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“I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of a secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be: listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject… Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, that he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." (43)

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What if you could freeze yourself for a hundred years and then wake back up in the future? Would you do it? How about 1,000 years? Or 10,000? Some very tiny worms in Russia just arrived from an ice-cold time machine after being frozen roughly 40,000 years ago. They're alive, they're moving and eating and they're now they're thought to be the oldest living organisms on the entire planet.

The two tiny nematodes (also called roundworms) were discovered in ancient permafrost in two areas of Russia's frigid north. Scientists from Russia, in partnership with Princeton University, estimate the worms to be around 32,000 and 42,000 years old, which would make them the oldest known living organisms on Earth.

The worms were found in permafrost samples taken from the ground; one was found on the inside of an ancient squirrel burrow while the other was discovered near a river. The permafrost samples were kept in storage before being slowly thawed, and once the temperature was warm enough for the worms to handle, they sprung back to life.

According to the recently published research, the tiny creatures have shown signs of life, including movement and even eating. Their long-term stasis doesn't seem to have hindered them much if at all, and the worms might even hold some clues that could help scientists develop new breakthroughs in cryonics.

The worms are obviously very old, coming from the Pleistocene era, which spanned from approximately 2.6 million years ago to just 12,000 years ago. It's the time period that most people refer to as the "Ice Age," and in their original time period, these small creatures shared the earth with some of the earliest humans.

This is obviously an incredible scientific breakthrough and there's likely much these worms can teach us about how life can persist over thousands and thousands of years while being completely frozen. Some astronomers believe that organisms could be transported between planets on asteroids while remaining frozen for the length of their trip through space, only thawing once they come crashing down on an alien world. It's one of many theories about how life spreads throughout the universe and it seems like these nematodes would be prime candidates.

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Scientists just brought 40,000-year-old worms back to life

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What if you could freeze yourself for a hundred years and then wake back up in the future? Would you do it? How about 1,000 years? Or 10,000? Some very tiny worms in Russia just arrived from an ice-cold time machine after being frozen roughly 40,000 years ago.

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“His voice became fainter as he spoke; and at length, exhausted by his effort, he sunk into silence. About a half hour afterwards he attempted again to speak, but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.” (182

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Why Frankenstein is the story that defines our fears

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The tragic horror has done more than any other story to shape modern anxieties. But it’s what it tells us about compassion that we need now more than ever.

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"Oh! When will my guiding spirit, in conducting me to the dæmon, allow me the rest I so much desire; or must I die and he yet live?" (176)

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Tombstones For Eyes - Mario Vitale | Dark Poem

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We search for solace amidst the crowd to appease One day we shall all bow humbly to our knees The land is dark without the sun to light When this life is over there is no double feature Shades of

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“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous” (84).

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Emerging research suggest parents who chronically neglect their children increase the chance that the child will develop aggressive and delinquent tendencies in adolescence.

Researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work believe the one factor that links neglect with those behaviors appears to be poor social skills.

While child neglect can include many different aspects, the study examined two areas: a failure to provide for a child's basic needs, and the lack of adequate supervision.

Investigators discovered a failure to provide, which includes not meeting a child's basic needs for food, shelter and clothing, was the key aspect of neglect that linked to later aggression and delinquency.

Researchers also found that lack of adequate supervision did not link to the same outcomes, even after accounting for the contributions of other forms of maltreatment.

"When you have a neglected child whose basic needs are not being met, they're not getting the socialization that enables them to grow to be a happy adolescent and adult," said Patricia Logan-Greene, Ph.D.

The study by Logan-Greene and coauthor Annette Semanchin Jones, Ph.D., will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

Logan-Greene says failing to provide for children may result in poor hygiene or a tendency toward illness, making some of them unappealing to their peers.

"These children are often rejected and lack the kind of social stimulation that would lead them to have positive, strong, social ties," she said.

"We expected lack of supervision - leaving children unattended - to be more contributive that it was. So that was a surprise; but remember, this is different from parental monitoring: knowing who their friends are or what they might be getting into when parents are not around."

