‘Yep, right there at No. 5 is a talking point about telling those present that he was actually listening to them. After what appear to be four questions he planned to ask those assembled, No. 5 is an apparent reminder for Trump to tell people, “I hear you.”

Even No. 1 is basically a reminder that Trump should empathize. “What would you most want me to know about your experience?” the card reads. So two-fifths of this card is dedicated to making sure the president of the United States assured those assembled that he was interested in what they had to say and their vantage points….’

Via Washington Post

His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming:

‘Andrew Yang, a well-connected New York businessman, … is mounting a longer-than-long-shot bid for the White House. Mr. Yang, a former tech executive who started the nonprofit organization Venture for America, believes that automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete — yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers. He says America needs to take radical steps to prevent Great Depression-level unemployment and a total societal meltdown, including handing out trillions of dollars in cash.

“All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign. In just a few years, he said, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.”

“That one innovation,” he continued, “will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”Alarmist? Sure. But Mr. Yang’s doomsday prophecy echoes the concerns of a growing number of labor economists and tech experts who are worried about the coming economic consequences of automation. A 2017 report by McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, concluded that by 2030 — three presidential terms from now — as many as one-third of American jobs may disappear because of automation….’

Via New York Times

‘Scientists from the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London showed that psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, makes people less likely to embrace authoritarian views like fascism and more connected with nature….’

Via Big Think

No excuse for silence?

‘In the United States alone, someone dies by suicide once every 13 minutes. For the longest time, there was a cloak of secrecy about the details of a death by suicide, but talking about suicide may be the best hope for stopping it, according to researchers.

Until recently, many religious leaders were not well-prepared to talk about suicide with their congregants. Now some clergy have become an important part of suicide prevention….’

Via NPR

A hint of a guess of a supposition:

‘It’s been a long time since it was first proposed, but now scientists appear to have finally found evidence of a weird quantum object called an “odderon“. “We’ve been looking for this since the 1970s,” says Christophe Royon of the University of Kansas (UK)….’

Via Big Think

‘…[B]y not reading the daily briefing, the president could hamper his ability to respond to crises in the most effective manner, intelligence experts warned….’

Via Washington Post

Every country gets the leader it deserves, and the stupidity of the American electorate in voting anti-intellectual will come back to bite them. 

‘We speak about the “Mueller probe” as a single entity, but it’s important to understand that there are no fewer than five (known) separate investigations under the broad umbrella of the special counsel’s office—some threads of these investigations may overlap or intersect, some may be completely free-standing, and some potential targets may be part of multiple threads. But it’s important to understand the different “buckets” of Mueller’s probe..

1. Preexisting Business Deals and Money Laundering…

2. Russian Information Operations…

3. Active Cyber Intrusions…

4. Russian Campaign Contacts…

and the big Kahuna,

5. Obstruction of Justice …’

Via Wired

‘A full-blown war with North Korea wouldn’t be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse….’

Via Vox

The case of a 13-year-old Oakland girl whose family has fought to continue care for her for more than two years after she was declared dead (in the face of complications of a tonsillectomy) raises questions about our definition of death, the medical establishment’s response to costly mistakes, and largely overlooked dimensions of the disparity in the healthcare of ethnic and religious minority patients. 

Interestingly, she began to menstruate several years into this state, a change mediated by a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. A condition called ischemic penumbra, proposed by some (but hardly generally accepted) might lead to a misdiagnosis of brain death in patients whose diminished but continuing cerebral blood flow could not be detected by standard tests, holding out the promise of some degree of recovery. Moreover, even if she was brain dead, is it necessarily the case that “the destruction of one organ is synonymous with death”? How similar is our notion of brain death to the concept embraced by the Nazis after the publication, in 1920, of a widely read medical and legal text called “Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Living”? 

If one did not take the issues in this case seriously, some of them have a strong flavor of black comedy. The girl’s family brought a malpractice suit against the Oakland Children’s Hospital where she had undergone her surgery, but the hospital is fighting the legal standing of a corpse to bring a lawsuit. The IRS has rejected mother’s tax return saying that one of the ‘dependents’ she had listed was dead.I couldn’t help thinking of the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. 

