Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: People
This is very important to all people, not just Europeans. This is vital for every citizen across the world.
Dan originally sent me the link to this video. I thank him enormously.
Here is the video:
I repeat, all persons who care about freedom, should sign this Act.
A useful article from The Conversation.
When I first read this article, I thought everyone will be aware, such is the awareness of wildfire smoke in so many places, and media.
Then I realised that this was wrong, and if only one or two people benefit from the advice then it should be republished. The original was on The Conversation.
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Colleen E. Reid, University of Colorado Boulder
Wildfire smoke from fires burning in Canada and northern Minnesota has been pouring across the Great Lakes and northeastern U.S. states, turning skies an eerie shade of orange. In the West, smoke has also been spreading into communities in Colorado and neighboring states as more wildfires burn in hot, dry conditions in July 2026.
University of Colorado environmental health researcher Colleen Reid explains what’s in that smoke and why breathing it is a health concern everyone should be aware of.
Wildfire smoke is a complex mixture that includes nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and particulate matter. When homes or buildings also burn, they can release an even more toxic stew of chemicals from burning electronics, furniture, plastics, paints and much more.
What you see when you see a smoke plume or when the air is hazy with wildfire smoke are the tiny particles that are too small to fall to the ground right away with gravity.
These particles, which scientists call particulate matter, are very small – we measure them in microns. When you breathe them in, they can harm your health. The smaller the particles, the deeper they can get into your lungs and body.
You may have heard the term PM2.5. It means particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter, many times smaller than the width of a human hair. High concentrations of these particles in the air during wildfire smoke episodes are what trigger air quality alerts.
Yes, wildfires have become more frequent and more intense just in the past couple of decades, and when wildfires become more frequent and intense, so does the smoke.
Scientists have found that wildfires are becoming more frequent due to a variety of factors that include increases in fire weather – hot, dry, windy conditions that fuel the spread of fires due to climate change – as well as other natural and human factors. The reasons for the increases in wildfires vary in different parts of the world.
Other studies have found that wildfire smoke makes up an increasing portion of the PM2.5 in the air in the U.S., and in many areas it is offsetting the decreases in air pollution that the U.S. has gained through regulations of industrial and vehicle emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Some effects of breathing wildfire smoke include shortness of breath, coughing, itchy or watery eyes, headaches, rashes and itchiness. But smoke can cause more serious harm. Numerous epidemiological studies have shown that hospitalizations and emergency department visits for asthma and other respiratory diseases increase during wildfire smoke events.
After you breathe in the particles, they cause inflammation and oxidative stress, and they can move into the blood and spread throughout the body, affecting other organ systems.
Breathing wildfire smoke has been associated with higher risk of preterm births and other issues during pregnancy, and potentially cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes, although the evidence for these effects are more mixed.
The longer-term health effects of wildfire smoke are less clear, but it is a growing area of research.
The first thing to do to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is to know how bad the smoke is and how long it is going to last.
One great place to get information for where you live on current wildfire smoke is fire.airnow.gov. You can zoom in on the map to where you live and find color-coded circles reflecting data from both U.S. EPA air-quality monitors and PurpleAir sensors that people have put in their homes.
The colors show the level of PM2.5 at that location and suggest the associated health risk.
To find out how wildfire smoke is expected to change over time in North America, you can look at maps from FireSmoke Canada and the U.S. Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program.
First of all, depending on the level of the air quality index where you are, there are different recommendations. When wildfire smoke reaches unhealthy levels, stay indoors as much as possible, with doors and windows shut to keep the wildfire smoke out.
If you have an air cleaner, use it, but check the filter, as filters can fill up quickly. Similarly, check the filter on your home HVAC system and replace it if needed.
If you have to go outside, consider wearing a well-fitting N95, KN95 or KF94 mask. These masks can protect you from inhaling particles in the air around you. Looser masks, such as surgical masks, mostly protect others from what you breathe out instead. They do not have a tight seal around your mouth, and when you breathe in, the air with all of the particles can find its way around the sides of the mask.
Having a tight fit of the mask to your face is important so that when you breathe, the air is going through the mask and capturing the smoke particles rather than letting them into your body where they cause harm.
If your home is leaky and you can see haze inside, consider going to a public space, such as a library or mall, with a good HVAC system. Some municipalities have designated clean air spaces where anyone can go.
Colleen E. Reid, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Thank you, Colleen, and thank you The Conversation. Lots of good advice.
What a fabulous person!
We came across this tribute to Ella the other day and I wanted to include a YouTube link (above).
She was born in 1917 and died in June, 1996.
Here is a summary of her life, courtesy of a Google search.
