Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: Culture
The pictures from my grandson.
My grandson, Morten, is quite an accomplished photographer. He uses my son’s previous camera, a Lumix DMC G7. Morten is fourteen. These photographs are locations in Southern England.
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Beautiful, Stunning, and Perfect.
It’s stating the obvious but all the above photographs are Copyright 2025 Morten Ronning, and All Rights Are Reserved.
Amazing what science can find out.
But while the science is brilliant the social implications are not so good. Read on!
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Ted Powers, University of California, Davis
An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a billion-dollar pharmaceutical success story. Yet the history told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics that made its discovery possible.
Named after the island’s Indigenous name, Rapa Nui, the drug rapamycin was initially developed as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ transplant rejection and to improve the efficacy of stents to treat coronary artery disease. Its use has since expanded to treat various types of cancer, and researchers are currently exploring its potential to treat diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases and even aging. Indeed, studies raising rapamycin’s promise to extend lifespan or combat age-related diseases seem to be published almost daily. A PubMed search reveals over 59,000 journal articles that mention rapamycin, making it one of the most talked-about drugs in medicine.
At the heart of rapamycin’s power lies its ability to inhibit a protein called the target of rapamycin kinase, or TOR. This protein acts as a master regulator of cell growth and metabolism. Together with other partner proteins, TOR controls how cells respond to nutrients, stress and environmental signals, thereby influencing major processes such as protein synthesis and immune function. Given its central role in these fundamental cellular activities, it is not surprising that cancer, metabolic disorders and age-related diseases are linked to the malfunction of TOR.
Despite being so ubiquitous in science and medicine, how rapamycin was discovered has remained largely unknown to the public. Many in the field are aware that scientists from the pharmaceutical company Ayerst Research Laboratories isolated the molecule from a soil sample containing the bacterium Streptomyces hydroscopicus in the mid-1970s. What is less well known is that this soil sample was collected as part of a Canadian-led mission to Rapa Nui in 1964, called the Medical Expedition to Easter Island, or METEI.
As a scientist who built my career around the effects of rapamycin on cells, I felt compelled to understand and share the human story underlying its origin. Learning about historian Jacalyn Duffin’s work on METEI completely changed how I and many of my colleagues view our own field.
Unearthing rapamycin’s complex legacy raises important questions about systemic bias in biomedical research and what pharmaceutical companies owe to the Indigenous lands from which they mine their blockbuster discoveries.
The Medical Expedition to Easter Island was the brainchild of a Canadian team comprised of surgeon Stanley Skoryna and bacteriologist Georges Nogrady. Their goal was to study how an isolated population adapted to environmental stress, and they believed the planned construction of an international airport on Easter Island offered a unique opportunity. They presumed that the airport would result in increased outside contact with the island’s population, resulting in changes in their health and wellness.
With funding from the World Health Organization and logistical support from the Royal Canadian Navy, METEI arrived in Rapa Nui in December 1964. Over the course of three months, the team conducted medical examinations on nearly all 1,000 island inhabitants, collecting biological samples and systematically surveying the island’s flora and fauna.
It was as part of these efforts that Nogrady gathered over 200 soil samples, one of which ended up containing the rapamycin-producing Streptomyces strain of bacteria.
It’s important to realize that the expedition’s primary objective was to study the Rapa Nui people as a sort of living laboratory. They encouraged participation through bribery by offering gifts, food and supplies, and through coercion by enlisting a long-serving Franciscan priest on the island to aid in recruitment. While the researchers’ intentions may have been honorable, it is nevertheless an example of scientific colonialism, where a team of white investigators choose to study a group of predominantly nonwhite subjects without their input, resulting in a power imbalance.
There was an inherent bias in the inception of METEI. For one, the researchers assumed the Rapa Nui had been relatively isolated from the rest of the world when there was in fact a long history of interactions with countries outside the island, beginning with reports from the early 1700s through the late 1800s.
METEI also assumed that the Rapa Nui were genetically homogeneous, ignoring the island’s complex history of migration, slavery and disease. For example, the modern population of Rapa Nui are mixed race, from both Polynesian and South American ancestors. The population also included survivors of the African slave trade who were returned to the island and brought with them diseases, including smallpox.
This miscalculation undermined one of METEI’s key research goals: to assess how genetics affect disease risk. While the team published a number of studies describing the different fauna associated with the Rapa Nui, their inability to develop a baseline is likely one reason why there was no follow-up study following the completion of the airport on Easter Island in 1967.