The groundbreaking research adds to a growing body of literature highlighting the effects of chronic neglect on child development. Neglect is an understudied research area despite being the most common form of maltreatment in the U.S. and among the most costly segments of child welfare systems.

"Neglect is hard to study," said Logan-Greene. "It's not like physical abuse or sexual abuse where there are specific incidents that we can ask people about. It's more difficult to answer the question, 'How often were you neglected?'"

Logan-Greene said neglect is quietly insidious and it took a long time to understand its powerful impact.

The absence of a consensus definition also compounds the difficulty of studying chronic neglect. There is no clinical threshold that establishes the point at which neglect becomes chronic.

For this study the researchers considered neglect in terms of a continuum and examined effects of neglect across development using LONGSCAN, a comprehensive resource of maltreatment data, tracking not only neglect, but physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and exposure to violence.

Their findings and the presence of a social connection suggest possible prevention strategies that Logan-Greene said are obvious and simple.

"Give them interventions that improve their social skills," she said. "We have these interventions now; they exist and we know they work on other levels. So there's a lot of promise that we can prevent these behaviors from occurring."

Researchers also found that boys are more likely to respond to chronic neglect with aggressive or delinquent behavior than girls. Although the research did not address what's responsible for that difference, historically boys have been more prone to engage in aggressive behavior than girls, but over the past 20 years that margin of difference has been decreasing.

Women are the fastest growing population in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, according to Logan-Greene.

Source: University at Buffalo

Chronic Neglect Can Lead to Aggression in Kids

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Chronic Neglect Can Lead to Aggression in Kids

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Emerging research suggest parents who chronically neglect their children increase the chance that the child will develop aggressive and delinquent tendencies in adolescence. Researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work believe the one factor that links neglect with those behaviors appears to be poor social skills.

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“Men, who before this change seemed to have been hid in caves, dispersed themselves, and were unemployed employed in various arts of cultivation” (97)

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What Twins Can Teach Us About Nature vs. Nurture (Published 2018)

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The relative importance of nature and nurture has been debated for centuries, and has had strong — and sometimes misguided — influences on public policy.

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“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel whom thou drivers from joy and no misdeed.” (84)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tombstones For Eyes - Mario Vitale | Dark Poem

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We search for solace amidst the crowd to appease One day we shall all bow humbly to our knees The land is dark without the sun to light When this life is over there is no double feature Shades of

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“No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” (44)
“I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.” (44)

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"Clear!" At some point during medical education and practice, every physician has heard or given this command. One person - such as a closely supervised medical student - pushes a button to deliver an electric shock and the patient's body jerks. The code team, in complex choreography, works to restore both the patient's cardiac rhythm and a pulse strong enough to perfuse vital organs.

After a successful defibrillation effort, team members do not have time to dwell on the line crossed from death to life. It is even difficult to focus on the ultimate goal: to enable the patient to leave the hospital intact, perhaps to grasp a grandchild's - or grandparent's - hand while crossing the street to the park.

Despite these dramatic hospital scenes, many scientists, doctors and patients balk at any mention of the words Frankenstein and medicine in the same breath. Because, unlike the Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's novel, the reanimators at a hospital code have not toiled alone in a garret; assembled body parts from slaughterhouses, dissecting rooms and charnel houses; or created an entirely new being. Nonetheless, in this bicentennial commemorative year of the book's publication, it is not only germane, but important to consider the impact of this story, including our reactions to it, on the state of scientific research today.

Shelley's Frankenstein has captured the imaginations of generations, even for those who have never read the tale written by a brilliant 18-year-old woman while on holiday with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dr. John Polidori amid extensive storms induced by volcanic ash during the so-called year without a summer. Mary Shelley (her name was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at the time) was intrigued by stories of science such as galvanism, which she would have heard through her father's scientist (then called natural philosopher) friends.

