Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: People
Just the one photograph today.
This photograph was sent to Jeannie from Trish, a friend who pre-dates me meeting Jean.
Trish believes the photograph was taken twenty years ago. Trish is standing in the middle of the picture, next to Suzanne and Jean on her right.
Memories!
One that I can republish and another that I can refer to.
First, the article presented in The Conversation that I can republish.
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Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University
The 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine honored Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work developing optogenetics – a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of neurons with light.
The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential to treat a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions. What follows is an edited transcript of the podcast.
Take us back to the early 1990s. You’re training to be a doctor and you start a rotation working with psychiatric patients. What questions about the brain did that raise for you?
Both basic neuroscience (people asking how the brain works) and clinical neuroscience (doctors trying to help people with brain disorders) have faced a very similar problem, which is the brain is quite mysterious and quite hard to study.
It’s billions of fragile, transparent, very fast-acting cells, buried within the skull and doing very complex things. We don’t have a good model for how the brain works, unlike the heart, which is very obviously a pump. We don’t actually know what the brain’s trying to do.
A lot of neuropsychiatric treatments are not as effective as they could be, and developing new ideas has been hard. The treatments we had were not grounded in a solid understanding of the cells involved. What are the cells actually doing? What are they trying to do? This was a problem that held back treatment.
When I was in psychiatry training in the early 2000s, and also as a medical student in the late 1990s, I was very much impressed with the magnitude of the challenge.
You went on to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and then you set up a lab at Stanford trying to understand how to control particular cells in the brain. What were the first experiments you did?
I have a background in molecular biology, and I knew how to work with genes. So I was motivated to see if we could use genetics to make a treatment or an intervention that targets one kind of cell.
Every cell has genes that tell it what to do. Different cells in the brain, just as other parts of the body, can be genetically targeted because different cells have different jobs. A cell that is a dopamine neuron has all the machinery needed to make the hormone dopamine. It uses different genes than a cell that makes the hormone serotonin, so they can be distinguished from each other.
And so the thought was maybe I could have a way of controlling just the dopamine cells or just the serotonin cells by inserting a specific gene into them. But I didn’t know what would work well, so I tried inserting different types of genes into neurons.
Some of the genes I tried were quite conventional; they were genes from mammals that I thought might affect the activity of neurons. But one was a gene from a single-celled algae – a microbe that converts light to energy. This gene coded for a light-activated protein called channelrhodopsin-2 that Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel identified a few years earlier.
And I thought it was worth a try. It was the least likely to work, but why not try it?
And amazingly, that was the one that worked. The genes that were lower risk didn’t work, and this gene from a single-cell microbe actually did.
Walk us through what you did. You inserted the gene into rat cells, right?
I had a preparation of cultured rodent neurons in a dish – basically a 24-well plate that let me look at many different conditions at the same time in different wells of this plate. This let me test side by side the conventional mammalian genes and this gene from the algae.
So the first step was to get the genes into the cells. Then I exposed some plates of cells to light, while others I did not. I used a test to see which cells had activated.
When I looked across the cells in the screen, I found that the ones that had the algae gene and had gotten light were showing this marker of activation, whereas the others had a much lower signal. That was a really thrilling moment because it showed that this gene from a photosynthetic single-celled organism – almost as far as you can possibly be from mammals evolutionarily – was working beautifully in fragile mammalian neurons.
It was a moment of a lot of pressure and complexity, but also delight.
You went on to name your method optogenetics – the ability to control specific nerves using light in the brain – and you soon went on to using it to control living mice in various ways. What was it like in those first few years of working with live animals?
The first experiment was in 2004, but we didn’t show that it could control the behavior of freely moving mammals until 2007. So it took almost three years. But that first moment in 2007 was quite uplifting because that showed we had gone a big, big chunk of the way toward making it work.
This was an experiment that was very visible and easy to understand. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and attention to the left side of the world. We put in a fiber optic into the right part of a mouse motor cortex – the part that controls movement – and when we flipped the switch, the mouse immediately began going left in circles.
And then as soon as we turned off the laser light, it stopped and just looked up at us, as if nothing had happened.
That, coupled with the first experiment – those were transcendent moments.
What changed in your understanding of the brain in the moment you were able to switch particular neurons on and off?
We understood that the technique would probably work to help us understand the brain better at that moment. And then we immediately started applying it to all sorts of different cells where things were mysterious – where nobody knew or couldn’t prove exactly what one cell type or another was doing in perception and cognition and action.
We were able to find cells that were involved in hunger and thirst – basic survival drives. We were able to identify cells and pathways controlling aggression and defensiveness, parenting, how all the different parts of anxiety come on together and go away together, memory, motivation.
