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Amelia Earhart Mystery Potentially Solved

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Amelia Earhart Mystery Potentially Solved

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Just three years after Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in 1937, a forensic anthropologist name D. W. Hoodless studied some bones found off the island of Nikumaroro. He concluded they were from a male, so they weren't hers; ever since then, the mystery has deepened and fascinated school children and adults alike for generations.

But now, Richard Jantz, a modern forensic anthropologist, has restudied those bones, and he is about as certain as anyone can be that they're Earhart's.

What makes him so sure?

Simple: The field has come a long way since 1940-far enough that certainty is all but assured by using modern techniques. This, in combination with some of the artifacts found on Nikumaroro, might just seal the case for good.

The researchers who worked with Jantz used modern quantitative techniques, including a program known as Fordisc, which simulates and estimates sex, ancestry, and stature from skeletal measurements. Today, it's used by nearly every board-certified forensic anthropologist in the world.

Jantz concluded: "This analysis reveals that Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99% of individuals in a large reference sample. This strongly supports the conclusion that the Nikumaroro bones belonged to Amelia Earhart."

But after using the Fordisc software he went even further, studying bone lengths; using old photographs with scalable, measurable items in them he could calculate Earhart's humerus and radius lengths and compare. He also enlisted an historical seamstress to measure clothing that Earhart wore to gauge bone lengths.

According to the paper, casting aspersions on the Hoodless conclusions from 1940 is not their intention. "Forensic anthropology was not well developed in the early 20th century. There are many examples of erroneous assessments by anthropologists of the period. We can agree that Hoodless may have done as well as most analysts of the time could have done, but this does not mean his analysis was correct."

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99% match: Forensic anthropologists may have solved the Amelia Earhart mystery

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Looks like we finally know some answers that they didn't in 1940.

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Ask an athlete if they'd rather break a bone or rupture their Achilles tendon, and they'll almost certainly say the former.

That's because injuries to the tendons - the strong, flexible cords of tissue that connect muscle to bone, thereby allowing movement - can have long, arduous, and incomplete healing processes. The soft tissue of tendons connecting to the hard tissues of bones makes for a difficult place for healing, and scar tissue there can limit the healed tendon's range of movement and the workload it can handle.

One way to treat tendon injuries is by introducing mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to the site. These cells, which live in the bone marrow, play an important role in regenerating tissue. They can be introduced to the site using "scaffolds" that put the MSCs and growth factors at the site of the injury, where they create new tissue.

Injuries to the tendons can have long, arduous, and incomplete healing processes.

In an effort to improve tendon repair and regeneration, researchers at Los Angeles' Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) turned to the silkworm.

By mixing a silk protein produced by the worm into a gel, the researchers were able to better repair tendon tissue in Achilles-injured rats.

"Tissue remodeling for tendon repair is especially difficult to achieve," TIBI director and CEO Ali Khademhosseini said. "The work done here significantly advances that achievement."

Of worms and wounds: The threads produced by silkworm Bombyx mori have uses beyond beautiful fabrics. The tiny fellows have been the source of important medical supplies for centuries, notably as sutures.

For their study, published in Small, the TIBI team used a specific silk protein called silk fibroin. The silk protein's strength, durability, and biodegradability make it "ideal for use in scaffolds for tendons," TIBI says - but it still poses some problems.

"Silk fibroin (SF) is a promising biomaterial for tendon repair, but its relatively rigid mechanical properties and low cell affinity have limited its application in regenerative medicine," the researchers explain in their paper.

Scaffolds made from gels, on the other hand, do a better job of getting cells to stick and tissues to remodel, but lack the mechanical strength to create tissues as tough as tendons.

So the researcher combined the two together.

In an effort to improve tendon repair and regeneration, researchers at Los Angeles' Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) turned to the silkworm.

The right mix: The Terasaki team combined the silk protein with a gel, creating sheets with various ratios, which they then tested for "fiber structure and stretchiness" until they found the best one for the task.

The winning sheets were then infused with MSCs, which grew better on the sheets with both silk fibroin and gel, compared to the silk protein on its own, and genetic analysis showed that the regenerative gene activity of the MSCs was "significantly increased" compared to fibroin alone.

By staining the sheets, the researchers determined that the cells of the combined sheets had an over 80% attachment rate and were forming the long shapes that indicate the cells were stuck fast. When looking at the gel or silk protein alone, the cells had only a 60% attachment rate and rounded shape.

The silk protein/gel mix showed superior tendon regeneration in rat models.

As a bonus, they noticed that the silk protein also made the resulting gel matrix more porous, which enhances tendon repair.

The silk protein and gel mix also showed superior tendon regeneration in rat models.

The next step will be testing this for safety and efficacy in humans - and we'll be one step closer to overcoming devastating (and sometimes career-killing) tendon injuries.
We'd love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at [email protected].

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Silkworms could one day repair human tendons stronger than before

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Mixing silk protein with a gel matrix allowed for better cell growth and healing in rat models.

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This article was first published on Big Think in May 2022. It was updated in August 2023.

It's 2006. I'm on the school bus listening to my iPod, when on comes Johnny Cash's "Hurt." The song begins softly, a wistful Cash singing of loss and regret over sparse acoustic plucking.

As a freshman in high school, I know nothing of the song's mature themes of aging and death. But about halfway through the song, something happens. The guitar and piano increase in volume, and Cash's voice starts to crescendo. I feel the hairs stand on the back of my neck. A warm shiver runs up my spine, and goosebumps appear on my arms. It feels like something important is happening. I don't know what exactly. But something is coming.

At the moment I expect the song will decrescendo, as it had in the previous chorus, it doesn't. Cash's voice wails over a pounding piano and guitar that threatens to blow out my headphones.

Suddenly, my body is seized by a rapturous electricity; my mind is invigorated by an indescribable fusion of ecstasy, awe, despair, and longing. And in an instant, I realize something deep in my bones:
This is what it feels like to be alive.
The physiology of frisson

There is a word that describes this common human response to music - a word for "that moment" when a song pierces your body and soul. It's called "frisson," and it's the reason why music from artists as seemingly disparate as Johnny Cash, Metallica, Céline Dion, and Mozart are all featured on a scientifically-backed playlist of songs that researchers claim are likely to give people "chills." The 715-song playlist was curated by a team of neuroscientists and is available on Spotify.

" Frisson " derives from French and is "a sudden feeling or sensation of excitement, emotion or thrill," and the experience is not confined to music. Historically, frisson has been used interchangeably with the term "aesthetic chills."

According to a 2019 study, one can experience frisson when staring at a brilliant sunset or a beautiful painting; when realizing a deep insight or truth; when reading a particularly resonant line of poetry; or when watching the climax of a film.

Researchers often describe frisson as a "piloerection" (or "skin orgasm") noting that the experience retains similar "biological and psychological components to sexual orgasm." Some refer to frisson as " pleasurable gooseflesh," while others maintain that the definition should expand "to include other perceptible, non-dermal reactions such as tears, lump-in-throat sensations, and muscle tension/relaxation."

While it is understood that appreciation of beauty is central to what makes us human, it is not clear to researchers what evolutionary advantage this sensitivity could have given our species. The current consensus is that it has something to do with our need to understand our environment:
"Aesthetic chills correspond to a satisfaction of humans' internal drive to acquire knowledge about the external world and perceive objects and situations as meaningful. In humans, this need to explore and understand environmental conditions is a biological prerequisite for survival."
What causes frisson?

In his 2006 book Sweet Anticipation, musicologist David Huron offers a compelling explanation for why we experience such powerful responses to music. He calls it "contrastive valence theory," in which feeling states are strongly influenced by contrast.

"If we initially feel bad, and then we feel good, thegood feeling tends to be stronger than if the good experience occurred without the preceding bad feeling." This is due to a regulatory process called "cognitive appraisal," in which our minds use cognitive and linguistic processes to reframe the meaning of a stimulus. Huron uses the idea of a surprise party to illustrate this phenomenon:
"When a person is unexpectedly surprised by her friends, the ﬁrst response is one of terror: her eyelids retract and her jaw drops. But within half a second, fear is replaced by happy celebration as the individual recognizes her friends and the positive social meaning of the event."
According to Huron, when the appraisal response confirms that there is nothreat, contrastive valence transforms the negative feelings into something positive.

