one neuron to the next. They actively process information, multiplying the brain's computing power.

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A computer simulated collection of dendrites, the branch-like structures of multiple neurons in the brain. Image credit courtesy of UCL/ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

According to the February 22, 2016 Science New Journal article, "A 'Neuroscience Bombshell' -- Human Brain is Capable of Storing the Entire World Wide Web," the brain with its connections is far more powerful than the web and is far more powerful than scientists have projected. The article states:

"An average human brain contains around 100 billion neurons and each neuron is capable of making around 1,000 connections (synapses) with the other neurons. These 1,000 potential synapses created by each neuron are responsible for data storage inside the brain. Now if we multiply the count of neurons (100 billion) by the number of connections (1000) that each of them can make, then we get a whopping 100 trillion data points -- which can at the very least account for storing about 1000 terabytes or 1 petabyte of information."

From my personal experience supporting my mother in her brain therapy support groups, I witnessed that the people who typically recovered fastest were the people who saw themselves healed before test results returned. Naturally while working with brain specialists, I needed to know the science behind such phenomenon. And I was surprised when I discovered that the brain's reshaping science had yet to be fully understood. So as a scientist, I started applying my own tools of math and science to find answers.

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Image of Olympia LePoint and her mother after her mother's surgery. Picture courtesy of Olympia LePoint.

The Science Behind The Triabrain and Brain Reshaping

I am seeing that Space and the human brain are almost identical in its structure through the application of Chaos Theory Mathematics. To fly to distant locations in our solar system with a fixed amount of fuel, a "freeway" through the solar system -- resembling a vast array of virtual winding tunnels and conduits around the Sun and planets -- allowed engineers to fly to distant planets like Mars and Jupiter. With all the crooks and turns used to transport rockets as I describe in my Huffington Post Martian Movie Review by a Rocket Scientist, there are identical unknown crooks and turns in the human brain that are used to transfer knowledge from one area to another faster, igniting the frontal lobes as a result. And these frontal lobes are responsible for creating solutions.

Artist's concept of interplanetary superhighway. Image credit courtesy of NASA/JPL.

According to Dr. Caroline Leaf, a neuroscientist and author specializing in brain neuroplasticity and cognitive therapy, when a person experiences fear or trauma, dark tar-like mass forms in the brain that binds brain tissue together. The mass is like glue. This mass causes cognitive issues and grows with the presence of fear and trauma. It is through my scientific understanding that these masses block the original pathways and forces the interior of the brain to alter its superhighway pathways, creating new crooks and crannies to certain pathways. As a result, massive structures block the physical space and brain's fire. However through my chaos math analysis, the brain fire acts like a rocket traveling in space. The brain information travels on two types of pathways: where information can stall, or where it would accelerate to an intended destination. And unlike brain synapses that consists of a presynaptic ending that contains neurotransmitters, mitochondria and other cell organelles, these brains neurons are specially acting on each other through collisions caused by blockages.

Through the blockage caused by the dark-trauma-mass, neurons form collisions on a miniature scale to us, but it constitutes a large collision in the brain space. And Einstein's Theory of Relativity characterizes their action. Ideally, all neurons are electrically excitable, maintaining voltage gradients across their membranes. And neurotransmitters tell a neuron either to fire, or not.

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Calculations and graphics by Olympia LePoint with image credit, iStock Photo.

Neuroplasticity science has yet to incorporate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves, chaos theory mathematics together within understanding how the brain reshapes itself. As a result, through my understanding of the brain, this led to the Triabrain Theory of Relativity, which says that the brain is composed of three sectors and the third sector consists of all the brain connections transferring energy inside and outside of itself using principles of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In this faith sector, it converts energy to mass in conjunction with light. Light can defined as the way in which a person is consciously aware of the world based on their location in space. Religious officials may call this "c" in the equation the effects of "holy enlightenment." And some energy workers may refer to this "c" as "awareness."

Einstein's theory hinged his proof on the fact that gravitational waves existed, which was recently proven when audio recordings captured two black holes colliding in January 2016. The Scientific American Special Report on February 14, 2016 "The Discovery of Gravitational Waves" gives a detailed account of all The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) gravitational wave discoveries. As a background, gravitational waves are "ripples" in space-time produced by violent events in the cosmos, such as the collisions and mergers of massive black holes. Their existence was predicted by Einstein in 1916, when he showed that accelerating massive objects would shake space-time so much that waves distorted space. Similar to the way two black holes collided in space, brain neurons and dark brain masses collide and merge. These collisions are considered massive in the brain space, thus they exert a force in the brain space, resulting in brain gravitational waves that I call Triabrain Waves.

The brain creates its own gravitational waves, known as 'Triabrain Waves' as depicted in this image. Image credit: Alamy Science Photo Library.

These waves are apart of the brain energy structure that directly builds (or destroys) mass in conjunction with brain light. These waves work to connect the left and right brain together and serve to reshape the brain's interior. The Triabrain Waves are a part of the brain's energy system that also sends waves exterior to the brain. This is the reason why a person may call when you are thinking about him or her. Or friends may know each other's thoughts for a split second. This energy is sensed by all living organisms. These waves reshape the brain and its physical properties are similar to how gravitational waves in space pierce through all matter. But most importantly, I believe these Triabrain Waves are the foundation of all future neuroplasticity science, human intuition studies and is the method in which prayer and faith work to change the exterior world.

For more information about the Triabrain, listen to my Answers Unleashed talk thow episode "Triabrain" by clicking the link.

Olympia LePoint shares how to reshape the brain with science and human experiences. Image courtesy of Olympia LePoint and Michelle Manley.

So instead of looking at my two family members' situations as tragedies, I chose to look at these brain surgeries as blessings. Their recoveries help shed light on our brains' powerful reshaping capabilities, as well as the energy we have yet to fully harness. There is still much for us to understand about the brain. And I welcome other scientists to help in developing this knowledge. And hopefully, this blog is a significant introduction to unlocking a new way of thinking about the brain's true capabilities, outside of a science fiction movie seen in theaters.

Until next time, find me on facebook on facebook.com/OlympiaLePoint and share your thoughts.

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Public Health Research Reduced Smoking Deaths -- It Could Do The Same For Gun Violence
By Sandro Galea, Boston University and Michael Siegel, Boston University

After the most recent mass shooting in the U.S. at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:

Other politicians echoed that sentiment. But prayers are not going to fix the fact that each year 30,000 deaths and many more injuries are caused by firearm violence. Recognizing gun violence for the public health problem it is might.

So what does it mean to view firearm violence as a public health problem? And how does that change the debate Americans are having about gun violence?

A public health perspective on firearms

First, and most importantly, viewing firearms violence as a public health problem means declaring that the current situation is unacceptable, and preventable.

We did not successfully tackle the AIDS epidemic until we made it a national health priority, an act marked by the passage of the Ryan White Care Act in 1990. Today this position is reflected by the federal government's commitment to ensure that at least 90 percent of HIV-infected individuals in the U.S. are properly treated by 2020. Federal funding has increased over the course of the epidemic, and the government is spending US$28 billion on domestic HIV prevention and treatment programs during the current fiscal year.

Second, treating firearm violence as a public health problem also means conducting research to identify the underlying causes of the problem and to evaluate potential strategies to address it. For instance, research may reveal common sense structural changes - such as firearm safety features - that limit the potential damage that can be done by guns.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has avoided conducting research on firearm violence since 1996, when Congress passed an appropriations bill barring the CDC from using funds to advocate or promote gun control.

In 2012 President Obama ordered the CDC and other federal bodies to resume research on firearms violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. But Congress has yet to allocate a single dollar for CDC research on firearm violence.

While the the National Institutes of Health is undertaking firearms research, very little funding is allocated for it, on the order of just $2 million over three years. That's not much out of the NIH's nearly $32 billion budget for fiscal year 2016.

Third, a public health perspective on firearm violence means moving beyond blaming individuals and toward societal programs and policies to curb this epidemic. Just as individual smokers are not to blame for the tobacco epidemic, individual gun owners are not to blame for what is a much larger societal problem.

Taking a broad, societal approach is exactly what we have done with other public health problems, such as smoking. Public health research helped identify a proven set of programs and policies that denormalized smoking, such as limitations on smoking in public places and anti-smoking media campaigns. Thanks in large part to these societal-level public health interventions, cigarette smoking prevalence dropped to its lowest level in history last year.

And fourth, a public health approach means the "public" is included in the discussion. This means that we need to listen to concerns across sectors, including gun owners, gun dealers, law enforcement officials and public health advocates. With a public health problem of this magnitude, everyone should be at the table. That might seem impossible now, given the deep polarization on both sides of the gun control debate. However, a lack of willingness to even discuss potential solutions to the problem is simply unacceptable.

A recent collaboration between the public health community and gun dealers to reduce firearms-related suicide in New Hampshire offers an example of what this might look like.

Handguns turned in from the public as part of the 'Gun Turn-in' event are seen in a box at Universal Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, Illinois, May 2016.
Jim Young/Reuters

So what does that kind of research look like?

In 2013, Boston University's School of Public Health started to conduct research aimed at understanding social norms about firearms and gun culture. We have also created a dedicated Violence Prevention Research Unit. So what have we found so far?

In a 2013 study, we linked state homicide data from the CDC with data on gun ownership, which revealed a strong relationship between levels of household gun ownership and firearm-related homicide rates at the state level. We found that this relationship is specific to homicides committed by offenders who are known to the victim.

Earlier this year, we published a study that documented a strong link between gun ownership levels and firearm-related suicide rates. These findings suggest that responding to mass shootings by arming teachers and ordinary civilians is not only unlikely to reduce homicide rates, but the resulting increase in the prevalence of firearms might actually increase deaths from both homicide and suicide.

We have also found a strong relationship between the implementation of state laws that require universal background checks for all gun sales and lower rates of firearm-related homicide.

These findings suggest that the loophole in federal law that allows unlicensed dealers to sell guns to any individual without conducting a background check may be contributing toward higher rates of firearm violence. On June 20, the Senate blocked four gun control measures, including a measure to close the loophole for background checks.

Where our research is headed

Our future work will explore the impact of various state firearm policies and identify policies that are specifically effective in reducing urban violence, which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

Even though much of this work has been done without external funding, it is essential that Congress allow the CDC to do its job and conduct research on gun violence, and that other federal agencies like the NIH increase allocations for research in this area.

Allocating $0 for research, as CDC currently does on a problem that results in more than 30,000 deaths each year, is not how we handle a public health issue.

"The Sandro Galea, Dean, School of Public Health, Boston University and Michael Siegel, Professor of Community Health Sciences, Boston University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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What a 99 Million Year Old Dinosaur Wing in Amber Tells Us
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

"2016-07-06-1467817248-6864049-amberdinosaurfeatherwing.jpeg"

By Jacqueline Ronson

The world's two most adorable fossils have been recovered in Myanmar.

Two partial wings were found encased in amber, left behind 99 million years ago after baby winged dinosaurs got stuck in tree resin. Unfortunately, the little guys never got a chance to grow up, flap their cute wings around, find a mate, and hatch eggs of their own. But their tiny bodies are now a remarkable contribution to shaping our modern understanding of their prehistoric world.

The wings are microscopic -- less than half an inch long from end to end. They are incredibly well preserved, showcasing details of the feathers, skin, and even coloration. Never before has the construction of bird-like dinosaur wings been found in such detail, according to an article published this week in Nature Communications.

Just a few decades ago, the idea of feathered, warm-blooded dinosaurs was a matter of fringy speculation. Since then, troves of evidence of feathered dinosaurs have been unearthed, particularly in the well-preserved fossil beds of China and Mongolia. But these sedimentary fossils preserve only 2D feather impressions and provide a frustratingly limited snapshot of how the animal was held together. Fossil feathers preserved in amber can provide additional information, but until now those have only been found detached from the skin and bones of the species they came from.