The general applicability became clear over the subsequent years.
Researchers are now using optogenetics in attempts to restore sight in people with visual impairment. How does that work?
In 2010, two of my colleagues in Europe were interested in delivering one of these light-activated proteins to human eye samples – specifically the retina of the eye – which worked very well.
So they did careful studies in monkeys and in people. And in 2021, just five years ago, they published a paper showing they could confer light sensitivity back to the retinas of a person who was completely blind from a neurodegenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
That’s what we call direct optogenetics. It’s somewhat complicated because you have to deliver the gene and light to the person.
And going back to your psychiatric patients, who you still see in the clinic today, how do you hope optogenetics will be able to help them?
There’s a much easier and more broadly impactful avenue that we call indirect optogenetics, which uses the knowledge that comes from studying which cells matter in a symptom and then designing medications that target those cells. This is something we’ve really lacked in neuropsychiatry for a long time.
Indirect optogenetics is making strong headway for autism and schizophrenia. There are trials that are moving to their final stages for those disorders.
My particular clinical specialty is autism, and I see the difficulties that come with irritability and anxiety in these patients. And I can see optogenetics leading to new medications that will help.
Karl Deisseroth, D. H. Chen Professor, Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Next, the article in Nature what has the title: Memory stays strong in old age when this brain enzyme is active
An enzyme found in the brain could help to preserve cognitive resilience with advancing age, according to research in mice, humans and cells1.
Researchers found that high levels of the enzyme are linked to low levels of inflammation in the brains of aged mice. They also showed that the enzyme boosts the growth of neurons in ageing brains. The findings were reported on 15 October in Nature Neuroscience.
The enzyme seems to act “as a compensatory cognitive-resilience mechanism”, says study co-author Amar Sahay, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“This is a fantastic, very thoughtful approach to get at what could be protecting neurons,” says Timothy Hohman, a neuroscientist and geneticist at the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who was not involved in the study. “This is a great example of how you can use a model system to get at some of these resilience mechanisms that are super challenging to study in humans.”
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Maybe, just maybe, the workings of the human brain is not such a mystery as it used to be.
This is an interesting report.
Exercise is good. From the following article we read that exercise is much more than an event. Read on to see where I am coming from.
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Diego Hernandez-Saavedra, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Yi-Heng (Hank) Huang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Have you ever taken months off training – maybe due to an injury, a new baby or crushing work deadlines – and come back convinced you were starting from zero?
Research from our team has some good news: At the cellular level, you probably weren’t.
We found that muscle and liver cells store memories from every training session in ways that may help improve endurance, control blood sugar levels and even slow weight regain after inactivity.
For most of the past century, long before fad diets and fancy workout trends took off, exercise was considered one of the most effective lifestyle changes to lower the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, several cancers and early death for people of all ages. But people typically understood exercise as something whose beneficial effects fade away over time: You use it or lose it.
When you stop training, your maximum oxygen uptake, muscle gains and insulin sensitivity drift back to where they started, often within weeks. Physical activity guidelines are built on this fact, which is why they emphasize consistency above all else.
Consistency, however, is a luxury that roughly 3 in 4 American adults aren’t able to enjoy. People can experience injuries, illness, pregnancy or jobs that limit their time for or ability to exercise. If adaptation really resets, every time you step into the gym would be as if you’ve never been there before. But that scenario doesn’t match what coaches and returning athletes typically describe: In practice, people who have trained before can get fit again faster than those who haven’t undergone similar training.
In recent years, however, scientists have started challenging the concept of “use it or lose it.” New research hints that your cells might keep a record of your training history so all of your gains are not completely lost.
We are exercise physiologists who study how cells remember exercise. Our lab and others have shown that the body is able to store a form of exercise memory across different organs.
To study how this exercise memory works, our team of researchers use an ON-OFF-ON exercise training protocol in mice, which involves an initial four- to eight-week training period, followed by detraining – a period of no exercise – and a second training bout. This method allows us to examine how cells form a memory of exercise, maintain a record of exercise through detraining, and recall memories of prior training when exposed again to exercise.
Using this strategy, our team found that skeletal muscle memory accelerates muscle growth. Compared to mice with no training history, mice who retrained grew bigger muscles, and the individual muscle fibers inside those muscles grew too. Larger muscle fibers meant that the working cells were themselves getting bigger, rather than the surrounding tissue.
Looking more closely at these muscle cells, we found that retrained muscle is better at matching energy production to demand – meaning, the muscles were better at drawing from energy stores when it’s needed most – and this ability persists without further exercise. This memory held even when the mice ate a high-fat diet, suggesting that prior training can still offer benefits even when diet is working against those gains.
