Category: People

The relationship between us and wild animals.

In this particular case looking at the wolf.

So many times a particular article from a website that allows republishing is not only a good and relevant article but also is a quick way of me publishing a post when, as I was yesterday, a bit pressed for time.

So here is that article from The Conversation.

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Wolf restoration in Colorado shows how humans are rethinking their relationships with wild animals

A gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park. NPS/Jim Peaco

Christopher J. Preston, University of Montana

From sports to pop culture, there are few themes more appealing than a good comeback. They happen in nature, too. Even with the Earth losing species at a historic rate, some animals have defied the trend toward extinction and started refilling their old ecological niches.

I’m a philosopher based in Montana and specialize in environmental ethics. For my new book, “Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals,” I spent three years looking at wildlife comebacks across North America and Europe and considering the lessons they offer. In every case, whether the returnee is a bison, humpback whale, beaver, salmon, sea otter or wolf, the recovery has created an opportunity for humans to profoundly rethink how we live with these animals.

One place to see the rethink in action is Colorado, where voters approved a ballot measure in 2020 mandating the reintroduction of gray wolves west of the Continental Divide. Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife Agency has released a draft plan that calls for moving 30 to 50 gray wolves from other Rocky Mountain states into northwest Colorado over five years, starting in 2024.

Aldo Leopold, the famed conservationist and professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, believed that moral beliefs evolve over time to become more inclusive of the natural world. And what’s happening in Colorado suggests Leopold was right. Human attitudes toward wolves have clearly evolved since the mid-1940s, when bounties, mass poisoning and trapping eradicated wolves from the state.

Recovering animals encounter a world that is markedly different from the one in which they declined, especially in terms of how people think about wildlife. Here are several reasons I see why societal attitudes toward wolves have changed. The importance of keystone species

Wolves released in northwest Colorado will wear GPS collars that enable wildlife managers to track them.

The idea that certain influential species, which ecologists call keystone species, can significantly alter the ecosystems around them first appeared in scientific literature in 1974. Bison, sea otters, beavers, elephants and wolves all exert this power. One way in which wolves wield influence is by preying on coyotes, which produces ripple effects across the system. Fewer coyotes means more rodents, which in turn means better hunting success for birds of prey.

Wolves also cause nervous behaviors among their prey. Some scientists believe that newly returned predators create a “landscape of fear” among prey species – a term that isn’t positive or negative, just descriptive. This idea has shifted thinking about predators. For example, elk avoid some areas when wolves are around, resulting in ecological changes that cascade down from the top. Vegetation can recover, which in turn may benefit other species.

Insights into pack dynamics

Animal behavioral science research has provided pointers for better wolf management. Studies show that wolf packs are less likely to prey on livestock if their social structure remains intact. This means that ranchers and wildlife managers should take care not to remove the pack’s breeding pair when problems occur. Doing so can fragment the pack and send dispersing wolves into new territories.

Wildlife agencies also have access to years of data from close observation of wolf behavior in places like Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were reintroduced starting in 1995. This research offers insights into the wolf’s intelligence and social complexity. All of this information helps to show how people can live successfully alongside them.

Predators provide economic value

Research has also demonstrated that wolves provide economic benefits to states and communities. Wisconsin researchers discovered that changes in deer behavior due to the presence of wolves have saved millions of dollars in avoided deer collisions with cars. These savings far exceed what it costs the state to manage wolves.

Wolf recovery has been shown to be a net economic benefit in areas of the U.S. West where they have returned. The dollars they attract from wolf-watchers, photographers and foreign visitors have provided a valuable new income stream in many communities.

Predators do kill livestock, but improved tracking has helped to put these losses in perspective. Montana Board of Livestock numbers show that wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions caused the loss of 131 cattle and 137 sheep in the state in 2022. This is from a total of 2,200,000 cattle and 190,000 sheep. Of the 131 cattle, 36 were confirmed to be taken by wolves – 0.0016% of the statewide herd.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dogs, foxes and coyotes in Montana all killed more sheep and lambs than wolves did in 2020. Even eagles were three times more deadly to sheep and lambs than wolves were.

Actual costs to ranchers are certainly higher than these numbers suggest. The presence of wolves causes livestock to lose weight because the animals feed more nervously when wolves are around. Ranchers also lose sleep as they worry about wolves attacking their livestock and guard dogs. And clearly, low statewide kills are small comfort to a rancher who loses a dozen or more animals in one year. Margins are always tight in the livestock business.

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A northern Colorado rancher discusses options for protecting his cattle from wolves, which already are naturally present in the state.

What’s more, predators’ economic impacts don’t end with ranching. In Colorado, for example, elk numbers are likely to decline after wolves are reintroduced. This may affect state wildlife agency budgets that rely on license fees from elk hunters. It may also affect hunting outfitters’ incomes.

In my view, voters who supported bringing wolves back to Colorado should remain deeply aware of the full distribution of costs and support proactive compensation schemes for losses. They should be mindful that support for wolf reintroduction varies drastically between urban and rural communities and should insist that effective mechanisms are in place ahead of time to ensure fair sharing of the economic burdens that wolves generate.

A new ethical playing field

Despite these complexities, the idea of the “big bad wolf” clearly no longer dominates Americans’ thinking. And the wolf is not alone. Social acceptance of many other wildlife species is also increasing. For example, a 2023 study found that between 80% and 90% of Montanans believed grizzly bears – which are recovering and expanding their presence there – have a right to exist.