The case has provoked a so-called shadow effect in which a number of families, many of them from ethnic or racial minorities, have been going to court to prevent hospitals from turning off the ventilators of their loved ones declared brain-dead. One neurologist has done research on hundreds of cases of what he called “chronic survival” after brain death. When the director of the Center of Bioethics at Harvard, which had been instrumental in the consensus conference fifty years ago establishing the definition of brain death, began to refer to it as a ‘catastrophic brain injury’ instead of death, he prompted a backlash from, among others, transplant surgeons decrying the immorality of “…[putting] doubts in the minds of people about a practice that is saving countless lives.” There is even growing discussion of the morality of taking organs from such patients even if we do not believe them to be dead.

Via New Yorker

Happy Super Bowl Day:

‘Over at  The Intercept, Josh Begley, a data visualization artist, has posted a video entitled “Field of Vision – Concussion Protocol.” By way of introduction, he writes:
Since the season started, there have been more than 280 concussions in the NFL. That is an average of 12 concussions per week. Though it claims to take head injuries very seriously, the National Football League holds this data relatively close. It releases yearly statistics, but those numbers are published in aggregate, making it difficult to glean specific insights….’

Via Open Culture

Playing jazz can make you cooler under pressure:

‘A small study by Emily Przysinda of Wesleyan University suggests that the brains of jazz musicians react differently to unexpected events than the brains of classical musicians or non-musicians. It also supports previous findings that learning to play music at all improves creativity….

…The researchers suggest that the jazz musicians, who study a musical tradition that places a high value on improvisation and often uses strange chord structures, were well trained to expect the unexpected…’

Via Big Think

And what about listeners who prefer improvisational styles?

Steven Pinker at Davos:

‘…[P]olitical correctness may be responsible for feeding some of the most odious ideas out there, developed by tech-oriented loners who grow such thinking in isolation from the mainstream discussion.

Pinker pointed out that by treating certain facts as taboo, political correctness helped “stoke” the alt-right by “giving them the sense that there were truths the academic establishment could not face up to.” He said the alt-right feeds on overzealous political correctness, pushing back with wrong-headed ideas that develop in their own bubbles – ideas on differences between the genders or capitalist and communist countries or things like crime statistics among ethnic groups….’

Via Big Think

‘Determine the age of a ship’s captain if there [are] 26 sheep and 10 goats on the vessel….’

Via Distractify

Umair Haque writes:

‘When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society….’

Via Eudaimonia

Drug firms shipped 20.8M pain pills to WV town with 2,900 people:

‘Over the past decade, out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers to two pharmacies four blocks apart in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people, according to a congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee cited the massive shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone — two powerful painkillers — to the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, amid the panel’s inquiry into the role of drug distributors in the opioid epidemic.

“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., in a joint statement.

The panel recently sent letters to regional drug wholesalers Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, asking why the companies increased painkiller shipments and didn’t flag suspicious drug orders from pharmacies while overdose deaths were surging across West Virginia….’

Via West Virginia Gazette Mail

‘How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual….’

Via The Guardian

‘I really shouldn’t need [crampons] to get around in a city’s downtown area. I mean, shouldn’t we have heated sidewalks and roads by now? We don’t need an expensive solar-tile road to do it, although that would be cool. Iceland’s got a nifty geothermal snowmelt system that uses hot water to melt snow and ice on Reykjavik streets. The city of Holland, Michigan has a snowmelt system too. Sure, it would require digging up streets and putting in tubing to circulate hot water—but places with snowmelt systems still generally save a ton of money every year….’

Via Motherboard

The costs include not only the snow removal budget but the environmental impact of the plowing (fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emission from diesel plows, etc.), the cost of pavement damage from plowing, the environmental impact of road salt, and the costs of social harm from associated traffic accidents and pedestrian injuries. 

Westerners Aren’t Good At Naming Smells. But Hunter Gatherers Are : 

‘English and other Western languages have a real gap when it comes to describing smells. Hunter-gathers, on the other hand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract words for scents….’

Via NPR

The biggest threat of such a diet may not be to your pet but to you.