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, composer, and songwriter who is often called the “First Lady of Song”. Known for her rhythmic sense, intonation, and scat singing, Fitzgerald was the first African-American woman to win a Grammy and the first woman to win multiple Grammys. She won 13 Grammys in total and sold more than 40 million albums. Fitzgerald’s career was marked by her determination to break down societal barriers.
Once again, Penny supplies a guest post.
I love what Penny writes, and here is another of her guest posts.
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For new pet boarding owners and first-time pet care entrepreneurship hopefuls, a pet daycare business startup can feel like the perfect way to turn a love of animals into steady, local work. The real tension is that caring for pets professionally means balancing joy with responsibility, and getting clear on what families in the local pet service market actually need. Community pet care needs can look very different from one neighborhood to the next, and the wrong assumptions can lead to stress for pets, disappointed clients, and a business that never finds its footing. With the right foundation, a caring idea can become a service people trust.
Understanding What Builds Trust in Pet Care
At its core, a successful boarding and daycare business is a promise: safe care, clear routines, and honest communication. A pet boarding services overview clarifies what you offer, while daycare facility requirements spell out what your space must support, from safe separation to clean airflow. Animal welfare standards set the non-negotiables that protect pets and guide daily decisions.
This matters because families are not buying a kennel run, they are buying peace of mind. With 94 million U.S. households now own a pet, trust is what turns first-time clients into regulars. Clear standards also reduce incidents, staff burnout, and stressful handoffs. Think of it like a child daycare check-in. Parents relax when the rules are consistent, the facility feels secure, and safety steps are visible. Pet parents respond the same way when your policies and setup match your care claims.
Build Business Skills That Make Your Pet Care Idea Profitable
When you understand what earns trust, the next step is building the business know-how that helps more local pet parents find you, and stick with you. If you want a more structured way to sharpen your planning and promotion skills, going back to school for a business degree can be a practical move while you develop your pet boarding or daycare idea. Whether you earn a degree in marketing, business, communications, or management, you can learn skills that can help your business thrive.
And because online degree programs are designed for flexibility, it can be easier to run your business while going to school at the same time. If you’d like to explore a guided option, you can look into an accredited online business program while you keep moving your plans forward. With your skills and support lined up, you’re ready to follow a step-by-step launch plan to bring your pet care business to life in your community.
From Idea to Opening Day: Your Launch Checklist
This quick launch path helps you cover the unglamorous essentials (legal, safety, staffing, marketing, and money) so you can open with confidence and avoid costly do-overs.
Pet Boarding and Daycare Questions, Answered
Q: What insurance do I actually need to open?
A: Start with general liability and animal bailee or care, custody, and control coverage for injuries, escapes, or property damage. Many owners also add workers’ comp if they hire staff and commercial auto if they offer pickups. Ask a broker for a pet-care specific quote and confirm exclusions in writing.
Q: How strict should my vaccination and health policy be?
A: Clear rules protect pets, your staff, and your reputation. Require proof of core vaccines, parasite prevention, and a symptom-free check at drop-off, plus a plan for isolating cough, vomiting, or diarrhea. Put your policy in plain language and enforce it consistently.
Q: What should I do if a pet gets sick or injured on my watch?
A: Get written owner permission for emergency care, a preferred vet, and a spending limit before the first stay. Train staff to document symptoms, call the owner fast, and transport safely if needed. Keep a stocked first-aid kit and a simple incident report form.
Q: How do I set prices without guessing?
A: A pricing strategy helps you set prices based on costs, demand, and the add-ons you offer. Calculate your true daily cost per pet, then compare local competitors and adjust for your hours, staffing ratio, and facility quality. Test packages and a small peak-day surcharge instead of constant price changes.
Q: What regulations tend to surprise new owners?
A: Zoning, noise rules, waste disposal, fire safety, and occupancy limits can affect your layout and capacity. Call your city or county early and ask what permits, inspections, and signage rules apply to animal care businesses. Getting clarity up front prevents expensive remodels later.
Turning Pet Care Passion Into a Reliable Local Business
Starting a pet boarding and daycare business can feel like balancing big heart with real-world rules, costs, and what-ifs. The steadier path is a simple mindset: build trust through clear standards, thoughtful planning, and consistent care, then improve one decision at a time as you grow. When that approach guides the launch, entrepreneurial motivation turns into confidence, startup challenges become manageable checkpoints, and long-term business growth starts to look realistic. A successful pet care business is built on clear policies, calm systems, and genuine care.
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As an ex-entrepreneur, a very ‘ex’ by the way, I can support that last sentence. As well as the three items of a successful business, I would add that, above all, there has to be an identified need for the business, and it helps enormously if the person, starting the pet business, is a salesperson.
Because the key role of a salesperson is to listen: to your potential customers, to whosoever will be your competitors, and through discussion with key people in your line of business.