With Frankenstein, Shelley wrote the first novel to forefront science as a means to create life, and as such, she wrote the first major work in the science fiction genre. Frankenstein, a flawed, obsessed student, feverishly reads extensive tomes and refines his experiments. After he succeeds in his labors, Frankenstein rejects his creation: He is revulsed by the sight of the "monster," whom he describes as hideous. This rejection of the monster leads to a cascade of calamities. The subtitle of the book, The Modern Prometheus, primes the reader for the theme of the dire consequences of "playing God."

A framework for examining morality and ethics

Frankenstein is not only the first creation story to use scientific experimentation as its method, but it also presents a framework for narratively examining the morality and ethics of the experiment and experimenter. While artistic derivations, such as films and performances, and literary references have germinated from the book for the past 200 years, the current explosion of references to Frankenstein in relation to ethics, science and technology deserves scrutiny.

Science is, by its very nature, an exploration of new frontiers, a means to discover and test new ideas, and an impetus for paradigm shifts. Science is equated with progress and with advances in knowledge and understanding of our world and ourselves. Although a basic tenet of science is to question, there is an underlying belief, embedded in words like "advances" and "progress," that science will better our lives.

Safeguards, protocols and institution approvals by committees educated in the horrible and numerous examples of unethical experiments done in the name of science are used to prevent a lone wolf like Victor Frankenstein from undertaking his garret experiments. Indeed, it is amusing to think of a mock Institutional Review Board approval process for a proposal he might put forward.

But these protections can go only so far. It is impossible to predict all of the consequences of our current and future scientific and technologic advances. We do not even need to speculate on the potential repercussions of, for example, the creation of a laboratory-designed self-replicating species, as we can look to unintended consequences of therapies such as the drug thalidomide, and controversies over certain gene therapies. This tension, this acknowledgment that unintended consequences occur, is unsettling.

The theory of galvanism - the idea that electricity could reanimate dead tissue - is named after researcher Luigi Galvani, who published an illustrated report on what he called animal electricity. (Photo from Luigi Galvani, De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius.)

Science and technology have led to impressive improvements in health and health care. People I love are alive today because of cancer treatments unknown decades ago. We are incredibly grateful to the medical scientists who envisioned these drugs and who did the experiments to prove their effectiveness.

As an anesthesiologist, I care for patients at vulnerable times in their lives; I use science and technology to render them unconscious - and to enable them to emerge from an anesthetized state.

But, as the frontiers are pushed further and further, the unintended consequences of how science and technology are used could affect who we are as humans, the viability of our planet and how society evolves. In terms of health, medicine and bioengineering, Frankenstein resonates far beyond defibrillation. These resonances include genetic engineering, tissue engineering, transplantation, transfusion, artificial intelligence, robotics, bioelectronics, virtual reality, cryonics, synthetic biology and neural networks. These fields are fascinating, worthy areas of exploration.

'Frankenstein' is not only the first creation story to use scientific experimentation as its method, but it also presents a framework for narratively examining the morality and ethics of the experiment and experimenter.

We, as physicians, health care providers, scientists and people who deeply value what life and health mean, cannot shy away from discussions of the potential implications of science, technology and the social contexts which give new capabilities and interventions even greater complexity. Not much is clear, but that makes the discussion more imperative.

Even the call "Clear!" and the ritual removal of physical contact with a patient just about to receive a shock is not so "clear," as researchers scrutinize whether interruptions to chest compressions are necessary for occupational safety - that is, it may be deemed safe in the future for shocks and manual compressions to occur simultaneously.

We need to discuss the big questions surrounding what is human, and the implications of those questions. What do we think about the possibility of sentient nonhumans, enhanced beyond our limits, more sapient than Homo sapiens? Who or what will our great-grandchildren be competing against to gain entrance to medical school?

Studying and discussing works of art and imagination such as Frankenstein, and exchanging ideas and perspectives with those whose expertise lies outside the clinic and laboratory, such as artists, humanists and social scientists, can contribute not just to an awareness of our histories and cultures, but also can help us probe, examine and discover our understanding of what it means to be human. That much is clear.