‘According to the Washington Post, [raw-meat-based diets, RMBDs] [are] the fastest growing trend among pet owners them in the US and other developed nations. The market has responded and is offering such choices at boutique and chain pet stores across the nation. But is such a diet good for your dog or cat? The results of a new study state you should not feed your pet a raw meat diet because the products associated with it are likely to carry bacteria or parasites. These findings were published in the journal Vet Record…

Escherichia coli (E. coli) was found on 80% of samples, and 23% had the type of E. coli that can cause kidney failure in humans. The researchers also found that 43% tested positive for listeria and 20% positive for salmonella. That’s not all. Two types of parasites were detected: 23% of samples tested positive for sarcocystis and 6% toxoplasma gondii. While the former mostly sickens farm animals, the latter can negatively affect human infants.

Toxoplasma gondii is also known to hurt cats and has been implicated in cases of mental illness among cat owners. Study authors told Time that the brands found in the Netherlands were “without a doubt similar” to those sold in the U.S. As a result, researchers say, such products should be labeled high risk.

Not only could these products get pets sick, they could affect their human owners through cross-contamination. Besides preparing food and food bowls on the counter or in the sink near dishes or utensils, a pet often licks its owner’s hands or face. What’s more, the owner has to handle the pet’s feces or things associated with it, so at many points throughout animal care, a person runs a risk of contracting a dangerous pathogen….’

Via Big Think

Why they are washing up on Japan’s shores:

‘Japanese police discovered another “ghost ship” washed up on its shores in mid-January. On the heels of 104 such ships in 2017, this wooden ship carried the corpses of seven men as it came ashore in the Ishikawa prefecture.

The men were carried badges with the likenesses of the North Korean leaders Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. The fleet of vessels as a whole is from North Korea, with people driven to undertake a very dangerous journey on turbulent seas….

Jeffrey Kingston from Temple University in Japan called the ghost ships “ “a barometer for the state of living conditions in North Korea — grim and desperate.”  …’

Via Big Think

No surprise. Who would want to come to this shithole country?

Via Bloomberg

‘A new study finds a strong relationship between armed conflict and the decline of Africa’s large animals….’

Via The Atlantic

As an antinuclear activist I was tortured by Peter Watkins’ terrifying 1965 War Games (banned from view for twenty years) and The Day After, (1983) but I had never heard of this:

‘In 1984 a bomb went off on British television.

That bomb was Threads, a well-researched TV movie about nuclear war. Unlike so many other movies, books, and television shows that deal with the subject of nuclear weapons, Threads showed what life was like for normal people on the ground during a nuclear war. It is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen on screen.

Threads traumatized an entire British generation. The BBC only aired it twice—once in 1984 then again in 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan—then put it in a vault for 20 years. When TBS aired it in the US in 1985, media mogul Ted Turner introduced it personally. “The more we know about what could happen, the less chance it is that it will happen,” the millionaire told Americans before airing the unsettling feature.

Despite its power and enduring relevance, Threads has always been tough to find outside of Britain. That’s about to change. On January 30, a restored Blu-ray and DVD will hit store shelves, complete with new interviews with the cast and crew….’

Via Motherboard

Who Ya Gonna Call?

‘Faced with some six-eyed slime-being rooting through your trash, or a spacecraft idling above your backyard (provided it’s not Elon Musk’s “nuclear alien UFO” again), who exactly would you think to call? And what would whoever you called do, when you called them?

…We reached out to dozens of agencies, everyone from NASA to the Center for Disease Control to the NYPD to find out who to call in such a situation, and what (if any) protocols are in place when these things are reported, and we came up mostly empty-handed—though the astronomers and independent institutes we spoke with did provide us with some hope. The US government might, at present, be grievously ill-prepared for first contact, but there are countless hobbyists and professionals keeping an eye on what’s happening up there….’

Via Gizmodo

‘The particulars surrounding how our memory works has baffled neuroscientists for decades. Turns out, it’s a very sophisticated process involving several brain systems. What about on the molecular level? Inside the brain, proteins don’t stick around longer than a few minutes. And yet, our memories can hang on for our entire lifetime.

Recently, an international collaboration of researchers from the University of Utah, the University of Copenhagen, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK, discovered something strange about a protein called Arc. This is essential to long-term memory formation. What they found was that it has very similar properties to how a virus infects its host. Their findings were published in the journal Cell.

In it researchers write, “The neuronal gene Arc is essential for long-lasting information storage in the mammalian brain, mediates various forms of synaptic plasticity, and has been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders.” They go on to say, “little is known about Arc’s molecular function and evolutionary origins.”