Omissions in the origin stories of rapamycin reflect common ethical blind spots in how scientific discoveries are remembered.
Georges Nogrady carried soil samples back from Rapa Nui, one of which eventually reached Ayerst Research Laboratories. There, Surendra Sehgal and his team isolated what was named rapamycin, ultimately bringing it to market in the late 1990s as the immunosuppressant Rapamune. While Sehgal’s persistence was key in keeping the project alive through corporate upheavals – going as far as to stash a culture at home – neither Nogrady nor the METEI was ever credited in his landmark publications.
Although rapamycin has generated billions of dollars in revenue, the Rapa Nui people have received no financial benefit to date. This raises questions about Indigenous rights and biopiracy, which is the commercialization of Indigenous knowledge.
Agreements like the United Nations’s 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples aim to protect Indigenous claims to biological resources by encouraging countries to obtain consent and input from Indigenous people and provide redress for potential harms before starting projects. However, these principles were not in place during METEI’s time.
Some argue that because the bacteria that produces rapamycin has since been found in other locations, Easter Island’s soil was not uniquely essential to the drug’s discovery. Moreover, because the islanders did not use rapamycin or even know about its presence on the island, some have countered that it is not a resource that can be “stolen.”
However, the discovery of rapamycin on Rapa Nui set the foundation for all subsequent research and commercialization around the molecule, and this only happened because the people were the subjects of study. Formally recognizing and educating the public about the essential role the Rapa Nui played in the eventual discovery of rapamycin is key to compensating them for their contributions.
In recent years, the broader pharmaceutical industry has begun to recognize the importance of fair compensation for Indigenous contributions. Some companies have pledged to reinvest in communities where valuable natural products are sourced. However, for the Rapa Nui, pharmaceutical companies that have directly profited from rapamycin have not yet made such an acknowledgment.
Ultimately, METEI is a story of both scientific triumph and social ambiguities. While the discovery of rapamycin has transformed medicine, the expedition’s impact on the Rapa Nui people is more complicated. I believe issues of biomedical consent, scientific colonialism and overlooked contributions highlight the need for a more critical examination and awareness of the legacy of breakthrough scientific discoveries.
Ted Powers, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Davis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Ted Powers explains in the last paragraph: “Ultimately, METEI is a story of both scientific triumph and social ambiguities.” Then goes on to say: “I believe issues of biomedical consent, scientific colonialism and overlooked contributions highlight the need for a more critical examination and awareness of the legacy of breakthrough scientific discoveries.”
If only it was simple!
I am very grateful for being given permission to republish these photographs.
They are from the website capturetheatlas.com and the photographer concerned is Dan Zafra.
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These photographs are perfect. The lighting, the landscape, the setting; just brilliant.
Dan Zafra is an artist!
Finally, we are at the shortest day of the year: the Winter Solstice.
…. with a mathematical function!
This is another republication of a George Monbiot post. The title of his post is Total Futility Rate.
It is another great article!
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Posted on15th December 2025
Let’s focus our campaigning on things we can actually change.
By George Monbiot, published as a BlueSky thread, 15th December 2025
Because the issue of population change is so widely misunderstood, I’ll seek to lay it out simply. This note explains why there is almost nothing anyone can do to change the global population trajectory, both as numbers rise, then as they fall.
The residual rise is due to:
A. The birth rate 60-100 years ago, which created a larger current base population. This means more children being born even as birth rates are in radical decline. The global total fertility rate, by the way, is now 2.2, just above the replacement rate of 2.1.
B. Infant mortality has declined very fast and longevity has risen very fast. Again, there’s nothing you can do about either of those things and, I hope, nothing you would want to.
All women should have total reproductive freedom and full access to modern birth control. Because it’s a fundamental right. Not because old men on other continents want them to have fewer children. Even if total reproductive freedom became universal now, it would scarcely nudge the curve, due to the factors mentioned above.
Before long, people will be fretting instead about the downwave, a very rapid decline in populations as the impact of 60+ years of falling birth rates overtakes the effects mentioned above. There’s almost nothing we can do about that either. It’s about as locked in as any human behaviour can be. As the opportunity costs of childcare rise (i.e. as prosperity increases), the birth rate declines.