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Why issues raised in Frankenstein still matter 200 years later

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Two hundred years later, quickly advancing science makes the ethical dilemmas raised in Frankenstein still worth considering.

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“When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibers, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour”(43).
" You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph[...] You would not call it 🤬 if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands"(125).

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This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. For an explanation of our Advertising Policy, visit this page.

One thing Japan is definitely known for is robots. From specially themed restaurants to robots that perform funeral rites, the country has always seemed to be on the forefront of incorporating them into people's everyday lives. So where else would you expect to find the first robot-staffed hotel recognized by the Guinness World Records? Sure enough, it's in Japan - and we paid the Henn-na Hotel a visit.

Booking

I booked this as a pre-change Citi Prestige 4th-night-free booking over the phone with the Citi concierge, and was able to get the actual cost of the fourth night - including taxes - as a statement credit. Getting the free night eased the sting, but robots still don't come cheap. The total cost for our stay was $178 per night before the 4th Night Free credit and ended up being $134 per night after it.

While other Huis Ten Bosch hotels are available through the Citi travel portal, the Henn-na Hotel isn't available for online booking so you're still going to have to call the Citi Concierge to book a fourth night free. But as you'll see below, you might not want to book four nights at this hotel. Alternatively, I could have paid with a travel credit card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the Chase Sapphire Preferred, which would have given me 3x or 2x points for the travel purchase, respectively.

Check-In

The hotel is in Huis Ten Bosch Machi in the Sasebo section of Nagasaki Prefecture, located about a 75-minute drive from the city of Nagasaki or nearly two hours by train. It isn't too hard to get there from Nagasaki Airport (NGS). The airport limousine bus picks passengers up right at the airport and drops them off at the entrance to the Huis Ten Bosch theme park. From that stop, you can wait for the regular bus to the hotel, but it's only a seven-minute walk. For ¥1,250 per person (~$11), the coach-style bus is a comfortable way of traveling between the airport and the hotel. Note that it only accepts cash, but you can get change - stow your luggage in the bottom of the bus and pay when you exit. A taxi ride runs at least ¥8,800 (~$78) each way. Since it's not going to save you much time and won't be any more comfortable, I'd only recommend taking a taxi if the bus doesn't work for your schedule.

From the exterior, the only indication that Henn-na was a robot hotel was a stationary Transformers-type robot outside the plain-looking lobby.

Inside, we were greeted in Japanese and English by - you guessed it - robots. At the check-in desk, two of them were dinosaurs...

...while the third looked like a human.

These weren't the robots that were there when the hotel first launched. On the website, we were excited to use the Aldebaran Nao robot to check in, because that was the robot my wife had been programming to play soccer over the last eight years - Katie just completed her Ph.D. in computer science and it's the robot that won the RoboCup in 2012. But at the reception desk, the Nao had been replaced by a dinosaur.

The check-in process was clunky. The robot merely greeted us before directing us to scan our passports on another machine. The whole thing was a lot less robot-assisted then we were expecting.

We were in Building E, Room 255. It wasn't close to the lobby, but it did seem to be one of the best rooms of our type. We couldn't request a specific room at check-in, and there was no obvious way to change the assigned room. If we'd been lucky enough to be assigned to Building A and arrived between 3:00pm and 10:00pm, we could've used one of the robot porters to move our bags to our room.

The Room

In keeping with the hotel's focus on technology, the doors could be opened with facial-recognition software. The first time we entered, we could opt into this system by touching our keys to a sensor and registering our faces, which would let us open the door at the touch of a button from then on.

Though cool in theory, it didn't work when the light changed, so if we'd registered our faces at night, we would've only been able to open the door at night. Beyond that, it wasn't 100% accurate. Bottom line: Don't leave your room key behind.

After we finally got the door to open, we checked out the room. Here's what we saw:

Yes, that was the sound of the toilet flushing as I walked in the bathroom. Ah, Japanese toilets and their motion-sensor technology. But more on that later.