Muscle isn’t the only body part that learns from exercise. Working muscle needs fuel, and the liver supplies it during and after training sessions.
My colleagues and I found that liver cells also store exercise memory and uses it to feed muscle more efficiently. In both mice and people who trained, stopped, then trained again, their livers released higher levels of a family of enzymes called carboxylesterases. These enzymes chop up lipids circulating in the blood, delivering fat in a form that muscle can take up and burn as it grows.
Recorded cellular memories of exercise may even be passed down to future generations.
In mice, we found that three to four weeks of maternal and paternal endurance exercise can have a lasting effect on their offspring. Compared to offspring born to sedentary parents, parental exercise granted protection against poor blood sugar levels and excess weight gain for an entire year after birth.
Researchers have hypothesized numerous ways that prenatal exercise may affect offspring. For example, maternal exercise might allow offspring to spend more time developing in the womb or lead parents to producer higher quality milk.
But there remains much to be discovered on how parents influence the health of their children and whether their lifestyle could provide a fitness advantage across generations.
Biology has traditionally granted memory to a short list of cells. Neurons store memory in the connections between them. Immune cells store memory so they can recognize pathogens faster and more strongly the next time they encounter them.
Researchers previously considered all other cells to be memoryless; a cell responds to a signal, then returns to baseline without keeping a record of that interaction. But that assumption is now coming apart.
Skin stem cells can keep a record of inflammation, allowing them to heal a new wound faster months later. Human fat cells keep a record of obesity that persists even after substantial weight loss, which may account for why you gain weight faster when switching back to a high-calorie diet – the so-called yo-yo effect.
We propose that every cell in the body remembers exercise, regardless of how little or how much someone trains. The question is how long these records are stored and whether researchers could prolong or expand each cell’s storage capacity. Better understanding of how cells learn and remember exercise, where they store memories and how those memories are preserved could help improve exercise guidelines for those who cannot exercise for prolonged or consistent periods of time.
To be clear, none of these findings are evidence for skipping the gym; nothing in our data suggests the effects of past training can substitute for present training. But there is hope that the work you put into getting in shape isn’t completely lost over time.
Somewhere, deep in your cells, there is a record waiting to be replayed the next time you lace up your running shoes, pick up a pair of dumbbells or want to fulfill a New Year’s resolution.
Diego Hernandez-Saavedra, Assistant Professor of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Yi-Heng (Hank) Huang, Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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There were many aspects of this applied health science that surprised me, and I suspect will surprise others. It is another supporting reason why I go cycling three or four times a week.
George Monbiot spells out a motoring hazard.
I do not drive. I haven’t driven for quite a few years. I had a biking accident that caused the DVLC to recall my license. (I had two sub-dural bleedings that required urgent surgery)
Thus, ironically, I am removed from having car-driving accidents.
That leads me on to republish a recent George Monbiot article.
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Posted on 23rd September 2026
Petromasculinity not only kills people on the road. It spills into our politics, fuelling far-right individualism.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th September 2026
Where is lawbreaking not just visible, but designed to be seen? Where is antisocial behaviour worn as a badge of honour? Where is pleasure gained directly from causing distress? And where is reckless endangerment often ignored by the police or treated with the mildest of punishments? The answer is on the roads.
Last month, three men in the West Midlands were convicted of street racing. Two were driving at over 80mph in a 40mph zone. The third clocked over 90mph in a 30mph zone. The West Midlands has long been blighted by organised racing, sometimes involving 200 cars or more and hundreds of spectators. The result is a long catalogue of deaths and life-changing injuries, including some caused when racers have left the road and ploughed into onlookers or pedestrians. And there are plenty more accidents where the police have little idea whether racing is to blame, for as soon as they happen, the drivers disperse.
The West Midlands is one of the few places in the UK where the police are actively trying to stop antisocial driving. An injunction bans street racing and dangerous tricks such as “drifting” (long sideways skids) and “doughnutting” (making the car spin on the spot). The local police commissioner has warned that reckless drivers “will face the full force of the law … including seizure of your vehicle and imprisonment”. But are the courts listening?
Of the three men convicted at Birmingham magistrates court, one received a suspended sentence, a £272 fine, 150 hours of community work and a two-year driving ban. Another was handed a £1,275 fine and seven penalty points: in other words, he could step out of the court and back into his car. The man who did over 90mph in a 30mph zone got a £253 fine and a 56-day driving ban. He’ll be back on the roads in November. All appear to have kept their cars.
If these men had caused the same level of endangerment by any other means, it’s hard to believe they would have got off so lightly. But in dozens of ways, driving gets special treatment.