"2016-07-06-1467817452-2020715-thosescalebarsarejust15ofaninchlong.jpeg"

Those scale bars are just 1/5 of an inch long.

These little creatures are both similar to -- and different from -- modern birds. The authors place the species in the clade Enantiornithes, which went extinct with most of the rest of the dinosaurs after the asteroid strike 65 million years ago, but are closely related to the dinosaurs that survived to become modern birds. The Enantiornithes looked a lot like birds with a couple key differences: They had two claws on the end of each wing, and they had teeth rather than beaks.

The researchers note that the wings show several types of feathers, and in a similar arrangement to what is seen on today's birds, indicting that features of modern bird wings evolved many millions of years before the Tyrannosaurus rex walked the planet. (An important digression: the T. Rex was very likely at least partially feathered, too.)

The other thing that the scientists learned from these little wings is that these babies had adult-like feather structures at a very young age, suggesting that they perhaps skipped the downy phase that today's birds grow through altogether. Speculatively, this might mean these ancient critters had less parental care or had to be prepared to take off on their own shortly after birth -- a hard thing to do for a tiny thing smaller than a hummingbird, especially if the tree you find yourself on is booby-trapped with sticky puddles of resin.

"2016-07-06-1467817909-444786-thetinydinosaurwingsarepreservedinexquisitedetail.jpeg"

The tiny dinosaur wings are preserved in exquisite detail.

The wings feed into a wider debate about the evolution of animal coverings in tetrapods. While many people still think of dinosaurs as reptilian, scaly things, there's plenty of evidence that suggest they were actually covered in everything from scales and hair-like filaments to downy feathers and quilled feathers.

In other words, try this thought experiment. Imagine the common ancestor of these creatures in all their diversity -- what would it look like? How about the common ancestor of all birds and reptiles, what characteristics of both would it display? And one more wild thought: What would the common ancestor of all birds, reptiles, and mammals look like?

A study published Wednesday in Science Advances has shed new light on this question. Both mammal fur and bird feathers share a characteristic anatomical placode, a skin thickening in the embryonic stage that gives rise to the follicle that allows for hair or feather growth. That's a curious thing, because reptiles are more closely related to birds than mammals, and until now there was no evidence that they had these placodes. Two ways around this: Either birds and mammals evolved this same structure independently, as a matter of convergent evolution, or their common ancestor had some genetic trait that gave rise to both hair and feathers.

"2016-07-06-1467818027-5390699-ascalelessbeardeddragon.png"

A scaleless bearded dragon.

And lucky us, we have an answer to this puzzler, thanks to a surprising source: a scaleless bearded dragon. While some reptiles are born without scales in a rare genetic mutation, made less rare by the fact that exotic pet breeders select for it, the scaleless bearded dragon has, well, no scales. Lead author and geneticist Michel Milinkovitch saw a naked lizard up for sale and wondered about its special genes. He bought it and studied it, discovering that a similar genetic mutation can lead to baldness in humans and mice.

It turns out that reptiles had placodes all along; they're just a little trickier to spot. Placodes exist only at a specific time and place in the embryonic development of scaled reptiles, and Milinkovitch was able to document them in bearded dragons, Nile crocodiles, and corn snakes. What this means is that 300 million years ago, a creature walked the earth who developed the first placodes, which gave rise to scales and eventually all fur and feathers.

"2016-07-06-1467818093-9078464-thisadorablelittlepangolinisbelieveitornotamammal.jpeg"

This adorable little pangolin is, believe it or not, a mammal.

Scientists have yet to discover an in-between state that links scales with feathers or scales with fur, but this research adds weight to the argument that more complex body coverings evolved from reptilian scales. This makes an intuitive sort of sense -- dinosaurs, after all, were probably covered in an assortment of these things. And although mammals are largely hairy beasts, you can still find the odd scaly mammal, too.

Birds are the only living creatures with feathers, and they are also the only living dinosaurs, suggesting that feathers are a specifically dinosaurian trait that evolved only once. (Pterosaurs, which were not dinosaurs, had fur-like filaments covering the skin on their wide wings.)

And while we still think of dinosaurs as a rather homogenous bunch of primitive lizards, those tiny dinosaur wings petrified in amber are proof of how diverse -- and how exquisitely evolved -- ancient creatures really were.

MORE FROM INVERSE:

Photos via Nature Communications (1, 2), CasaDeOrtiz Dragons / YouTube, Valerius Tygart / Wikimedia, R.C. McKellar / Nature

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If Aliens Ever Attack Earth, We Need to Protect the Moon or Die Trying
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

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By Neel V. Patel

In the world of science fiction, when aliens attack the Earth, they often go after another rocky sphere. That would be the moon, our planet's only natural satellite. Although there are exactly zero humans currently residing on the moon, zero pieces of essential equipment or instruments (although let's be real, those lunar go-karts are pretty dope) situated on its surface or its orbit, and no concrete sense of whether it possesses any valuable resources, the moon is essential to our species' survival on this planet. If hostile aliens were to blow it to bits or cause some serious damage to it, human would be in serious trouble -- even if we managed to successfully repel an extraterrestrial threat.

The moon has played a key role in shaping the way natural processes of Earth, and it continues to do so today. The moon is thought to have been formed just a mere 30 million years after the Earth (which itself is 4.53 billion years old). Since then, the moon's single greatest (and most obvious) effect on the Earth has been the mediation of the ebb and flow of tides on the planet's bodies of water.

Scientist believe that in the infancy of this relationship, the moon's distance from Earth was half of what it is today -- and this resulted in much more extreme tides. These tides drove heat from the equator to the poles, leading to ice ages. These glacial shifts spurred more rapid migratory patterns in various species, resulting in a more diverse array of life around the globe. In fact, because of how important water is to molecular processes in primitive life and organic materials, tide shifts may have acted as a kind of natural way for those chemical reactions to get rid of or acquire water in the formation of basic structures like nucleic acids. In other words, tides may have jumpstarted or encouraged the evolution of life on Earth.

"2016-07-05-1467752515-7110444-becauseitsgoneforever.gif"

Because it's gone forever.

Okay, that's a pretty cool history lesson, but what about today? What exactly would be the biggest impact on our lives today if the moon disappeared or had a chunk ripped out from itself?"

"We'd lose the normal rhythm of tides," says Noah Petro, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who works with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. He tells Inverse we'd probably lose the large tides we're used to on a day-to-day basis, and instead experience "smaller tides, caused by the Earth's rotation with the sun."

The most noticeable effect this would have is that we'd see oceans around the world level off, to a certain extent. While initially that might save coastal communities from having to deal with potential floods during high-tide, it would also mean they would lose the benefits of low tide. That would wreak havoc on clams, which would have a cascading effect on underwater ecosystems as well as the beachside food shacks worldwide.

Furthermore, the moon plays a significant role in distorting water around the equator. Without a natural satellite, that water would probably redistribute itself around the poles. This might seem like a good thing for coastal cities by the ocean that are constantly threatened by rising floods. But this is awful for bodies of water inland that are fed by oceans. We might see estuaries -- responsible for desalinating water naturally -- dry up or become significantly reduced. Rivers and lakes further inland would also shrink by quite a bit.

Unless we manage to make artificial desalination technology viable, we'd see the whole world inundated by water shortages -- and that's already a problem much of the world is currently contending with.

Petro also cites two other significant effects the moon's vanishing act would have on Earth. "The moon stabilizes Earth's orbit," he says, "so we'd see changes to the climate we're currently used to." He points to Mars as an indicator of what we might see. Mars doesn't have large moons like Earth's to affect its axial tilt as much, so the red planet is stuck with very long ice ages.

On Earth, there would be a significant amount of long winters, and "a general cooling off," of the world at first, he says, perhaps followed by a warming. We'd see "wild extremes" that are more drawn out and last much longer than the planet has previously exhibited. Petro emphasizes that these climatic effects would certainly not be felt immediately -- they would occur on a scale of 1,000 to 10,000 years. But there is one other effect that humans would have to find solutions to very quickly if the moon were blown up or hit with some sort of explosive force: debris.

A lot of material, he says, would be expelled into Earth's orbit, and some of it might even push through the atmosphere and strike the surface. If that debris were big enough, we'd basically deal with a catastrophic scenario of falling moon rocks that not even Brian May would be able to fix.

Let's also not forget the fact that orbital debris is also an increasing threat to the world's satellite currently zipping around the globe. Some of those instruments are extremely important to communications systems used by governments and militaries. If aliens fired a bunch of missiles at the moon, we can basically kiss those satellites goodbye. Hopefully we have a few landlines still lying around as a backup.

"Fortunately, we don't expect the destruction of the moon to happen," Petro added, laughing.

MORE FROM INVERSE:

Photos via YouTube

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Playing a science-based video game? It might be all wrong

Playing 'Spore' is a good way to explore evolution.'Spore' screenshot

By Alex Leith, Michigan State University

You look down from the sky, manipulating the world and seeing how it responds to your changes. You are able to alter vegetation and climate while watching their effects on the surrounding organisms. In this way, and many others, digital games provide excellent opportunities for players to learn about complicated subjects, including the concept of evolution through natural selection. Even games designed for fun and not specifically for education can provide rich, concise, dynamic representations of complex science, technology, engineering and math topics.

Since I was young, digital games have successfully supplemented the educational process in a range of topics, including math, science and biology. Research shows that if these games are going to actually teach those concepts, they must represent them accurately. Games that include incorrect depictions teach the wrong lessons.

Since Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution has been understood as a process based on genetic differences between individual organisms of the same species. There are three key principles:

Organisms with genetic advantages for their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, while organisms whose genes make their bodies less suited will die more quickly and reproduce less effectively.
Because these characteristics are genetic, they are passed on to offspring.
Organisms with genes that improve their survival will have more successful offspring, which will in turn pass on their advantages to the next generation.

Some colleagues and I looked into how well current games could serve as educational tools, specifically about evolution. We examined how Darwinian evolution was represented in 22 games, which we located either through game databases like GameSpot or IGN, or through Google searches. Most games got evolution at least partly wrong. Only five accurately represented all three key principles of evolution.

The five that got it right

A screen-capture of a Norn interacting with its environment in 'Creatures 2,' developed by Creatures Labs and published by Mindscape.
Wikipedia

"Creatures" provides a rare example of the three principles. In that game, players create cartoon-like creatures called "norns," through a process that allows norns to be altered not just in terms of appearance, but at the genetic level. For the most accurate representation of evolution, the game offers a play mode called "wolfling run." In that mode, players cannot directly affect their norns, but can observe their relative fitness for a particular in-game scenario. The potential variations in both norn creation and the environment they must survive in provide for an astonishing number of evolutionary possibilities.

Maxis, best known for creating the "SimCity" game series, and its spinoff "The Sims" collection, also made a set of games called "SimEarth" and "SimLife." Like "SimCity," both give players top-down control of a world. "SimEarth" was designed for players to make major changes to the weather, landscape and animals to create an environment. Players were then able to see how the animals would fare in this created environment. "SimLife" was more specific: it has players engage with the animals (rather than merely creating them) to learn about the biology surrounding their survival.

A screen-capture of 'Who Wants to Live a Million Years,' playable on the Science Channel website.
from sciencechannel.com

We also found two academically oriented games that loosely presented the three mechanics of evolution: "Selection Game" and "Who Wants to Live a Million Years" (which was later renamed "Charles Darwin's Game of Survival"). The two games were designed to be simple tools that could be played quickly in places like museums. Despite the limited mechanics present in such games, they still clearly show each element of the evolution process.

Market success doesn't mean accuracy

The most commercially popular game we found didn't quite get evolution right. "Spore" left out something many other games did, too: Organisms' genetic differences didn't affect their survival rates. Instead, organisms whose genes were unfit for the environment would not necessarily die more often, in keeping with evolutionary principles. Rather, players could intervene and increase an organism's likelihood for success by, say, helping it move more intelligently and strategically, beyond the scope of its genetically predisposed movements.