Consider Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (one of three Metallica songs featured on the curated playlist). It is understandable if your immediate emotional reaction to the song's shocking intro is one of fear and foreboding. But thanks to "cognitive reappraisal," that initial adrenaline rush can be transformed into something positive when you realize that you are safe, and that it is music making you feel this way.

Also, notice how this experience is related to how our brains anticipate. This ties into Huron's larger argument in Sweet Anticipation, which is built upon ideas popularized by renowned music psychologist Leonard Meyer.

The emotional power of violated expectations

According to an article in Frontiers in Psychology, "Expectancy violations (e.g., harmonic, rhythmic, and/or melodic violations) are strongly correlated to the onset of musical frisson, such that some level of violated expectation may be a prerequisite."

Our minds, which evolved to predict future outcomes to ensure our survival, are always anticipating how something will play out. And when our initial predictions are wrong, depending on the situation, we can feel anything from anger to surprise to frisson.

Thinking back to my experience of listening to Johnny Cash, it was at the precise moment the song "violated my expectations" that I felt frisson. When I anticipated that the song would decrescendo, it crescendoed even more. And, as Huron's book discusses, the most reliable indicator of musical frisson is an increase in loudness.

Other reliable indicators include the entry of one or more instruments or voices; an abrupt change of tempo or rhythm; a new or unexpected harmony; and abrupt modulation. Music psychologist John Sloboda found that the most common types of musical phrases to elicit frisson were "chord progressions descending the circle of fifths to the tonic." This is a deeply affecting chord progression common in many of Mozart's compositions.

Some researchers have also noted how the "human scream" can induce musical frisson. Huron writes:
"The adult human scream displays a disproportionate amount of energy in the broad 0-6 kHz region, where human hearing is best. A human scream is the sound humans can hear at the greatest distance."
There are few things more powerful (or traumatic) than a human scream, and professor William O. Beeman, in his workMaking Grown Men Weep, notes how professional singers (particularly opera singers) exploit this auditory sensitivity.

Consider the soaring choruses in Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" or Adele's "Hello" or John Lennon's screams in The Beatles' "Twist & Shout" (all featured on the playlist). Or listen to Merry Clayton's legendary backing vocals on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

On YouTube, there is a clip from the 2013 film 20 Feet From Stardom in which Clayton's vocal track is isolated. If you scan the comments section, you will see many people citing Clayton's vocal as the reason behind the song's power - particularly the accidental crack in her voice as she screams "murder." Her howls are activating a primal response in us.

It should be noted that there are many different disciplines outside of evolutionary biology that offer compelling explanations of frisson, ranging from the anthropological ( Jeanette Bicknell's Why Music Moves Us) to the ethnomusicological ( Judith Becker's Deep Listeners) to the psychosocial study of "emotional contagion" ( Patrik Juslin's "Toward a Unified Theory of Musical Emotions").

And Huron's contrastive valence theory can help us better understand what is going on behind the scenes when we experience this profound emotional state. By stimulating and exploiting our primitive threat-detection systems, music activates deeply embedded neural networks that have evolved over millions of years. It's no wonder why we feel songs so deeply in our core: Music reminds us what it is like to be alive.

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This 715-song playlist is scientifically verified to give you the chills, thanks to "frisson"

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Listening to some songs can cause a powerful physiological response known as "frisson." What is it, and why does it happen?

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In 1905, our conception of the Universe changed forever when Einstein put forth his special theory of relativity. Prior to Einstein, scientists were able to describe every "point" in the Universe with the use of just four coordinates: three spatial positions for each of the three dimensions, plus a time to indicate which moment any particular event occurred. All of this changed when Einstein had the fundamental realization that every single observer in the Universe, dependent on their motion and location, each had a unique perspective on where and when every event in the Universe would have occurred.

Whenever one observer moves through the Universe relative to another, the observer-in-motion will experience time dilation: where their clocks run slower relative to the observer-at-rest. Based on this, Einstein suggested that we could make use of two clocks to put this to the test: one at the equator, which speeds around the Earth at approximately 1670 km/hr (1038 mph), and one at the Earth's poles, which is at rest as the Earth rotates about its axis.

In this regard, however, Einstein was wrong: both clocks run at exactly the same rate relative to one another. It wasn't until 1971 that a proper test could be conducted, and it required a lot more than special relativity to make it so.

Back when Einstein first put forth his special theory of relativity, there was a missing element: it didn't incorporate gravitation into the mix. He had no idea that proximity to a large gravitational mass could alter the passage of time as well. Owing to the planet's rotation and the attractive gravitational force of every particle that makes up the Earth, our planet bulges at the equator and gets compressed at the poles. As a result, the Earth's gravitational pull at the poles is slightly stronger - by about 0.4% - than it is at the equator.

As it turns out, the amount of time dilation due to a point on the equator zipping around the Earth is exactly cancelled by the additional amount of gravitational time dilation that results from the difference in gravity at the Earth's poles versus the equator. Being deeper in a gravitational field, which the poles are, causes your clock to tick by more slowly, just as moving faster relative to a stationary observer does.

If you want to account for the rate at which the passage of time will appear to occur for each and every observer, both the relative motion effects of special relativity and also the relative effects of gravity - i.e., the relative curvature of spacetime between multiple observers - must be taken into account.

Time dilation was one of the few relativistic phenomena that was actually predicted even before Einstein put forth the ideas of special and general relativity, as the consequences of motion close to the speed of light for distances ( length contraction) was worked out in the 19th century by George FitzGerald and Hendrik Lorentz. If distances changed, then in order to maintain the proper working of physics that we knew for electrons in atoms (as shown by Joseph Larmor in 1897) or for clocks in general (as shown by Emil Cohn in 1904), that the same factor - the Lorentz factor (γ) - must factor into time equations as well.

Although this was very difficult to measure initially, our growing understanding of the subatomic world soon made it possible. In the 1930s, the muon, a subatomic particle that's the heavier, unstable cousin of the electron, was discovered. With a mean lifetime of just 2.2 microseconds, muons that are produced from cosmic ray collisions in Earth's upper atmosphere should all decay within just hundreds of meters. And yet, if you hold out your hand, about one such muon passes through it with every second, indicating that they journeyed somewhere around 100 kilometers: a feat that's physically impossible without time dilation. As soon as we developed the technology of cloud chambers, these muons could easily be seen even by the naked eye.

Other experiments further demonstrated that time dilation was a very real phenomenon for subatomic particles.

The 1932 Kennedy-Thorndike experiment showed that both length contraction and time dilation are required to explain the motion of light through different directions in space; this represented an improvement over the earlier Michelson-Morley experiment, which required length contraction alone.

The Ives-Stilwell experiment measured the Doppler shift of light and tested it against the predictions of special relativity; it was the first laboratory confirmation of time dilation, arising from positively charged hydrogen ions, and showed that the Lorentz factor was the correct factor for time dilation.

And in 1940, the Rossi-Hall experiment experimentally measured the relativistic decay of muons in the atmosphere, quantitatively confirming special relativity's predictions for time dilation.

But Einstein's original goal of using run-of-the-mill clocks at or near the surface of Earth to test the validity of special relativity still remained unfulfilled. Two developments occurred in the 1950s, however, that finally brought the idea within the realm of testability.

The first development that would make such a test possible had long been in the works: the invention of the atomic clock. Previously, the most accurate timepieces involved either quartz clocks or mechanical clocks. However, as the temperature changed, they became less and less accurate, leading many to search for an alternative. Originally suggested by James Clerk Maxwell and later developed further by Lord Kelvin and then Isidor Rabi, the idea of using an atom's vibrational frequency to keep time suddenly leapt into the realm of practicality.

Every atom has a series of energy levels that its electrons are allowed to occupy: those specific levels and no other. However, due to quantum mechanical effects - such as the quantum mechanical spins of the electrons and nuclei interacting with the electromagnetic fields generated by the electrons in motion - some of those energy levels split, creating fine-structure and hyperfine-structure with very small energy differences. When the electrons transition from a slightly higher energy level to a slightly lower one, it will emit a photon of a very specific frequency. By inverting the frequency, you can arrive at a value for time, and therefore, you can use properly prepared atoms to keep time. This is the idea and implementation of modern atomic clocks: currently the best device for timekeeping known to humanity.