A post by George Monbiot on the 9th July explains.
I looked up quotations about government, and this one caught my eye: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” — Thomas Paine.
Here is that post by George, republished with his permission.
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Posted on 9th July 2026
The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2026
The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.
Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.
Yes, £264bn. More than a quarter of a trillion. This cost will be divided between the public and private sectors. Given the record of CCS programmes so far, we can expect the public to carry most of it.
An investigation by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that roughly 25% of the public costs of CCS will be borne directly by the government, while the remainder will come from extra levies on our energy bills. The government should explain to the electorate that it intends to slap up to £198bn on our bills. Then see how that lands.
Even this might not be the end of it. Buried in an arcane side document is a government commitment to pay a “premium” for the hydrogen produced by the CCS programme for 15 years. This commitment is uncosted, but could run to tens of billions more.
But surely CCS is essential for cutting carbon emissions? That’s how the government has pitched it. On the contrary, this programme will massively increase them. The Climate Change Committee claims that the role of CCS is “limited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives”. But this is simply untrue. Its own data shows that only between 5% and 6% of the CCS deployment in the UK will be used to address the emissions of industrial sectors such as chemicals and cement, whose impact is hard to abate (though even here there are partial alternatives).
The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government’s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee’s claim is bunkum.
Its insistence that we need hydrogen made from fossil gas is also baseless. Its own figures show that producing hydrogen from gas with CCS will cost twice as much by 2050 as producing it from the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity.
The new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required. Ultimately, that means more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now know that, thanks to methane leakage along the production and transport chain, LNG has higher emissions than coal. Two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurs before the gas arrives in this country. So that’s all right then – it doesn’t count towards our national figures.
If the real aim were to cut emissions, we would push fossil fuel use in the electricity sector down to zero, and scale up renewables and battery storage instead. The net effect? Much lower climate impacts and much lower bills. Instead, the programme will greatly ramp up both. Why?
Well, the whole thing has been built the wrong way round. It appears likely to be the result of massive lobbying by fossil fuel companies. In 2023 alone, as the key decision on deployment loomed, the oil companies Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers to discuss CCS. Why? Because they know it’s the only way they will be permitted to keep burning gas. Governments have sought to find a way of meeting their demands while adhering to the climate budgets, so lo, a £264bn white elephant is born. As the Climate Change Committee admits, “gas with CCS accounts for around half of the remaining demand for fossil fuels in 2050” in the UK. In other words, this is their lifeline.
And now we know something else: that the scientific credibility of CCS as a climate solution was shaped by the oil company BP. Investigative work by ProPublica and Drilled discovered that BP both financed and helped steer one of the most famous of all climate papers. The “Wedges” paper, published in 2004, became a foundation of government policy around the world. It purported to show how climate stabilisation was compatible with continued fossil use. And one of the major policies its plan relied on was carbon capture and storage.
BP’s chief executive suggested the “wedges” concept. Another BP executive was so heavily involved that the scientists suggested he should be named as co-author. He declined: the industry tries not to leave fingerprints. The paper greatly oversold CCS, presenting it as “already deployed at an industrial scale”. In reality, it had barely been tested. Yet it underpinned three of the 15 climate actions the paper proposed.
Since then, there has been a long record of shiny promises followed by partial or total failures. In the UK alone, three attempts (the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project and a 2012 funding competition) have been abandoned, thanks to cost escalation and infeasibility. As the Public Accounts Committee remarks, the government “is taking a high-risk approach by backing first-of-a-kind, unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding”.
But success is not the point. The point is to provide a gigantic, publicly-funded reason for the fossil fuel industry to stay in business. Guess who the lead operator of the government’s first CCS cluster is. Hello, BP.
So we come round full circle. From cradle to grave, this programme appeases the world’s most antisocial and destructive sector. The wasted money, the lost years, the lost lives: for how much longer will this farce continue? And how many more warnings will the government ignore?
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I am towards the end of my days, and we live a pretty frugal (as in use of fossil fuels) life.
However, that does not mean that I am not very concerned about George’s essay. I have a son, a daughter, and a grandson. They are a tangible group who will be affected by this proposed legislation. As will millions of other people.
I really hope, and this is truly meant, that the UK Government does not push ahead with this Act.
Learning the skills of resistance.
Saying ‘no’ is difficult. This is an article from The Conversation that talks of our need at times to be the opposite of friendly, to stand one’s ground, and to be true to yourself.
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Sunita Sah, Cornell University
You’re in a meeting when your boss suggests changing a number to make the quarterly report look stronger. Heads nod. The slides move on. You feel a knot in your stomach: Do you speak up and risk being branded difficult, or stay silent and become complicit?