Nevertheless, "Spore" does a reasonable job presenting the broader concept of evolution to players, and is the best such game made this century. ("Creatures," "SimEarth," and "SimLife" are all from the 1990s.) "Spore" is also still available for purchase, so it is the only game readily usable by the average educator or student.

But other findings were disappointing. Most games inaccurately portrayed evolution, usually in the same way Spore did - allowing player intervention to save organisms that were unfit for survival.

For these other games, evolution becomes more akin to mutation during a single organism's life than a process that occurs through generations. In "E.V.O.: Search for Eden" and "L.O.L.: Lack of Love," players earn points they can spend to modify their organisms. In "Eco," at the end of each level, the player arbitrarily changes an attribute, though not necessarily one that affects an organism's survival prospects. In each of these cases, what the game calls "evolution" is actually external genetic manipulation, rather than inheriting particular traits.

These inaccuracies may confuse those unsure of what evolution actually is. If other scientific subjects are similarly poorly depicted in video games, the potential educational benefits of these games could be lost. However, as game designers become more adept at modeling scientific themes, it could herald an educational revolution.

"The Alex Leith, Doctoral Candidate in Media and Information Studies, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Kalevi Kull: Censorship & Royal Society Evo Event

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Founders of the Copenhagen-Tartu School of Biosemiotics at a Seminar in Estonia: (l-r) KALEVI KULL, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Frederik Stjernfelt

Biosemiotics pioneer Kalevi Kull has sent the following letter to me in response to one of the organizers of the upcoming Royal Society public meeting on paradigm shift attempting to censor my coverage of the event.

Kalevi Kull plans to attend the November gathering in London.

Dear Suzan,

Well, I really interpret the letter you refer to in your article ["Censorpship & Upcoming Royal Society Evo Meeting"] as evidence that this IS a paradigm shift. Because it focuses not on the biological theory itself, but on social matters in academia. And this is a serious hint. Because if this kind of deep change happens, then very many scientists face a problem of how to survive this change because the new dominant model they would like to accept results in many of their previous writings losing much of their value. Nobody wants to belong to the party of losers. One of the best strategies in such a case is evidently an interpretation of the change as a gradual accumulation of knowledge while their work has always been at the cutting edge.

[Following is the censorship email Kull refers to above -- it was not written by Denis Noble:

"Could I request that you stop referring to the forthcoming RS-BA meeting ("New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives"), and to the extended evolutionary synthesis, more generally, as in some way advocating a "paradigm shift". Such language is both misleading (the vast majority of scientists working towards an extended synthesis do not seek revolutionary change in neo-Darwinism) and counterproductive (such talk undermines calm scientific discussion by creating an unnecessarily emotive and antagonistic atmosphere). I view the Kuhnian model as superseded long ago: the data suggests that sciences rarely if ever change through "revolutions". Lakatos' framework of "research programmes" offers a more up-to-date, accurate and useful conceptualization of (gradual and progressive) scientific change. The extended evolutionary synthesis is best regarded as an alternative research programme, entirely complementary to orthodox evolutionary biology. Talk of "paradigm shift" gives the false impression that the differences amongst evolutionary biologists are far more extreme than they actually are. . . ."]

[Kalevi Kull's correspondence continues:] Is this a radical change in biology what is going on now? The contrast is quite clear, if we look at how evolutionary innovation is described. Either innovation begins from a new mutation, followed by newly behaving phenotype, which is amplified by natural selection (this is what the neo-Darwinian model suggests), or innovation begins from a change of function (with habitat choice, or resource choice, etc.) first stabilised by epigenetic or ecological inheritance and followed by fixation due to mutational noise (which is what the new model states, let us call it the post-Darwinan model).

That is: either a genetic change first, followed by functional change, or a functional (epigenetic, i.e., non-genetic) change first, followed by genetic changes.

The details of this contrast are described, for instance, in my work "Adaptive Evolution without Natural Selection" published in the Linnean Society journal. . . but there are many scholars who share this model. That paper provides a row of references. Isn't it a deep contrast, and a possible move from one to another, a radical change of the major model of evolution?

However, if indeed one knows all the dramatic history of the theory of evolution. . .
Here's a sketch. Estonia has been described as a country with one of the richest political experiences. We also see this in our history of Darwinism.

In the 19th century, Tartu University was one of the leading German-language universities, and one of the leading critics of Darwin was working at Tartu University -- Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of developmental biology. Simultaneously, one of the very first courses in the world and best textbooks written about Darwin's-time Darwinism was provided by a professor at the same university, Georg Seidlitz.

Around the turn of the century, before WWI, Tartu University was a Russian-language university, and Darwinism was soon popularised as supporting early socialist ideas. Soon after, together with advances in genetics, evolutionary theory was interpreted as a basis for eugenics (also used in this way by national socialists in Germany before WWII).

Then Estonia was annexed by Russia, and after the WWII for more than a decade it meant the influence of vulgar Darwinism (also called 'creative Darwinism' at that time), as propagated by Lysenko (yes, he also praised Darwin, he just did not like genetics).

In the 1970s and 80s, all students in the Soviet Union had to learn how Darwinism goes hand in hand with Marxism, meaning a good connection with the 'synthetic theory of evolution', which was a synonym for neo-Darwinism. . .

Simultaneously, a radical non-Darwinism was also developing within certain circles of Soviet biologists, who took it from the theory of Nomogenesis of Lev Berg and his follower Alexander Lyubischev. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an outgrowth of neo-Darwinism called sociobiology became a dominant view for many, particularly among zoologists. . .

If one has read all this and been able to understand why all these scholars had the views they had, it is hardly possible to describe this history as gradual improvement of a model, continuous extension of a synthesis. There have rather been different paradigms existing and developing in parallel. Most of the time just one of them was strongly dominant over the other. And since evolutionary theory has almost always been tied to some ideological battles, its changes were not limited by scientific discoveries.

Nevertheless, we have good friends and colleagues whose views about evolution we do not share. But should we therefore be less strict in our formulations about our views? No, that would mean giving up our understanding. Good teachers wouldn't do so.

Science, deeply speaking, is the mutual help in understanding. We should help each other as friends; nobody is understanding everything. Keeping this in mind, the best way to make our thoughts clear is to use formulations that do not hide meaning. A better understanding is not always an extension of the earlier model, sometimes it is an alternative.

In other words -- summarizing -- claiming that what is going on is just an ongoing extension of Darwinism would be equivalent to saying that Einsteinian physics is just an extended Newtonianism. Why not, one may describe it so. However, the Einsteinian change became a classic example of a paradigm shift, for Kuhn. . . .

I like very much your writings.

Warm wishes

Kalevi

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Weekend Roundup: Present at the Unraveling
"Present at the Creation" was the title Dean Acheson, the famed American secretary of state from 1949-1953, gave to his memoir, which recounts the vision and construction of the post-World War II institutions of global order such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the trade-opening precursor to the World Trade Organization, and NATO that followed on the heels of the United Nations. In that same era, French diplomat Robert Schuman, considered "the father of Europe," planted the seeds of European integration that have grown for the last several decades into a club of 28 countries with a population of 500 million. Both efforts, aimed at extinguishing the nationalism and protectionism seen as the root cause of world war, fostered the era of globalization now coming to an end. Brexit, like the Trump campaign in the U.S. and the rise of the anti-European Union right on the European continent, marks an historic turn of the tide. Today, we are present at the unraveling of those grand institutions that have outlived their capacity to deliver inclusively and lost the allegiance of their publics.

"Brexit is another demonstration," Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "that the big global institutions built in the wake of World War II are no longer able to maintain global order." Popular anger targeted distant and seemingly unaccountable cosmopolitan elites in charge of those institutions for failing to address pressing concerns over immigration and economic dislocation that are part and parcel of interdependence. "Brexit is a rejection of 'Cool Britannia,' the 1990s branding of a cosmopolitan, creative and united Britain as a part of a happy vision of globalization," Calhoun cuttingly quips.

The global order now waning has been the springboard for China's dramatic rise in recent decades. Writing from Beijing, He Yafei worries now that Brexit is only "the first wave of deglobalization" that will "rebalance in the domestic and EU-wide political landscape in favor of those anti-globalization and anti-EU forces." He might add the U.S. as well where Donald Trump this week lashed out at China and trade deals as the cause of America's woes.

The great historical question is what comes next -- a return to nationalism or a leap forward toward responsive new institutions with the capacity and competence to forge a deeper, more inclusive integration that can actually solve the problems at hand? Perpetual suspension in the purgatory between these historic options only fuels highly polarized discontent.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer puts his finger squarely on the key contradiction behind chaos in Europe: for all the populist anger against "Brussels," the reality is that nation-states still run the show -- not least his own country whose insistence on protracted austerity policies in financially troubled southern Europe has destabilized politics there. "The EU institutions are blamed for all kinds of problems: globalization, immigration, welfare cuts and Thatcherism, youth unemployment, lack of democracy, and much more," he writes from Berlin. "In fact, by preventing the EU from addressing these issues, the national governments -- helpless to tackle them effectively on their own -- have made these problems worse." Also writing from Germany, Green activist Sven Giegold emphasizes Fischer's point. "Like the amputations practiced in medieval medicine," he says, "Brexit is not a cure. In the face of global challenges, European nation-states cannot secure self-determination and stability on their own. Cooperation with the European Union would make nation-states less vulnerable."

Writing from the dispassionate distance of New Delhi, Dhruva Jaishankar views Brexit as "the first major casualty of digital democracy." "Social media, rather than creating connections with people who possess differing points of view and ideologies," he observes, "tends to reinforce prejudice." Rather than being a force for consensus, the widespread use of social media during the Brexit debate spread misinformation and myths, feeding "polarization and gridlock." Writing from Paris, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, too, sees Brexit as a victory "not of democracy[,] but of demagogy."

This week's horrific suicide attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul is yet another indication of how post-World War II institutions have outlived their purpose in the face of new realities. NATO, the defense alliance rooted in the Cold War that ties together Turkey with European states that have also recently been subject to terrorism, is a complete mismatch with the security challenges confronting these countries today. Writing from Istanbul, Behlül Özkan sees the main target of the so-called Islamic State as Turkey's secular democracy because it is the opposite of its idea of a caliphate. Turkish novelist Kaya Genc relates the enveloping mood after the series of recent attacks. "Istanbul as a bridge of cultures belonged to the noughties: the 2010s is the decade of ruptures."

WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports personal stories from on the ground in Istanbul about how local residents are reaching out to help the victims and follows the investigation by authorities into Islamic State suspects from post-Soviet states. Dean Obeidallah is upset that the American media does not give the same attention to terror attacks in Muslim-majority places like Istanbul as it does to similar attacks in Paris or Brussels.

"india

While headlines from London and Istanbul grip the global attention, a drought in India affecting a staggering 330 million barely registers. Reporting exclusively for The WorldPost from Bundelkhand, a vast rural landscape in north-central India, photojournalist Vivek Singh chronicles the life and death struggle for drops of water in striking black and white images that convey the desperation leading to farmer suicide and mass migration in the country. "As the crisis deepens," Singh says, "the country that celebrated the 1960s agricultural revolution and a resulting boom in production of food grains is now seeing its farmers dying in debt and despair."

In our continuing series on Africa and China presented by Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, a Nigerian living in Guangzhou asks, "why are Chinese people so racist towards black people?" The two also look at how Chinese ivory smugglers in Namibia are affecting that southern African nation's efforts to curb the illegal trade.

In a thoughtful riposte to a recent interview with "Sapiens" author Yuval Harari in The WorldPost, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains why we creative humans can't accept an algorithmic account of human life based only in intellectual processes. "The history of human cultures," he writes, "is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms." No algorithm could have designed the cultivated beauty of these Japanese gardens and landscapes captured by the sensitive aesthetic of photographer Hidenobu Suzuki. Finally, our Singularity series this week profiles a robot that can wash your dishes.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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Yes, Benzos Are Bad For You
WARNING: I will be saying very negative things about benzodiazepines in an effort to force doctors to think twice before prescribing them and to discourage patients from ever using them. However, because withdrawal symptoms can be severe and dangerous, individuals already taking benzos in significant doses on a regular basis should not try to stop or reduce their dose without careful medical supervision. More on this later.