However, if you wanted to travel at high speeds in a single direction and return to your starting point, meeting up with an observer who's been stationary the entire time, there's another confounding factor at play: the Earth's uneven terrain. You'll probably have to change elevation, and that's true whether you drive or walk or sail or fly. The problem is this: when you change elevation, you're now a different distance away from the center of the Earth, and that changes how severely the fabric of space is curved. As the curvature of space changes, so does the effect of gravitational time dilation: the component of time dilation that requires general relativity to account for it.

That's why it's so important that, in 1959, the Pound-Rebka experiment was performed. While the most stable isotope of iron is iron-56, with 26 protons and 30 neutrons, you can also make iron-57, with one additional neutron. Depending on whether it's in an excited state or not, iron-57 can either emit or absorb gamma rays of a very specific energy: 14,400 electron-volts.

At the bottom of Harvard's Jefferson laboratory, an emitting sample of iron-57 was placed, and at the top an absorbing sample of iron-57 was placed. As the emitted gamma-rays climbed up out of Earth's gravitational field, they lost energy, and therefore none of them were absorbed at the top of the lab. However, when a speaker cone was added to the emitting sample at the bottom, the emitted photons were "kicked" with an additional amount of energy. When the energy matched the energy lost via gravitational redshift, the photons were indeed absorbed at the top of the tower, demonstrating that the frequency shift observed matched up precisely with that predicted by Einstein's general relativity.

As is often the case, however, it took a few brilliant minds to piece together the idea for how such an experiment would work, even though the detection of such a small, precise effect was now theoretically possible. Physicist Joseph Hafele realized that if you took an atomic clock - one of the then-modern, precise, cesium-133 versions available at the time - and brought it aboard a commercial airliner that was capable of flying completely around the world in a single flight, you could tease out both the effects on time dilation of special and general relativity.

After giving a talk on the idea where astronomer Richard Keating was in the audience, Keating approached Hafele and told him about his work with atomic clocks at the United States Naval Observatory. A short while later, the funding arrived from the Office of Naval Research, as Hafele's ideas would prove to be one of the most inexpensive tests of relativity ever to be conducted; 95% of the research funding was spent on round-the-world plane tickets: half for the scientists and half for the atomic clocks that would occupy the seats.

The brilliance of this idea is that it wasn't just, "Hey, let's fly this plane around the world and see if time dilates the way that special and general relativity predict that they ought to." In and of itself, that would've been completely sufficient to test Einstein's theories for time dilation directly.

But instead, Hafele and Keating both metaphorically and literally went the extra mile. First, one clock remained on the ground at the original location, ticking away and keeping time as accurately as possible: to within a few tens of nanoseconds over the timescale of weeks.

Second, two clocks were brought aboard a round-the-world flight, where they flew around the world in the eastward direction: the same direction as Earth's rotation. Because the plane's motion and Earth's rotation were in the same direction, velocities added, and so its additional, more rapid motion through space should mean that less time passed, with time dilation predicting a loss of time.

And finally, those clocks were then brought aboard a round-the-world flight moving westward: against the Earth's rotation. These planes flew slower than Earth's rotation, so the clock on the ground actually moved faster than the westward-moving plane. The less-rapid motion through space should mean that more time passed for this clock, relative to the eastward-moving clock and also to the stationary one on the ground.

At the conclusion of the experiment, the results were revealed and compared with expectations. The clock that was on the ground the entire time would be treated as "at rest," and everything else that occurred would be both predicted and measured relative to that standard of reference.

Although both clocks were meant to fly along similar courses at similar altitudes, such plans are rarely realistic. That's why the flight crew helped take measurements of the plane's location all throughout its dual journeys, allowing for both the predicted gravitational time dilation and the predicted due-to-motion time dilation to be quantified.

For the eastward-moving plane, it was predicted that 144 nanoseconds would be gained by the clock due to gravitational time dilation, but that 184 nanoseconds would be lost owing to time dilation from its motion. All told, that's a predicted loss of 40 nanoseconds, with an uncertainty of ± 23 nanoseconds.

For the westward-moving plane, which flew at an overall higher altitude, a predicted 179 nanoseconds would be gained from gravitational time dilation. However, its lesser motion through space led to a prediction of a further gain of 96 nanoseconds, for a total predicted gain of 275 nanoseconds, with an uncertainty of ± 21 nanoseconds.

And finally, the measurements, as first reported in Science in 1972 - a full 50 years ago - showed a net loss of 59 nanoseconds (with an experimental uncertainty of ± 10 nanoseconds) for the eastward-moving plane and a net gain of 273 nanoseconds (with an experimental uncertainty of ± 7 nanoseconds) for the westward-moving one.

Although this initial experiment only confirmed the predictions of special and general relativity to within about 10%, it was the first time that time dilation had been tested for large, macroscopic objects using something as precise as an atomic clock. It showed, convincingly, that Einstein's predictions for both the motion component of relativity and also for the gravitational component of relativity were both necessary and both correct in their description for how time ought to pass. This, today, has applications ranging from GPS to radar tracking to measuring the lifetimes of subatomic particles and more.

Today, we can confirm the motion component of time dilations for speeds as low as that of a cyclist, and for elevation differences in the gravitational field at Earth's surface that are as small as 0.33 meters (about 13 inches). Einstein's conception of the Universe was so dramatically different from everything that came prior to it that there was an enormous amount of resistance to the ideas of special and general relativity, and criticisms were leveled at it for decades. But in the end, the results of experiments and observations, not our prejudices, reveal the ultimate truths of nature. The Universe truly is relativistic, and measuring the differences in atomic clocks as they flew around the world is how we truly confirmed it in our everyday lives.

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Einstein was right. Flying clocks around the world in opposite directions proved it.

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Time isn't the same for everyone, even on Earth. Flying around the world gave Einstein the ultimate test. No one is immune from relativity.

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Ancient technology that was centuries ahead of its time

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These astounding examples of ancient technology show that past civilizations were more advanced than we might have thought.

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Perched on a mountaintop, straddling the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Paul Scharre's Army Ranger sniper team was scoping out routes Taliban fighters were suspected of using to move between the countries.

They had gotten into position under the cover of darkness; they were spotted early in the morning by a farmer, Scharre writes in Army of None, his book about autonomous weapons and the future of war.

"Now, what we expected to happen was that some fighters would come to attack us," Scharre tells Freethink. "And we were ready for that."

Sure enough, someone does head out of the village and moves towards Scharre's position. But this is not a Taliban fighter; down the sights of his sniper rifle is a young girl, perhaps just five or six, with two goats in tow.

She began "herding" the goats, Scharre writes, taking long, slow loops and looking at the sniper team's position. A radio she is carrying chirps.

"They sent a little girl to scout on our position," Scharre says.

Scharre does not pull the trigger, of course. It was never an option, even under the extremely dangerous circumstances. But what if a human being wasn't there to make that choice? What if an autonomous weapons system had spotted the girl, and acted according to its programming?

"If you programmed a robot to comply perfectly with the laws of war," Scharre says, "it would have killed this little girl."

"Is it acceptable for a machine to make life and death decisions in war?"
Paul Scharre

The Future of Conflict

Autonomous weapons aren't science fiction, aren't some distant concern, aren't the nightmare-inducing, shiny skeleton Terminators or even the bumbling battle droids ( roger, roger) of the Star Wars prequels.

They've existed, with varying levels of autonomy, for hundreds of years, and they are getting more sophisticated all the time. Today, powered with deep learning AI and advanced computer vision technology, autonomous weapons can exhibit a range of "freedom" that has never been achieved before in warfare.

An autonomous weapons system housed on a drone may have seen combat in 2020 in Libya, and in 2020, Israeli agents assassinated Iran's top nuclear scientist using a robotic sniper.

Their proponents believe that if autonomous weapons are more accurate, more precise, and kill only their intended targets, it may mean less death and less casualties, both for the militaries deploying them and the civilians caught in the crossfire. It may also mean removing the psychological and emotional burden of death from more people.

Opponents believe that to expect a machine to be able to handle the chaotic environment of a battlefield, to operate perfectly in a crowded city, to not suffer one of those weird errors AI often makes - with deadly consequences - is unrealistic and dangerous.

And they argue that, far from a benefit, relieving human beings from the moral and tactical burden of deciding when to kill a person - deliberately losing control of a weapon - is an ethical nightmare that cannot be allowed to happen.