The room was quite small and had little storage - the supposed wardrobe was only a few hangers teetering from a thin wooden plank. That's it. There was no closet, no dressers or any real shelving - only four small vertical cubbies. There was also no desk, but there were two simple wooden chairs and a small side table. The not-quite-full-size beds (48 inches wide by 74 inches long) took up virtually the whole room. We found the beds firm but comfortable. There was only one standard pillow and one long cylindrical pillow per bed.

Our room had massive windows with a great view of the Huis Ten Bosch theme park. While not quite floor-to-ceiling, the window seemed to take up more than 80% of the wall.

Since we were working on a New York time schedule, we were especially happy with the roll-down blackout curtains. There was also a retractable privacy shade, but we found - simply from walking around the hotel at night - that this did a poor job of providing any privacy.

The in-room robot assistant, Tuly, was... interesting. There were no light switches, clocks or alarm clocks; instead, these functions were handled by Tuly via voice command. She also told us the weather and room temperature and sang a selection of Auto-Tuned Japanese songs - upon request, of course.

The lack of light switches, though interesting in theory, proved annoying. Tuly had a motion sensor and if you didn't move for a while, the lights would turn off. If you didn't specifically tell Tuly to turn off the lights - say, at bedtime - the motion sensor would remain activated. On the nights when Katie went to sleep and I stayed up working, I was faced with a no-win situation when I wanted to hit the sack: I could wake up my wife with a loud exchange with Tuly, or risk having the lights turned on every time we rolled over in our sleep.

Another annoying thing about Tuly: She loved to randomly jump into our conversations. There were a few times when she would interrupt my phone calls by yelling out, "Did you call me?" - and this a few minutes into the conversation, for some reason. We learned to instruct Tuly to "be quiet," and she didn't respond to any voice commands until we relieved her by commanding, "You can talk now."

There was no lack of power plugs in the room. We counted 11 total US-style plugs; four of which were grounded three-prong plugs. They look like US plugs but put out a different voltage, and while cell phones, laptops and other devices should handle the different voltage with no issues, it's a good idea to check any electronics before plugging them in.

The room came stocked with two sets of bathrobes, two sets of slippers, a blowdryer, a safe, a mini-bar stocked with two free water bottles, a kettle, two mugs, a corkscrew, a bottle opener, two umbrellas and a shoehorn.

The bathroom was stocked with two new toothbrushes - standard for Japanese hotels - two cups, and Pola Shower Break soap and shampoo. Coffee, tea or any other other bathroom amenities we might've wanted had to be purchased from a vending machine in the lobby.

Compared to other "shower"-enabled toilets we ran across in Japan, this toilet control panel was pretty straightforward.

There was also a 31-inch flat screen TV, but we couldn't find any English programming on the six channels. At one point, though, there were four baseball games across the six channels.

Amenities

The hotel didn't have a pool, fitness center or any nearby attractions besides the Huis Ten Bosch theme park, which featured Disney-esque prices. What the hotel did have was... robots.

The hotel lobby was full of them, including a robot orchestra that played three times a day.

Most of the interactive robots only spoke and understood Japanese. The little teddy bear that was supposed to be bilingual was pretty bad at English, but still ridiculously cute.

One of the most noticeable features of the lobby was the glass-enclosed robot cloakroom, perfect for storing bags if you got to the hotel too early to check in or wanted to head to the Huis Ten Bosch theme park after checking out. Of course, we had to test it out. Here's the bag-retrieval process:

A self-driving robot vacuumed the lobby during the day.

Outside, an automated robot mowed the grounds.

A Winbot window-cleaning robot cleaned the windows of the lobby.

There was hotel-wide free Wi-Fi, which worked for us everywhere except the on-site restaurant; the speeds were determined by how many other people were online. I clocked blazing 50 Mbps-plus download and upload speeds in the room during the day, while the lobby during a busy check-out time tested at disappointing 1.38 Mbps download and 1.87 Mbps upload speeds.