There’s a similar racing culture in mid-Wales, where I lived until 2012. Night after night, a convoy of cars with exhausts modified to be as loud as possible would race past, at 50mph or more in a 30mph zone. They would start at around 10pm and continue some nights until 2am, going round the nearby roads in a loop. As soon as I’d got my infant daughter to sleep, they’d roar past and wake her up again.
Calls to the police were useless: they told me to take down the number plates and “report the incident”. When I did so, they explained, in effect, that I was wasting my time, as I couldn’t prove the drivers were breaking the speed limit. In fact, their advice was counterproductive: when I went outside to take the plates, the young men jeered, gave me the finger and accelerated. It seemed that shock and disgust was what they craved. And this was before TikTok, where drivers can achieve much wider notoriety.
The first young man to “do a ton” (100mph) down my high street in Wales on his motorbike became a local hero. Soon afterwards, he rode into a wall and died. Other drivers killed their passengers, hit pedestrians or forced other cars off the road. When people were killed or injured, the drivers were prosecuted and lightly punished, but there was little effort to address the underlying culture. Some men went straight back into the convoys when they regained their licences. I’m told that nothing has changed, despite the default 20mph speed limit now applied to residential areas across Wales. Every year a new cohort of young men joins the local urban racetrack.
Now I live in Devon, where there’s a different culture of antisocial driving. Here it’s mostly middle-aged men in “lifted” pickup trucks, which have been modified to be as loud and smoky as possible. Two local SUVs have been refitted to “roll coal” from twin exhaust towers mounted behind the cab, releasing a dense black cloud of soot when the driver hits the “smoke switch”. Adapting your truck for this purpose means buying a “delete kit” to bypass the vehicle’s emissions control system, retuning the engine and fitting bigger injectors. The practice emerged in the US, both as an anti-environmental protest and as a form of amusement. It is largely deployed against cyclists, pedestrians and electric vehicles. I’ve seen these two trucks doing it, blinding the drivers behind and choking everyone around. Of course it’s illegal. But it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the police in my area.
What we see here are manifestations of petro-masculinity: a violent, misogynistic, climate-denying version of manhood, expressed through an antisocial driving culture. Some of the modified trucks have decals saying “Stop the Boats” or “Save Our Children” (who are apparently being brainwashed by LGBTQ+ cultural Marxists). This is the Magafication of transport – a vehicle that carries some of the worst aspects of US culture and politics into the UK.
It’s the extreme end of a much wider trend. In the UK last year, 52% of the new cars on sale were SUVs. Not only do the ever-rising bonnets of these trucks make it harder for drivers to see pedestrians and cyclists, especially children, but higher and heavier cars are also more likely to cause deaths or serious injuries when they hit people: children under nine are three times more likely to be killed if they’re hit by an SUV than by a regular car.
And what are they for? On narrow country lanes round here, tourists in these “off-road” vehicles won’t back up if it means touching a hedge, in case the high-gloss finish on their Wankpanzer Childkiller gets scratched. In one of the poshest parts of London, the Chelsea Truck Company advertises “iconic urban 4x4s”. “Iconic” appears to mean huge. But what the hell is an “urban 4×4”? And why is it legal?
Isn’t it obvious that selfishness on the road changes us as a society? The belief that drivers should be allowed to do whatever they please, regardless of the impact on others, mounts the pavement and travels deep into our lives. If this is to be a decent, inclusive country that values human life, then the law and its enforcement should match that aspiration. But when the roads are used to amplify and celebrate a dangerous, antisocial culture, we are driven towards a very dark place.
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Now this is in England but I have very little doubt that it occurs here in America. Especially since a far greater proportion of vehicles are SUV’s. Well that’s the case here in Oregon.
And I want to republish this article.
I am slowly getting to know my new Mac, and there are many features that make it an improvement over my old Mac.
So to today’s post. It is an article published by The Conversation about the cosmos.
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Cara Giovanetti, University of California, Berkeley
Could you imagine if pagers made a comeback? Sure, your smartphone would still be your notepad-flashlight-camera-personal assistant-MP3 player-wallet-social media browser. But imagine if pagers made it so easy to do that one important thing – pinging your friends and associates – that we all brought them back into our lives, or adopted them for the first time.
A redemption arc like this is happening in cosmology, the study of the history of our universe. The hero – rather than old technology – is an epoch of cosmological history called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, or BBN.
Some cosmologists have thought that BBN is too old-school to be as good a tool for cosmology as other probes of the early universe. But BBN is the darling of my research program, where I use cosmology to learn more about particle physics. I have seen firsthand how recent results from this old cosmological epoch can guide new research about our universe.