Most new wonder drugs turn out to be not so wonderful once we get to know them better. The family of drugs known as benzodiazepines (commonly called "benzos" for short) were wonder drugs of the 1960s. I and many others welcomed their introduction and began prescribing Valium or Librium not just for anxiety, but also for all sorts of other clinical problems beyond this primary indication -- for instance, to soothe psychotic patients' symptoms, to help people with alcohol use disorders quit drinking, to take the edge off agitation in depression and dementia, and to aid sleep. Benzos were reputed to be safe, and initially we were pretty oblivious to the risk of addiction. Before long, benzos became among the most frequently prescribed medications in America.

A second benzo craze began in the1980s when Xanax became the new wonder drug. Its maker, Upjohn (then run by a former head of the NIH), fashioned a brilliant marketing strategy -- hiding the company's wolfish greed for profit under the sheep's clothing of research sponsorship. Upjohn was able to co-opt the top academic psychiatrists from all around the world by organizing the first large-scale international clinical trial of any psychiatric drug. The results were disturbing to me as an outside observer. By then I had wised up to the great risk of benzos and was not surprised to discover that the dose of Xanax needed to treat panic disorder was dangerously close to the dose needed to result in addiction. This should have scared off everyone from using Xanax, but it didn't. Xanax quickly became, and remains, a best seller.

The real wonder of the benzos is that sales continue to boom, despite their having so little utility and no push from pharma marketeering (because patents have run out - thereby decreasing costs and profits.) Between 1996 and 2013, the percentage of people in the U.S. using benzos jumped more than one-third from an already remarkable 4.1 to 5.6 percent. Especially troubling is that benzo use is ridiculously high (nearly one out of ten) in the elderly, the group most likely to be harmed by them. (See below.) And women are twice as likely as men to be given a prescription.

You would expect such a ubiquitous drug to have many clinical uses but you would be wrong -- the psychiatric indications for benzos can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While benzos do wonders for patients with catatonia, this disorder is rarely encountered. Benzos are also useful short-term for severe agitation in psychosis, mania, and depression. And they are sometimes helpful for patients with severe panic disorder who need instant relief in the several weeks before SSRI's kick in. Benzos would be fine for occasional "as needed" use in times of special stress or insomnia. But since you can't predict who will get hooked, it is wise not to try them at all for this purpose. In my opinion, all of the legitimate indications for benzos are very short term. However, in real life most people take them long term, in doses high enough to be addicting, and for the wrong reasons.

Benzo popularity derives from their ability to quickly relieve anxiety, reduce worry, help people relax, and lubricate social anxiety -- kind of like drinking alcohol but in a convenient pill form. Doctors love prescribing benzos because it's the most efficient way to get a complaining patient out of the office in the shortest possible time. The patient is very satisfied at the moment, but may go on to develop a devastating addiction. People love taking them but once hooked can't stop. In short, benzos are very easy to get on, almost impossible to get off.

Benzos harm in three ways -- most dramatic dangers are deadly overdoses. Between 1996 and 2013, the death rate from benzo overdoses exploded by more than 500 percent, from 0.58 per 100,000 people to 3 per 100,000. Benzos are now involved in more than 30 per cent of all overdose deaths, usually in combination with opioids or alcohol.

Second on the list of harms come the painful and dangerous withdrawal symptoms that foster addiction. Benzo withdrawal is a beast- often terrifying, sometimes dangerous, and almost always drawn out over a very long period of time. The anxiety and panic experienced by people stopping benzos is usually much worse than the anxiety and panic that initially led to their use. Other common symptoms are irritability, insomnia, tremors, distractibility, sweating, and confusion. At the extreme, if doses were high and discontinuation is quick, the symptoms resemble alcoholic delirium tremens with hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, and the risk of death. Withdrawal is made even more difficult if, as is common, benzo dependence is complicated by concomitant abuse of alcohol and/or opioids or other drugs. Most people fail in their first attempts at withdrawal. Success rates increase if the withdrawal is done very gradually over a period of many months. Careful medical supervision is always a must.

Third and most insidious, but still very damaging, are the day-to-day impacts on brain functioning. On-going benzo use can be devastating, especially in the elderly, who (bizarrely) are the group most likely to receive a benzo prescription. If you meet an elderly patient who seems dopey, confused, has memory loss, slurred speech, and poor balance, your first thought should be benzo side effects -- not Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Many elders begin their downward spiral to disability and death after a benzo-induced fall that results in broken hips, concussions, or subdural hematomas (a collection of blood outside the brain.) Benzos are also a major risk factor for car and machine accidents.

Easier said than done. Along with opioids and methamphetamine, benzos are the most seductive of drugs. The combination of benzos and opioids is especially seductive and especially deadly. In my book, no one with any history of substance abuse should ever be prescribed a benzo. It will most likely just get added to the mix.

Benzos should never be used as they are most typically used. While safe and effective in low doses for just a few days, they are ineffective and unsafe when taken, as they usually are, in increasing doses over a long period of time. If prescribed at all in someone who has never used them before, it should be cautiously and with warnings. The time period should be short, the dose low, and quantity very limited at any one time. Real world practice flagrantly violates all these concerns - 90 percent of benzo prescriptions are written, often carelessly, by primary care doctors, who can spend only seven minutes with the patient without giving serious thought to the considerable risk of addiction.

The bottom line is that there is only one way to confidently avoid addiction to benzodiazepines: never start taking them. Since we can't predict who will eventually get hooked, the short term gains are rarely worth the long term risks.

It has been more than 30 years since I last prescribed a benzo for anxiety. In my view, the only legitimate uses in psychiatry now are very short-term relief of catatonia, for severe agitation, and for detox from benzos. For everyone else, risk of addiction outweighs the potential benefit of use.

The tough question is what to recommend for those many unfortunates already suffering the tyranny of benzo addiction. Should they stay the course to avoid the rigors and risks of withdrawal or should they make the great effort to detox? This is an individual decision that can't be forced on someone. But the longer you are on them, the harder it gets to stop, and the cognitive side effects of benzos create more and more dysfunction as your brain ages. The best bet is to stick with a determined effort to detox, however long and difficult, under close medical supervision. On a hopeful note, some of the happiest people I have known are those who have overcome their dependence on benzos.

This article was originally published on Recovery Brands' Pro Talk/Pro Corner
http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/yes-benzos-are-bad-for-you/

Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.

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Monsanto Fingerprints Found All Over Attack On Organic Food
When a reputable-sounding nonprofit organization released a report attacking the organic food industry in April 2014, the group went to great lengths to tout its independence.

The 30-page report by Academics Review, described as "a non-profit led by independent academic experts in agriculture and food sciences," found that consumers were being duped into spending more money for organic food because of deceptive marketing practices by the organic industry.

Trade press headlines blared: "Organics exposed!" (Brownfield News) and "Organic Industry Booming by Deceiving Consumers" (Food Safety Tech News), touting the findings by supposedly independent experts.

The findings were "endorsed by an international panel of independent agricultural science, food science, economic and legal experts from respected international institutions," according to the group's press release.

In case the point about independence wasn't clear, the press release ends on this note: "Academics Review has no conflicts-of-interest associated with this publication, and all associated costs for which were paid for using our general funds without any specific donor' influence or direction."

What was not mentioned in the report, the news release or on the website: Executives for Monsanto Co., the world's leading purveyor of agrichemicals and genetically engineered seeds, along with key Monsanto allies, engaged in fund raising for Academics Review, collaborated on strategy and even discussed plans to hide industry funding, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know via state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Monsanto's motives in attacking the organic industry are obvious: Monsanto's seeds and chemicals are banned from use in organic farming, and a large part of Monsanto's messaging is that its products are superior to organics as tools to boost global food production.

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Academics Carry Monsanto's Message

Academics Review was co-founded by "two independent professors ... on opposite ends of the planet," Bruce Chassy, Ph.D., professor emeritus at University of Illinois, and David Tribe, Ph.D., senior lecturer at University of Melbourne. They claim the group "only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources."

Yet two email exchanges in 2010 reveal plans to find corporate funding for Academics Review while keeping corporate fingerprints hidden.

In a March 11, 2010 email exchange with Chassy, Jay Byrne, former head of communications at Monsanto who now runs a PR and market research firm, offered to act as a "commercial vehicle" to help find corporate funding for Academics Review.

Chassy discussed his interest in attacking the organic industry in the emails. "I would love to have a prime name in the middle of the organic aura from which to launch ballistic missiles..." he wrote, "I sure don't have the money."

Byrne replied,

"Well, I suggest we work on the money (for all of us) first and quickly! I've proposed to Val [Giddings, former vice president of BIO, the biotech industry trade association] that he and I meet while I'm in DC next week so we can (not via e-mail) get a clear picture of options for taking the Academic Review project and other opportunities forward. The "Center for Consumer Freedom" (ActivistCash.com) has cashed in on this to the extreme."

The Center for Consumer Freedom is directed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist who has been called "Dr. Evil" and the "king of corporate front groups and propaganda" for his work to promote the tobacco industry and other corporate interests under the cover of neutral-sounding groups.

"I think we have a much better concept," Byrne told Chassy.

Byrne shared an "opportunities" list of targets comprised of people, groups and content critical of GMOs and Monsanto: Vandana Shiva, Andrew Kimbrell, Ronnie Cummins, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," the movies "Food, Inc" and "The World According to Monsanto," and "topic cross-over on all the risk areas of ag-biotech (out crossing/ contamination, bees, butterflies, human safety, etc...)."

"All of these individuals, organizations, content items and topic areas mean money for a range of well heeled corporations, Byrne wrote, adding:

"I believe Val and I can identify and serve as the appropriate (non-academic) commercial vehicles by which we can connect these entities with the project in a manner which helps to ensure the credibility and independence (and thus value) of the primary contributors/owners... I believe our kitchen cabinet here can serve as gatekeepers (in some cases toll takers) for effective, credible responses, inoculation and proactive activities using this project platform..."

"Sounds good to me," Chassy replied. "I'm sure that you will let me know what you discuss."

In an email exchange with Chassy dated November 30, 2010, Eric Sachs, a senior public relations operative for Monsanto, discussed finding corporate support for Academics Review while "keeping Monsanto in the background."

Sachs wrote to Chassy:

"You and I need to talk more about the "academics review" site and concept. I believe that there is a path to a process that would better respond to scientific concerns and allegations. I shared with Val yesterday. From my perspective the problem is one of expert engagement and that could be solved by paying experts to provide responses. You and I have discussed this in the past. Val explained that step one is establishing 501(c)3 not-for-profit status to facilitate fund raising. That makes sense but there is more. I discussed with Jerry Steiner today (Monsanto Executive Team) and can help motivate CLI/BIO/CBI and other organizations to support. The key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information."

CLI/BIO/CBI refers to three industry trade groups -- Crop Life International, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the Council for Biotechnology Information -- that represent agrichemical corporations.

Chassy responded to Sachs, "Yes we should talk about Academics Review. I think we are on the same page."

When asked directly about funding, Chassy replied via email: "Academics Review does not solicit or accept funds from any source for specific research or any other activities associated with any products, services or industry. Academics Review only accepts unrestricted donations from non-corporate sources to support our work."

He said that Academics Review incorporated and reported no income in 2012 and he provided the IRS form 990s for 2013 and 2014 (now also posted on the website). Those documents report $419,830 in revenues but include no information about contributors. Chassy did not respond to requests to provide that information.