Of course, if economic and social life collapsed, the process might go into reverse, and birth rates could be expected to rise again. But is that really what you want? For my part, I’m heartily sick of people who think collapse is the answer to anything.
In the short run, we can survive the decline in wealthy countries by reopening the door to immigrants, which would also offer sanctuary to people fleeing from the climate breakdown and conflict we’ve caused overseas. Two wins, in other words. In the long run, we’ll steadily shuffle away.
Whether you think that’s good or bad will not affect the outcome. I see demographic change as an underlying factor, like gravity, we simply have to adapt to as well as we can. If you want to pick a fight with a mathematical function, be my guest. But it seems to me as if you’re wasting your time.
But surely there’s no harm in it? Surely we can seek, however hopelessly, to change the population trajectory while also campaigning against environmental breakdown, inequality, injustice? Some people who worry about population do. But in my experience, most fixate on population to the exclusion of other issues.
Something must be done about them breeding too fast, rather than us consuming too fast. All too often, residual population growth is used as a scapegoat to shift blame from rich-world impacts, which means that the people in places where growth is still occurring are themselves scapegoated. The result, broadly speaking, is wealthy white people pointing the finger at much poorer Black and Brown people and saying, “You’re the problem.” It’s more than a distraction, it’s a grim and sometimes racist alternative to effective action. It’s an excuse for inaction.
So yes, do both if you want to, while being aware that one activity is useful and the other is futile. But be aware that for most population obsessives, it’s either/or, and is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.
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If you read this you will understand why Mr Monbiot explains clearly the changes in the global demographics: That the global population is falling. My own guess is that in the lifespans of those who today are in their teens, the global population will be remarkably lower. I can’t forecast the changes that will bring about but I’m certain they will be significant.
George’s last point is key “(It) is used to avoid moral responsibility and effective citizenship.“
Speaks on BBC Radio 4 this week.
Let me offer you Rebecca Stott’s website.
Now I am going to republish that site because it is the only way I can think of to spread the word more widely.
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Rebecca also writes for radio. She has been a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio Four over the years.
Her radio essay ‘Reflections on My Mother’s Kenwood Mixer’, a homage to her mother’s gritty resilience in times of trouble, promoted scores of people on Twitter and Facebook to share stories about Kenwoods and their own steely mothers. Her essay ‘On Waiting’, tells the story of being marooned with her daughters at dusk in a bus-stop in remote Norfolk during a Covid lockdown. Her essay ‘House Clearing’ tells the story of the strangeness of dismantling her mother’s house after she had moved into a carehome. And her final essay for the programme, ‘On Migration’, describes an astonishing ten days in which hundreds of wild geese flew across the skies of her home town, as well the story of the great philosopher Aristotle study of migrating birds whilst himself a migrant in flight for his life on the island of Lesbos.
You’ll find a link to Rebecca’s Private Passions episode here too. A kind of Desert Island Discs without the Desert Island…. and with the extraordinary composer Michael Berkeley in the interview seat.
Also here is her five-part series commissioned by Radio Four in 2025 called Beautiful Strangeness. You can find the link below.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fv7z/episodes/player
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Being the age I am, Rebecca’s Beautiful Strangeness programmes spoke to me in a way that I find difficult to put into words but nonetheless the series did.
Perfect!
I’m indebted to George Monbiot for this article, and ‘Tolly’ as a nickname for Iain Tolhurst.
Many articles from people that I follow online pass through my ‘inbox’.
But there was something special about a recent article by George Monbiot that was published in the Guardian on December 5th and I have great pleasure in republishing it here, with George’s permission.
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Posted on 7th December 2025
A eureka moment in the pub could help transform our understanding of the ground beneath our feet.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th December 2025
It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and remarkable thing: a eureka moment.
For the past three years, I’d been struggling with a big and frustrating problem. In researching my book Regenesis, I’d been working closely with Iain Tolhurst (Tolly), a pioneering farmer who had pulled off something extraordinary. Almost everywhere, high-yield farming means major environmental harm, due to the amount of fertiliser, pesticides and (sometimes) irrigation water and deep ploughing required. Most farms with apparently small environmental impacts produce low yields. This, in reality, means high impacts, as more land is needed to produce a given amount of food. But Tolly has found the holy grail of agriculture: high and rising yields with minimal environmental harm.