Aldo Leopold famously claimed to have experienced an epiphany when he shot a wolf in New Mexico in the 1920s and saw “a fierce green fire” dying in her eyes. In reality, his attitude took several more decades to change. Humans may have an ingrained evolutionary disposition to fear carnivorous predators like wolves, but the change ended up being real for Leopold, and it lasted.

Leopold, who died in 1948, did not live to see many wildlife species recover, but I believe he would have regarded what’s happening now as an opportunity for Americans’ moral growth. Because Leopold knew that ethics, like animals, are always evolving.

Christopher J. Preston, Professor of Philosophy, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Those last few paragraphs under the sub-heading of ‘A new ethical playing field’ show how many other wildlife species have gained a real advantage, a social acceptance as the article said. Long may it continue.

Please, please watch this

And I wish I knew what to say…

This is a video that is three years old.

But it is more pertinent today than it was when it was first released.

The video asks ‘… why we never really learnt how to talk about this’.

The video is a little less than ten minutes long so watch it now, with the family as well, if that is appropriate, and perhaps have a discussion afterwards.

Jean and I do not have any answers especially when the news is all about other things.

Yes, we know that the climate is changing but what exactly does that mean is a more difficult question to answer. Mind you there are a growing number of organisations committed to finding answers.

Yes, there are many scientists who have clear opinions on the situation but we need a global movement, NOW, to address this very urgent requirement, and there is no sign that the global community are even talking about climate change let alone doing something.

Please, please watch this:

I would love to hear your thoughts.

The clue to making us human

A really fascinating article from The Conversation on Imagination.

The website The Conversation had another very interesting link to something that sorts out the humans from all other life forms. It is imagination!

I have pleasure in republishing it!

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Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history

Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Andrey Vyshedskiy, Boston University

Published February, 23rd, 2023

You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.

Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?

I’m a neuroscientist who studies how children acquire imagination. I’m especially interested in the neurological mechanisms of imagination. Once we identify what brain structures and connections are necessary to mentally construct new objects and scenes, scientists like me can look back over the course of evolution to see when these brain areas emerged – and potentially gave birth to the first kinds of imagination.

From bacteria to mammals

After life emerged on Earth around 3.4 billion years ago, organisms gradually became more complex. Around 700 million years ago, neurons organized into simple neural nets that then evolved into the brain and spinal cord around 525 million years ago.

Velociraptor chasing a furry critter
It was to mammals’ advantage to hide out while cold-blooded dinosaurs hunted during the day. Daniel Eskridge/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images

Eventually dinosaurs evolved around 240 million years ago, with mammals emerging a few million years later. While they shared the landscape, dinosaurs were very good at catching and eating small, furry mammals. Dinosaurs were cold-blooded, though, and, like modern cold-blooded reptiles, could only move and hunt effectively during the daytime when it was warm. To avoid predation by dinosaurs, mammals stumbled upon a solution: hide underground during the daytime.

Not much food, though, grows underground. To eat, mammals had to travel above the ground – but the safest time to forage was at night, when dinosaurs were less of a threat. Evolving to be warm-blooded meant mammals could move at night. That solution came with a trade-off, though: Mammals had to eat a lot more food than dinosaurs per unit of weight in order to maintain their high metabolism and to support their constant inner body temperature around 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).

Our mammalian ancestors had to find 10 times more food during their short waking time, and they had to find it in the dark of night. How did they accomplish this task?

To optimize their foraging, mammals developed a new system to efficiently memorize places where they’d found food: linking the part of the brain that records sensory aspects of the landscape – how a place looks or smells – to the part of the brain that controls navigation. They encoded features of the landscape in the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain. They encoded navigation in the entorhinal cortex. And the whole system was interconnected by the brain structure called the hippocampus. Humans still use this memory system for remembering objects and past events, such as your car and where you parked it.

two bits of human brain are highlighted, one on each side
An interior brain structure called the hippocampus helps synthesize different kinds of information to create memories. Sebastian Kaulitzki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Groups of neurons in the neocortex encode these memories of objects and past events. Remembering a thing or an episode reactivates the same neurons that initially encoded it. All mammals likely can recall and re-experience previously encoded objects and events by reactivating these groups of neurons. This neocortex-hippocampus-based memory system that evolved 200 million years ago became the first key step toward imagination.

The next building block is the capability to construct a “memory” that hasn’t really happened.

Involuntary made-up ‘memories’

The simplest form of imagining new objects and scenes happens in dreams. These vivid, bizarre involuntary fantasies are associated in people with the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep.

Scientists hypothesize that species whose rest includes periods of REM sleep also experience dreams. Marsupial and placental mammals do have REM sleep, but the egg-laying mammal the echidna does not, suggesting that this stage of the sleep cycle evolved after these evolutionary lines diverged 140 million years ago. In fact, recording from specialized neurons in the brain called place cells demonstrated that animals can “dream” of going places they’ve never visited before.

In humans, solutions found during dreaming can help solve problems. There are numerous examples of scientific and engineering solutions spontaneously visualized during sleep.

The neuroscientist Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment that proved nerve impulses are transmitted chemically. He immediately went to his lab to perform the experiment – later receiving the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Elias Howe, the inventor of the first sewing machine, claimed that the main innovation, placing the thread hole near the tip of the needle, came to him in a dream.

Dmitri Mendeleev described seeing in a dream “a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” And that was the periodic table.