As a result of the study, researchers now believe that a chance encounter occurring hundreds of millions of years ago, led to Arc’s centrality in our memory function today. Assistant professor of neurobiology Jason Shepherd, Ph.D. of the University of Utah, led this research project. He’s dedicated himself to the study of the protein for the last 15 years…

Researchers were intrigued by the idea that a protein could behave like a virus and serve as the platform through which neurons communicate. What Arc does is open a window through which memories can become solidified. Without Arc, the window cannot be opened…..’

Via Big Think

‘Although previous research has shown that groups with smarter leaders perform better by objective measures, some studies have hinted that followers might subjectively view leaders with stratospheric intellect as less effective. Decades ago Dean Simonton, a psychologist the University of California, Davis, proposed that brilliant leaders’ words may simply go over people’s heads, their solutions could be more complicated to implement and followers might find it harder to relate to them. Now Simonton and two colleagues have finally tested that idea, publishing their results in the July 2017 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology….’

Via Scientific American

For you nostalgia buffs:

• January 20th: Trump Signs First Documents As President, Has Absolutely No Idea What He’s Doing
• Sean Spicer’s debut, 21 January 2017
• Travel ban chaos, 28 January 2017
• A prayer for Arnold, the Bowling Green massacre, 2 February 2017
• February 10th: Trump Gives Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe One Hell Of A Squeeze
• The baseless wiretapping claim, 4 March 2017
• March 31: Trump Gets Chased Out Of His Own Executive Order Signing By Questions About Michael Flynn
• April 12th: Trump Incorrectly Brags About Firing Missiles At Iraq Over Cake
• Spicer emerges from the bushes, 9 May 2017
• May 22nd: Melania Swats Donald’s Hand Away Because… Do We Need To Explain?
• Covfefe, 31 May 2017
• June 19th: Trump Brags To Panamanian President About Building Panama Canal… Over 100 Years Ago
• The 29-second handshake, 14 July 2017
• The Mooch: blink and you’ll miss him, 21 July 2017
• Trump talks politics with the Boy Scouts, 24 July 2017
• July 28th: Trump Endorses Police Brutality
• Blaming both sides, 15 August 2017
• September 20th: Trump Can’t Say Namibia
• October: President Trump’s Entire Reaction To Hurricane Maria Was Crazy
• Later in the day, President Trump helped to distribute aid by… launching paper towels like a t-shirt cannon? 
• November 27th: Trump Make ‘Pocahontas’ Jab At Event Honoring Native Americans
• The anti-Muslim retweets, 29 November 2017
• December 6th: Trump Slurs His Speech While Making Globally Condemned Announcement On Israel
• Stable genius, 6 January 2018
• January 12th 2018: Trump Asked ‘Are You Racist’ Immediately After Signing MLK Day Speech

Via Digg   and The Guardian

Here’s hoping this is the only year’s retrospective of Trump’s presidency we ever have to observe. 

‘Thinking about spaces in a more ‘Japanese’ way can open up new ways of organizing our lives and focusing on the relationships that matter to us. Building spaces that deepen relationships (wa), generate new knowledge (ba), connect to the world around us (tokoro), and allow moments of quiet and integration (ma) can enrich our experience of the world and that of those around us….’

Via Quartz

This Might Actually Change Your Driving Habits:

‘Think it’s okay to go just a few miles beyond the speed limit? Maybe think again….’

Via Digg

A small change in speed can dramatically increase the energy of a collision.

Search data shows that interest in Trump is waning:

‘The gravest threat to a ratings-thirsty creature such as President Donald Trump is the nightmare scenario of not being on everyone’s mind all the time. While the president remains the hottest topic in so many newsfeeds and the specter looming over so many, recent data shows that the hype around him has begun to die down over the past year….’

Via Salon

(Poor baby.)

Epidemic leads to early deaths:

‘Previous research has linked an epidemic of loneliness to early deaths across wealthy nations. The groundbreaking 2017 meta studies came to two important conclusions; greater social connection was associated with a 50% reduced risk of dying early and the effect of loneliness had an effect on the risk of dying younger equal to that of obesity….’

Via Quartz

Will You See Him Coming?