Press Covers "Independent" Attack on Organic

Academics Review released its organic marketing study in April 2014 to a robust round of trade press coverage describing the findings of "independent researchers":

• "The Organic Food Industry Has Been Engaged in 'Multi-Decade Public Disinformation Campaign' claims report" (Food Navigator)

• "Report: Organic Industry Achieved 25 Years of Fast Growth Through Fear and Deception" (Food Safety News)

• "A Scathing Indictment of Organic Food Marketing" (Hoard's Dairyman)

• "Using Fear as a Sales Tactic" (Food Business News)

In the New York Post, Naomi Schaffer Riley built a case against "tyranny of the organic mommy mafia" who are duped by disingenuous marketing tactics of the organic industry. Her sources included the Academics Review report and Julie Gunlock, author of a book about the "culture of alarmism."

Riley didn't mention that Gunlock, and also Riley herself, are both senior fellows at the Independent Women's Forum, a group heavily funded by Donors Trust, which has bankrolled corporate attacks on unions, public schools and climate scientists.

In the Des Moines Register, John R. Block, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who now works for a law firm that lobbies for agribusiness interests, reported on the "blockbuster report" by Academics Review and its findings that the organic industry's secret to success is "black marketing."

The corporate front group American Council on Science and Health, which receives funding from the agrichemical industry and where Chassy serves as a scientific advisor, pushed the "black marketing" theme in articles by ACSH president Hank Campbell and Henry I. Miller, MD, a Hoover Institute fellow who served as the spokesmodel in commercials for the effort to kill GMO labeling in California, for which Monsanto was the lead funder.

Miller, who has a long history of making inaccurate scientific claims in support of corporate interests, also used the Academics Review report as a source for organic attacks in Newsweek and the National Review, and claimed in the Wall Street Journal that organic farming is not sustainable.

Similar anti-organic themes run through other agrichemical industry PR channels.

GMO Answers, a marketing website funded by the Big Six agrichemical companies (and where Chassy and Tribe serve as "independent experts"), promotes the ideas that organics are no healthier, no better for the environment and just a marketing program -- although, ironically, the PR firm that runs GMO Answers has launched a specialty group in San Francisco to try to cash in on the organic market.

Monsanto's top spokesperson, Robb Fraley, also repeatedly trashes the organic industry on his Twitter feed.

Money Flow Goes Public; Academics Review Goes Silent

In March 2016, Monica Eng reported for WBEZ on documents showing that Monsanto paid Professor Bruce Chassy more than $57,000 over a 23-month period to travel, write and speak about GMOs -- money that was not disclosed to the public.

According to Eng's investigation, the money was part of at least $5.1 million in undisclosed money Monsanto sent through the University of Illinois Foundation to university employees and programs between 2005 and 2015.

"Chassy did not disclose his financial relationship with Monsanto on state or university forms aimed at detecting potential conflicts of interest," Eng reported.

"Documents further show that Chassy and the university directed Monsanto to deposit the payments through the University of Illinois Foundation, a body whose records are shielded from public scrutiny. The foundation also has the ability to take in private money and disburse it to an individual as a 'university payment' -- exempt from disclosure."

In January 2016, Carey Gillam, research director of U.S. Right to Know, reported on emails showing that hundreds of thousands of dollars had flowed from Monsanto to the University of Illinois "as Chassy collaborated on multiple projects with Monsanto to counter public concerns about genetically modified crops (GMOs) - all while representing himself as an independent academic for a public institution."

"What you find when reading through the email chains is an arrangement that allowed industry players to cloak pro-GMO messaging within a veil of independent expertise, and little, if any, public disclosure of the behind-the-scenes connections," Gillam wrote.

The last post on the Academics Review site, dated Sept. 2, 2015, is a blog by Chassy explaining that some of his emails would be made public due to the FOIA requests of U.S. Right to Know, which he characterized as an assault on his 40 years of public science, research and teaching.

Financial support from the private sector for public sector research and outreach is "appropriate, commonplace and needed to further the public interest," Chassy wrote. "Such support should be, and in all my experiences has been, transparent and done under the strict ethical guidelines of the public institutions that are benefiting from private sector or individual financial contributions."

Three days later, some of Chassy's emails were first made public in a front-page New York Times article by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eric Lipton. Lipton reported that Monsanto gave Chassy a grant for an undisclosed sum in 2011 for "biotechnology outreach and education activities."

Chassy told Lipton that the money he received from Monsanto "helped to elevate his voice through travel, a website he created and other means."

Still Getting Press as an Independent Source

Despite the revelations in the emails and the disclosure of Chassy's financial ties to Monsanto, the Academics Review website and its report attacking the organic industry are still posted online with all the descriptions claiming independence.

And Chassy still enjoys press coverage as an "independent" expert on GMOs. In May 2016, two separate Associated Press stories quoted Chassy on that topic. Neither story mentioned Chassy's now-public financial ties to Monsanto.

Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/StacyMalkan

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Why The Haitian Cholera Victims Deserve Their Day In Court
The battle between victims of the cholera epidemic in Haiti and the United Nations may resemble a classic David and Goliath story, except in this case Goliath hasn't even shown up to fight.

The reason is that the United Nations is granted "immunity from every form of legal process" -- even though public health experts believe UN peacekeeping troops are responsible for the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has infected more than 750,000 people and killed more than 9,000 since October 2010. (Though a recent paper from Médecins Sans Frontières researchers suggests that there may be "a substantially higher cholera mortality rate than previously reported.")

Nevertheless, on Jan. 9, 2015, US District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. But in March the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the District Court's ruling. The decision of the three judges is pending.

The United Nations should not be able to invoke immunity in order to foreclose on justice. The 1946 convention that granted them immunity also charged them with a responsibility. They aren't to be accountable to no one. Rather, according to the convention, the UN "shall make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement." But the UN has refused to do so in this case.

The United Nations should account for their role in one of the deadliest outbreaks of cholera in recent history. Some argue that time is better spent on halting the epidemic and not trying to point fingers at who started it. But while that trade may satisfy members of elite organizations, it is unlikely to satisfy people like Lisette Paul, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her brother, Fritznel, became sick while working in the fields. He vomited and had diarrhea for seven days straight until he died. His medical and funeral expenses plunged his family into debt. Soon, they could no longer afford to send his daughter to school. The suffering of Fritznel, Lisette, and those like them shouldn't be pitted against the prevention of future pain. They should have a forum to air their claims and the UN should provide it.

No one doubts that the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti is a man-made disaster. The debate is who, or what, was responsible. Cholera is a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea and vomiting and, unstopped, eventually dehydration and sometimes death. People can catch it from contaminated water. But it hadn't been in Haiti for 100 years at least. So how did it wind up there in October 2010?

The short answer is human activity from South Asia. One team of public health experts matched the strain of cholera to a South Asian type. Another made a circumstantial case that the disease came from a camp of UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal. Before the troops were deployed to Haiti, there had been a cholera outbreak in Kathmandu, Nepal. Less than two weeks after the first cases, the Associated Press reported an overflowing septic tank, the "stench of excrement," and "a reeking black flow" from the camp's pipes to the Artibonite River, which 1.5 million Haitians use.

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The UN doesn't deny all of these claims. In fact, they rounded up an independent panel that reached many of the same conclusions. They also found that the cholera strain matches the South Asian type and the outbreak happened "as a result of human activity."

But the UN panel report arrives at a different conclusion. Though they agree someone must have brought cholera to Haiti, they say no one should be blamed. This is because, they argue, there was a "confluence of circumstances." These circumstances include the environmental conditions, the role that Haitians played in spreading the disease, an especially deadly strain of cholera, and the country's poor sanitation and water conditions. Indeed, by the time the cholera outbreak hit, a mere 17% of Haitians had access to facilities that separate human waste from human contact.

The "confluence of factors" argument amounts to little more than victim blaming. If only Haiti had better water and sanitation, the argument goes, then cholera would not have spread.

But does that mean someone should be able to leak contaminated raw sewage with impunity? "From a legal perspective that stuff is all totally irrelevant," counters Brian Concannon, the executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. "If the UN negligently introduced this disease into an environment they knew was weak, then legally it's still responsible."

Still, this isn't an open-and-shut case. Daniele Lantagne and the rest of the UN panel give two reasons why not. First, there is no hard scientific link between the peacekeepers and the outbreak. Someone else from South Asia could have been in Haiti at the time and, however miniscule the possibility, they could have carried the strain. Second, the introduction of cholera undoubtedly was an accident and not a deliberate act.

But this only raises more questions that the UN should answer. No one argues that the peacekeepers contaminated the water supply on purpose. If they had the disease, they may have had no idea. In fact, it is possible to be totally asymptomatic. But this doesn't answer why they weren't screened for the disease. After all, a cholera outbreak was reported on September 23, 2010, in Kathmandu, which is where the peacekeepers trained for three months. They received a medical examination before traveling to Haiti. Why weren't they tested for cholera? A recent article in PLOS Medicine reports that the rapid diagnostic test only costs $2.54 per person and a single-dose prophylaxis on the higher end runs $1.32 per person.

Even if they were definitively singled out as the cause, it would be unfair to punish the peacekeepers. They weren't experts. Peacekeeping troops are hired out, largely from poor countries, to the UN for $1,028 per soldier per month of duty.

But that doesn't mean no one could have foreseen harm. Just two days after the January 2010 earthquake, the US National Center for Medical Intelligence wrote that it "expects damage to urban water and sewage infrastructure will increase rates of diarrheal disease, possibly to include cholera." Even if an accidental act and a confluence of factors spread cholera, the important ethical questions are when those factors were known, and by whom.

It isn't only outsiders like Brian Concannon and the IJDH who are calling on the UN to hear claims from the victims of cholera. In his first report as the UN's independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti, Gustavo Gallón called for a "reparation commission for cholera victims." Given that the UN proclaimed that victims of human rights violations must be able to seek remedies and reparations, Mr. Gallón reminds us, anything less would be hypocritical.

In October 2015, four UN Special Rapporteurs joined Gallón to argue that "the victims of cholera have access to a transparent, independent and impartial mechanism that can review their claims and decide on the merits of those claims in order to ensure adequate reparation, including restitution, compensation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition."

More recently, Jan Eliasson, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote a letter that the "Secretary General and I are fully committed to ensuring that the Organization fulfills its human rights obligations." Yet the letter doesn't mention financial compensation nor does it mention any "transparent, independent and impartial mechanism" to review claims.

One out of every fourteen Haitians has been infected with cholera. They deserve an official forum to examine why this happened and who is responsible. People like Claudine, another client of IJDH, who spent her life savings to bury her father should be made financially whole. As of today, none of this will happen.

This blog originally appeared at PLOS Public Health Perspectives.

Photo Credit: V. cholerae on TCBS. Via Flickr VeeDunn CC BY 2.0.

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Day 300: Virtually There

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Until we get really good at transgressing the laws of physics, we live under the thumb of certain hard facts. One of the hardest is this: we can't physically be in two places at once. Happily, through miracles of modern technology like speakerphones, Skype, and virtual reality, as long as we're on the same planet as an event, we can virtually attend. At least, our likenesses can. Our voices, faces, and/or avatars can appear in our places. Using these work-arounds, our essences can sort of exist in two or more places at once. Virtually near-infinite versions of ourselves, some more robust than others, can experience elements of distant locations and the people -- with a catch.

"Distant" here is "less than or equal to the maximum circumference of the Earth and nearby orbits." This modus operandi does not function at an interplanetary level. In fact, it starts to break down as soon as you get to the Moon. The delay -- 1 second each way -- is barely perceptible, but nonetheless palpable. Send a command -- wait for it, wait for it -- then get a reply. "Hello!"... 1... 2 -- "Hello!" It's ALMOST like being there, but not quite. It's more like awaiting an echo.

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The further out we go in the Universe, the more protracted these conversations become. By the time you get to Mars, delay could be as short as 4 minutes -- like being placed "on a brief hold while we find someone to serve you" -- or as long as 20 minutes each way; like Mars is telling you, "Go on a lunch break. Your reply will be waiting when you return."