These discoveries were enabled by the same mechanism of involuntary imagination first acquired by mammals 140 million years ago.

young professionals looking at glass wall with post-it notes
Intentionally brainstorming ideas depends on being able to control your imagination. Goodboy Picture Company/E+ via Getty Images

Imagining on purpose

The difference between voluntary imagination and involuntary imagination is analogous to the difference between voluntary muscle control and muscle spasm. Voluntary muscle control allows people to deliberately combine muscle movements. Spasm occurs spontaneously and cannot be controlled.

Similarly, voluntary imagination allows people to deliberately combine thoughts. When asked to mentally combine two identical right triangles along their long edges, or hypotenuses, you envision a square. When asked to mentally cut a round pizza by two perpendicular lines, you visualize four identical slices.

This deliberate, responsive and reliable capacity to combine and recombine mental objects is called prefrontal synthesis. It relies on the ability of the prefrontal cortex located at the very front of the brain to control the rest of the neocortex.

When did our species acquire the ability of prefrontal synthesis? Every artifact dated before 70,000 years ago could have been made by a creator who lacked this ability. On the other hand, starting about that time there are various archeological artifacts unambiguously indicating its presence: composite figurative objects, such as lion-man; bone needles with an eye; bows and arrows; musical instruments; constructed dwellings; adorned burials suggesting the beliefs in afterlife, and many more.

Multiple types of archaeological artifacts unambiguously associated with prefrontal synthesis appear simultaneously around 65,000 years ago in multiple geographical locations. This abrupt change in imagination has been characterized by historian Yuval Harari as the “cognitive revolution.” Notably, it approximately coincides with the largest Homo sapiens‘ migration out of Africa.

Genetic analyses suggest that a few individuals acquired this prefrontal synthesis ability and then spread their genes far and wide by eliminating other contemporaneous males with the use of an imagination-enabeled strategy and newly developed weapons.

So it’s been a journey of many millions of years of evolution for our species to become equipped with imagination. Most nonhuman mammals have potential for imagining what doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened involuntarily during REM sleep; only humans can voluntarily conjure new objects and events in our minds using prefrontal synthesis.

Andrey Vyshedskiy, Professor of Neuroscience, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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There we are! As the author of the article says: “Most nonhuman mammals have potential for imagining what doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened involuntarily during REM sleep; only humans can voluntarily conjure new objects and events in our minds using prefrontal synthesis.“

It has been a very long journey for us humans to be equipped with imagination. One wonders what the next ten or twenty years will bring? Any thoughts you want to leave as comments?

Good posture

Why it is so important!

We go to the local Club Northwest. Jean attends the Rock Steady class and I work for an hour with Bruce Pilgreen, one of the staff. Bruce is very knowledgeable of human bodies and, indeed, trained as a Coach some years ago.

About a month ago Bruce showed me how to lay on my back, with my legs pulled back and my head slightly raised on a small cushion. My hands were palm upwards and about forty degrees either side of my body. The point of this position was to feel my spine, particularly my lower spine, flat against the ground and practice deep breathing at the same time. It was all to do with posture and Bruce remarked how common bad posture was to be seen out in the streets.

Well I came across a MedlinePlus item on Posture and wanted to share it with you all.

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Guide to Good Posture

Summary

Good posture is about more than standing up straight so you can look your best. It is an important part of your long-term health. Making sure that you hold your body the right way, whether you are moving or still, can prevent pain, injuries, and other health problems.

What is posture?

Posture is how you hold your body. There are two types:

  • Dynamic posture is how you hold yourself when you are moving, like when you are walking, running, or bending over to pick up something.
  • Static posture is how you hold yourself when you are not moving, like when you are sitting, standing, or sleeping.

It is important to make sure that you have good dynamic and static posture.

The key to good posture is the position of your spine. Your spine has three natural curves – at your neck, mid back, and low back. Correct posture should maintain these curves, but not increase them. Your head should be above your shoulders, and the top of your shoulder should be over the hips.

How can posture affect my health?

Poor posture can be bad for your health. Slouching or slumping over can:

  • Misalign your musculoskeletal system
  • Wear away at your spine, making it more fragile and prone to injury
  • Cause neck, shoulder, and back pain
  • Decrease your flexibility
  • Affect how well your joints move
  • Affect your balance and increase your risk of falling
  • Make it harder to digest your food
  • Make it harder to breathe

How can I improve my posture in general?

  • Be mindful of your posture during everyday activities, like watching television, washing dishes, or walking
  • Stay active. Any kind of exercise may help improve your posture, but certain types of exercises can be especially helpful. They include yoga, tai chi, and other classes that focuses on body awareness. It is also a good idea to do exercises that strengthen your core (muscles around your back, abdomen, and pelvis).
  • Maintain a healthy weight. Extra weight can weaken your abdominal muscles, cause problems for your pelvis and spine, and contribute to low back pain. All of these can hurt your posture.
  • Wear comfortable, low-heeled shoes. High heels, for example, can throw off your balance and force you to walk differently. This puts more stress on your muscles and harms your posture.
  • Make sure work surfaces are at a comfortable height for you, whether you’re sitting in front of a computer, making dinner, or eating a meal.

How can I improve my posture when sitting?

Many Americans spend a lot of their time sitting – either at work, at school, or at home. It is important to sit properly, and to take frequent breaks:

  • Switch sitting positions often
  • Take brief walks around your office or home
  • Gently stretch your muscles every so often to help relieve muscle tension
  • Don’t cross your legs; keep your feet on the floor, with your ankles in front of your knees
  • Make sure that your feet touch the floor, or if that’s not possible, use a footrest
  • Relax your shoulders; they should not be rounded or pulled backwards
  • Keep your elbows in close to your body. They should be bent between 90 and 120 degrees.
  • Make sure that your back is fully supported. Use a back pillow or other back support if your chair does not have a backrest that can support your lower back’s curve.
  • Make sure that your thighs and hips are supported. You should have a well-padded seat, and your thighs and hips should be parallel to the floor.