He uses no fertiliser, no animal manure and no pesticides. His techniques, the result of decades of experiment and observation, appear to enrich the crucial relationships between crops and microbes in the soil, through which soil nutrients must pass. It seems that Tolly has, in effect, “trained” his soil bacteria to release nutrients when his crops require them (a process called mineralisation), and lock them up when his crops aren’t growing (immobilisation), ensuring they don’t leach from the soil.
So why the frustration? Well, Tolly has inspired many other growers to attempt the same techniques. Some have succeeded, with excellent results. Others have not. And no one can work out why. It’s likely to have something to do with soil properties. But what?
Not for the first time, I had stumbled into a knowledge gap so wide that humanity could fall through it. Soil is a fantastically complex biological structure, like a coral reef, built and sustained by the creatures that inhabit it. It supplies 99% of our calories. Yet we know less about it than any other identified ecosystem. It’s almost a black box.
Many brilliant scientists have devoted their lives to its study. But there are major barriers. Most soil properties cannot be seen without digging, and if you dig a hole, you damage the structures you’re trying to investigate. As a result, studying even basic properties is cumbersome, time-consuming and either very expensive or simply impossible at scale. To measure the volume of soil in a field, for example, you need to take hundreds of core samples. But as soil depths can vary greatly from one metre to the next, your figure relies on extrapolation. This makes it very hard to tell whether you’re losing soil or gaining it. Measuring bulk density (the amount of soil in a given volume, which shows how compacted it might be), or connected porosity (the tiny catacombs created by lifeforms, a crucial measure of soil health), or soil carbon – at scale – is even harder.
So farmers must guess. Partly because they cannot see exactly what the soil needs, many of their inputs – fertilisers, irrigation, deep ploughing – are wasted. Roughly two-thirds of the nitrogen fertiliser they apply, and between 50% and 80% of their phosphorus, is lost. These lost minerals cause algal blooms in rivers, dead zones at sea, costs for water users and global heating. Huge amounts of irrigation water are also wasted. Farmers sometimes “subsoil” their fields – ploughing that is deep and damaging – because they suspect compaction. The suspicion is often wrong.
Our lack of knowledge also inhibits the development of a new agriculture, which may, as Tolly has done, allow farmers to replace chemical augmentation with biological enhancement.
So when I came to write the book, I made a statement so vague that it reads like an admission of defeat: we needed to spend heavily on “an advanced science of the soil”, and use it to deliver a “greener revolution”. While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme, exploring the barren regolith there. What we needed, I argued, is an Earth Rover programme, mapping the world’s agricultural soils at much finer resolution.
I might as well have written “something must be done!” The necessary technologies simply did not exist. I sank into a stygian gloom.
At the same time, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, then a professor of geophysics at the University of Oxford, was grappling with a different challenge. Seismology is the study of waves passing through a solid medium. Thanks to billions from the oil and gas industry, it has become highly sophisticated. Tarje wanted to use this powerful tool for the opposite purpose – ecological improvement. Already, with colleagues, he had deployed seismology to study elephant behaviour in Kenya. Not only was it highly effective, but his team also discovered it could identify animal species walking through the savannah by their signature footfall.
By luck we were both attached, in different ways, to Wolfson College, Oxford, where we met in February 2022. I saw immediately that he was a thoughtful man – a visionary. I suggested a pint in The Magdalen Arms.
I explained my problem, and we talked about the limits of existing technologies. Was seismology being used to study soil, I asked. He’d never heard of it. “I guess it’s not a suitable technology then?” No, he told me, “soil should be a good medium for seismology. In fact, we need to filter out the soil noise when we look at the rocks.” “So if it’s noise, it could be signal?” “Definitely.”
We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?
Over the next three days, Tarje conducted a literature search. Nothing came up. I wrote to Prof Simon Jeffery, an eminent soil scientist at Harper Adams University, whose advice I’d found invaluable when researching the book. I set up a Zoom call. He would surely explain that we were barking up the wrong tree.
Simon is usually a reserved man. But when he had finished questioning Tarje, he became quite animated. “All my life I’ve wanted to ‘see’ into the soil,” he said. “Maybe now we can.” I was introduced to a brilliant operations specialist, Katie Bradford, who helped us build an organisation. We set up a non-profit called the Earth Rover Program, to develop what we call “soilsmology”; to build open-source hardware and software cheap enough to be of use to farmers everywhere; and to create, with farmers, a global, self-improving database. This, we hope, might one day incorporate every soil ecosystem: a kind of Human Genome Project for the soil.