This is not a complaint by any means. Compared to the good folks running the Juno mission to Jupiter (due to arrive on 7/4!) a call to Mars represents a rapid turn-around. Juno's controllers currently wait 1.5 hours for a reply from their spacecraft. The folks listening to signals from Voyager 1 stay on hold for more than 37 hours. Still, our lag, however tiny on the scale of the solar system, means that we on simulated Mars are never quite there on Earth: for the people we care about, or for ourselves.

To be fair, even when I stayed put on one planet, in the course of more than thirty solar revolutions I missed an event or two. Due to residency training, I was absent during my only sibling's wedding. I missed the funeral of one of my best friends from high school because it occurred on the same day as my cousin's wedding. These circumstances aside, I've made every attempt to be there -- virtually if not physically -- for marriages, births, deaths, anniversaries, chemotherapy, and just about every important happening in the world where my presence could make a difference. That is, until my presence was requested on a different world.

It's been a little over 300 days since I was physically present for anyone back on Earth. Now seems like a good time to acknowledge the things that I have missed.

Two friends began and completed chemotherapy. Survival looks promising! Good job, guys.
My only niece began school.
A colleague who spent her life removing cancers from women's reproductive systems was forced to stop working... because she has cancer.
My husband's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, turned 90.
My father was assaulted in his own home and had to undergo surgery to stabilize his arm.
My best friend since childhood had twins (Full-sized twins!)
On Monday, at the age of 88, my beautiful grandmother passed away peacefully in her sleep.

On Earth, we cannot always be there for these moments. Future space explorers will not be there for these moments. As much as we all accept this as part of the job, the fact that we cannot be there however much we wish to be might take a toll on future missions to asteroids, other planets, and other stars.

To mitigate the potential damage from this rift, we've begun studying how our presences back home (and our family's absence in space) can best be substituted. Based our experiences during the last 10 months, I can report that sending videos back-and-forth satisfies some basic needs. We can see and hear people. They can see and hear us. Everyone walks away knowing that everyone else basically OK. What else does one need, really?

Before yesterday, I couldn't have answered that question. Now it's clear that there's something more that we space travelers might need from time to time -- something that regular video cannot supply.

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The HI-SEAS crew goes on VR trips in the airlock: one of the few places in the hab where it's large enough (and quiet enough) to set up the system.

The news of my grandmother's passing arrived in the morning via an email from my mother. The crew had a full day of studies ahead (there's really no day off in space). Coincidentally, I was at the helm for that particular day's experiment. So I set to work getting everything ready. When my turn came, I hooked myself up to all of the gadgets and gizmos, started the recorder, and hit "Go" button on the 3D virtual reality system. I had done this before, many times. This time, however, the experience was different.

The city that appeared before me was one in which I used to live. By happenstance, the high-resolution 3D images were taken in the early summertime, which is taking place right now on that continent on Earth. They were taken around the same time of day when I was watching the video in the hab: early afternoon. The images were of places that I had visited frequently. In an unexpected twist, people walking past the camera rig would occasionally stop and peer at it. Sometimes, they would even point and gesture to it. I experienced the satisfying sensation that life was going along back at home just as it should have been -- not without me, but with me present as a sort of spectral spectator. Though you might not expect it, that part of the VR experience -- being noticed by people on Earth -- was the most moving. The visual cues told my brain, if not my mind, that I was home.

Being able to give future space explorers this experience on demand may be critically important. As our crew architect recently pointed out: if this were really Mars, we would have just arrived. Since mankind's smallest target area on Mars is a few kilometers at best, we would have spent much of these last few weeks running around looking for our stuff. Hopefully, we would have found all or most of it by now. Hopefully, all or most of it would be functional (or would be after some intrepid astronaut intervention). Then those first human visitors to Mars may discover, as we have, that missing Earth is not a regular occurrence. Here, the vistas here are grand and strange. We appreciate them for their beauty and oddity. The scenery is more than good enough. No scenery can substitute for people, though: we miss people and their lives, if not life on Earth, persay.

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Being gone for three years, not just one, means that each man and woman on that journey will miss everything about people's lives that we've missed, times three. In a way, it's a frustrating experience. There was nothing I could do when my father was attacked. It's also a sort of relief: because I could not be there, a friend of the family stepped up and is living with him now -- done and handled. In that way, being in space is both a sacrifice and a ticket to ride. I told my grandmother that I loved her and thanked her for being in my life over delayed video. That was hard. On the other hand, in my last memory of her, my grandmother is standing by her white sink washing green grapes. She's on her own two feet in her own home. She's smiling. I have that image of her, happy and healthy, because I was here, not there, for the end.

I've come to realize that like most of life, this whole space thing is a give and take. In a recent interview (by delayed audio signal) I was asked, "How are you handling the stress of isolation?" My reply was: "How are you all on Earth handling the stress of waking up every day, getting to work through traffic, racing to get everything done so that you can get the kids to soccer practice or play league volleyball with your friends, then shopping, cooking, and fixing the house?" I seem to recall that on Earth the demands on one's time and the places from which those demands might emanate are nearly limitless. Here, the demands on our bodies and minds are highly limited by the simple fact that we aren't on Earth. Our commute is remarkably short. Though we're busy growing the radishes under LEDs, there is no shopping or insuring to be done, no phones to answer, no snow to shovel off the driveway. I truly believe that the average stress in space and on Earth is equal in magnitude if differently distributed -- with one notable exception.

Difficulty with long distance -- really long distance -- arises when there's a part of our lives that cannot be assigned to someone else, or something particular about Earth that cannot be replicated in space. One of those non-replicable things is being there for your friends and family in their moments of triumph and grief. Another is the sheer mass of humanity. By virtue of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, while on Earth we know that there's someone nearby going through the exact same thing that we are going through. We might not know who they are or where they are, but we know that they are out there: by the dozens if not hundreds or thousands. The five other people here all know what it's like to look for a certain type of volcanic rock while experiencing intermittent radio failure. (Thankfully.) None of them are going through the loss that I'm going through right now. It's me alone. Or rather, it was. In an unexpected moment of relief, I stepped back into a familiar city on Earth and was suddenly surrounded by other people -- people who might be and are experiencing anything, from extreme joy to extreme defeat, loss and gain and everything in between. In spite of the distance, I was virtually there with them and they were there with me -- if only for a moment.

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We Must Not Accept an Algorithmic Account of Human Life
One remarkable development of twentieth century science is the discovery that both physical structures and the communication of ideas can be assembled on the basis of algorithms that make use of codes. The genetic code helps living organisms assemble the basics of other living organisms and guide their development. Verbal languages provide us with alphabets (with which we can assemble an infinity of words that name an infinity of objects, actions, relationships and events) and with grammatical rules that govern the sequencing of the words so as to construct sentences and stories that narrate events or explain ideas.

Many aspects of the assembly of natural organisms and of communication depend on algorithms and on coding, as do all aspects of computation as well as the enterprises of artificial intelligence and robotics. These solid and interesting facts, however, have given rise to the sweeping notion that natural organisms would be reducible to algorithms or fully explainable by algorithms.

The worlds of artificial intelligence, biology and even neuroscience are inebriated with this notion. The thoughtful historian Yuval Harari echoed it in a recent interview published in the The WorldPost. Asked to pick one idea that would prove most influential in the next 50 years, Harari responded, "It's definitely the algorithm" and added that current biology can be summarized in three words: "Organisms are algorithms." Not only that, biology and computer science are converging because the "basic insight that unites the biological with the electronic is that bodies and brains are also algorithms." The fact that "we can write algorithms artificially" enables the convergence.

Needless to say, I am not blaming Harari for voicing ideas that have gained currency in technology and science circles. I am only interested in the merit of the ideas and because ideas do matter, this is an opportunity to consider if they conform to scientific fact and how they fare in human terms. From my perspective, they are not scientifically sound, and they suggest a problematic account of humanity. Why so?

Saying that living organisms are algorithms is, in the very least, misleading and in strict terms, false.

Saying that living organisms are algorithms is, in the very least, misleading and in strict terms, false. Algorithms are formulas, recipes, enumerations of steps in the construction of a predicted result. As noted, living organisms, including human organisms, use code-dependent algorithms such as the genetic machinery. But while, to a certain extent, living organisms are constructed according to algorithms, they are not algorithms themselves. They are consequences of the engagement of algorithms. The critical issue, however, is that living organisms are collections of tissues, organs and systems within which every component cell is a vulnerable living entity made of proteins, lipids and sugars. They are not lines of code.

The idea that living organisms are algorithms helps perpetuate the false notion that the substrates of organism construction are not relevant. This is because embedded within the label "algorithm" is a notion of context and substrate-independence. Applying the same algorithm to new contexts, using different substrates, is presumed to achieve similar results. But this is simply not so. Substrates count. The substrate of life is organized chemistry, a servant to thermodynamics and the imperative of homeostasis, and to the best of our current knowledge, that substrate is essential to explain who we are. Why so?

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A model of the human brain constructed of wires and ports.

First, because the particular chemical substrate of life is necessary for the phenomena of feeling, and, in humans, reflection and elaboration on the experience of feelings is the basis for much that we hold as humanly distinctive and admirable, including moral and aesthetic judgments as well as the experience and notions of being and transcendence. While there is plenty of evidence that artificial organisms can be designed so as to operate intelligently and even surpass the intelligence of human organisms, there is no evidence to date that such artificial organisms can generate feelings without an actual living substrate (I note that the counterhypothesis, i.e. that certain designs might allow artificial organisms to simulate feelings, is well worth investigating).

In brief, there is no evidence that pure intellectual processes, which lend themselves well to an algorithmic account and which do not appear to be as sensitive to the substrate, can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human. Throw away the chemical substrate and you throw away feelings along with the values that humanistic cultures, from the axial ages forward, have been celebrating in the form of arts, religious beliefs, justice and fair governance. Once we remove suffering and flourishing, for example, there is no natural grounding for the logical conclusion that human beings deserve dignity. Of note, none of this implies that the higher functions of living organisms are not amenable to scientific investigation. They certainly are, provided the investigations take into account the living substrate and the complexity of the processes.

The implication of these distinctions is not trivial as we contemplate a new era of medicine in which the extension of human life will be possible by means of genetic engineering and the creation of human-artificial hybrids.

There is no evidence that pure intellectual processes can form the basis for what makes us distinctly human.

Second, the abundant presence of conscious feeling and creative intelligence in humans guarantees that the execution of the native algorithms can be thwarted. Our freedom to run against the impulses that the good or bad angels of our natures attempt to impose on us, is limited; but the fact remains that we can act against such impulses. The history of human cultures is in good part a narrative of our resistance to native algorithms by means of inventions not predicted by those algorithms. One can argue that all of these departures from native algorithms are in turn open to an algorithmic account. The scope of an algorithm may be expanded to capture a system at an arbitrary level of detail, but by then, what are the advantages of using the term algorithm?

Third, accepting an algorithmic account of humanity is the sort of reductionist position that often leads good souls to dismiss science and technology as demeaning and bemoan the passing of an age in which philosophy, complete with aesthetic sensibility and a religious response to suffering and death, made humans soar above the species on whose biological shoulders they were riding. But of course, denying the value of science as a reaction to problematic accounts of humanity is not acceptable either.

Science and philosophical inquiry can proceed side by side, not always in synchrony but often feeding off each other. Science needs to continue, in spite of the enthusiasts who reduce the sublime power of life to engineering and entrepreneurial successes, and in spite of the nervous Jeremiahs who are afraid that science will not honor the humanist traditions of the past. Both science, as honest knowledge-seeking, and philosophy, as serious debate and love of honest scientific knowledge, will not only endure but prevail.

Earlier on WorldPost:

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Juno, Jupiter And The Battery Dude
** HOO-RAY! JUNO ARRIVING AT JUPITER ON JULY 4th !!! **

What's all the jubilation about? Well, for one of the last people who touched the little spaceship's battery before it left the earth in 2011, it's a time for joyous celebration. That would be Mike Surline, a guy who knows batteries. He makes, breaks and tests them. Batteries are the power that makes rocket science go. Without the best-tested batteries, space vehicles would not be able to sustain long missions, like Juno's.