How can I improve my posture when standing?

  • Stand up straight and tall
  • Keep your shoulders back
  • Pull your stomach in
  • Put your weight mostly on the balls of your feet
  • Keep your head level
  • Let your arms hang down naturally at your sides
  • Keep your feet about shoulder-width apart

With practice, you can improve your posture; you will look and feel better.

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There you are! I am sure that many, many people do not have good posture and the guidance above may just inspire you to aim for better posture.

Plastics in the ocean

A fascinating insight into recovered plastic.

Like so many others we do our little bit regarding plastic but do not properly think about the issue. I have to admit that I am not even sure if all plastics are harmful or just some.

But I comprehend art!

That is why I am republishing, with permission, this article from The Conversation.

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My art uses plastic recovered from beaches around the world to understand how our consumer society is transforming the ocean

Pam Longobardi amid a giant heap of fishing gear that she and volunteers from the Hawaii Wildlife Fund collected in 2008. David Rothstein, CC BY-ND

Pam Longobardi, Georgia State University

I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning.

My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. At the edge of a black lava beach pounded by surf, I encountered multitudes upon multitudes of plastic objects that the angry ocean was vomiting onto the rocky shore.

I could see that somehow, impossibly, humans had permeated the ocean with plastic waste. Its alien presence was so enormous that it had reached this most isolated point of land in the immense Pacific Ocean. I felt I was witness to an unspeakable crime against nature, and needed to document it and bring back evidence.

I began cleaning the beach, hauling away weathered and misshapen plastic debris – known and unknown objects, hidden parts of a world of things I had never seen before, and enormous whalelike colored entanglements of nets and ropes.

Three large plastic art installations, the central one a cornucopia spilling plastic objects onto the floor.
‘Bounty Pilfered’ (center), ‘Newer Laocoön’ (left) and ‘Threnody’ (right). All made of ocean plastic from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, installed at the Baker Museum in Naples, Fla., 2022. Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

I returned to that site again and again, gathering material evidence to study its volume and how it had been deposited, trying to understand the immensity it represented. In 2006, I formed the Drifters Project, a collaborative global entity to highlight these vagrant, translocational plastics and recruit others to investigate and mitigate ocean plastics’ impact.

My new book, “Ocean Gleaning,” tracks 17 years of my art and research around the world through the Drifters Project. It reveals specimens of striking artifacts harvested from the sea – objects that once were utilitarian, but have been changed by their oceanic voyages and come back as messages from the ocean.

Array of plastic objects, including toys, action figures and fragments of larger objects.
‘Drifters Objects,’ a tiny sample of the plastic artifacts Pam Longobardi has collected from beaches worldwide. Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

Living in a plastic age

I grew up in what some now deem the age of plastic. Though it’s not the only modern material invention, plastic has had the most unforeseen consequences.

My father was a biochemist at the chemical company Union Carbide when I was a child in New Jersey. He played golf with an actor who portrayed “The Man from Glad,” a Get Smart-styled agent who rescued flustered housewives in TV commercials from inferior brands of plastic wrap that snarled and tangled. My father brought home souvenir pins of Union Carbide’s hexagonal logo, based on the carbon molecule, and figurine pencil holders of “TERGIE,” the company’s blobby turquoise mascot.

On the 2013 Gyre Expedition, Pam Longobardi traveled with a team of scientists, artists and policymakers to investigate and remove tons of oceanic plastic washing out of great gyres, or currents, in the Pacific Ocean, and make art from it.

Today I see plastic as a zombie material that haunts the ocean. It is made from petroleum, the decayed and transformed life forms of the past. Drifting at sea, it “lives” again as it gathers a biological slime of algae and protozoans, which become attachment sites for larger organisms.

When seabirds, fish and sea turtles mistake this living encrustation for food and eat it, plastic and all, the chemical load lives on in their digestive tracts. Their body tissues absorb chemicals from the plastic, which remain undigested in their stomachs, often ultimately killing them.

Two piles of tiny particles of virtually identical sizes.
Plastic ‘nurdles,’ (left), tiny pellets that serve as raw materials for manufacturing plastic products, and herring roe, or eggs (right). These visually analogous forms exemplify how fish can mistake plastic for food. Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

The forensics of plastic

I see plastic objects as the cultural archaeology of our time – relics of global late-capitalist consumer society that mirror our desires, wishes, hubris and ingenuity. They become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature. By regurgitating them ashore or jamming them into sea caves, the ocean is communicating with us through materials of our own making. Some seem eerily familiar; others are totally alien.

Two views of a degraded arm from a plastic doll, found on Playa Jaco in Costa Rica.
A degraded plastic doll arm, from the series ‘Evidence of Crimes.’ Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

A person engaging in ocean gleaning acts as a detective and a beacon, hunting for the forensics of this crime against the natural world and shining the light of interrogation on it. By searching for ocean plastic in a state of open receptiveness, a gleaner like me can find symbols of pop culture, religion, war, humor, irony and sorrow.

A rolling landscape covered with thousands of life vests.
‘Division Line,’ 2016. This photograph shows the ‘life-jacket cemetary’ in Lesvos, Greece. Traumatized asylum-seekers and migrants arriving by boat from Türkiye leave the life vests on shore as they stagger inland. Most of the waste is plastic. © Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

In keeping with the drifting journeys of these material artifacts, I prefer using them in a transitive form as installations. All of these works can be dismantled and reconfigured, although plastic materials are nearly impossible to recycle. I display some objects as specimens on steel pins, and wire others together to form large-scale sculptures.