Cosmology’s superstar is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, which formed some 400,000 years after the Big Bang. It’s an all-sky mosaic of hot and cold patches of light, which appeared while electrons and nuclei combined into the first neutral atoms. Viewed from Earth, each hot or cold patch is small enough for the Moon to block out.
The CMB’s intricate patterning has been the subject of several intense observational campaigns, and for good reason. The key scientific model in cosmology has six major unknown quantities that researchers must measure to understand the universe. All of these quantities can be inferred with good measurements of the CMB.
But the CMB’s much older, less famous cousin is starting to steal some of its limelight.
The universe started with a bang – the Big Bang – and about 10 minutes later, the largest game of musical chairs in history began. By that time, the universe was still dense, and hotter than the Sun. But it had cooled just enough for formerly freewheeling protons and neutrons to fuse into nuclei, which make up the centers of atoms.
The game started, and every proton searched for neutrons to fuse with. A proton lucky enough to find a neutron partner formed deuterium. That couple could snatch either another neutron to make tritium, or another proton to make helium-3. One more proton or neutron each finally made helium-4, which has a remarkably stable nucleus with two protons and two neutrons.
The catch is that the number of neutrons in the universe plummeted during the game, like chairs being yanked out of line. Neutrons are unstable when they’re not bound in nuclei, spontaneously spitting out lighter particles in about 15 minutes to become the slightly lighter proton.
The music stopped for good when the universe became too cold for these particles to continue fusing. By that time – just 20 minutes after the game started – nearly all neutrons had either turned into protons or ended up in helium-4. Any proton that wasn’t lucky enough to partner up probably remained single for millennia, and might even be wandering the universe alone today.
This process is called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Astrophysicists can actually measure the quantities of helium-4 and deuterium that formed by the time it ended, referred to as primordial abundances.
But a new measurement of the primordial helium-4 abundance, published in September 2026, has reached stunning precision, providing information about the universe during BBN at a level of detail never before known.
Just a few seconds after the Big Bang, neutrons could absorb lighter particles and become protons, setting the stage for Big Bang Nucleosynthesis in processes distinct from the decays that happened toward the end of BBN 15 minutes later. This conversion could occur as long as the universe was very dense and hot. The longer that condition was satisfied, the more neutrons could turn into protons before BBN began.
But the universe expanded quickly after the Big Bang. The stretching of the fabric of the universe was propelled by radiation, where “radiation” refers to hot particles with tiny masses. The rate of expansion – and, by proxy, the amount of radiation – determined how quickly the universe became less dense.
It’s harder for neutrons to absorb particles and convert into protons in a diluted universe, because everybody’s so far away. The quicker the universe expanded, the less time there was to turn neutrons into protons, and so the more neutrons there would be the start of BBN. More neutrons at the beginning of musical chairs means more helium-4 by the end of it.
The amount of radiation therefore determines the final helium-4 abundance. By measuring that abundance, my colleagues and I work backward to find the precise amount of radiation in the early universe.
That’s an important quantity to measure. Among other reasons, particle physicists can use it to learn more about dark matter, a largely invisible substance that constitutes 80% of the matter in the universe.
Many models of dark matter, or other hypothetical physics, call for slightly more or slightly less radiation than what’s expected in standard cosmology. Measuring this quantity precisely helps particle physicists differentiate these predictions from the truth.
BBN now determines the amount of radiation in the early universe better than the CMB. And its newfound prowess doesn’t stop at helium-4. Measurements of primordial deuterium, taken throughout the 21st century, tell cosmologists the density of particles like protons and neutrons with extreme precision. The precision with which BBN determines this quantity rivals, though does not yet exceed, that of the CMB.
The CMB isn’t quite ready to give up its spotlight. Even more precise measurements of all of the major unknowns in cosmology are already underway, as the Simons Observatory – a new high precision CMB telescope – makes its first observations. But there’s no clear path to improved measurements after the Simons Observatory finishes taking data, since the next-generation experiment CMB-S4 was suspended indefinitely last year.
Maybe it’s good timing, then, for BBN to be making its comeback. Getting even better BBN data doesn’t require dedicated observatories. Instead, observers only need more time on existing or planned telescopes. With near-term improvements to astronomical observations, physicists may get closer than ever to understanding the makeup – and therefore history and future – of our universe.
Cara Giovanetti, Postdoctoral Researcher in Physics, University of California, Berkeley
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Now there’s another thing I have just learnt (on the 26th). That is to copy and paste I now have to use the Command key plus the appropriate letter key.
The latest report on this year’s super El Niño.