We later found that some scientists had in fact sought to apply seismology to soil, but it had not been developed into a programme, partly because the approaches used were not easily scalable.
My role was mostly fixer, finding money and other help. We received $4m (£3m) in start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund. This may cause some discomfort, but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want. We also got a lot of pro-bono help from the law firm Hogan Lovells.
Tarje, now at the University of Exeter, and Simon began assembling their teams. They would need to develop an ultra-high-frequency variant of seismology. A big obstacle was cost. In 2022, suitable sensors cost $10,000 (£7,500) apiece. They managed to repurpose other kit: Tarje found that a geophone developed by a Slovakian experimental music outfitworked just as well, and cost only $100. Now one of our scientists, Jiayao Meng, is developing a sensor for about $10. In time, we should be able to use the accelerometers in mobile phones, reducing the cost to zero. As for generating seismic waves, we get all the signal we need by hitting a small metal plate with a welder’s hammer.
On its first deployment, our team measured the volume of a peat bog that had been studied by scientists for 50 years. After 45 minutes in the field, they produced a preliminary estimate suggesting that previous measurements were out by 20%. Instead of extrapolating the peat depth from point samples, they could see the wavy line where the peat met the subsoil. The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous.
We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.
Eventually, we hope, any farmer anywhere, rich or poor, will be able to get an almost instant readout from their soil. As more people use the tools, building the global database, we hope these readouts will translate into immediate useful advice. The tools should also revolutionise soil protection: the EU has issued a soil-monitoring law, but how can it be implemented? Farmers are paid for their contributions “to improve soil health and soil resilience”, but what this means in practice is ticking a box on a subsidy form: there’s no sensible way of checking.
We’re not replacing the great work of other soil scientists but, developing our methods alongside theirs, we believe we can fill part of the massive knowledge gap. As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up.
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George Monbiot puts his finger precisely on the point of his article: “While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme.“
An incredible fact, as in the truth, that almost nobody will accept.
Until the 22nd November, 2025, that is last Saturday, I believed this lie. A lie that spoke of the dangers, the hazards, the imminent end of the world as I believed it; as in Climate Change!
Very few of you will change your minds, of that I’m sure.
Nonetheless, I am going to republish a long article that was sent to me by my buddy, Dan Gomez.
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Latest Science Further Exposes Lies About Rising Seas
By Vijay Jayaraj
It’s all too predictable: A jet-setting celebrity or politician wades ceremoniously into hip-deep surf for a carefully choreographed photo op, while proclaiming that human-driven sea-level rise will soon swallow an island nation. Of course, the water is deeper than the video’s pseudoscience, which is as shallow as the theatrics.
The scientific truth is simple: Sea levels are rising, but the rate of rise has not accelerated. A new peer-reviewed study confirms what many other studies have already shown – that the steady rise of oceans is a centuries-long process, not a runaway crisis triggered by modern emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).
For the past 12,000 years, during our current warm epoch known as the Holocene, sea levels have risen and fallen dramatically. For instance, during the 600-year Little Ice Age, which ended in the mid-19th century, sea levels dropped quite significantly.
The natural warming that began in the late 1600s got to a point around 1800 where loss of glacial ice in the summer began to exceed winter accumulation and glaciers began to shrink and seas to rise. By 1850, full-on glacial retreat was underway.
Thus, the current period of gradual sea-level increase began between 1800-1860, preceding any significant anthropogenic CO2 emissions by many decades. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2025 critical review on carbon dioxide and climate change confirms this historical perspective.
“There is no good, sufficient or convincing evidence that global sea level rise is accelerating –there is only hypothesis and speculation. Computation is not evidence and unless the results can be practically viewed and measured in the physical world, such results must not be presented as such,” notes Kip Hansen, researcher and former U.S. Coast Guard captain.
New Study Confirms No Crisis
While activists speak of “global sea-level rise,” the ocean’s surface does not behave like water in a bathtub. Regional currents, land movements, and local hydrology all influence relative sea level. This is why local tide gauge data is important. As Hansen warns, “Only actually measured, validated raw data can be trusted. … You have to understand exactly what’s been measured and how.”