Most people picture defiance as dramatic outbursts. In reality, it’s often these small, tense moments where conscience collides with compliance.
I first saw the power of defiance not in the workplace, but closer to home. My mother was the ultimate people-pleaser: timid, polite, eager to accommodate. Barely 4 feet, 10 inches tall, she put everyone else’s needs above her own. But one day, when I was 7, I saw a different side to her.
We were walking home from the grocery store in West Yorkshire, England, when a group of teenage boys blocked our path in a narrow alleyway. They hurled racist insults and told us to “go back home.”
My reaction was instantaneous: Stay quiet, avoid conflict and get past them as quickly as possible. I grabbed my mother’s arm, urging her to move with me. But she didn’t. My quiet, deferential, never-confrontational mother did something completely different. She stopped, turned and looked the boys directly in the eyes. Then she asked, calmly but firmly, “What do you mean?”
She wasn’t loud or aggressive. And in that moment, she showed me that defiance doesn’t always roar, and it can come from the people you least expect.
I’ve carried these lessons into my work as a physician-turned-organizational psychologist. For decades, I’ve studied why people comply, staying silent when they don’t want to, and how they can resist wisely. In my book “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes,” I offer a framework based on behavioral science research that can help you defy in ways that are intentional, effective and true to your values.
When people think of defiance, they often picture teenagers slamming doors, protesters shouting in the streets or rebels breaking rules just for the thrill of it. But that’s not the kind of defiance I study or the kind that shapes our lives most often.
Defiance is not about being oppositional for its own sake. It’s about choosing to act in line with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise.
That pressure can come from anywhere: a boss urging you to fudge the numbers, a friend nudging you toward something you don’t believe in, a culture telling you to stay in your place. Defiance in those moments might be as small as saying “no,” asking for clarification or simply pausing instead of rushing along with the group. Other times, it means speaking up, challenging authority or maybe walking away.
Seen this way, defiance isn’t a fixed trait that some people are born with and others lack. It’s a practice: a skill you can strengthen over time. Some days you might comply, other days you might resist. What matters is that you have the awareness and the tools to make the choice consciously, rather than letting fear or habit decide for you.
If defiance is so important, why do people so often stay silent?
One reason is a psychological process I’ve uncovered in my research: insinuation anxiety. It arises when people worry that not complying with another person’s wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust. Turning down a boss’s request to “adjust” the numbers might feel like you’re implying they’re dishonest. To avoid that discomfort, you go along – even when it violates your values.
Behavioral science has long documented this pull toward compliance. In the 1960s, for example, psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary people would administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to strangers simply because an authority figure told them to.
My own research has shown surprisingly high levels of compliance with obviously bad advice, even when given by a stranger with no consequences for disagreeing. People feel immense social pressure to go along with what others suggest. That’s because if you’ve never been trained in how to say no, it feels uncomfortable and awkward.
If compliance is the human default, how can you build the muscle of defiance? In my research, I’ve developed a simple actionable guide that I call the Defiance Compass. Like a navigation aid, it orients you in difficult situations by asking three questions:
Asking these questions shifts defiance from a gut reaction to a conscious practice. And here’s what’s important: That third question (“What does a person like me do?”) circles back to the first (“Who am I?”), because how you act again and again becomes who you are.
Defiance doesn’t always mean open confrontation. Sometimes it means asking a clarifying question, buying time or quietly refusing. It can mean speaking up or walking away. The key is to start small, practice regularly and anchor your choices in your values. Like any skill, the more you practice, the more natural it becomes.
Defiance may be risky, but it’s never been more relevant. At work, employees are pressured to meet targets at any cost. In politics, citizens face waves of misinformation and polarization. In everyday life, people struggle to set healthy boundaries. Across all these contexts, the temptation to comply for the sake of comfort is strong.
That’s why learning to defy strategically matters. It protects personal integrity, strengthens institutions and helps sustain democracy. And it doesn’t require being loud or confrontational.
Of course, not every act of defiance is safe or guaranteed to make a difference. Sometimes it comes at real personal cost and some people still choose to act even when the impact isn’t certain: think of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. In those moments, the act itself becomes the message. Both of those individuals were deeply connected to their values and the assessment is personal: What feels worth the risk to one person might not to another.
Defiance does require practice: noticing when values are at stake, pausing before you nod along, and choosing actions that align with who you want to be. Each act of consent, compliance or defiance shapes not just your story but the stories of our societies.
If you practice defiance, and teach it and model it, you can imagine a different type of society. You can start to envision a world where, in that same alleyway from my childhood, one of the boys will step forward and tell his friends, “That’s not OK. Let them pass.”