‘One day, very soon, your personal Donald Trump will come along. It’ll be all of the same tricks, only perfectly tailored to your beliefs and pent-up rage. He or she will be just as dishonest and as abrasive as the proverbial cat’s tongue on your genitals … but everything they say will go down smooth as butter….

They may not even be running for office. They may only want you to buy their book, or listen to their podcast. What matters is that you spot them before it’s too late. So, here’s how:…’

Via Cracked

‘…Long before the Google Arts and Culture app, which became the most downloaded mobile app over the weekend, art aficionados, dabblers, narcissists and soul searchers pondering a cosmic connection to distant humans have been searching for their art twins, a long-gone, sometimes fictional or unknown doppelgänger encased in oil, sculpture or ceramics.

Some set out specifically to find their twin, in an engaging pastime that gives museum visits a new focus. Others, like the Duffins, have stumbled on theirs as they wander.

As anyone who regularly looks at a social media feed knows by now, millions more need never leave home or cross a border to find that uniquely familiar face on some obscure etching. They just upload a selfie and let technology do the sleuthing….’

Via New York Times (thanks, abby)

Combating addiction:

‘Tristan Harris a former “design ethicist” at Google, says today’s candy colored interfaces are addictive. One way to make your phone less appealing, it to make the display grayscale….’

Via Boing Boing

‘There’s a fascinating linguistic fight brewing in Kazakhstan, due to the president’s decision to adopt a new alphabet for writing their language, Kazakh.

The problem? It’s got too many apostrophes!

For decades, Kazakhs have used the Cyrillic alphabet, which was imposed on them by the USSR back in the 30s. Now that Kazakhstan has started moving away from Russia — including making Kazakh more central in education and public life — the president decided he wanted to adopt a new alphabet, too. He wanted it based on the Latin one.

But! Kazakh has many unique sounds that can’t be easily denoted using a Latin-style alphabet.

Kazakhstan’s neighbors solved that problem by following the example of Turkey, where they use umlauts and phonetic symbols. But Kazkhstan’s president didn’t want that — and instead has pushed for the use of tons of apostrophes instead.

Kazakhstan’s linguists intellectuals think this is nuts…’

Via Boing Boing

Hint: not the same as putting you to sleep:

‘inhibits “communication between neurons across the entire brain in a systematic way that differs from just being asleep. In this way it is very different than a sleeping pill.”…’

Via Big Think

“…A massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

‘Roth, when asked if he could have predicted today’s political and cultural landscape responds that, “No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.” He adds, “How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint!”…’

Via Salon

“One billionaire president in a decade is going to be plenty for us”

‘While plenty of people have evinced a belief that delivering a single speech qualifies Oprah to be president (presumably with Dr Oz as Surgeon General and history’s smoothest selljob for invading other countries on flimsy pretenses), the young, motivated Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic party are a lot less enthusiastic.

As Justice Democrats director Corbin Trent says, “From our perspective as an organization, part of what we’re trying to do is create paths to high office that don’t run through the billionaire class. One billionaire president in a decade is going to be plenty for us.”…’

Via Boing Boing

“Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off).”

‘…The moment Alice arrives in Wonderland, she goes through a series of strange metamorphic changes, becoming larger or smaller after ingesting certain foods and liquids. These sensations are also experienced by individuals with a certain medical condition termed Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS).

AIWS was first described in 1955 by a British psychiatrist Dr. John Todd, who noticed that many of his younger patients experienced distortions in the size of objects or body parts (metamorphopsia) as a result of their migraines. He noted a strong association between these symptoms and migraines, and determined that AIWS may constitute a rare ‘migraine variant’. In fact, Lewis Carroll himself is reported to have suffered from migraines and manifested his experiences in his writing….’

Via Neuroscience News

Explosive Stimulation (ES):

‘In ES, a small stimulus can lead to a dramatic synchronized reaction in the network, as can happen with a power grid failure (that rapidly turns things off) or a seizure (that rapidly turns things on). This phenomenon was, until recently, studied in physics rather than medicine. Researchers say it’s a promising avenue to explore in the continued quest to determine how a person develops fibromyalgia.

“As opposed to the normal process of gradually linking up different centers in the brain after a stimulus, chronic pain patients have conditions that predispose them to linking up in an abrupt, explosive manner,” says first author UnCheol Lee, Ph.D., a physicist and assistant professor of anesthesiology at Michigan Medicine. These conditions are similar to other networks that undergo ES, including power grids, Lee says….’