"Killer robots change the relationship between people and technology by handing over life and death decision-making to machines."
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

It's that final concern that separates the autonomous weapons of today from those we've used before: the ability to actively hunt down and attack targets, with no final human say on pulling the trigger.

It's a question at the heart of the debate around autonomous weapons, as militaries develop them and arms control and humanitarian organizations, like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, seek a ban.

"Is it acceptable," Scharre asks, "for a machine to make life and death decisions in war?"

A Brief History of Autonomous Weapons

"Autonomous weapons" conjures up images of Predator drones and robot dogs, but the use of weapons that can act on their own is actually centuries old.

Mines, both on land and at sea, are passive autonomous weapons. Once they have been set, they do not need to be told to kill. Instead, they have sensors designed to detect the presence of someone or something, which triggers them to do their thing. They highlight that autonomous weapons do not need "intelligence."

What mines do have, however, is patience; they can lie in wait for decades, killing any who cross their path. They do not know a war is over.

Army of None also recounts autonomous weapons systems of the past that seem advanced even today. Militaries have been developing weapons which can wander around a certain area seeking targets - known as "loitering munitions" - for decades.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Navy designed and tested a loitering missile called the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TSAM).

The idea was that you could launch the TSAM over the horizon, where you suspected Soviet ships would be. Once it arrived at its destination, the TSAM would fly a search pattern, looking for Soviet radar signals. If it found one, it would attack the source.

The TSAM was taken out of service in the 1990s, and never used in combat, but it was the first fully operational autonomous weapon of the modern era, Scharre writes.

Another loitering munition that is in use is the Israeli-made Harpy. This drone circles around a specific area and hones in on signals used by radar devices, which it then attacks. According to Scharre, the Harpy can stay airborne for two and a half hours, covering 500 km of ground - and it can do so without a human in the loop.

Today's autonomous weapons can exhibit a range of "freedom" that has never been achieved before in warfare.

And it is the humans - not the technology - that are actually at the heart of the fight for the future of war. Could autonomous weapons reduce the burden on human life, by avoiding mistakes? They may lead to less trauma, psychological and physical, for people fighting the wars. Or would they make war too easy, thus making it more common?

"If we had a war, and no one felt bad about the fact that we were killing other human beings, what would that say about us?" Scharre asks.

"What would it say about us if no one slept uneasy at night afterwards?"

Which leads to the question: Should autonomous weapons be banned - and can they be?

To Build or To Ban

The proponents of autonomous weapons, including powerful militaries and major defense contractors, see great upside in them.

Writing in Military Review, the Army's professional journal, Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Seattle's Allen Institute for AI, lay out some of the primary advantages of autonomous weapons systems for those deploying them.

Autonomous weapons are "force multipliers." This means that a commander can use fewer people for a mission, as the capabilities of each person are enhanced. You could imagine one drone operator destroying an entire convoy, rather than dispatching dozens or hundreds of soldiers with anti-vehicle weapons.

That technology could be deployed in places or conditions too dangerous for conventional troops, and, of course, fewer soldiers at risk means fewer soldiers killed.

Some military experts and roboticists believe autonomous weapons have moral benefits, as well.

The Etzionis quote roboticist Ronald C. Arkin, who argues that "they do not need to be programmed with a self-preservation instinct, potentially eliminating the need for a 'shoot-first, ask questions later' attitude." Their orders would not be colored by emotions like fear, they could be used to monitor and report human war crimes without bias, and removing humans from high-stress combat zones could help preserve their mental health.

But many of those benefits are based on the assumption that autonomous weapons work correctly. Already, Teslas are befuddled by road conditions, and phone-unlocking cameras have problems with certain skin colors. Could those systems be trusted to work with much higher stakes?

The argument for banning autonomous weapons outright has been taken up by almost 100 countries and the United Nations.

"Autonomy in weapons systems is a profoundly human problem," the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots lays out in their argument for banning them.

"Killer robots change the relationship between people and technology by handing over life and death decision-making to machines."

The technology behind autonomous weapons can carry the same biases as the people who designed them, the campaign maintains. They may also lower the threshold for war, by reducing the human cost to starting one - a cruel twist.

Could autonomous weapons reduce the burden on human life, by avoiding mistakes? Or would they make war too easy, thus making it more common?

Autonomous weapons could also remove human judgment, understanding, and accountability in war. An autonomous drone may have fired on that young Afghani girl - and it could have been justified by its programming in doing so.

War is inherently too complicated, and civilians too often in the line of fire, to hand control fully to machines, opponents argue.

"There are many situations in war that are gray," Scharre says. "And that's a real challenge when it comes to autonomous weapons. How would a robot know the difference between what's legal, and what's right?"

It's a question which needs to be answered soon. The future of warfare is already here.
We'd love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at [email protected].

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Should war robots have "license to kill?"

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War is changing. As drones replace snipers, we must consider the ethics of autonomous weapons making life or death decisions.

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Millions of roads across the United States are constructed with asphalt pavement that's deteriorating over time. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri are using recyclables, including plastic waste, as a sustainable solution to fix America's fracturing road system.

In partnership with the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT), researchers from the Mizzou Asphalt Pavement and Innovation Lab (MAPIL) recently created a real-world test road using recycled materials like scrap tires and plastic waste along a portion of Interstate 155 in the Missouri Bootheel. By increasing the sustainability of asphalt mixes, this innovative method can help reduce the number of items going into landfills or leaking into the environment, said Bill Buttlar, director of MAPIL.

"Missouri is the Show-Me State, so we take a very pragmatic view," Buttlar said. "The science can be thorny and difficult, but we are up to the task. We're excited that while our approach is complicated in the lab, its simple to execute in the field, so it makes it easily adaptable, scalable and cost-effective to incorporate into many types of road environments."

The I-155 project takes the group's previous test road, installed along a stretch of Stadium Boulevard in Columbia, Missouri, one step further. Instead of just testing four different types of recycled materials, the I-155 project will evaluate the real-world effectiveness of nine different types of recycled materials in the creation of asphalt pavement. This includes three different types of polyethylene (PE) - a material commonly found in plastic grocery bags - and ground tire rubber, which is a newer way of disposing scrap tires.

"These projects afford us an opportunity to intentionally build the next generation of roads with these materials not as a type of linear landfill, but to also help the environment while making the value of dollars spent on transportation infrastructure like this stretch farther into the future," said Buttlar, who is also the Glen Barton Chair in Flexible Pavements.

MU is on the leading-edge of this type of work in the U.S. because its team has addressed most of the translational research questions like durability and safety that could prevent a general contractor or department of transportation from adopting this ground-breaking strategy.

"We don't just live in the laboratory," Buttlar said. "In the field of transportation material research, we need to see how all the various materials used to construct a road - the rock, the asphalt and the recycled materials - behave in the real world and gel together to build a road. Asphalt is liquified with heat, and when you put an additive in like a plastic or rubber material, you must get everything to bond together with good adhesion. But we're only going to know if that happens successfully when we produce it on a full-scale level and then expose it to elements, such as different weather conditions and heavy traffic."

MAPIL specializes in a dry process, which allows the researchers to easily add the recyclables directly into the mixture before it's applied to a road surface.

"The form, shape and size of the plastics bring different challenges in how the material flows, how it behaves and how it mixes," said Punya Rath, an assistant research professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who works at MAPIL. "So, we did extensive small-scale testing for almost an entire year before we moved to a larger scale out in the field with contractors."

One advantage of this process is that the researchers can test the mixtures in the field using a mobile research lab, which they developed and used for both the Stadium Boulevard and I-155 projects.

"It helps the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) immensely to have a mobile research lab on-site in the field that has the ability to rapidly test samples and provide results within 24-48 hours to better inform the process," Rath said.

Citing environmental concerns, Buttlar said the team makes sure everything they do is within the current limits as established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

"We are designing the material to be able to hold or capture the environmental by-products at the highest percentage for the longest amount of time. It's not going to be a 100% containment," Buttlar said. "Everything built in a natural environment will degrade over time, so that's why EPA has standards for everything, and we make sure we are safely within those standards."