A plastic bottle cap inscribed 'Endless' and a photograph of a beach littered with plastic objects.
From the series ‘Prophetic Objects,’ a plastic cap from a Greek manufacturer of cleaning products, found on the Greek island of Kefalonia. Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

I am interested in ocean plastic in particular because of what it reveals about us as humans in a global culture, and about the ocean as a cultural space and a giant dynamic engine of life and change. Because ocean plastic visibly shows nature’s attempts to reabsorb and regurgitate it, it has profound stories to tell.

A large sculpted anchor in the center of an art gallery, with ties to life preservers mounted on the ceiling.
‘Albatross’ and ‘Hope Floats,’ 2017. Recovered ocean plastic, survival rescue blankets, life vest straps and steel. Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND

I believe humankind is at a crossroads with regards to the future. The ocean is asking us to pay attention. Paying attention is an act of giving, and in the case of plastic pollution, it is also an act of taking: Taking plastic out of your daily life. Taking plastic out of the environment. And taking, and spreading, the message that the ocean is laying out before our eyes.

Pam Longobardi, Regents’ Professor of Art and Design, Georgia State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Pam at one point describes the ocean plastic”… because of what it reveals about us as humans in a global culture, and about the ocean as a cultural space and a giant dynamic engine of life and change …”. It raises questions that I can only ponder the answer. Ultimately, are there too many inhabitants on this planet? What does the next generation think? Is there an answer?

Picture Parade Four Hundred and Seventy-Three

A little different for today!

Our neighbour Dordie L. sent these across earlier in the month. Enjoy!

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Thank you, Dordie!

Burt Bacharach remembered

So many tuneful memories.

I grew up with the songs of Burt Bacharach in my heart, my mind and my ears. He was born on May 12, 1928 and lived until quite recently; namely the 8th February, 2023. This may be Valentine’s Day for 2023 but I think the obituary of Bacharach comes first.

The Conversation had a brilliant item on him, published on February 10th and I am going to republish that piece now.

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Burt Bacharach mastered the art of the perfect pop song – and that ain’t easy

A pop pioneer whose songs were performed by the great and good for decades.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Gena R. Greher, UMass Lowell

Easy on the ear, perhaps. But the label of “easy listening” often attached to the songs of Burt Bacharach belies the mastery of his talent in crafting perfect moments in music.

Yes, Bacharach’s back catalog is filled with memorable, catchy melodies – whether they were written with longtime partner and lyricist Hal David, former wife Carole Bayer Sager or in collaboration with more contemporary artists such as Elvis Costello, Adele and Dr. Dre.

But there is a harmonic and rhythmic complexity to his music that elevates it above the sweet, often saccharine arrangements that can typify easy listening. It is full of influences from jazz chord structures and progressions, as well as rhythms.

It is why Bacharach, who died on Feb. 8, 2023, at the age of 94, appealed to generations of listeners, as well as the diverse pool of singers who chose to work with him.

Cross-generational appeal

Bacharach began his long songwriting career in the 1950s, but it was the following decade that saw him come to prominence with a series of hit songs.

But with the 1960s as a backdrop – a time of immense innovation in popular music – Bacharach may not have been taken as seriously as many of his contemporaries. It was a time when rock ‘n’ roll and the British Invasion were at the forefront, with rhythm and blues, protest music and folk rock finding their way on the musical landscape.

While Bacharach’s musical counterparts were writing and performing music that responded to and reflected the political, social and cultural upheavals that defined the era, Bacharach and David’s songs focused on different themes: Theirs was music that dealt with relationships and matters of the heart.

They also stood apart from other notable songwriting partners of the age – Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, for example – in that the songs were written for others to perform. In that way, they were a throwback to an earlier age of popular music, when the likes of Rodgers and Hart provided hit after hit for a roster of singers.

Indeed, they were a late product of Tin Pan Alley – the music industry centered around midtown Manhattan. Bacharach met David in 1957 in the storied Brill Building in New York City – a place where a young songwriter could perhaps catch a break.

Not long after they began working together, Bacharach came across a young backup singer at a recording session who seemed to have promise. The first single he produced with her, “Don’t Make Me Over,” was the first of 38 songs he and David produced with Dionne Warwick.

Her warm tones and fluid phrasing made Warwick’s voice the perfect accompaniment to Bacharach’s music.

But she was one of many collaborators. Some, like Warwick, were plucked from relative obscurity. Others, like Perry Como, were already established singers.

The list of artists who found success with Bacharach songs in that era is astonishing: Aretha Franklin, The Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and The 5th Dimension, to name just a few.

Through collaborators, Bacharach’s music was able to reach a fairly diverse audience. The songs were so well written that they could easily be reworked into different genres, and break the confines of “easy listening” – a genre often maligned as unhip. In the hands of Isaac Hayes, the sweet refrains of “Walk on By” becomes a psychedelic funk classic. Years later, The White Stripes transformed “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” into a stripped-down, guitar-heavy slice of rock.

Froms Oscars to revivals

The music of David and Bacharach also worked on a different level – as the background to movie soundtracks. The 1966 Michael Caine film “Alfie” is perhaps equally known today for the title track, with versions by Cher, Warwick and British singer Cilla Black all becoming hits on the back of the film.

In 1969, Bacharach and David’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” sung by B.J. Thomas in the western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” won the Academy Award for best original song. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best original score.