Food and Beverage

The on-site restaurant served breakfast, lunch and dinner. While 4th Night Free reservations aren't supposed to select breakfast-included rates, my Citi concierge somehow booked one of these for us so we were able to enjoy a fresh Japanese-style breakfast each morning.

Besides this, there were no nearby restaurants outside the park. In fact, all the informational kiosks pointed us only toward in-park restaurants. Unfortunately, there was no robot room service at the hotel. Instead, there were vending machines.

I tried one of the ¥500 (~$4.41) packages of French fries from the hot-food machine and instantly regretted it. The soggy and hot - yet somehow not thoroughly cooked - fries were a total waste of money.

Overall Impression

As Katie completed her Ph.D. in a lab that focused on human-interactive robotics, we came with high hopes for this hotel, but were disappointed by the limited check-in robots and robot butlers and frustrated by the facial-recognition keyless entry process. And what could've been the best aspect, Tuly, fell flat because she struggled to understand us. Overall, the hotel felt really gimmicky.

That said, for families with kids and technophiles of all ages visiting Japan, we'd still recommend the Henn-na Hotel. While we used our Citi Prestige card for a 4th Night Free stay, you could really experience all that this hotel has to offer in just a night or two. We would only recommend staying longer only if you're planning on visiting the Huis Ten Bosch theme park during your stay - that's the only entertainment in the area outside this hotel.
Have you plugged into the robot hotel? Tell us about your experience, below. All photos and videos by the author.

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Review: Henn-na Hotel, the World's First Hotel Run by Robots

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This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. For an explanation of our Advertising Policy, visit this page. One thing Japan is definitely known for is robots.

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“For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” (47)
"Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate. My own strength is exhausted; and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration.” (168)

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Written by Dr. Mary Dowd

Environmental regulation dates back to the 13th century, when King Edward threatened to execute his subjects for burning soft coal from the sea that polluted London with billowing smoke. Nevertheless, coal use continued unabated. Just as the citizenry ignored King Edward, many people today enjoy the benefits of an industrialized society with little thought to ecological repercussions. To sustain life on Earth, government entities such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitor levels of chemical discharge from industrial operations that threaten natural resources.

Air Pollution

Industrial pollution contributes a startling amount of air pollution to the atmosphere, as evidenced by the EPA's regulation of 80 different categories of toxins. Examples of common industrial emissions deemed hazardous to the environment include asbestos, dioxin, methylene chloride, perchlorethylene and metals like lead and chromium. The EPA indicates that factories, oil refineries, coal-fired power plants, steel mills, dry cleaners and chromium electroplating facilities are among the worst air polluters in the United States. Also, trucks used in shipping goods and services to these industries discharge toxic benzene and toluene from fuel oil.

Water Pollution

Lakes and rivers near factories typically have higher levels of pollution than bodies of water in rural areas, according to S.K. Agarwa, the author of "Water Pollution." Industrial toxins enter the water supply in gaseous, liquid or solid form. For example, pollution from smokestacks falls as acid rain on land and water. Highly toxic waste from incinerators is deposited in landfills where it can leach into ground water. Inadequately treated waste water from paper mills can release pollutants into rivers. Worse still, about 70 percent of industrial waste generated in developing countries is dumped untreated into waterways, as reported by National Geographic.

Soil Contamination

The U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that mining, manufacturing plants and factory waste are sources of soil contamination. Industrial waste often contains heavy metals that pollute urban soil and cropland. Lead is the most common toxin found, according to the USDA. Soil becomes contaminated when toxic industrial emissions fall as precipitation. Other sources include improperly lined industrial landfills, mining tailings and chemicals spilled during transport. Most heavy metals don't degrade like carbon-based materials, making soil decontamination difficult and very costly.