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Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey) said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, what is a battery? People may not consider the skills and time it takes to create one, or they may think of a battery as a vague, magic box. If the latter, Clarke might have likened Mike to a magician.

He performs his magic in a giant laboratory of the highest hi-tech nature. It's got all the bells & whistles and electronic gadgets that any battery guy or gal could wish for, including environmental test chambers, cabling, coolers, and crane operations. For Mike, it's like Christmas every day, opening up his boxes of tinker-toy tricks.

On Independence Day while Americans are enjoying barbecues and fireworks, Juno - the spacecraft designed by NASA and Lockheed Martin Corporation - will insert itself into polar orbit to study the composition, gravity and magnetic field of the solar system's largest planet. Juno's purpose is to uncover secrets about Jupiter's formation, including whether it has a rocky core, the amount of water present in the atmosphere, how its mass is distributed, and its ferocious winds. Mike and his band of battery experts will be looking forward to celebrating Juno as another success story in their team's long list.

A multi-million dollar spacecraft without battery power is simply several hundred pounds of junk. Today's interplanetary spacecraft require between roughly 300 watts and 2.5 kW of electrical power to supply all the computers, radio transmitters and receivers, motors, valves, thrusters, data storage devices, instruments, hosts of sensors and other devices. The batteries must weigh as little as possible and be able to sustain varying temperature extremes. So they're packed in boxes made of beryllium, a lightweight metal used in cell phones and aircraft.

Juno, on its 5-year cruise to Jupiter, will travel nearly two billion miles. "Mike's battery" will power the orbit insertion burn, on July 4th, to slow the spacecraft enough to allow capture into the planet's gravity. It will do two 53-day orbits before a subsequent burn in October that will lower it into a 14-day polar orbit.

In the polar orbit, the battery will power the infrared and microwave instrumentation to measure thermal radiation emanating from Jupiter's atmosphere. From this data, combined with that from previous missions, will come insight into the mysteries of the planet's origins.

Because Jupiter lacks a solid surface, Juno won't end up there, to live for eternity like a flag planted on the moon. It will be de-orbited and burned up in Jupiter's outer atmosphere to avoid any contamination, or impact with one of Jupiter's moons. However, Mike did admit that one of his batteries - he wouldn't say which - is now (or will be) out there in space somewhere, forever, with this message carved inside the box: "MIKE WAS HERE". How utterly cool is that?

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In addition to Juno, Mike has worked on the Mars Odyssey, Phoenix, Orion, Space-Based Infrared Radar, Joint Strike Fighter Raptor, Advanced High-Frequency and other military satellite programs. Although Juno was one of his most challenging, he said his favorite was the Odyssey - a Mars lander, one of the first to test for water on the Red Planet. In 2001 he worked on its power sequencer board, wiring components every day for nine months - and it worked, the very first time. Amazing!

Mike isn't the only rocket scientist in his family, a bunch of space cadets. His father worked as a manager on Titan rocket programs, the Space Shuttle, and before that, the first Mars lander, the Viking. His mother worked on satellite programs, warfighter tactical communications and space defense studies. Mike's step-father was a computer engineer on the first Apollo mission to the moon, as well as Venus Radar Mapper, and other rocketry and planetary science projects, including Viking. His uncle developed Orion rocket propulsion hardware and parts of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His brother-in-law supported enterprise data systems. Maybe the whole family is extra-terrestrial and they're trying to 'go home'.

Mike's mom said he started young in electronics, always tinkering in his room with wires and tiny radio or flashlight batteries. She would wake up in the night and see his light on and knew he was trying out some new experiment. Mom wished he would sleep more, like other boys, but didn't think much about his obsession - until he came home from high school one day saying a fellow student in auto mechanics had blown off a finger and lost an eye in an exploding battery accident. Because of that, she doesn't worry much about him now that he works with more complex batteries. He learned great appreciation and respect for battery safety.

Mike configures and tests all kinds, but primarily lithium batteries. I asked him why lithium ion batteries are so ubiquitous now. He said: "They're lighter, low maintenance, small, with high-energy density power that delivers more payload." Yes, we all need to deliver more payload - in our rockets, planes, cars, phones, computers, drones and personal robots!

Batteries were invented in 1800, and they're still a bit mysterious. They have their own "charisma" and eccentricities. Building these magic boxes of energy requires a person with a passion for detail and a brave soul, one who understands them. The payoff? That person will be thrilled to gaze into outer space and know their work is there, helping discover answers about our Last Frontier. Mike is all these things, including being a single parent of two boys for much of his demanding career. His mother is very proud of him, The Battery Dude.

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Why Every Society Needs a Cartman
South Park is on the threshold of its 20th season: what is the source of its staying power? As with most universal human behaviors, satire can be productively understood in light of the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors--in this case, the challenges presented by cooperation. One thing that distinguishes humans as a species is the degree to which we help each other. Our ancestors didn't just hunt and gather wild foods, they brought them back to camp and shared them. This behavior ensured that a person who had a run of bad hunting luck or couldn't go foraging due to sickness or injury would still get something to eat. Our ancestors also cooperated to build shelters, raise children, provide health care, engage in trade, arrange marriages, form political alliances, and share information. By pooling their labor, they reduced their risk of dying from hunger, illness, injury, exposure, and predation. In short, humans are designed to make a living by cooperating: our survival depends on being part of a society.

Thus, it's in everyone's interest to maintain harmony among their group members. Conflict jeopardizes group cohesion because, when two members fight, others take sides, and the group may fission. Fissioning reduces the size of the cooperative network, which in turn increases risk: the smaller your cooperative network, the fewer people you can call on in time of need. In ancestral environments, smaller groups would have been more vulnerable to starvation, predation, and attack. Alas, cooperation is difficult to sustain. Inevitably, someone will put their own interests before those of others, which incites anger and fighting. Our ancestors thus needed effective means of mitigating conflict.

Enter storytelling. In modern hunter-gatherer societies and, presumably, ancient human groups, storytelling is used as a means of discouraging antisocial behavior and consequent conflict. The Trickster character is a prime example: across forager cultures, he is widely regarded as a model of bad behavior. Lazy, stingy, and gluttonous, he always wants something for nothing. He thus uses deception rather than cooperation to accomplish his ends: he fools people into to helping him, but never returns the favor. Impulsive and irresponsible, he doesn't think about the possible consequences of his actions, which often end up hurting him and others. He is also callous and incorrigible: he never learns from his mistakes, never heeds warnings, and when others suffer as a result of his rash behavior, he doesn't care. Unscrupulous and exploitative to the point of being a sociopath, he uses people and will do anything to get what he wants. In short, Trickster is unremittingly selfish: he always puts his needs before those of others, and holds himself above the rules. In so doing, he perpetually jeopardizes the security of his fellow group members, thereby destabilizing the cooperative network. He is the embodiment of behaviors that tick people off and lead to conflict.

If this sounds familiar to South Park fans, it should: Eric Cartman is a modern incarnation of the trickster. Greedy, lazy, unscrupulous, and manipulative, Cartman cares only about himself and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. So why have we tuned in for twenty years to watch him?

The answer is social sanctioning. Trickster stories discourage antisocial behaviors by vividly modeling the bad things that happen to people who engage in them. Trickster is sanctioned using a variety of tactics, chief of which is ridicule: his tricks typically backfire on him, making him an object of scorn. Although seemingly mild, this punishment packs a big punch, because in forager societies people dread public disapproval. For example, as anthropologist Frederica de Laguna notes, the Dena people "are very sensitive to what others may say . . . [and] the unwritten laws of the people are enforced through the strength of public opinion." Shaming works because it's a veiled threat: it hints that, if the behavior doesn't stop, more forceful sanctions will follow. Sterner sanctioning takes the form of ostracism: when people discover that Trickster has been free riding, they punish him by refusing to cooperate with him anymore. In extreme cases, he's kicked out of the group. Because the sanctioning tactics used against Trickster mirror those used in real life, the genre serves as a means of moral strong-arming: "straighten up and fly right, or what happened to Trickster will happen to you." In hunter-gatherer societies, expulsion from the group is a death sentence. In modern environments, it bodes a friendless existence. No one likes Cartman: he survives socially by bullying people into associating with him.

Trickster stories--and satire in general--are an important means of policing society. If the audience bears in mind the consequences of Trickster's antisocial behavior, they will be less inclined to behave inappropriately themselves. Storytelling is thus used proactively to discourage proscribed behavior and lessen the risk of conflict. It's also used post hoc to discipline those who stray. Punishing transgressors is tricky because a person confronted with his/her crime may become angry and aggressive. Storytelling enables discipline to be effected non-confrontationally by making a character rather than the wrongdoer the target of judgement. A pointed story told in a public forum enables people to criticize the transgression without revealing the identity of the transgressor, which reduces the risk of conflict. David Sedaris uses this tactic in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. As he explains: "There was something liberating about writing a story about a squirrel and a chipmunk because I didn't have to worry about the chipmunk coming to me and saying, 'Thanks a lot for telling the world about me and that squirrel.'" The key to satire's effectiveness as a policing tactic is humor: Trickster's schemes typically backfire on him in comical fashion. His humiliation is thus served with a heaping helping of laughter, making the pill of shame easier to swallow for the target of the story, and reminding the rest of the audience to keep their inner Cartman in check, or they too might find themselves the butt of society's joke.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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SETI, Imagining Extraterrestrial Civilizations, and War
I've often thought it interesting that when SETI scientists imagine extraterrestrial civilizations, they usually think in terms of unified worlds that have one civilization. The image is very much unlike our world, in which we have multiple civilizations that are fractured and in conflict with other societies. The Brexit event of the past couple of days is a good example of just how fractured our world is as well as representing some solid data not in support of the idea that humans are becoming increasingly unified.

When we imagine other worlds, we tend to take a distant view and create images that reflect a fictionalized, romanticized representation of life right here on Earth. Rather than fractured worlds with many civilizations like the one on which we actually live, many SETI scientists think in terms of what I call the Star Trek Imaginary, in which each world forms a civilization equivalent to a geopolitical unit on Earth. In other words, we think of alien worlds as unified political states or countries.

There is a good chance that this is an inaccurate view of civilizations on other planets, but it still may be a useful way to think about extraterrestrial intelligence if only to deconstruct our assumptions about life on other worlds. Indeed, one way to use this image is to turn it around and think about Earth from the perspective of an alien world. This makes for an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose ET planted some sort of observational device near Earth, say, 6,000 years ago. Somehow, they had noticed that there seemed to be an emerging civilization and thought it would be interesting to study how things evolved. ET doesn't have a lot of time to spend on watching Earth and the observational device isn't sensitive enough to show all the nuances of political machinations throughout human history. So the data are limited in detail. The result is a wide-angle picture of Earth throughout history that gives a general sense of what cultural evolution on Earth is like. ET will have learned quite a bit, actually, about how humans evolve and form societies over time, but a lot of the detail will be left out. They probably won't get the nitty-gritties about the Brexit.

So what would such a device tell ET? As I thought about this, I realized there would be one overwhelming image ET would get about Earth. And it's an image we here--with our close-up picture of our own history--don't usually associate with civilization on this planet.

I think what ET might conclude is that Earth has been at war for about 5,000 years--pretty much non-stop. The first war in recorded history seems to have been in Mesopotamia around 2,700 BCE between Sumer and Elam, and from the outside it might look like it never stopped. Since that time, if one were to stand back a bit from Earth, there is a pretty good chance that warfare would be the dominant feature of human civilization. There is always war going on somewhere on Earth. It ebbs and flows in intensity. Sometimes it's regional; sometimes it covers most of the planet. But it is always there and it might look like one long war from an outside perch. If you didn't know all of the political and historical details, there would be no reason to assume that our history had been an endless string of wars rather than simply one really long one.