In addition, local tide-gauge data cannot be extrapolated to represent global sea level. This is because the geographic coverage of suitable locations for gauges is often poor, with the majority concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. Latin America and Africa are severely under-represented in the global dataset. Hansen says, “The global tide gauge record is quantitatively problematic, but individual records can be shown as qualitative evidence for a lack of sea-level rise acceleration.”
A new 2025 study provides confirmation. Published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, the study systematically dismantles the narrative of accelerating sea-level rise. It analyzed empirically derived long-term rates from datasets of sufficient length – at least 60 years – and incorporated long-term tide signals from suitable locations.
The startling conclusion: Approximately 95% of monitoring locations show no statistically significant acceleration of sea-level rise. It was found that the steady rate of sea-level rise – averaging around 1 to 2 millimeters per year globally – mirrors patterns observed over the past 150 years.
The study suggests that projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which often predicts rates as high as 3 to 4 millimeters per year by 2100, overestimate the annual rise by approximately 2 millimeters.
This discrepancy is not trivial. It translates into billions of dollars in misguided infrastructure investments and adaptation policies, which assume a far worse scenario than what the data support. Because we now know that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise measured locally.
Rather than pursuing economically destructive initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of questionable projections and erroneous climate science, money and time should be invested in supporting coastal communities with accurate data for practical planning to adapt to local sea level rise.
Successful adaptation strategies have existed for centuries in regions prone to flooding and sea-level variations. The Netherlands is an excellent example of how engineering solutions can protect coastal populations even living below sea level.
Rising seas are real but not a crisis. What we have is a manageable, predictable phenomenon to which societies have adapted for centuries. To inflate it into an existential threat is to mislead, misallocate, and ultimately harm the communities that policymakers claim to protect.
This commentary was first published by PJ Media on September 10, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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I shall be returning to this important topic soon. Probably by republishing that 2025 Study referred to in the above article.
I hope that you read this post.
Thank you, Dan.
An article in The Conversation caught my eye.
We must never forget that evolution is always happening.
So without any more from me here is that article.
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Michael A. Little, Binghamton University, State University of New York
If evolution is real, then why is it not happening now? – Dee, Memphis, Tennessee
Many people believe that we humans have conquered nature through the wonders of civilization and technology. Some also believe that because we are different from other creatures, we have complete control over our destiny and have no need to evolve. Even though lots of people believe this, it’s not true.
Like other living creatures, humans have been shaped by evolution. Over time, we have developed – and continue to develop – the traits that help us survive and flourish in the environments where we live.
I’m an anthropologist. I study how humans adapt to different environments. Adaptation is an important part of evolution. Adaptations are traits that give someone an advantage in their environment. People with those traits are more likely to survive and pass those traits on to their children. Over many generations, those traits become widespread in the population.
We humans have two hands that help us skillfully use tools and other objects. We are able to walk and run on two legs, which frees our hands for these skilled tasks. And we have large brains that let us reason, create ideas and live successfully with other people in social groups.
All of these traits have helped humans develop culture. Culture includes all of our ideas and beliefs and our abilities to plan and think about the present and the future. It also includes our ability to change our environment, for example by making tools and growing food.
Although we humans have changed our environment in many ways during the past few thousand years, we are still changed by evolution. We have not stopped evolving, but we are evolving right now in different ways than our ancient ancestors. Our environments are often changed by our culture.
We usually think of an environment as the weather, plants and animals in a place. But environments include the foods we eat and the infectious diseases we are exposed to.
A very important part of the environment is the climate and what kinds of conditions we can live in. Our culture helps us change our exposure to the climate. For example, we build houses and put furnaces and air conditioners in them. But culture doesn’t fully protect us from extremes of heat, cold and the sun’s rays.
Here are some examples of how humans have evolved over the past 10,000 years and how we are continuing to evolve today.
While the sun’s rays are important for life on our planet, ultraviolet rays can damage human skin. Those of us with pale skin are in danger of serious sunburn and equally dangerous kinds of skin cancer. In contrast, those of us with a lot of skin pigment, called melanin, have some protection against damaging ultraviolet rays from sunshine.
People in the tropics with dark skin are more likely to thrive under frequent bright sunlight. Yet, when ancient humans moved to cloudy, cooler places, the dark skin was not needed. Dark skin in cloudy places blocked the production of vitamin D in the skin, which is necessary for normal bone growth in children and adults.
The amount of melanin pigment in our skin is controlled by our genes. So in this way, human evolution is driven by the environment – sunny or cloudy – in different parts of the world.