Habitat Destruction

Reduced species biodiversity can occur when the ecosystem is disrupted by urban expansion and industrialization. For example, the bison population was decimated when settlers cleared the land for homes, businesses and agriculture. Modern day examples include displacement of birds and animals by logging operations, gravel pits, strip mines, industrial explosions, road construction, oil spills and proliferating factories. Global warming can render an area inhospitable to certain species of flora or fauna. The risk of species extinction from global warming may be even greater than the risk of extinction from deforestation, according to a study reported in Conservation Biology.

About the Author

Mary Dowd holds a doctorate in educational leadership and a master's degree in counseling and student personnel from Minnesota State University, Mankato. In her 20 years of higher education experience, she has taught classes, served as interim dean of students, and worked in many areas of student affairs, including student discipline, career advising, orientation and violence prevention.

Photo Credits

John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images

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The Effects on the Environment From Industrialization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Environmental regulation dates back to the 13th century, when King Edward threatened to execute his subjects for burning soft coal from the sea that polluted London with billowing smoke. Nevertheless, coal use continued unabated. Just as the citizenry ignored King Edward, many people today enjoy the benefits of an ...

# data[].attributes.body
“Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (84).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Emerging research suggest parents who chronically neglect their children increase the chance that the child will develop aggressive and delinquent tendencies in adolescence.

Researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work believe the one factor that links neglect with those behaviors appears to be poor social skills.

While child neglect can include many different aspects, the study examined two areas: a failure to provide for a child's basic needs, and the lack of adequate supervision.

Investigators discovered a failure to provide, which includes not meeting a child's basic needs for food, shelter and clothing, was the key aspect of neglect that linked to later aggression and delinquency.

Researchers also found that lack of adequate supervision did not link to the same outcomes, even after accounting for the contributions of other forms of maltreatment.

"When you have a neglected child whose basic needs are not being met, they're not getting the socialization that enables them to grow to be a happy adolescent and adult," said Patricia Logan-Greene, Ph.D.

The study by Logan-Greene and coauthor Annette Semanchin Jones, Ph.D., will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

Logan-Greene says failing to provide for children may result in poor hygiene or a tendency toward illness, making some of them unappealing to their peers.

"These children are often rejected and lack the kind of social stimulation that would lead them to have positive, strong, social ties," she said.

"We expected lack of supervision - leaving children unattended - to be more contributive that it was. So that was a surprise; but remember, this is different from parental monitoring: knowing who their friends are or what they might be getting into when parents are not around."

The groundbreaking research adds to a growing body of literature highlighting the effects of chronic neglect on child development. Neglect is an understudied research area despite being the most common form of maltreatment in the U.S. and among the most costly segments of child welfare systems.

"Neglect is hard to study," said Logan-Greene. "It's not like physical abuse or sexual abuse where there are specific incidents that we can ask people about. It's more difficult to answer the question, 'How often were you neglected?'"

Logan-Greene said neglect is quietly insidious and it took a long time to understand its powerful impact.

The absence of a consensus definition also compounds the difficulty of studying chronic neglect. There is no clinical threshold that establishes the point at which neglect becomes chronic.

For this study the researchers considered neglect in terms of a continuum and examined effects of neglect across development using LONGSCAN, a comprehensive resource of maltreatment data, tracking not only neglect, but physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and exposure to violence.

Their findings and the presence of a social connection suggest possible prevention strategies that Logan-Greene said are obvious and simple.

"Give them interventions that improve their social skills," she said. "We have these interventions now; they exist and we know they work on other levels. So there's a lot of promise that we can prevent these behaviors from occurring."

Researchers also found that boys are more likely to respond to chronic neglect with aggressive or delinquent behavior than girls. Although the research did not address what's responsible for that difference, historically boys have been more prone to engage in aggressive behavior than girls, but over the past 20 years that margin of difference has been decreasing.

Women are the fastest growing population in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, according to Logan-Greene.

Source: University at Buffalo

Chronic Neglect Can Lead to Aggression in Kids

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Chronic Neglect Can Lead to Aggression in Kids

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Emerging research suggest parents who chronically neglect their children increase the chance that the child will develop aggressive and delinquent tendencies in adolescence. Researchers in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work believe the one factor that links neglect with those behaviors appears to be poor social skills.