Sunita Sah, Professor of Management and Organizations, Cornell University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Across the range of society there will always be persons who choose to act with poor social values. Some are very senior, such as many politicians, some are towards the bottom of society. That is a fact of life.
Sunita Sah does us proud in writing this article, and I am delighted to republish it, with the permission of The Conversation.
This drought is not ameanable to fireworks.
A few days ago I asked our neighbours to the south of us if they would like to come out on July 4th. The answer was thanks but no. Fireworks and dry forest do not mix and they wanted to stay home for the day.
I write this as an introduction to the latest post from The Conversation.
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Lauren Lowman, Wake Forest University
Across the United States, the sky will be erupting with fireworks on July 4, 2026, and the days around it as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence. Many cities will be hosting spectacular fireworks shows.
But not everyone will be leaving the pyrotechnics to the professionals, so let’s talk about the risk of fireworks starting fires, including dangerous wildfires.
Fireworks, from bottle rockets to Roman candles, start a lot of fires in the U.S. every year – 32,000 of them in 2023 alone. And each year there is a clear spike in human-caused fires on July 4.
In 2026, much of the U.S. has been very dry and in moderate to severe drought. That means many areas are at high risk for fires igniting and spreading.
In the first half of the year, the U.S. has already experienced more wildfires than in the first half of any of the previous 10 years, which has included some of the country’s worst fire years on record.
The southeastern U.S. had far-below-normal precipitation in early 2026, which led to extremely dry conditions that fueled wildfires in the spring. In mid-June, half the region was still in severe to extreme drought.
In the West, a snow drought has put a pinch on water resources and left forests without the usual moisture they would get from a lingering snowpack.
Large parts of the West and Great Plains are in extreme or exceptional drought, including areas of Oklahoma, Nebraska and Utah, where wildfires in June forced entire communities to evacuate. And the national wildfire forecast shows above normal fire risk continuing into July in much of the U.S. West and Texas.
At the same time, large parts of the U.S. West and Southeast are forecast to see above-normal heat along with dryness through early July. Heat waves significantly raise the fire risk. A recent study found that 42% of all land burned in the West from 2001 to 2024 happened during or right after a heat wave.
In hot, dry conditions it doesn’t take much to start a fire. Dry vegetation – trees, shrubs and grasses – provides the fuel. A windy day can substantially raise the risk of a runaway fire. The spark often comes from human activities, whether a car, power line or someone lighting fireworks.
Between 1992 and 2015, humans started 97% of all fires that threatened homes in the wildland-urban interface, the areas where homes and cities overlap with wildlands.
Of all the days, July Fourth stands out for its exceptional number of human-caused fires. From 1992 to 2020, around 15,000 fires were started on this holiday. Even in the eastern U.S., where July falls outside of the peak fire season, Independence Day still sees about 400 more fires than other days that month.
In many states and drought-plagued regions, commercial fireworks are banned for community safety, and not just because of the fire risk. Emergency rooms saw an estimated 9,700 fireworks-related injuries in 2023 – injuries to hands, faces, ears and elsewhere – a third of them involving children.
The National Fire Protection Association encourages everyone to leave the fireworks to the professionals who are prepared to manage any wayward sparks. Public displays are cheaper for you, safer for everyone, and often far more spectacular.
Lauren Lowman, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Wake Forest University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Picking up on the last paragraph of the article, I repeat “leave the fireworks to the professionals ..”.
I wonder how many will abide by that recommendation?
Finally, Jeannie and I wish everyone a Very Happy July 4th.
I had little idea about dopamine, and I suspect that I’m not the only person.
Luckily, there are a number of medical websites that describe the role of dopamine in some details.
First, a small part of an AI report based on information from HealthDirect
Dopamine is a critical neurotransmitter and hormone that acts as the brain’s chemical messenger, playing a central role in motivation, reward-motivated behavior, pleasure, and motor control.
Second, part of an explanation from Cleveland Clinic.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in your brain. It plays a role as a “reward center” and in many body functions, including memory, movement, motivation, mood, attention and more. High or low dopamine levels are associated with diseases including Parkinson’s disease, restless legs syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Third, Psychology Today reports.
Dopamine is known as the feel-good neurotransmitter—a chemical that ferries information between neurons. The brain releases it when we eat food that we crave or while we have sex, contributing to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction as part of the reward system. This important neurochemical boosts mood, motivation, and attention, and helps regulate movement, learning, and emotional responses.
How does dopamine make you feel?
Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your search for information. Dopamine creates reward-seeking loops in the sense that people will repeat pleasurable behavior, from checking Instagram to taking drugs.