Ten thousand years ago, our human ancestors began to tame or domesticate animals such as cattle and goats to eat their meat. Then about 2,000 years later, they learned how to milk cows and goats for this rich food. Unfortunately, like most other mammals at that time, human adults back then could not digest milk without feeling ill. Yet a few people were able to digest milk because they had genes that let them do so.
Milk was such an important source of food in these societies that the people who could digest milk were better able to survive and have many children. So the genes that allowed them to digest milk increased in the population until nearly everyone could drink milk as adults.
This process, which occurred and spread thousands of years ago, is an example of what is called cultural and biological co-evolution. It was the cultural practice of milking animals that led to these genetic or biological changes.
Other people, such as the Inuit in Greenland, have genes that enable them to digest fats without suffering from heart diseases. The Turkana people herd livestock in Kenya in a very dry part of Africa. They have a gene that allows them to go for long periods without drinking much water. This practice would cause kidney damage in other people because the kidney regulates water in your body.
These examples show how the remarkable diversity of foods that people eat around the world can affect evolution.
Like all living creatures, humans have been exposed to many infectious diseases. During the 14th century a deadly disease called the bubonic plague struck and spread rapidly throughout Europe and Asia. It killed about one-third of the population in Europe. Many of those who survived had a specific gene that gave them resistance against the disease. Those people and their descendants were better able to survive epidemics that followed for several centuries.
Some diseases have struck quite recently. COVID-19, for instance, swept the globe in 2020. Vaccinations saved many lives. Some people have a natural resistance to the virus based on their genes. It may be that evolution increases this resistance in the population and helps humans fight future virus epidemics.
As human beings, we are exposed to a variety of changing environments. And so evolution in many human populations continues across generations, including right now.
Michael A. Little, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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This was published for the Curious Kids section of The Conversation.
However, I believe this is relevant for those adults as well who are interested in the subject. I’m in my 80’s and find this deeply interesting.
Irrespective of our believe.
There are only two days in our lives when we live for less than twenty-four hours: the day we are born and the day when we die!
I was born in November, 1944 and that makes me eighty-one. I was born as a result of an affair between my mother and my father. The family genes favour girls over boys, as in seven girls for every boy, and the son is normally the first born. My mother lost her first child, it was a boy. Then my mother had a second baby. Surprise, surprise, it was another son – me!!
I say this as an introduction to a post on The Conversation.
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Kahli Zietlow, University of Michigan
Hollywood legend Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home in February 2025. Hackman had been living with Alzheimer’s and depended on Arakawa as his full-time caregiver.
Disturbingly, postmortem data suggests that Arakawa died of complications from pulmonary Hantavirus several days before her husband passed. The discordant times of death point to a grim scenario: Hackman was left alone and helpless, trapped in his home after his wife’s death.
The couple’s story, while shocking, is not unique. It serves as a warning for our rapidly aging society. The U.S. population is aging, but most Americans are not adequately planning to meet the needs of older adulthood.
As a geriatric physician and medical educator, I care for older adults in both inpatient and outpatient settings. My research and clinical work focus on dementia and surrogate decision-making.
In my experience, regardless of race, education or socioeconomic status, there are some universal challenges that all people face with aging and there are steps everyone can take to prepare.
Aging is an unpredictable, highly individualized process that varies depending on a person’s genetics, medical history, cognitive status and socioeconomic factors.
The majority of older Americans report a strong sense of purpose and self-worth. Many maintain a positive view of their overall health well into their 70s and 80s.
But at some point, the body starts to slow down. Older adults experience gradual sensory impairment, loss of muscle mass and changes in their memory. Chronic diseases are more likely with advancing age.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 46% of adults over age 75 live with at least one physical disability, and this proportion grows with age. Even those without major health issues may find that routine tasks like yard work, housekeeping and home repairs become insurmountable as they enter their 80s and 90s.
Some may find that subtle changes in memory make it difficult to manage household finances or keep track of their medications. Others may find that vision loss and slowed reaction time make it harder to safely drive. Still others may struggle with basic activities needed to live independently, such as bathing or using a toilet. All of these changes threaten older adults’ ability to remain independent.
Nearly 70% of older Americans will require long-term care in their lifetime, whether through paid, in-home help or residence in an assisted living facility or nursing home.