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"From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk! [...] a high destiny seemed to bear me on until I fell, never, never again to rise." (178)
"Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries" (182)

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5-year-old with pigtails: "I want to be an astronaut!"

Society: "Aww, that's so sweet. You can be whatever you want to be!"

15-year-old with metallic blue highlights: "I want to be an astronaut!"

Society: "That's nice. Maybe if you study hard in all the right subjects it might be possible, but you'd better have a backup plan. How about you stop dying your hair weird colors and think about being a secretary instead?"

25-year-old with a ponytail: "I want to be an astronaut!"

Society: "Get real. Only kids think about stupid stuff like that. Get a job, a mortgage, a car payment, and contribute to society like you're supposed to."

We nurse practitioners tend to be helpers and organizers. We had ginormous idealistic dreams when we were younger, wanting to help the entire world and all the people around us. However, as we grew up society and people around us firmly told us to put that idealism away, so we did.

Slogging through the reality of nursing and medicine in today's health care environment tends to squash that idealism even further. The squashing happens so subtly and slowly that we don't even notice it happening until its decay is advanced, leaving us feeling drained, stressed, burned out and unhappy.

We do get to help people as nurse practitioners, but not like we thought we would when we were kids, or even when we were nursing students. We start to feel cynical and jaded and even trapped within "the system," trying our damnedest to make a difference but feeling powerless because we often are simply not allowed to do so due to constraints by society, insurance companies, patients and administrators.

So what can you do?

Acknowledge The Death Of Your Idealism

We rarely engage in this kind of thing in US culture, as we love actions and "fixing" things. However, you have to admit the problem exists and give yourself time to process and grieve before you can fix it.

I realized my idealism was dead a couple years ago. I started to feel cynical, jaded and sarcastic. I started judging my self, patients and coworkers harshly, as well as random people around me. I felt excruciatingly frustrated with what I perceived as my inability to truly make a difference in my patients' lives, even though I was working my tail off every single day. I was burning out and losing hope. I went through a many-months-long process to acknowledge and then rekindle my hope and idealism, and I hope to help you get there, too. Yes, you can have your spark back.

The first step in acknowledging the death of your idealism is to grieve your loss. We are trained as adults to see realism as correct, and idealism as foolish. However, when we lose contact with our idealism, a large chunk of our physical, mental and spiritual energy leave with it. This rapidly results in lack of meaning and purpose in work and life.

For example, remember what you expected your role/identity would be as a nurse practitioner would be back when you were a student? It turned out to be much different than what society, patients and clinics want you to be, didn't it. The loss inherent in that rift hurts, and deserves to be acknowledged.

You don't have to do anything fancy to acknowledge it. Just sit down in a quiet place for a few minutes and remember and imagine what it was like to be an idealistic student or new nurse, and how excited you were at the time.

Have a conversation with or write a letter to your younger self, expressing your grief at the loss of your innocence and idealism. Or think about it as vividly as you can, and allow yourself to experience the loss of your idealism fully.

The moment you admit to yourself how idealistic you aren't, you connect with the fact that your idealism isn't dead, just dormant.

Before you start trying to rekindle your idealism, though, give yourself time to sit with the acknowledgement. Some people can acknowledge something and immediately "own" the knowing of it, but most of us take some time to fully understand it. Go at your own pace.

Once you successfully internalize the knowledge of your dormant idealism, you are ready to start rekindling that idealism. I will discuss exactly that in my next blog post, to help you take the next step toward stress relief and healing burnout.

Take Care of You,

Sam

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Have You Acknowledged The Death Of Your Idealism?

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5-year-old with pigtails: "I want to be an astronaut!" Society: "Aww, that's so sweet. You can be whatever you want to be!" 15-year-old with metallic blue highlights: "I want to be an astronaut!" Society: "That's nice. Maybe if you study hard in all the right subjects it might be possible, but you'd better have a backup plan.