We love living in Southern Oregon. This rural part of the countryside is a delight, and feeding the wild deer is a bonus.
However, we also have to take note of the changing climate and the potential risks that extremes of weather can bring.
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Bethany Tietjen, Tufts University
This year’s El Niño has the potential to be one of the strongest in living memory, and the evidence is showing up around the world.
The U.S. just saw its hottest summer on record in the Lower 48 states. Drought is slowing shipping in the Panama Canal. The Pacific is experiencing an exceptionally busy hurricane season, while the Atlantic is unusually quiet. Those are just a few early signs. Forecasters warn that this El Niño could bring extreme heat, destructive storms and flooding to many parts of the planet through early 2027.
I am a researcher who works on climate and disaster resilience, and I study how governments prepare for climate disasters and help to identify what they are missing.
Community planning for El Niño often starts by identifying infrastructure that’s vulnerable to extreme weather. What can be harder to address are the needs of the populations most at risk, including low-income communities and older adults who may need help preparing their homes and themselves for extreme conditions.
As communities prepare for the rising risk of extreme weather, they need to be aware of the blind spots.
El Niño is part of a natural climate pattern that appears every few years when temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean rise.
Its effects can shift weather patterns away from what is considered normal. Typically wet regions can get unusually dry, while dry areas can experience extreme rainfall that causes flooding. Global average temperatures also tend to rise during El Niño conditions, leaving people facing dangerous heat, both indoors and outdoors.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPA-KpldDVc?wmode=transparent&start=0 What is El Niño?
On the U.S. West Coast, for example, the combination of El Niño conditions with king tides and rising sea levels could lead to more coastal flooding, erosion and damage to homes and infrastructure. In the past, flood damage and landslides from heavy rain during El Niño have shut down highways and affected public services long after a storm has passed.
Preparing for the strong El Niño expected in late 2026 and early 2027 means ensuring that critical infrastructure is able to withstand flooding, temperature extremes and other severe weather conditions.
That means inspecting flood control and drainage systems, trimming trees that could knock down power lines during high winds, and reinforcing or maintaining infrastructure such as dams, stormwater channels, roads and bridges.
Aging infrastructure, in particular, can be a problem.
Old levees and dams, for example, can leave a community vulnerable to catastrophic flooding, as the Seattle area saw in December 2025 when flooding from heavy rainfall broke levees in multiple communities. Repairing and replacing large-scale infrastructure like this is expensive and time-consuming. Too often, by the time it fails, repairs had been discussed for years but not completed.
Infrastructure is only part of the challenge. Preparing a community for El Niño also means preparing people for what could be unprecedented conditions.
A study I worked on with researchers at Tufts University reviewed climate adaptation and disaster preparedness in several high-risk communities in the United States. We identified gaps in the policies, resources and institutional capacity available to help communities adapt to rising risks.
In particular, we found that governments often focus heavily on physical risks while giving too little attention to social vulnerability.
Vulnerable populations, including people experiencing homelessness, older adults and people with disabilities, often face higher risks and greater challenges in preparing for disasters.
People with limited mobility, for example, may have difficulty evacuating quickly or getting into shelters. Individuals with limited financial resources might have fewer options for relocating or for making home improvements in preparation for extreme weather. Someone experiencing homelessness may not have safe shelter.
It is often easier for governments to identify and invest in physical infrastructure than to invest in policies that address complex social vulnerabilities like these. For example, building a seawall can be tied to a specific project or funding stream. Reducing social vulnerability, on the other hand, may require coordination across housing, healthcare, emergency management and social services. And it typically requires sustained investments over time.
Yet, preparing successfully for extreme weather often requires considering housing and shelter needs, healthcare access and support services.
After a wildfire or major flooding, people may need temporary rental assistance or affordable housing to avoid displacement. Older adults or people with disabilities may need transportation to shelters or assistance getting medications and healthcare.
Many of these needs can be difficult to address because the underlying vulnerabilities are deeply entrenched. Issues such as affordable housing shortages, poverty or difficulty accessing healthcare cannot be solved by a single disaster-preparedness policy. But they do shape how communities are able to recover from extreme weather.
A community’s preparedness often improves after an event, when the gaps become obvious. The challenge is identifying those gaps before a disaster occurs.
In Los Angeles, emergency managers are using a good method to meet that challenge in 2026: They are carrying out scenario exercises that bring together county departments and community disaster management coordinators to practice how they would respond to an El-Niño-driven extreme weather event.
These exercises are designed to identify gaps in existing plans and figure out what might be needed if severe storms, flooding or mudslides occur. Scenario exercises allow people involved in disaster response to work through a hypothetical event before it happens.