Swedish pharmacologist and neuroscientist Arvid Carlsson won the Nobel prize in 2000 for his research on dopamine, showing its importance in brain function. He helped show that the neurotransmitter is heavily involved in the motor system. When the brain fails to produce enough dopamine, it can result in Parkinson’s disease. The primary treatment for Parkinson’s disease is a drug called L-dopa, which spurs the production of dopamine.
Dopamine has also been implicated in schizophrenia and ADHD; the brain systems underlying these conditions (as well as substance abuse disorder) are complex. The activity of the dopamine system depends on the state of one’s dopamine receptors, and in people with these conditions, the chemical interacts with other factors in ways that have yet to be explained.
How does dopamine function in the brain?
It is no exaggeration to say that dopamine makes us human. Beginning in infant development, dopamine levels are critical, and mental disabilities can arise if dopamine is not present in sufficient quantities. Dopamine is implicated in genetic conditions like congenital hypothyroidism. Dopamine deficiency is also implicated in other conditions such as Alzheimer’s, depressive disorders, binge-eating, addiction, and gambling.
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My darling Jean takes Carbidopa-Levodopa four times a day and has been doing so for many years.
As one can see from the above extracts, dopamine is incredibly important for the human brain.
Dopamine makes us human!
Different ways of looking at the world.
Nature is king! I have longed believed that, and here is an example of nature at work.
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Stewart Edie, Smithsonian Institution and Torben Rick, Smithsonian Institution
State boundaries can be iconic. Many were drawn by human hands, but some of the most recognizable contours were shaped by nature: the boot of southeastern Louisiana, carved by the Mississippi River, or the ocean waves sculpting the hook of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
For a moment, imagine that there are no state lines. View the United States through its natural contours. As curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, we often look at our nation this way, drawing different kinds of maps that trace mountains, watersheds, animal migrations, biomes, ancient seas and so much more.
These kinds of maps show us how connected we all are by nature, since it transcends state boundaries. That idea is central to our new exhibition, “From These Lands: Sharing Our Natural and Cultural Heritage,” now open at our museum to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States. We are co-curators of the show, part of a team of exhibit designers and developers who created the exhibition.
“From These Lands” uses items from the museum’s collections to explore these patterns and ideas, offering a way to see the country’s natural and cultural heritage beyond state lines.
Pine cones can be easy to overlook.
When you’re out for a walk in the woods, you see the forest, maybe even the trees, but not always the cones at your feet. For many people, a pine cone is just a pine cone. But when you look closely, subtle differences in the styles of cones carry clues about the trees that produced them and the places where those trees live.
There are 43 pine species native to the United States, making up nearly a third of the world’s pine tree diversity. Together, they stretch across surprisingly different combinations of climate, terrain, plants and animals, the regions scientists call biomes. Something as simple as the pine cone can let you hold that concept in your hand: soils, fire, rain, birds and rodents all helped shape the tree that made it.
For example, cones from the sand pine can shield seeds for years, only to release them as the heat from low-intensity fires melts their resin and opens their scales. These scrubby and fire-shaped landscapes are one part of the larger temperate evergreen forests that spread through the southeastern U.S.
On the other side of the country, the Coulter pine produces cones that can be more than a foot-and-half long (50 centimeters) and weigh up to 8 pounds (3.5 kilograms). This large cone size helps its seeds to survive fires, allowing small birds and mammals to then disperse them into new areas in the Mediterranean Scrub of Southern California.
A pine cone comes from one tree in one place, but its form reflects a wide set of environmental conditions. Pine cones provide an interesting way to view the different biomes found in the United States and its territories.
The land under your feet can be millions of years old, and it has not always been dry ground.
During the late Mesozoic Era – the time interval made famous by the dinosaurs – a warm, shallow inland sea covered states from North Dakota to Texas. This Western Interior Seaway laid down many of the rocks and sediments that you can see today throughout the Great Plains and Badlands. The sea was also full of life, and the rocks it left behind are full of fossils.
There were familiar characters living on this ancient seafloor: clams, snails and sea stars. But swimming in the waters above were the now-extinct animals called ammonites.
These coiled, shelled relatives of squid and octopuses were abundant predators, hunting in the same waters as fish, turtles, sharks and extinct marine reptiles called plesiosaurs. Ammonites used the chambers in their shells to control buoyancy, much like the modern nautilus.
Ammonite fossils demonstrate that much of the central U.S. was an ancient ocean. They also remind us that the landscapes we know today are just the latest version of those reshaped over and over by the slow work of geologic time.
Animals move. Some travel only short distances with the seasons, but others travel thousands of miles, crossing not only state lines, but countries, oceans and hemispheres. Animal migration routes might look chaotic on a map, but birds, whales, turtles and more forge these paths for specific reasons.