Editor's Note:

For more on the story, please see:

Missouri Center for Transportation Innovation

Both the Stadium Boulevard and I-155 projects were developed in collaboration with the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) as part of their ongoing partnership with the University of Missouri System's Missouri Center for Transportation Innovation (MCTI). While both projects only involved repairing an existing road surface, Buttlar said there have been some preliminary talks between his team and MoDOT on how to incorporate more sustainable asphalt pavement mixtures into the building of a third lane on Interstate 70 across Missouri.

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Driving innovative solutions for advancing use of 'plastic' roads

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University of Missouri researchers are on the leading-edge of developing sustainable plastic waste road pavement mixtures.

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Why Japanese Calligraphy Brushes Are So Expensive | So Expensive

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Mushrooms Turned into Bacon and Styrofoam

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Mushrooms Turned into Bacon and Styrofoam

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How Mushrooms Are Turned Into Bacon And Styrofoam | World Wide Waste

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Superstitions hold that the body parts can bring riches, success, power or sexual conquest. (June 15, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

On a Thursday night in early March, a Malawian man named Gilbert Daire was woken by the sound of people trying to drill through his wall. He was convinced that hunters had come to kill him for his body parts.

When his wife screamed, neighbors came to help and fended off the attackers. But Daire no longer feels safe in the streets or at home. He worries that the hunters will return.

Daire has albinism, a condition that makes him a valuable commodity in parts of eastern and southern Africa. Like elephants and rhino, they are hunted and killed for their body parts, which can fetch thousands of dollars and are often trafficked across borders.

Slayings of people with albinism are common in Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, where body parts are used in witchcraft rituals because of superstitions that they can bring riches, success, power or sexual conquest. Children are especially vulnerable.

At least 20 Malawians with albinism have been killed for their body parts since November 2014, according to Amnesty International. But the number could be higher, with many other people with albinism having disappeared. In Tanzania, at least 75 have been killed since 2000.

The danger has become so significant that the United Nations refugee organization has recently begun relocating families of people with albinism in Malawi to Canada and other countries.

The recessive genetic condition, which limits the body's production of melanin and results in lack of pigmentation in skin, hair and eyes - often leading to skin cancer or eye damage - affects as many as 1 in every 1,400 people in Africa.

Because people with the condition there are so visible in their communities, they are often forced to hide in their houses to avoid attack, abduction and slaughter. But even there they are not safe.

The attacks are often brazen: Homes are invaded or people are seized in broad daylight. Toddlers and children are snatched from impoverished single mothers or while walking to school. Family members such as uncles, fathers or boyfriends are often implicated.

Their mutilated bodies are often found later without hands, feet, breasts, genitals, skin, eyes or hair - depending on the spells to be cast.

The latest apparent victim was a 9-year-old Malawian boy named Mayeso Isaac, who was traveling to visit relatives late last month when he was attacked and abducted by a gang of 10 men. He has not been seen since and it is feared he was killed for his body parts. It was part of a familiar pattern.

Other recent young victims in Malawi: 2-year-old Whitney Chilumpha, whose teeth and clothes were found dumped in a neighboring village; 9-year-old Harry Mokoshini, whose head was recovered by police; and teenager David Fletcher, whose body was found without hands or feet.

Edna Cedric lost one son to body part hunters. When they later returned for his twin brother, she was ready and managed to fight them off.

Deprose Muchena, a spokesman for Amnesty International, said deep-seated cultural traditions persist, including a belief in mythical powers of people with albinism and a conviction that their body parts could change lives, bringing fabulous wealth, power or good fortune. Some believe that albinos are not human, that their only value is monetary and that they have gold in their bones.

"It's a readiness to believe in mythical expectations about how you create wealth," Muchena said. "These are false, deep-seated beliefs that need to be eliminated in society. These beliefs feed on ignorance from the lack of education that afflicts a number of people in Malawi, particularly in rural areas."

Many people with albinism in Malawi live in remote, impoverished communities where education levels are low, superstitions are common, unemployment is high, and information about albinism is not available. Women who give birth to children with albinism are sometimes shunned.

Killings of people with albinism also occur in South Africa, although these are less common. In February, a 67-year-old traditional healer there was convicted of murdering a 20-year-old woman with albinism and sentenced to life in prison.

The healer, Bhekukufa Gumede, and four young accomplices removed the genitals, limbs and skin of the victim, Thandazile Mpunzi, and tossed her body into a shallow grave. Two of the accomplices told the court that Gumede convinced them that they would get rich if they ingested traditional medicine with the body parts.

The victim's boyfriend, who helped lure her to her death, was sentenced to 18 years while three others were given 20-year terms.

Muchena said poor policing and an inept criminal justice system in Malawi contributed to the attacks on people with albinism there, with nobody convicted in any of the 20 known slayings there in the last three years.

Even suspects found with bones or other body parts were released because of errors by prosecutors or acquitted by poorly trained magistrates.

Muchena said a government task force to tackle the problem had also failed to deliver.

After a series of attacks this year, Malawian police chief Lextern Kachama told local media that the president had ordered police to protect schools from the hunters and called on communities to do more.

"People in the communities play very crucial roles in the protection of people with albinism because they stay with them all the time," he said.
To read the article in Spanish, click here robyn.dixon@latimes.com Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT ALSO He lost a leg to a shark. Now he's trying to save the species The day road rage led to a treason charge in Zambia, as democracy falters in Africa One of South Africa's top tourist destinations is almost out of water

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association of people with albinism in malawi

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In parts of Africa, people with albinism are hunted for their body parts. The latest victim: a 9-year-old boy

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On a Thursday night in early March, a Malawian man named Gilbert Daire was woken by the sound of people trying to drill through his wall.

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Feb. 22, 2012— -- Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of Kentucky Medical Center.

As a transfusion was being readied, the baby's grandmother suggested to doctors that he looked like the "blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek." Relatives described the boy's great-grandmother Luna Fugate as "blue all over," and "the bluest woman I ever saw."

In an unusual story that involves both genetics and geography, an entire family from isolated Appalachia was tinged blue. Their ancestral line began six generations earlier with a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky.

Doctors don't see much of the rare blood disorder today, because mountain people have dispersed and the family gene pool is much more diverse.

But the Fugates' story still offers a window into a medical mystery that was solved through modern genetics and the sleuth-like energy of Dr. Madison Cawein III, a hematologist at the University of Kentucky's Lexington Medical Clinic.

Cawein died in 1985, but his family charts and blood samples led to a sharper understanding of the recessive diseases that only surface if both parents carry a defective gene.

The most detailed account, "Blue People of Troublesome Creek," was published in 1982 by the University of Indiana's Cathy Trost, who described Benjy's skin as "almost purple."

The Fugate progeny had a genetic condition called methemoglobinemia, which was passed down through a recessive gene and blossomed through intermarriage.

"It's a fascinating story," said Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, a hematologist from Minnesota's Mayo Clinic. "It also exemplifies the intersection between disease and society, and the danger of misinformation and stigmatization."

Methemoglobinemia is a blood disorder in which an abnormal amount of methemoglobin -- a form of hemoglobin -- is produced, according to the National Institutes for Health. Hemoglobin is responsible for distributing oxygen to the body and without oxygen, the heart, brain and muscles can die.

In methemoglobinemia, the hemoglobin is unable to carry oxygen and it also makes it difficult for unaffected hemoglobin to release oxygen effectively to body tissues. Patients' lips are purple, the skin looks blue and the blood is "chocolate colored" because it is not oxygenated, according to Tefferi.

"You almost never see a patient with it today," he said. "It's a disease that one learns about in medical school and it is infrequent enough to be on every exam in hematology."

The disorder can be inherited, as was the case with the Fugate family, or caused by exposure to certain drugs and chemicals such as anesthetic drugs like benzocaine and xylocaine. The carcinogen benzene and nitrites used as meat additives can also be culprits, as well as certain antibiotics, including dapsone and chloroquine.

The genetic form of methemoglobinemia is caused by one of several genetic defects, according to Tefferi. The Fugates probably had a deficiency in the enzyme called cytochrome-b5 methemoglobin reductase, which is responsible for recessive congenital methemoglobinemia.

Normally, people have less than about 1 percent of methemoglobin, a type of hemoglobin that is altered by being oxidized so is useless in carrying oxygen in the blood. When those levels rise to greater than 20 percent, heart abnormalities and seizures and even death can occur.