In both the San Francisco Bay Area and in Durham County, North Carolina, officials are talking publicly about the risks to encourage residents to prepare. Bay Area officials are stressing the importance of following emergency management notifications and weather forecasts, particularly for individuals living close to the water or on hillsides that could face flash flooding and landslides.
In Oceanside, California, city officials convened an El Niño working group that included representatives from their public works, engineering, fire and police departments to coordinate planning, communications strategies and the monitoring of the San Luis Rey River.
The challenge of preparing for El Niño in the face of uncertainty reflects some of the broader issues humanity faces when preparing for future climate changes.
Keeping up with infrastructure maintenance, scenario planning ahead of heat or storm seasons, understanding the needs of vulnerable populations and having plans in place to meet them can help prevent a severe storm from becoming a major disaster for the community.
Bethany Tietjen, Research Fellow in Climate Policy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Some of the trees that we have are, potentially, too close to the house. I hate cutting down trees but then even worse than that would be that the house is badly damaged and we have to move out.
It is nicely summarised in that last chapter of the article, and I quote: “The challenge of preparing for El Niño in the face of uncertainty reflects some of the broader issues humanity faces when preparing for future climate changes.”
The face of uncertainty!
2026!
And it couldn’t be better covered than in the following YouTube video:
A reminder of July 4th, 2026.
Heather Cox Richardson published a post on YouTube,
Despite the fact that Jeannie and I were born in London, and July, 2026 is now nearly three months ago, this video is splendid.
She introduces it as follows:
From the time of our country’s founding 250 years ago, the story of America has been one of the constant efforts of Americans—from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities—to make real the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy. We will be telling their stories over the next several weeks because now, as ever, “We Are America.”
Here is the video,
The latest tricks are very clever!
I’m too confident, and I need to change. My confidence comes from having been scammed a few years ago, and trying now to be very careful.
But scamming is moving forward, technologically speaking, at a great pace.
Thus, I’m including the following article from The Conversation because it offers fantastic tips.
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Pawan Jain, University of Michigan Flint
The phone rings, and it’s your grandson’s shaken voice. There’s been an accident, he says, and he needs money before anyone finds out. Except it isn’t him. It’s software that learned his voice from a clip posted online, run by a stranger working through a list of phone numbers.
For years, warnings about artificial intelligence and cybersecurity have focused on corporate networks and government systems. Those threats are real. But if you follow the money in the FBI’s fraud data, a different picture emerges: Staggering sums are flowing out of household accounts.
In its 2025 annual report, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center began tracking complaints with an AI connection for the first time. Americans filed more than 22,000 such cases and reported roughly US$893 million in losses. Investment fraud accounted for $632 million of that, and people over 60 accounted for $352 million of the losses.
Those figures include only victims who reported to the FBI, and only cases where AI’s role could be identified. The consulting firm Deloitte projects that the actual hit from AI will be much bigger and help push U.S. fraud losses overall to $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023.
I’m a finance professor who studies household finance and how people use AI to make money decisions. And I believe the most consequential AI security story right now isn’t unfolding in server rooms, but at kitchen tables.
None of these scams are new. What AI changed is the cost and the quality of the cons.
Cloning a voice now takes a few seconds of audio and cheap consumer tools. In one study, listeners were able to identify an AI-generated voice only about 60% of the time. Video is heading the same way. In 2024, a finance employee at the architecture and design firm Arup was tricked into wiring about $25 million to fraudsters after they set up a video meeting “staffed” by deepfakes of the chief financial officer and several colleagues.
Phishing has improved, too. Clumsy wording and odd formatting used to give fraudulent emails away. Language models now write clean, fluent messages and can personalize them at scale using details scraped from social media. Deepfake videos of well-known business figures pitch bogus trading platforms.
The same pressure is visible in business losses. The cyber insurer Resilience reported that more than 85% of the losses in its claims portfolio in the first half of 2026 stemmed from attacks aimed at people rather than systems.
We’d like to believe that only careless people get taken. Research in behavioral finance says otherwise.
These scams are engineered around fear and urgency: a panicked grandchild, a boss demanding a same-day transfer, an investment window that closes tonight. Stress narrows attention and pushes people toward fast, intuitive judgments at the very moment they need slow, deliberate ones. Fraudsters also strike a pose of authority, whether a CFO’s face or a government agency’s letterhead, because most people defer to it.
Fluency matters as well. My own research examines how the smoothness of AI-generated communication leads people to trust it. A message with no typos, in a voice that sounds exactly right, sails past defenses that a clumsy fake would have tripped.