Adding to success on the charts and on screen, Bacharach also won acclaim for his work on Broadway. The 1968 show “Promises, Promises” was groundbreaking in its use of amplification in the orchestra, which included a rock band. The show contained a number of songs that topped the charts, most notably Warwick’s version of the show-stopping “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

A mana and woman sit at a recording desk.
Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick recording together in 1964.
Bela Zola/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

In an NPR “Fresh Air” interview in 2010 – when the musical was being revived on Broadway – Bacharach discusses the number of rhythmic meter changes in the title song, “Promises, Promises,” and the difficulties these rhythmic changes presented for singers and musicians in the show.

The interview is also notable in that it reunited him with David – the two had a much publicized split in 1973 after working on a failed movie. The breakdown of their successful musical partnership saw Bacharach lose interest in writing music for a spell, and affected his relationship with Warwick.

This was eventually resolved with her recording of one of Bacharach’s most memorable songs, 1985’s “That’s What Friends are For,” written with his then-wife, Carole Bayer Sager. Though the song had been first recorded by Rod Stewart for the film “Night Shift,” the Warwick & Friends’ version – the friends being none other than Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder – is the one that became a hit and helped revive Bacharach’s career.

Though best known for the songs he wrote in the 1960s through the 1980s, Bacharach continued to write music into his old age, collaborating with Elvis Costello, Adele and Dr. Dre.

You may have noticed the sheer number – and range – of artists Bacharach worked with. It speaks to the quality and endurance of his output. Yes, he will be remembered by some as the writer of exemplary “easy listening” songs. But Burt Bacharach’s legacy will prove that he was so much more.The Conversation

Gena R. Greher, Professor of Music, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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There are so many of his melodies on YouTube and you are free to do your own searching. But I just wanted to share one with you. It is Burt Bacharach with Barbra Streisand with Close To You and Be Aware.

Perfect!

Fossils

A fascinating article about the fossilisation of teeth.

Change is a constant! That’s not my saying but it is still a very good one. There are many, many articles online about the pace of change and I am not going to pick a particular one; you can do that yourself if you are interested.

But I am going to republish an article about the fossilisation of teeth. It was published on January 25th, 2023 and it was an article in The Conversation.

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Fossil teeth reveal how brains developed in utero over millions of years of human evolution – new research

Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate. Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

Tesla Monson, Western Washington University

Fossilized bones help tell the story of what human beings and our predecessors were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how can you learn about important parts of our ancestors’ life cycle – like pregnancy or gestation – that leave no obvious trace in the fossil record?

The large brains, relative to overall body size, that are a defining characteristic of our species make pregnancy and gestation particularly interesting to paleoanthropologists like me. Homo sapiens’ big skulls contribute to our difficult labor and delivery. But the big brains inside are what let our species really take off.

My colleagues and I especially wanted to know how fast our ancestors’ brains grew before birth. Was it comparable to fetal brain growth today? Investigating when prenatal growth and pregnancy became humanlike can help reveal when and how our ancestors’ brains became more like ours than like our ape relatives’.

To investigate the evolution of prenatal growth rates, we focused on the in-utero development of teeth – which do fossilize. By building a mathematical model using the relative lengths of molar teeth, we were able to track evolutionary changes in prenatal growth rates in the fossil record. Based on our model, it looks as if pregnancy and prenatal growth became more humanlike than chimplike almost 1 million years ago.

pregnant woman's silhouette against sunset on landscape
Pregnancy and delivery come with a lot of risks for parent and baby. Jimy Lindner/EyeEm via Getty Images

Gestation and the human brain

Pregnancy and gestation are important periods – they guide future growth and development and set the biological course for life.

But human pregnancy, and particularly labor and delivery, cost a lot of energy and are often dangerous. The large fetal brain requires a lot of nutrients during development. The rate of embryonic growth during gestation, also known as the prenatal growth rate, exacts a metabolic and physiological toll on the gestating parent. And the tight fit of the infant’s head and shoulders through the pelvic canal during delivery can lead to death, for both the mother and child.

As a trade-off to those potential downsides, there must be a really good reason to have such large heads. The justification is all the abilities that come along with having a big human brain. The evolution of our large brain contributed to our species’ dominance and is associated with increased use of technology and tools, creation of art and the ability to survive in diverse landscapes, among other advances.

The timing and sequence of events that led to the evolution of our large brains is entangled with the ability to find and process more resources, through the use of tools and cooperative group work, for example.

By investigating changes in prenatal growth, we are also investigating changes in how parents gathered food resources and distributed them to their offspring. These increasing resources would have also helped drive the evolution of an even bigger brain. Understanding more about when prenatal growth and pregnancy became humanlike at the same time reveals information about when and how our brains did too.

Humans have the highest prenatal growth rate of all primates living today, at 0.41 ounces/day (11.58 grams/day). Gorillas, for example, have a much larger adult body size than humans, but their prenatal growth rate is only 0.29 ounces/day (8.16 grams/day). Because more than a quarter of all human brain growth is completed during gestation, the rate of prenatal growth directly relates to how big an adult brain grows. How and when Homo sapiens‘ high prenatal growth rate evolved has been a mystery, until now.

What teeth can tell about prenatal growth

Researchers have spent centuries investigating variation in fossilized skeletal remains. Unfortunately brains – let alone gestation and prenatal growth rate – don’t fossilize.

ultrasound of a baby in utero
The developing brain of a human being gestating at 26 weeks. Tesla Monson

But my colleagues and I started thinking about how teeth develop very, very early in utero. Your permanent adult teeth started developing long before you were born, when you were just a 20-week-old fetus. Tooth enamel is more than 95% inorganic, and the vast majority of everything we see in the vertebrate fossil record is teeth, or has teeth.