But at levels of between 10 and 20 percent a person can develop blue skin without any other symptoms. Most of blue Fugates never suffered any health effects and lived into their 80s and 90s.

"If you are between 1 percent and 10 percent, no one knows you have an abnormal level and this might be the case in a lot of unsuspecting patients," he said.

Many other recessive gene diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis can be lethal, he said.

"If I carry a bad recessive gene with a rare abnormality and married, the child probably wouldn't be sick, because it's very rare to meet another person with the [same] bad gene and the most frequent cause therefore is in-breeding," Tefferi said.

Such was the case with the Fugates.

Martin Fugate came to Troublesome Creek from France in 1820 and family folklore says he was blue. He married Elizabeth Smith, who also carried the recessive gene. Of their seven children, four were reported to be blue.

There were no railroads and few roads outside the region, so the community remained small and isolated. The Fugates married other Fugate cousins and families who lived nearby, with names like Combs, Smith, Ritchie and Stacy.

Benjy's father, Alva Stacy showed Trost his family tree and remarked, "If you'll notice -- I'm kin to myself," according to Trost.

One of Martin and Elizabeth Fugate's blue boys, Zachariah, married his mother's sister. One of their sons, Levy, married a Ritchie girl and had eight children, one of them Luna. Luna married John E. Stacy and they had 13 children.

Benjy descended from the Stacy line.

Modern Fugates Still in Kentucky

ABCNews.com was unable to determine if Benjamin Stacy is still alive -- he would be 37 today. Trost writes that he eventually lost the blue tint to his skin, but as a child his lips and fingernails still got blue when he was angry or cold.

His mother Hilda Stacy, who is 56, appears to still live in Hazard, Ky., but did not answer calls to her home. Other relatives are scattered throughout Virginia and Arkansas.

Most of what scientists know about the family was discovered by Cawein, the grandson of Kentucky's poet laureate, who had done pioneering research on L-dopa as a treatment for Parkinson's disease.

Later in 1965 he was famous for another reason. His wife was murdered by chemical poisoning, but no one was ever indicted.

Cawein heard rumors about the Fugates while working at his Lexington clinic and set off "tromping around the hills looking for blue people," according to Trost's account.

At an American Heart Association clinic in the town of Hazard, Cawein found a nurse, Ruth Pendergrass, and she was willing to assist. She remembered a dark blue woman who had come to the county health department on a frigid afternoon seeking a blood test.

"Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue," she told Trost. "It like scared me to death. She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women."

More families were found -- Luke Combs, and Patrick and Rachel Ritchie, who were "bluer'n hell" and embarrassed by their skin color.

Cawein and Pendergrass began to ask questions -- "Do you have any relatives who are blue?" -- and mapped a family tree and took blood samples.

The doctor suspected methemoglobinemia and uncovered a 1960 report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Dr. E. M. Scott, who worked in public health at the Arctic Research Center in Anchorage, had seen a recessive genetic trait among Alaskans that turned their skin blue.

That suggested an inbred line that had been passed from generation to generation. To get the disorder, a person would have to inherit two genes -- one from each parent. When both parents have the trait, their children have a 25 percent chance of getting the disorder.

Scott speculated these people lacked the enzyme diaphorase in their red blood cells. Normally diaphorase converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin.

All of the blue Fugates he tested had the enzyme deficiency, just like the Alaskans Scott had observed.

Their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it over-powered the red hemoglobin that normally turns skin pink in most Caucasians.

The bluest of the bunch was Luna, and she lived a healthy life, bearing 13 children before she died at the age of 84.

As coal mining arrived in Kentucky in 1912 and the Fugates moved outside of Troublesome Creek, the blue people began to disappear.

Doctors say Benjy likely carried only one gene for methemoglobinemia, because he eventually had normal skin tones, and the likelihood of him marrying a woman with the same recessive gene would have been small.

By the time reports appeared in the media on the disorder, the Stacy family was upset with insinuations about in-breeding that fed into stereotypes of backwoods Appalachia.

"There was a pain not seen in lab tests," wrote Trost. "That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black."

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Fugates of Kentucky: Skin Bluer than Lake Louise

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Feb. 22, 2012- -- Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of Kentucky Medical Center.

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Genetically Modified Pigs help Solve Rare Disease Treatment

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Genetically Modified Pigs help Solve Rare Disease Treatment

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There are thousands of diseases known to modern medicine without any cure or treatment. Many are too rare to get much attention from doctors, governments, or drug companies. But the gene editing tool CRISPR is offering hope for people with rare and hard to study diseases, like the genetic disease known as NF1. There are tens of thousands of Americans with this tumor-causing nerve disease, but because it has over 4,000 genetic variants, it's nearly impossible to find enough people with the same strain to do a reliable clinical drug trial.

So when biotech researcher Chuck Konsitzke's son was diagnosed with a rare form of NF1, he teamed up with his colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Dhanu Shanmuganayagam, to create enough patients to help them find a cure. They used CRISPR to create pigs born with the same genetic variant of NF1 as particular patients, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to study a rare disease from the beginning. Critics view the research as inhumane, but scientists argue that it offers an irreplaceable tool to develop new treatments for victims of neglected diseases.

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Can Genetically Modified Pigs Be the Key to Treating Rare Diseases?

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When it comes to rare diseases, doctors often don't have enough patients to determine the effectiveness of various treatments. Now, scientists are breeding pigs with the same genetic code as people with a disease in order to create a pool of test "patients" unlike any before.

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BrightSide - Inspiration. Creativity. Wonder.

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As technologies develop, experts find more and more pollutants in the world's oceans, and there's a wide range of them, from pills and cosmetics to pesticides and petroleum. We've been using freshwater bodies of water for dumping chemical and biological wastes for so long, that it will soon be impossible to find a clean river or lake. When Marino Morikawa, a scientist from Peru, learned that the lake from his childhood had become extremely contaminated, he rushed to help.

Here at Bright Side we've had a closer look at the technology this talented scientist invented, and we can't wait to tell you how it works.

The urge to save the landscapes of his childhood helped a scientist to make a breakthrough in water cleaning.

When scientist Marino Morikawa learned that the Cascajo Wetlands (El Cascajo) he remembered from his childhood had gotten dramatically polluted, he gave up his research work in Japan and came back to Peru. When Marino saw the wetlands with his own eyes, 20 years after his last visit, it looked like "an oxidation pond."

The waters smelled terrible, and the 150 hectares of the wetlands he remembered from childhood had drastically diminished to 40 hectares. That was the moment Marino realized he had to do something about it.

Holding a PhD in Bioindustrial Science, Marino used all his knowledge in water quality control to invent a new technology that could help him clean El Cascajo. He took his personal savings, borrowed money from several banks, and started his work on this technology that worked wonders.

He came up with a bubbling nano-system which consists of adding a microbubble solution to contaminated waters and using biofilters. "The micro-nano bubble has an electromagnetic field of positive and negative ions that works like a magnet. On the way to the surface of the water, it attracts viruses and bacteria, kind of like catching them in a spider's web," explains Marino.

It took Marino 6 months to develop this unique technology, and 4 months to clean the entire wetlands. As a result, dozens of migratory birds species have returned to El Cascajo, and 10 fish species have come back to its waters.

Apart from cleaning the lake, the scientist raised the awareness among the people in Peru, and showed with his own actions that one person can do a lot to save the environment. With time Marino gathered his own team of enthusiasts who are helping him on his mission to clean up local lakes.

The solution Marino Morikawa has invented is expensive, but highly efficient and eco-friendly.

Marino admits that the technology he invented is rather expensive, but it is totally worth it. The solution he adds into the water is 100% organic and can even be eaten. It attracts "bad" bacteria and parasites, and keeps "good" microorganisms that contribute to micro-flora of lakes. As for the ceramic biofilters that Marino used together with the solution, he made them himself at local pottery classes.

Now Marino is on a mission to clean other contaminated lakes using his technology.

Together with his team, Marino Morikawa has a noble goal to clean other contaminated lakes using his patented technology. Looking at how devoted this talented scientist is, we have no doubt that he'll manage to turn his ambitious plans into reality, and we hope more people join his team.

What do you think of Marino's planet-saving project? Would you travel thousands of miles to save a place from your childhood memories?