Timing is a key component of migration. Thanks to a critical refueling stop in Delaware Bay, the ruddy turnstone shorebird manages to migrate thousands of miles each year to its breeding grounds in the high Arctic. These East Coast migrants time their layover with the migration of horseshoe crabs, which come ashore to lay millions of nutrient-packed eggs on beaches. The turnstones gorge themselves on those eggs before continuing their journey north.
It is a strange and wonderful handoff between an ancient marine animal hauling itself out of the ocean and a weary shorebird bound for the Arctic. A single bay brings them together, illustrating how the many migration routes through these lands can hinge on key moments and places.
Topography is more than scenic landscapes. Everything from the flat coastal plains to the ridges, valleys and stream-cut mountainsides helps shape where animals can live and how biodiversity accumulates.
The rugged terrain of the Appalachian Mountains creates cool, wet forests, shaded hollows, caves, ponds and streams. These habitats can differ from each other in elevation, temperature, moisture and water flow – and salamanders take note. More salamander species live in the Appalachian Mountains than anywhere else in the world. It can feel as though every other rock you turn over hides yet another species.
The trio of Plethodon salamanders, the southern gray-cheeked, red-cheeked and red-legged salamanders, were once thought to be regional variations of the same species. But these salamanders live at varying elevations in different mountain ranges, and genetic sequencing confirmed that each was, in fact, its own species. Topography and shifting climates had broken up these populations into different habitats, allowing each to evolve into distinct species.
Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the U.S., fed by a watershed connecting rivers and drainage basins that reach into six states and the District of Columbia. It’s home to more than 3,600 species, including oysters and blue crabs. But one fish in particular has become strongly intertwined with the lives and cultures of many people around the bay.
The American shad spends much of its adult life in the Atlantic Ocean but returns to the freshwater rivers in the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay to spawn. For more than 12,000 years, this herring’s spring migration has been part of Pamunkey Indian Tribe diet and culture.
From 1918 to 2019, to mitigate declining populations of herring, the tribe ran a hatchery to “give back to the river.” The Pamunkey Tribe’s fishing rights date back to their 1677 treaty with the British Crown. Today, only the Pamunkey and citizens of other tribes in Virginia can legally fish for shad in this region.
A single type of fish moving between salt and freshwater, tracing the paths of the watershed, has helped to shape centuries of diet, law, culture and stewardship, highlighting the many connections between nature and culture.
Pine cones, ammonites, shorebirds, salamanders and shad tell more than individual stories about particular places. Together, they point to older and larger patterns: varied forests, vanished seas, seasonal migrations, mountain habitats and rivers that harbor a fantastic diversity of life.
State lines are one way to picture the U.S., but natural history provides another – one that shows the ancient and living connections running across the landscape.
Stewart Edie, Research Geologist and Curator of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution and Torben Rick, Curator of North American Archaeology, Smithsonian Institution
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Stewart and Torben have presented a very interesting article.
Thank goodness for the Smithsonian, and thank goodness for natural history!
Prompted to write this after reading an article in The Conversation.
I turned 12 in November, 1956. My father died on December, 20th, 1956.
My mother eventually remarried and my step-father quickly became a wonderful Dad to me. But the shock of my father’s death never left me, and the fact that I am writing this some 70 years later shows that the episode is still with me, albeit in a much reduced way.
Thus this article in The Conversation hits the mark.
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Matthew Alemu, University of Michigan; Northeastern University
“What do dads do on Tuesdays?”
This wasn’t a rhetorical question when I posed it to my wife as our daughter’s birth approached. Before my daughter was born, I had seen my father just once in the past 27 years. That’s over 1,400 Tuesdays. In fact, as a kid I hardly saw fathering any day of the week, save for on TV sitcoms; absent dads were prevalent within my family and among my peers.
My daughter was born on a Saturday. My first Tuesday as a father came and went in a blur of exhaustion. I’d always loved playing and working with kids. I felt generally competent in what to do with my newborn daughter. Yet as I held her, insecurity from my father’s absence kept me questioning: Will I be better than my absent father?
Years before my daughter’s birth, I was a first-year Ph.D. student intending to study Black men and how their memories of childhood affected them as adults.
My pivot toward focusing on fatherhood began while I was conducting interviews for a larger study on men of all races and unemployment. After completing these interviews, I was surprised to see that 85% of my respondents grew up with absent fathers. The nature of the absences – how they occurred and how they felt – struck me as a more compelling area of study.
Historically, scholars and policymakers looked at whether fathers lived with their kids as the sole criterion when designating them as “present” or “absent.” Yet, my respondents’ stories revealed distinctions that “nonresident” alone did not capture. Specifically, my analysis identified four unique patterns of absence: “consistent,” “inconsistent,” “extended” and “absolute.”