Via Neuroscience News

“There’s been concern that’s been expressed on both sides of the aisle.”

‘Questions about Donald Trump’s mental fitness have dogged him since he entered office last year. And lately his Twitter threats about having a bigger and more powerful “nuclear button” than the North Korean regime, and Michael Wolff’s dishy new book depicting him as erratic and impulsive, have renewed the push to do something about a seemingly out-of-control president.

The only legal mechanism that exists to remove a sitting president from office is the 25th Amendment. Ratified after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the amendment was created to allow the vice president to take over if a president became severely physically or mentally incapacitated. In the era of Trump, it’s being talked about as a way to remove him if there are enough concerns about his mental fitness.

To do that, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet would have to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office….’

Via Vox

Women are chimeras, with genetic material from both their parents and children. Where does that leave individual identity?

‘Within weeks of conception, cells from both mother and foetus traffic back and forth across the placenta, resulting in one becoming a part of the other. During pregnancy, as much as 10 per cent of the free-floating DNA in the mother’s bloodstream comes from the foetus, and while these numbers drop precipitously after birth, some cells remain. Children, in turn, carry a population of cells acquired from their mothers that can persist well into adulthood, and in the case of females might inform the health of their own offspring. And the foetus need not come to full term to leave its lasting imprint on the mother: a woman who had a miscarriage or terminated a pregnancy will still harbour foetal cells. With each successive conception, the mother’s reservoir of foreign material grows deeper and more complex, with further opportunities to transfer cells from older siblings to younger children, or even across multiple generations….’

Via Aeon

Correcting misconceptions about the 1918 flu pandemic:

‘This year marks the 100th anniversary of the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Between 50 and 100 million people are thought to have died, representing as much as 5 percent of the world’s population. Half a billion people were infected.

Especially remarkable was the 1918 flu’s predilection for taking the lives of otherwise healthy young adults, as opposed to children and the elderly, who usually suffer most. Some have called it the greatest pandemic in history.

The 1918 flu pandemic has been a regular subject of speculation over the last century. Historians and scientists have advanced numerous hypotheses regarding its origin, spread and consequences. As a result, many of us harbor misconceptions about it….’

Via The Conversation

“If Trump lies during this interview, he will be guilty of a felony.”

‘President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he would testify under oath about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. But now it looks like Trump’s lawyers are worried about a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller — and are seeking ways to avoid it….’

Via Vox

The black kite (pictured, an animal at Madagascar’s Tsimbazaza Zoo) is one of the birds thought to spread fire in Australia.

‘Australia’s indigenous peoples have long observed “firehawks” spreading wildfires throughout the country’s tropical savannas….’

Via National Geographic

‘The ozone hole feels like the quintessential ‘80s problem, but unlike car phones and mullets, it remains relevant in a number of ways. For starters, it’s still there, chilling over Antartica. More importantly, it’s slowly healing, and a new study offers some of the best evidence yet that sound environmental policy is responsible.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the world adopted the Montreal Protocol, a landmark treaty banning the use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But despite a firm scientific understanding of the link between CFCs and ozone depletion, it’s been tough to tell how much of a success the protocol was, because the ozone hole didn’t start showing signs of recovery until a few years back….’

Via Earther.com

(It’s Very Bad News):

‘As the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just explained, cacao plants are on the road to becoming extinct by 2050.

In essence, climate change is going to suck far more moisture out of soil and plants in Africa.

There probably won’t be enough rainfall to offset this sucking.

That will drive cacao farms — which are mostly in West Africa — up the mountains. There, though, the conditions aren’t ideal. And much of the mountain areas are already designated as wildlife preserves.

We, the chocolate lovers of the world, are likely doomed….’

Via Inc.com

…Or shaking it in disbelief:

‘The intriguing advertisements were compiled by All That Is Interesting and range from confusing to controversial, from hilarious to offensive. Yet, they are curious to scroll through, as they reveal past-time trends and attitudes which were socially acceptable just a handful of decades ago….’

Via The Mind Unleashed

I have a different take on this. Instead of showcasing how far we’ve come in only a few decades, I see these as testimony to how primitive and backward we still are.