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A Man From Peru Has Found an Ingenious Way to Clean Lakes, and It's a Breakthrough the Earth Was Crying For

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As technologies develop, experts find more and more pollutants in the world's oceans, and there's a wide range of them, from pills and cosmetics to pesticides and petroleum. We've been using freshwater bodies of water for dumping chemical and biological wastes for so long, that it will soon be impossible to find a clean river or lake.

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US Gov Replaced Migrant Workers w/ High Schoolers

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US Gov Replaced Migrant Workers w/ High Schoolers

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Randy Carter is a member of the Director's Guild of America and has notched some significant credits during his Hollywood career. Administrative assistant on The Conversation. Part of the casting department for Apocalypse Now. Longtime first assistant director on Seinfeld. Work on The Blues Brothers, The Godfather II and more.

But the one project that Carter regrets never working on is a script he wrote that got optioned twice but was never produced. It's about the summer a then-17-year-old Carter and thousands of American teenage boys heeded the call of the federal government ... to work on farms.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was anagreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

But farmers complained - in words that echo today's headlines - that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn't want to do, and that the end of the Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields.

Wirtz cited this labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as reason enough for the program. But he didn't want just any band geek or nerd - he wanted jocks.

"They can do the work," Wirtz said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the creation of the project, called A-TEAM - Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower. "They are entitled to a chance at it." Standing beside him to lend gravitas were future Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Warren Spahn and future Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown.

Over the ensuing weeks, the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture, and the President's Council on Physical Fitness bought ads on radio and in magazines to try to lure lettermen. "Farm Work Builds Men!" screamed one such promotion, which featured 1964 Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte.

Local newspapers across the country showcased their local A-TEAM with pride as they left for the summer. The Courier of Waterloo, Iowa, for instance, ran a photo of beaming, bespectacled but scrawny boys boarding a bus for Salinas, where strawberries and asparagus awaited their smooth hands. "A teacher-coach from [the nearby town of] Cresco will serve as adviser to all 31," students, the Courier reassured its readers.

But the national press was immediately skeptical. "Dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive" than money or the prospects of a good workout, argued a Detroit Free Press editorial. "Like, for instance, gnawing hunger."

Despite such skepticism,Wirtz's scheme seemed to work at first: About 18,100 teenagers signed up to join the A-TEAM. But only about 3,300 of them ever got to pick crops.

One of them was Carter.

He was a junior at the now-closed University of San Diego High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Southern California. About 25 of his classmates decided to sign up for the A-TEAM because, as he recalls with a laugh more than 50 years later, "We thought, 'I'm not doing anything else this summer, so why not?' "

Funny enough, Carter says none of the recruits from his school - himself included - were actually athletes:"The football coach told [the sportsters], 'You're not going. We've got two-a-day practices - you're not going to go pick strawberries."

Students from across the country began showing up on farms in Texas and California at the beginning of June. Carter and his classmates were assigned to pick cantaloupes near Blythe, a small town on the Colorado River in the middle of California's Colorado Desert.

He remembers the first day vividly. Work started before dawn, the better to avoid the unforgiving desert sun to come. "The wind is in your hair, and you don't think it's bad," Carter says. "Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. The first ray. Everyone looked at each other, and said, 'What did we do?' The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees."

Garden gloves that the farmers gave the students to help them harvest lasted onlyfour hours, because the cantaloupe's fine hairs made grabbing them feel like "picking up sandpaper." They got paid minimum wage - $1.40 an hour back then - plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 fruits. Breakfast was "out of the Navy," Carter says - beans and eggs and bologna sandwiches that literally toasted in the heat, even in the shade.

The University High crew worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and theywere not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in "any kind of defunct housing," according to Carter - old Army barracks, rooms made from discarded wood, and even buildings used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

This experiment quickly disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history. In fact, when Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores did research for what became her award-winning 2016 book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, she discovered the controversy for the first time. Until then, the only time she had heard of any A-TEAM, she now says with a laugh, "was the TV show."

Flores thinks the program deserves more attention from historians and the public alike.

"These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," she says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."

She says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

Carter agrees.

"If we took a vote that first day, we would've left," he says of his friends. "But it literally became a thing of pride. We weren't going to be fired, and we weren't going to quit. We were going to finish it."

The students tried to make the most of their summer. On their Sundays off, they would swim in irrigation canals or hitchhike into downtown Blythe and try to get cowboys to buy them a six-pack of beer. Each high school team was supposed to have a college-age chaperone, but Carter said theirs would "be there for a day, and then disappear to go to Mexico or surfing."

Carter and his classmates still talk about their A-TEAM days at every class reunion. "We went through something that you can't explain to anyone, unless you were out there in that friggin' heat," the 70-year-old says. "It could only be lived."

But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workersthat Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

"There's nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they're lazy," he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, 'Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.' "

Gustavo Arellano is the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and a longtime guest on NPR's "Barbershop" segment on Weekend All Things Considered.

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When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

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Randy Carter is a member of the Director's Guild of America and has notched some significant credits during his Hollywood career. Administrative assistant on The Conversation. Part of the casting department for Apocalypse Now. Longtime first assistant director on Seinfeld. Work on The Blues Brothers, The Godfather II and more.

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Your Phone Is Listening and it's Not Paranoia

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Here's how I got to bottom of the ads-coinciding-with-conversations mystery.

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Powered by 3D printer technology, people are making prosthetics at a fraction of the cost. Watch this episode of "Superhuman" for the story of how e-NABLE, an online network of volunteers, has created 3,000 bionic hands for people in need (mostly kids) across 90 countries.

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Could Growing Vaccines in Plants Save Lives?

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Powered by 3D printer technology, people are making prosthetics at a fraction of the cost. Watch this episode of "Superhuman" for the story of how e-NABLE, an online network of volunteers, has created 3,000 bionic hands for people in need (mostly kids) across 90 countries.

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Sharks do it, coral do it, even seahorses do it. Jellyfish do it, turtles do it, even human teeth do it.

Biofluorescence is widespread in the marine environment

Scientists have identified a new group of molecules that are responsible for the fluorescent glow of two shark species

Green fluorescent proteins previously identified in other biofluorescent animals are used in biomedical sciences

With apologies to Cole Porter, we're not talking about falling in love, but the ability of some species to absorb light and reflect it back as a different colour.

The phenomenon is known as biofluorescence.

And it's what's responsible for the bright green glow of two species of shark - the swell shark ( Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) and the chain catshark ( Scyliorhinus retifer) - as they swim through the ocean's depths.

To work out exactly what gives these sharks their colour, US researchers extracted chemicals from both the light and dark tones in the animals' skin.

They discovered these two species use a group of molecules not seen before in other biofluorescent animals, they report today in the journal iScience.

Unlike bioluminescence, which is another glow-in-the-dark phenomenon where animals produce light on their own (think anglerfish with their luminescent lures), biofluorescence requires an external light source.

An animal with this ability absorbs a particular wavelength of light and then reemits it at a lower energy. So in the ocean high-energy blue light often gets turned into green or red light.

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In the case of these two species of shark it was molecules in the light part of their skin that caused the fluorescence.

"The molecules in the light skin were biofluorescent, turning blue light into green light," said chemist Jason Crawford of Yale University and co-author of the study.

This fluorescence could help the sharks see each other better, said marine biologist David Gruber of the City University of New York and co-author on the study.

Previous research has shown the sharks only have monochromatic vision, but can see at the blue/green interface.

"Fluorescent sharks can see other biofluorescent sharks better than non-fluorescent objects, especially as they go deeper," Professor Gruber said.

"Descending into the ocean, the other colours are filtered out and the dominant wavelength of sunlight becomes blue.

"As the fluorescent compound in the shark transforms blue into green, it creates better contrast for other sharks to see in the blue ocean."

But that wasn't the only thing they found that could benefit these bottom-dwelling species.

"One molecule found in both the dark and light skin killed other bacteria in laboratory experiments," Dr Crawford said.

"The antimicrobial activity observed in the lab suggests a potential protective role for the shark in the wild."

Why do animals glow?

Biofluorescence is widespread in marine fishes, although not all species have the ability to see it.

In 2014 Professor Gruber co-authored another paper that identified over 180 species of biofluorescent fish, including these two shark species.

"We are discovering an increasing diversity of animals in the blue ocean that possess biofluorescence," Professor Gruber said.