Nobody plans to make a major financial decision mid-panic. That’s exactly why scammers manufacture the panic.
AI-enabled theft doesn’t necessarily involve talking to the victim. Stolen personal data sells for a few dollars on dark web markets. Criminals then feed it to automated AI agents that probe bank and fintech systems around the clock, testing credentials and hunting for weak points at a speed no human crew could match. Last fall, the AI company Anthropic disrupted an espionage campaign in which an AI agent performed 80% to 90% of the intrusion work against roughly 30 targets, including financial institutions.
When an attacker gets into a customer account, the takeover can be over in minutes. Instant payment platforms like Zelle, built for speed and convenience, become the getaway car. The money typically moves within minutes, and getting it back is almost impossible.
Banks defend their own wire rooms with procedures, not vigilance. Households can borrow those procedures.
Check by calling back. When you get a suspicious call, hang up and dial a number you already know – like your bank’s fraud hotline – and never one the caller or message supplies. The point is to leave the channel the scammer controls. A cloned voice can’t answer your grandson’s real phone.
Trust and verify. You should agree on a robust family code word for emergencies and treat any request for money that lacks it as fake. Require two people in your household to sign off on any large transfer, so nobody moves serious money alone and under pressure. And build in a delay, such as a self-imposed 24-hour wait, before any big payment. Urgency is the scammer’s tool. Slowness is yours.
Add layers of protection. Protect the accounts themselves, too. Turn on two-factor login for financial accounts, and never share a verification code with someone who contacts you. That code is the second lock on your door, and the only reason a caller wants it is to get in.
You should also switch on your bank’s transaction alerts so a takeover announces itself in minutes, and consider a credit freeze, which is free and blocks thieves from opening new accounts with data bought on the dark web.
Protect older people. With $352 million of reported AI-related losses coming from Americans over 60, conversations with older family members are key. Walk through the callback rule and the code word, and ask their bank or brokerage about adding a trusted contact they can call. It costs nothing, and it gives the institution a way to raise an alarm before the money moves.
If money has already moved, you should call your bank immediately, ask it to attempt a recovery, then report the scam to the Federal Trade Commission.
Good habits raise the cost of every one of these scams, but they can’t do it all. This is where the U.S. regulations have fallen behind the technology.
Federal law is supposed to protect consumers from unauthorized electronic transfers, and regulators have said that a transfer set in motion by a fraudster counts as unauthorized even when the victim was tricked into handing over account credentials.
In practice, though, victims of instant-payment fraud often recover little. Banks frequently classify losses as “authorized” when a customer was deceived into approving the payment, and even obvious victims of such takeovers can face long fights over reimbursement.
For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Zelle’s operator and three of the country’s largest banks over their response to alleged fraud in late 2024, then dropped the case in March 2025. New York’s attorney general has since filed her own lawsuit, which a judge allowed to proceed in July. Zelle’s operator denies the allegations and says it will appeal.
The U.K. has taken a different path. Since late 2024, U.K. banks have been required to reimburse most scam victims up to £85,000, roughly $115,000, with the cost split between the sending and receiving institutions. The logic is that banks are best equipped to fight fraud, since they run security teams and networkwide analytics that can spot suspicious patterns across millions of transactions. What they had lacked was a strong financial reason to deploy them fully, and the reimbursement rule supplied it.
The regulator’s own dashboard shows that 88% of the money lost to eligible scams has been returned to victims since the rules took effect. More telling: An independent evaluation found that scam losses fell by roughly a fifth in the rule’s first year. That shows that when banks bear the losses, they find ways to prevent them.
I believe American regulators and Congress should study that model closely. When payments are instant and irreversible, the risk cannot rest almost entirely on the customer, who is the least-equipped party in the chain.
Pawan Jain, Associate Professor of Finance, University of Michigan Flint
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The advice is excellent.
A reminder of the tips explained above: Check by calling back., Trust and verify., Add layers of protection., Banking protections,. Protect older people.
They are excellent tips.
And I need to learn this advice and take action, not just republish it and forget it!
It is called NO PROPHETS.
Over last weekend I finished reading Jared Huffman’s book. To say is was good would be an understatement. It was excellent.
I will print the last paragraph of the last chapter.
CONCLUSION
We don’t need to agree on everything, but right now we must come together as fellow Americans who agree on the most important thing: Our beleaguered democracy remains the best system of government the world has ever seen, and it belongs to all of us. Let us be worthy of it by confronting the myths, defending the facts, and honouring the Enlightenment inheritance that made pluralistic democracy possible. And as we do, let us remember Thomas Paine’s words that echo across the centuries: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” (My emboldening.)
Here, here!