From our perspective, this would not be a very accurate picture. Different societies have had on-and-off periods of war and peace. And we don't tend to think about our civilization(s) as being characterized by a single war lasting 5,000 years, because we understand the geopolitical details in which there have been lots of wars over that time, not just one war. But if you look at Earth from the outside and treat human societies as a civilization, then it's probably a reasonable conclusion about us. From the external--or in anthropology what we would call etic--perspective, human civilization might appear to be based on and characterized by a single war that has spanned almost 5,000 years.

This raises the importance of seeing the difference between proximate and distant perspectives and the difficulties in imagining intelligent life and civilizations on other worlds when we don't have a lot of data to work with (or in our current situation, without any data at all). SETI scientists often tend to impose their own assumptions about intelligence and civilization on imagined extraterrestrial worlds and those assumptions are shaped by ideas about the way our world is that: 1) may not be empirically accurate, and 2) are unlikely to reflect how we would look to outsiders.

The devil is in the details, and we don't have any of those, since we have no evidence of alien intelligence. But even if we do get evidence sometime, we probably won't have much detail and we will need to be very careful to avoid imposing the Star Trek Imaginary--or any other set of assumptions--on what little data we receive. Standing back and trying to imagine what our world would look like to distant outsiders is a useful way of trying to control this tendency to imagine alien others in terms of romanticized images of ourselves.

Perspective is important. It may well be that characterizing our world as being at war for 5,000 years is accurate, but it isn't how we see ourselves and that, too, is an important piece of data about humans. Recognizing the potential disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how others might see us is a key component of trying to deflect, to the extent possible, our tendencies to infuse assumptions about intelligence and civilization drawn from our proximate understanding of and imagination about life on Earth into our speculations about intelligent life on other worlds.

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Weekend Roundup: When Politics Fails, Look to Unifiers Like Pope Francis and Yo-Yo Ma
When politics divides instead of unites, walls off instead of embraces, what, or who, can bind fractured societies? Spiritual authority and the arts step into the breach when political leaders fail.

Pope Francis has become, in effect, the planet's pastor and reconciler-in-chief, washing the feet of the poor and incarcerated, taking in refugees at the Vatican, meeting with Muslim clerics, venerating China's long civilizational heritage and declaring that climate change and inequality are moral issues. Above all, his humility challenges the example of power through the power of example, exhibiting a reverence for human dignity in all its diversity.

The cellist Yo-Yo Ma is the pope's spiritual cousin in this cause, sounding the healing chord of fellowship instead of enmity. More than a musician, he, too, is a guiding spirit who rises to the challenge of a world unraveling. His Silk Road Project, started in 1998, brings "the music of strangers" -- also the title of his just-released documentary -- together to show the common humanity of diverse traditions from around the globe.

The film is about art for life's sake, as Yo-Yo Ma likes to say. It doesn't shy away from political turmoil -- the Syrian civil war and refugee camps, the Iranian Revolution, China's Cultural Revolution -- that turns the lives of musicians, like everyone else, upside down, but shows how the human spirit perseveres in the face of tribulation. As one of the musicians says in "The Music of Strangers," the Silk Road Ensemble reveals the possibility of a profound correspondence behind differences -- and where there is possibility, there is hope.

There could be no more urgent message today than this. And no one puts it better than Yo-Yo Ma himself. "To be able to put oneself in another's shoes without prejudgment is an essential skill," he once told The WorldPost. "Empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections. These parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away. Empathy is the ultimate quality that acknowledges our identity as members of one human family."

The historic rupture of the Brexit vote this week, in which the "leave" camp closely defeated the "remain" camp, typifies the split societies we see today across Europe as well as in the U.S. and elsewhere. WorldPost Fellow Jesselyn Cook outlines how immigration and the fear of losing control of borders is a core concern of British voters, a reminder that empathy is just a starting point that is only a meaningful value when matched with a realistic capacity to integrate newcomers. World Reporter Charlotte Alfred outlines what's next for the U.K. after Brexit.

Writing from Paris, Geoffroy Clavel describes how the French National Front sees the Brexit vote as proof that the European Union will, and should, "disintegrate." And, indeed, as Anne Sinclair also writes from Paris, the Brexit is likely only the first in a series of defections from the European Union. Writing from Germany, Konstantin Kuhle argues that the EU must immediately take steps to reassure voters on the continent, including moving toward direct election of the EU Commission president. Howard Fineman worries that the Brexit vote presages the victory of Trump populism in the United States. In a losing appeal to voters ahead of the referendum, Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur who is in many ways the face of a globally-oriented Britain, warned that jobs and investment opportunities that depend on the link with Europe would be at risk if the U.K. left the EU.

Turning to another instance of political paralysis in another divided country, Guillermo Rodriguez reflects on the situation in Spain ahead of elections Sunday. "Spanish people are drained," he writes from Madrid. "It feels like Spain is the main character in the movie Groundhog Day: Everything starts fresh with each new round of elections."

Writing from Beirut, former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke sees all the hopeful agreements of recent months among Russia, the U.S. and Iran unwinding, particularly with respect to the Syrian cease-fire, which he now sees as having "failed." In a special series launched this week on female journalists in Afghanistan -- "Sahar Speaks" -- we profile 12 women and the challenges they've faced in that country's male-dominated culture. Writing from Bisada, Uttar Pradesh in India, Betwa Sharma chronicles the breakdown of decades of conviviality between Hindus and Muslims after a villager was lynched for allegedly slaughtering a cow.

Writing from Cape Town, South Africa, gay imam Muhsin Hendricks says that, after the Orlando massacre, it is time for Muslims to reassess their stance on sexual orientation: "The orthodox belief that homosexuality is a sin -- based on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah -- is what leads to the nuances of homophobia around the massacre in Orlando."

Writing from Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin and Rens Lee argue that Russia can play a key role alongside the U.S. and China in helping curb North Korea's nuclear program. A ruling is due soon from a tribunal under the aegis of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea on a territorial dispute over islands between the Philippines and China. China's high profile ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, argues the court has no proper jurisdiction, the issue should be resolved bilaterally and that China has no intention of "ruling the waves." Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian calls the case before the tribunal the "trial of the century." "What is at stake here," he says, "is no less than protecting global commons under the auspices of international law. The alternative is the tragedy of great power politics and the rule of the jungle in high seas."

Tensions also mounted further in the South China Sea this week when the U.S. sent two aircraft carriers to patrol the zone between China and the Philippines. Just when it is most needed, the region has lost one of its leading voices for restraint and reconciliation. Wu Jianmin, among China's most prominent senior diplomats and a partner in the Berggruen Institute's "Understanding China" dialogues, was killed this week in a car accident near Wuhan, sparking a debate over the direction of China's foreign policy.

"wu

Wu Jianmin (left) with Mohamed el-Erian (right) at the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council meeting in Paris, October, 2011. (Berggruen Institute)

"Recently, nationalism and populism have been expanding around the world, becoming a global phenomenon," Wu said in a speech on June 6. "....Nationalism has two connotations. First, love for your own country, which is not wrong. Second, exclusion of others and pushing the blame for your country's problems onto other countries. I am good, others are bad. This is problematic. ... Nationalism and populism are also very dangerous in China. Nationalism often flies under the banner of 'patriotism,' which is innocent. Populism can dress up as 'appealing on behalf of the people.' But both are very deceptive. We need to see that the essence of populism goes against reform, and the essence of nationalism goes against opening up."

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden ask whether China's heavy investment in South Sudan is "naked imperialism in pursuit of the country's vast oil reserves or a genuine effort to bring peace to help end a brutal conflict." This amazing video was taken by a drone flying around inside a Byzantine-era church in France. These dazzling photos display the diversity of Mexico's indigenous cultures.

Writing from Tambopata, Peru, Next Gen Scientist's Aaron Pomerantz discovers a remarkable collaboration between ants and butterflies in bamboo stalks in the remote Amazon jungle. In a separate video post, he also explains something we've all wondered about: how do butterflies create color in their wings? Finally, our Singularity series this week explores how understanding human learning can make artificial intelligence smarter.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

What? It's what NASA said - what are you thinking of?

From Acorns to bedrooms

Whichever way you look it's all exactly the same, boffins confirm

Also told: ‘Don't look at France... it's a nightmare'

And that's just one of last night's Ig Nobel Prizes

And Bill Gates approves

Flying death spotted in the Cotswolds, boffins move in for the kill

Tune in at 10:40PM UTC next Friday for a 'controlled crash'

Expect fireworks late in 2017

Antikythera mechanism shipwreck yields old bones

The best words in science: 'That's odd'

Keep Solar System Tidy message heeded despite plan for three probe dumps

Calibrating relationships between celestial objects

Apparently, it was designed to be 'tongue in cheek'

Top profs and R&D bod make plea to Parliament

Amazon CEO's rocket company reveals its orbit-and-beyond-capable boosters

... sexual selection, that is

Why it matters:

The nitty gritty:

But keep in mind:

What they're saying:

You'll want to know:

The bottom line:

Movement without energy? Redmond puts its money where its mouth is

Mars' layered rocks look just like the American southwest, says Yanquiphile NASA

Did space rocks bring us life? Just 7 years and we'll know!

'Anomaly' wasn't rocket engine's fault, he claims

Yersinia pestis fingered as slayer of 10,000 black death victims

Realistic tech or lazy plot device what do you think?

A Canadian case study

Measuring belonging

Implications for policymakers

Not just mankind: Ladies love 'em too, we're told

Chilling on 70°C comet, leg stuck in the air... Fancy a beer, friend?

'Tabby's Star' gets a friend and it's even stranger, but let's not do the 'alien megastructure' thing again okay?

Human guinea pigs to be subjected to more testing after arrival

Better late than never for Mars InSight and its thermo-hammer plan to drill 5 metres into Mars

Juno's joy of six in spaaaaace: half a dozen megabytes of data took 62 hours to download

Geology, space-style

Biomed brainboxes have already begun moving in

Secret until now, that is

When big media goes clueless about big data

That'll buff right out, no worries

Plucky climate-change probe fends off cosmic intruder

Stromatolites are evidence of changing chemistry on Earth

Set your watches for tomorrow's skylight extravaganza

Microgravity does little to life's secret sauce, experiment confirms

SONEAR sees 25-metre-plus rock when it was, well, so near

First real test for second-hand reusable Falcon

Mystery of the missing baryons leads to a surprising find

Fooling around with VLC systems

Show me the way to go Ohm

Settle, SETI-fans: one radio spike does not a civilisation make

An archaeological specialty

Finding objects from past cultures

Skills of a Ph.D. and an MBA

Downloads will take days

NASA to watch Musketeer relatives carefully

Telescope to enter new "Beyond" phase

Your mother was a punch card reader and your father smelt of static C libraries

Closest encounter with gas giant will see craft close to just 4,200km from cloud-tops

Miracle material bests Man of Steel, withstands incredible pressure, say eggheads

Children of Time features talking space spiders

NASA, China traffic jam on fourth rock from the sun

Only Cassini's been there since, V'ger 2 is now 15 light-hours away

Longest aircraft hits the deck during second test flight

Proxima b is a likely target for Starshot project

But freshly cut grass is the olfactory equivalent, right?

New observations don't contradict Martian wet patch theories, but dry them up a lot

Wait, there's more: it's also an accelerometer

But Deep Space Network brought her back online

For sale: Space station, several owners, billions of miles travelled

Vale Owen Bruce Slee, who helped our universe expand

All is forgiven, you gaffe-prone cyber-cooks. You're one of us

Don't drop that wrench, whatever you do

Bennu.... no, not a scientology overlord

Hospital combed for cause of sweet infection

An archaeologist and astrophysicist propose a new way of historic dating

NASA's bean-counters okay US$1.4 billion rock-munching space robot

'Boson X' related to dark matter?

Juno's joy of six in spaaaaace: half a dozen megabytes of data took 6² hours to download

Barton Aqueduct where heavy metal shifts H₂O

19^th century optics gets the 21^st century treatment