Building off this realization, we decided to investigate the relationship between prenatal growth rate, brain size and the lengths of teeth.

We measured the teeth of 608 recently living primates from skeletal collections all around the world. We compared those measurements to rates of prenatal growth that we calculated from average gestation length and mass at birth for each species. We also looked at endocranial volume – essentially how much space is inside the skull – as a proxy for brain size.

We found that the rate of prenatal growth is significantly correlated with both adult brain size and relative tooth lengths, across apes and monkeys.

Because prenatal growth is so tightly correlated with relative molar lengths, we were able to use this statistical relationship to generate a mathematical equation that predicts prenatal growth rate from teeth alone. With this equation, we can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.

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Using the new equation, researchers found that prenatal growth rates increased over millions of years of human and hominid evolution. Tesla Monson, CC BY-ND

Using our new method, we then reconstructed prenatal growth rates for 13 fossil species, building a timeline of changes over the past 6 million years of human and hominid evolution. “Hominid” describes all the species on the human side of the family tree after the split about 6 million to 8 million years ago from the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees. From our new research, we now know that prenatal growth rates increased throughout hominid evolution, reaching a humanlike rate that exceeds what we see in all other apes less than 1 million years ago.

A fully human prenatal growth rate appeared with the evolution of our species Homo sapiens only around 200,000 years ago. But other hominid species living in the past 200,000 years, such as Neanderthals, also had “human” prenatal growth rates. Which genes were involved in these changes in growth rate remains to be investigated.

Equation means teeth now reveal even more

Even with only a few teeth and some of the jaw, a trained expert can tell countless things about an extinct individual – what species it was, what kind of diet it ate, whether it competed for mates through fighting, how old it was when it died, whether or not it had any serious health issues and more.

Now, for the first time, we can add to that list knowing what pregnancy and gestation were like for that individual and other members of its species. Teeth can even indirectly hint at the emergence of human consciousness, via evolving brain size.

Interestingly, our model suggests that prenatal growth rates started increasing well before the emergence of our Homo sapiens species. We can hypothesize that having a fast prenatal growth rate was necessary for growing that big brain and evolving human consciousness and cognitive abilities.

These are the sorts of big-picture questions this research lets us start to formulate now – all from just a few teeth.

Tesla Monson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Western Washington University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Tesla Monson is the Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University.

This may not make the daily headlines but, personally, I think that is a shame. The discovery has all sorts of implications for life, including ancient life, on this planet. And speaking of life let us bear a thought for the carnage that is happening in Turkey at this present time. A BBC headline:

A rescue operation is under way across much of southern Turkey and northern Syria following a huge earthquake that has killed more than 2,300 people

Putting aside the pills!

A fascinating article presents an alternative.

There was a recent item on The Conversation that is being shared with you all today. It is about the role of meditation and mindfulness is keeping one healthy, and I sense this will be a popular article!

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Meditation and mindfulness offer an abundance of health benefits and may be as effective as medication for treating certain conditions

By Hilary A. Marusak

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Wayne State University

Published January 12th, 2023

Many people look to diet trends or new exercise regimens – often with questionable benefit – to get a healthier start on the new year. But there is one strategy that’s been shown time and again to boost both mood and health: meditation.

In late 2022, a high-profile study made a splash when it claimed that meditation may work as well as a common drug named Lexapro for the treatment of anxiety. Over the past couple of decades, similar evidence has emerged about mindfulness and meditation’s broad array of health benefits, for purposes ranging from stress and pain reduction to depression treatments to boosting brain health and helping to manage excessive inflammation and long COVID-19. 

Despite the mounting body of evidence showing the health benefits of meditation, it can be hard to weigh the science and to know how robust it is.

I am a neuroscientist studying the effects of stress and trauma on brain development in children and adolescents. I also study how mindfulness, meditation and exercise can positively affect brain development and mental health in youth.

I am very excited about how meditation can be used as a tool to provide powerful new insights into the ways the mind and brain work, and to fundamentally change a person’s outlook on life. And as a mental health researcher, I see the promise of meditation as a low- or no-cost, evidence-based tool to improve health that can be relatively easily integrated into daily life. 

Meditation requires some training, discipline and practice – which are not always easy to come by. But with some specific tools and strategies, it can be accessible to everyone.

What are mindfulness and meditation?

There are many different types of meditation, and mindfulness is one of the most common. Fundamentally, mindfulness is a mental state that, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn a renowned expert in mindfulness-based practices, involves “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” 

This means not ruminating about something that happened in the past or worrying about that to-do list. Being focused on the present, or living in the moment, has been shown to have a broad array of benefits, including elevating mood, reducing anxiety, lessening pain and potentially improving cognitive performance. 

Mindfulness is a skill that can be practiced and cultivated over time. The goal is that, with repetition, the benefits of practicing mindfulness carry over into everyday life – when you aren’t actively meditating. For example, if you learn that you aren’t defined by an emotion that arises transiently, like anger, then it may be harder to stay angry for long. 

The health benefits of meditation and other strategies aimed at stress reduction are thought to stem from increasing levels of overall mindfulness through practice. Elements of mindfulness are also present in practices like yoga, martial arts and dance that require focusing attention and discipline.