But long-term care is expensive. In 2021, the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program reported that the average hourly rate for in-home care was US$27. An assisted living apartment averaged $4,800 per month, and a nursing home bed cost nearly double that, at a rate of $276 per day.
Many Americans may be shocked to discover that these costs are not covered by Medicare or other traditional medical insurance. Long-term care insurance covers the cost of long-term care, such as in-home care or nursing home placement. However, what is covered varies from plan to plan. Currently, only a small minority of Americans have long-term care insurance due to high premiums and complex activation rules.
I am not aware of any high-quality, peer-reviewed studies that have demonstrated the cost effectiveness of long-term care insurance. Yet, for many Americans, paying for care out of pocket is simply not an option.
Medicaid can provide financial support for long-term care but only for older adults with very low income and minimal assets – criteria most Americans don’t meet until they have nearly exhausted their savings.
Those receiving Medicaid to cover the costs of long-term care have essentially no funds for anything other than medical care, room and board. And proposed federal financial cuts may further erode the limited support services available. In Michigan, for example, Medicaid-covered nursing home residents keep only $60 per month for personal needs. If individuals receive monthly income greater than $60 – for instance, from Social Security or a pension – the extra money would go toward the cost of nursing home care.
Those who don’t qualify for Medicaid or cannot afford private care often rely on family and friends for unpaid assistance, but not everyone has such support systems.
Beyond financial planning, older adults can make an advance directive. This is a set of legal documents that outlines preferences for medical care and asset management if a person becomes incapacitated. However, only about 25% of Americans over 50 have completed such documentation.
Without medical and financial powers of attorney in place, state laws determine who makes critical decisions, which may or may not align with a person’s wishes. For instance, an estranged child may have more legal authority over an incapacitated parent than their long-term but unmarried partner. Seniors without clear advocates risk being placed under court-appointed guardianship – a restrictive and often irreversible process.
In addition to completing advance directives, it is important that older adults talk about their wishes with their loved ones. Conversations about disability, serious illness and loss of independence can be difficult, but these discussions allow your loved ones to advocate for you in the event of a health crisis.
Finding a caregiver is an important step in making arrangements for aging. If you are planning to rely on family or friends for some care, it helps to discuss this with them ahead of time and to have contingency plans in place. As the Hackman case demonstrates, if a caregiver is suddenly incapacitated, the older adult may be left in immediate danger.
Caregivers experience higher rates of stress, depression and physical illness compared with their peers. This is often exacerbated by financial strain and a lack of support. It helps if the people you will be relying on have expectations in place about their role.
For instance, some people may prefer placement in a facility rather than relying on a loved one if they can no longer use the bathroom independently. Others may wish to remain in their homes as long as this is a feasible option.
There are local and federal initiatives designed to help aging adults find and get the help they need. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently launched the GUIDE Model to improve care and quality of life for both those suffering from dementia and their caregivers.
This program connects caregivers with local resources and provides a 24-hour support line for crises. While GUIDE, which stands for Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience, is currently in the pilot stage, it is slowly expanding, and I am hopeful that it will eventually expand to provide enhanced coverage for those suffering from dementia nationwide.
The Program for All-Inclusive Care of the Elderly helps dual-eligible Medicare and Medicaid recipients remain at home as they age. This program provides comprehensive services including medical care, a day center and home health services.
Area agencies on aging are regionally located and can connect older adults with local resources, based on availability and income, such as meals, transportation and home modifications that help maintain independence.
Unfortunately, all of these programs and others that support older adults are threatened by recent federal budget cuts. The tax breaks and spending cuts bill, which was signed into law in July 2025, will result in progressive reductions to Medicaid funding over the next 10 years. These cuts will decrease the number of individuals eligible for Medicaid and negatively affect how nursing homes are reimbursed.
The government funding bill passed on Nov. 13 extends current Medicare funding through Jan. 30, 2026, at which point Medicare funding may be reduced.
Even as the future of these programs remains uncertain, it’s important for older adults and their caregivers to be intentional in making plans and to familiarize themselves with the resources available to them.
Kahli Zietlow, Physician and Clinical Associate Professor of Geriatrics & Internal Medicine, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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This article is a wakeup call for me, because I have no plan in place.
While I think about death more frequently than I used to, the fact that I don’t have plan is naive: I must get myself to a stage where I have a plan, and soon! I guess I am not the only person in their 80s without a plan!
Learning from Dogs 