Consistent absence includes regular interactions, like every Tuesday after school or every weekend.
Inconsistent absence involves irregular and unpredictable interactions – a dad who promises to show up on Tuesday but doesn’t appear until Friday, or disappears for weeks at a time.
Extended absence occurs when years pass between interactions: meeting your father for the first time at 9 years old, and then having no interaction with him until he shows up at your high school graduation, for instance.
Finally, absolute absence means interactions never occurred or they can no longer occur, such as a father who died or disappeared, with his whereabouts unknown. Some people in this category didn’t even know their fathers’ names.
These categories complicate what can otherwise be oversimplified.
For example, the fathers of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both absent, but in distinctly different ways.
Clinton’s biological father died in a car accident before he was born – an absolute absence. Obama’s father left the family when Barack was 2 years old and reappeared only once, years later – a relationship characterized by extended absence.
In contrast, other famous people saw their absent fathers more regularly.
The parents of the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, divorced when he was 3 years old, but he grew up spending summers with his father, putting the absence in the “consistent” category. Similarly, Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine regularly saw his dad on weekends after his parents divorced, which I also classify as a consistent form of absence.
Ironically, I became a father as I began my dissertation research on absent fathers. Using the four categories of paternal absence I developed, my dissertation examined how men’s experiences with absence shaped their own aspirations for fatherhood and romantic relationships.
I wanted to showcase the complexity and range of experiences of growing up with an absent father, while also exposing the disparity in how people remembered their absent fathers. Specifically, some people knew their fathers, while others knew only that their father was absent. This memory gap makes it harder for some new dads to envision what it means to be better than their own fathers.
Like me, the men I interviewed for my research relayed anxieties about navigating fatherhood. Like me, they wanted to be better than their fathers.
But we all differed in how prepared we felt for the task. Some had vivid memories to guide them: One respondent, who experienced inconsistent absence, hated that his father never showed curiosity in getting to know him. So when he became a parent, he made sure to ask his daughter questions so she would know he cared about her life.
Yet those with little to no memories of their father may aspire to be, as another respondent put it, “a father like my mother.”
Doing this work, I’ve been able to reimagine my own experience with absence.
I used to assume that the pattern of absence I experienced with my own dad reflected a standard. My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. I saw my father regularly until moving away at 6 – a form of consistent absence. But the rest of my childhood passed without seeing my father, shifting me to extended absence. I used to wrongly dismiss less extreme patterns of absence, such as seeing one’s father weekly or monthly, as “not absence.”
My unique experience of absence has also distinctly shaped how I remember my father. My memories mainly come from 6 years old and earlier. Many are unfavorable, like his smoking in the car, knowing I had asthma. Some fond ones exist, like the two of us walking on the beach or feeding ducks at a local pond.
Still, what I recall most is my fear of my father. The origins of this fear escape me. I’ve been told he abused my mother, but I don’t remember witnessing it.
These scant memories presented a paradox as I entered fatherhood: I didn’t want to be feared like my father, but I didn’t know exactly what made me afraid of my father. This uncertainty loomed throughout my early years of parenting: When my daughter cried in my arms or preferred my wife over me, was it simply a sign of normal fussiness? Or had I unknowingly become a scary figure, like my father?
I last met my father 20 years ago. I was full of hate when that meeting began, but this hatred soon dissipated. First, I realized I wasn’t angry at my father, because I barely knew my father. I was angry at his absence. Second, I learned that his father was absent, too.
They say “hurt people hurt people.” Before my dad was an absent father, he was missing his dad, too. This doesn’t excuse his absence or his treatment of my mother. But it did make it harder to hate someone who was probably hurting like me.
As I continue to explore the impact of absent fathers as an academic, I continue to reconcile my transition from abandoned son to a present father. Lacking inspiration or guidance from my own father, I’m practicing fatherhood on my terms.
For me, that’s meant building traditions. From the outset, we’ve created routines around music, dancing, bath time, reading and talking about “big emotions.” Our most meaningful tradition has been our weekly daddy-daughter breakfast, which I started when she was 18 months old. She’s now 8.
Sometimes we go on Tuesdays. But any day of the week is fair game.
Matthew Alemu, Special Advisor, Poverty Solutions, University of Michigan; Northeastern University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Now Matthew Alema was much more furtunate than me. At least he saw his father from time to time.
I often reflect how my life would have been different had my father lived for much longer, say until he was in his 70’s or 80’s. There’s no question it would have been significant. I would have had a profession, possibly in the designing of buildings. I would have gone to university, And so on …
I have a son and a daughter, both in their 50’s, and a grandson by my daughter and her husband. I am so grateful to be able to speak to them on a regular basis. They all live in England.
Learning from Dogs 