The vast body of evidence supporting the health benefits of meditation is too expansive to cover exhaustively. But the studies I reference below represent some of the top tier, or the highest-quality and most rigorous summaries of scientific data on the topic to date. Many of these include systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which synthesize many studies on a given topic. 

Stress and mental health

Mindfulness-based programs have been shown to significantly reduce stress in a variety of populations, ranging from caregivers of people living with dementia to children during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Meta-analyses published during the pandemic show that mindfulness programs are effective for reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression – including the particularly vulnerable time during pregnancy and the postnatal period.

Mindfulness-based programs also show promise as a treatment option for anxiety disorders, which are the most common mental disorders, affecting an estimated 301 million people globally. While effective treatments for anxiety exist, many patients do not have access to them because they lack insurance coverage or transportation to providers, for instance, or they may experience only limited relief.

It’s important to note, however, that for those affected by mental or substance use disorders, mindfulness-based approaches should not replace first-line treatments like medicine and psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Mindfulness strategies should be seen as a supplement to these evidence-based treatments and a complement to healthy lifestyle interventions like physical activity and healthy eating. 

How does meditation work? A look into the brain

Studies show that regular meditators experience better attention control and improved control of heart rate, breathing and autonomic nervous system functioning, which regulates involuntary responses in the body, such as blood pressure. Research also shows that people who meditate have lower levels of cortisol – a hormone involved in the stress response – than those who don’t. 

A recent systematic review of neuroimaging studies showed that focused attention meditation is associated with functional changes in several brain regions involved in cognitive control and emotion-related processing. The review also found that more experienced meditators had stronger activation of the brain regions involved in those cognitive and emotional processes, suggesting that the brain benefits improve with more practice. 

A regular meditation practice may also stave off age-related thinning of the cerebral cortex, which may help to protect against age-related disease and cognitive impairment. 

Limitations of meditation research

This research does have limits. These include a lack of a consistent definition for the types of programs used, and a lack of rigorously controlled studies. In gold-standard randomized controlled trials with medications, study participants don’t know whether they are getting the active drug or a placebo. 

In contrast, in trials of mindfulness-based interventions, participants know what condition they are assigned to and are not “blinded,” so they may expect that some of the health benefits may happen to them. This creates a sense of expectancy, which can be a confounding variable in studies. Many meditation studies also don’t frequently include a control group, which is needed to assess how it compares with other treatments.

Benefits and wider applications

Compared with medications, mindfulness-based programs may be more easily accessible and have fewer negative side effects. However, medication and psychotherapy – particularly cognitive behavioral therapy – work well for many, and a combination approach may be best. Mindfulness-based interventions are also cost-effective and have better health outcomes than usual care, particularly among high-risk patient populations – so there are economic benefits as well.

Researchers are studying ways to deliver mindfulness tools on a computer or smartphone app, or with virtual reality, which may be more effective than conventional in-person meditation training. 

Importantly, mindfulness is not just for those with physical or mental health diagnoses. Anyone can use these strategies to reduce the risk of disease and to take advantage of the health benefits in everyday life, such as improved sleep and cognitive performance, elevated mood and lowered stress and anxiety. 

Where to get started?

Many recreation centers, fitness studios and even universities offer in-person meditation classes. For those looking to see if meditation can help with the treatment of a physical or mental condition, there are over 600 clinical trialscurrently recruiting participants for various conditions, such as pain, cancer and depression. 

If you want to try meditation from the comfort of your home, there are many free online videos on how to practice, including meditations for sleep, stress reduction, mindful eating and more. Several apps, such as Headspace, appear promising, with randomized controlled trials showing benefits for users. 

The hardest part is, of course, getting started. However, if you set an alarm to practice every day, it will become a habit and may even translate into everyday life – which is the ultimate goal. For some, this may take some time and practice, and for others, this may start to happen pretty quickly. Even a single five-minute session can have positive health effects.

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This is a comprehensive article on a most important topic.

For whatever is happening in our world it is getting busier especially for those that are a great deal younger than me.

A lost, and found, dog in Utah

A story that was widely reported.

I was short on time yesterday so no pre-amble.

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Search and rescue team save dog near frozen waterfall in Utah 

The dog separated from its owner on Christmas Eve.

By Teddy Grant, December 27, 2022.

A dog that was stranded near a frozen waterfall in Utah on Christmas Eve was saved by search and rescue officials and reunited with her owner.

According to the Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue, a local man was hiking near Waterfall Canyon on Saturday when he became separated from his dog Nala.

The unidentified hiker couldn’t find Nala by nightfall and resumed his search the morning of Christmas Day, the sheriff’s office wrote on its Facebook page.

The hiker’s family members contacted authorities around 1:00 p.m., local time, saying he wasn’t responding to their calls or text messages, officials said.

Nala’s owner answered one of the phone calls once he regained cellphone service and was able to let people know that Nala was around the waterfall, but couldn’t reach her because of the steepness and the icy condition of the terrain, according to Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue.

A grab from video posted by Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue shows the dog Nala at Waterfall Canyon in Ogden, Utah, Dec. 25, 2022.

Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue

The search and rescue team responded to the call and were able to save a skittish Nala after a little coaxing, officials said.

“Nala was cold with a few minor injuries, but was able to hike down with the rescuers,” officials wrote. “She is one tough puppy! Once reaching the trailhead parking lot, both human and canine couldn’t have been happier to be reunited.”

According to Waterfall Canyon it is a “moderately challenging,” 2.4-mile trail near Ogden, Utah, according to AllTrails. Ogden is around 38 miles north of Salt Lake City.

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I’m sure you read that the human and the dog were very grateful to be reunited.