"This is a very new field and we are not yet certain what it may mean."

And that's the big question that this paper doesn't address, said tropical marine ecologist Maarten De Brauwer of the University of Leeds, who has studied biofluorescence but wasn't involved in this work.

There are lots of suggestions, but as yet no conclusive evidence as to why animals might use biofluorescence, Dr De Brauwer said.

For example, it could be a way of communicating information in a particular species, it could be used as a type of camouflage, it could be a way to lure prey, or strong fluorescence could be a sign of good health.

"Another hypothesis is that fluorescence doesn't actually mean much for fish."

But, he said, the molecules described in the study seem to be really, really interesting and useful.

"They without a doubt will have some function in the animal's body. The question is the fluorescence linked to their function or is it a side effect?".

Biofluorescence allows us to see inside cells

While we don't know what biofluorescence means for animals we've been using it in biomedical science for years.

After green fluorescent proteins were first discovered in jellyfish in 1962, it revolutionised the life sciences, said biochemist Mark Prescott of Monash University, who was not involved in this study.

When the gene that switched these proteins on was isolated in the 1990s "all hell broke loose", Dr Prescott said.

"We could start to see or spy inside living cells and organisms using these fluorescent molecules [without hurting the organism]."

This has allowed us to better follow what's going on in cells and better understand diseases.

However, he said, it was still too early to say whether we might be able to use this new group of molecules in a similar way.

"There'd have to be some unique attribute which could be useful."

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Yes, these sharks glow in the dark. And now scientists know why

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Sharks do it, coral do it, even seahorses do it. Jellyfish do it, turtles do it, even human teeth do it.

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Inclusion in the Fashion Industry

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GET TO KNOW SOME OF THE MODELS FROM OUR 2022 A FASHION REVOLUTION NYFW SHOW.

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GET TO KNOW SOME OF THE MODELS FROM OUR 2022 A FASHION REVOLUTION NYFW SHOW. about what he wears - like I do everyday - but realized his options were THE RUNWAY OF DREAMS FOUNDATION IS A 501 (C)(3) NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION

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ADHD Diagnosis may be PTSD in some Cases

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ADHD Diagnosis may be PTSD in some Cases

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Some experts say the normal effects of severe adversity may be misdiagnosed as ADHD.

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Dr. Nicole Brown's quest to understand her misbehaving pediatric patients began with a hunch.

Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress prevailed. Their parents found them hard to manage and teachers described them as disruptive or inattentive. Brown knew these behaviors as classic symptoms of ADHD, a brain disorder characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and an inability to focus.

When Brown looked closely, though, she saw something else: trauma. Hyper-vigilance and dissociation, for example, could be mistaken for inattention. Impulsivity might be brought on by a stress response in overdrive.

"Despite our best efforts in referring them to behavioral therapy and starting them on stimulants, it was hard to get the symptoms under control," she said of treating her patients according to guidelines for ADHD. "I began hypothesizing that perhaps a lot of what we were seeing was more externalizing behavior as a result of family dysfunction or other traumatic experience."

Considered a heritable brain disorder, one in nine U.S. children-or 6.4 million youth-currently have a diagnosis of ADHD. In recent years, parents and experts have questioned whether the growing prevalence of ADHD has to do with hasty medical evaluations, a flood of advertising for ADHD drugs, and increased pressure on teachers to cultivate high-performing students. Now Brown and other researchers are drawing attention to a compelling possibility: Inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behavior may in fact mirror the effects of adversity, and many pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychologists don't know how-or don't have the time-to tell the difference.

Though ADHD has been aggressively studied, few researchers have explored the overlap between its symptoms and the effects of chronic stress or experiencing trauma like maltreatment, abuse and violence. To test her hypothesis beyond Baltimore, Brown analyzed the results of a national survey about the health and well-being of more than 65,000 children.

Brown's findings, which she presented in May at an annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, revealed that children diagnosed with ADHD also experienced markedly higher levels of poverty, divorce, violence, and family substance abuse. Those who endured four or more adverse childhood events were three times more likely to use ADHD medication.

Interpreting these results is tricky. All of the children may have been correctly diagnosed with ADHD, though that is unlikely. Some researchers argue that the difficulty of parenting a child with behavioral issues might lead to economic hardship, divorce, and even physical abuse. This is particularly true for parents who themselves have ADHD, similar impulsive behavior or their own history of childhood maltreatment. There is also no convincing evidence that trauma or chronic stress lead to the development of ADHD.

For Brown, who is now a pediatrician at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, the data are cautionary. It's not evident how trauma influences ADHD diagnosis and management, but it's clear that some misbehaving children might be experiencing harm that no stimulant can fix. These children may also legitimately have ADHD, but unless prior or ongoing emotional damage is treated, it may be difficult to see dramatic improvement in the child's behavior.

"We need to think more carefully about screening for trauma and designing a more trauma-informed treatment plan," Brown says.

Dr. Kate Szymanski came to the same conclusion a few years ago. An associate professor at Adelphi University's Derner Institute and an expert in trauma, Szymanski analyzed data from a children's psychiatric hospital in New York. A majority of the 63 patients in her sample had been physically abused and lived in foster homes. On average, they reported three traumas in their short lives. Yet, only eight percent of the children had received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder while a third had ADHD.

"I was struck by the confusion or over-eagerness-or both-to take one diagnosis over another," Szymanski says. "To get a picture of trauma from a child is much harder than looking at behavior like impulsivity, hyperactivity. And if they cluster in a certain way, then it's easy to go to a conclusion that it's ADHD."

A previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders urged clinicians to distinguish between ADHD symptoms and difficulty with goal-directed behavior in children from "inadequate, disorganized or chaotic environments," but that caveat does not appear in the latest version. Unearthing details about a child's home life can also be challenging, Szymanski says.

A child may withhold abuse or neglect to protect his family or, having normalized that experience, never mention it all. Clinicians may also underestimate the prevalence of adversity. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, a years-long survey of more than 17,000 adults, found that two-thirds of participants reported at least one of 10 types of abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction. Twelve percent reported four or more. That list isn't exhaustive, either. The study didn't include homelessness and foster care placement, for example, and the DSM doesn't easily classify those events as "traumatic."

It's not clear how many children are misdiagnosed with ADHD annually, but a study published in 2010 estimated the number could be nearly 1 million. That research compared the diagnosis rate amongst 12,000 of the youngest and oldest children in a kindergarten sample and found that the less mature students were 60 percent more likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis.

Though ADHD is thought to be a genetic condition, or perhaps associated with lead or prenatal alcohol and cigarette exposure, there is no brain scan or DNA test that can give a definitive diagnosis. Instead, clinicians are supposed to follow exhaustive guidelines set forth by professional organizations, using personal and reported observations of a child's behavior to make a diagnosis. Yet, under financial pressure to keep appointments brief and billable, pediatricians and therapists aren't always thorough.

"In our 15-minute visits-maybe 30 minutes at the most-we don't really have the time to go deeper," Brown says. If she suspects ADHD or a psychological condition, Brown will refer her patient to a mental health professional for a comprehensive evaluation. "You may have had this social history that you took in the beginning, but unless the parent opens up and shares more about what's going on in the home, we often don't have the opportunity or think to connect the two."

Caelan Kuban, a psychologist and director of the Michigan-based National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children, knows the perils of this gap well. Four years ago she began offering a course designed to teach educators, social service workers and other professionals how to distinguish the signs of trauma from those of ADHD.

"It's very overwhelming, very frustrating," she says. "When I train, the first thing I tell people is you may walk away being more confused than you are right now."

In the daylong seminar, Kuban describes how traumatized children often find it difficult to control their behavior and rapidly shift from one mood to the next. They might drift into a dissociative state while reliving a horrifying memory or lose focus while anticipating the next violation of their safety. To a well-meaning teacher or clinician, this distracted and sometimes disruptive behavior can look a lot like ADHD.

Kuban urges students in her course to abandon the persona of the "all-knowing clinician" and instead adopt the perspective of the "really curious practitioner."

Rather than ask what is wrong with a child, Kuban suggests inquiring about what happened in his or her life, probing for life-altering events.

Jean West, a social worker employed by the school district in Joseph, Missouri, took Kuban's course a few years ago. She noticed that pregnant teen mothers and homeless students participating in district programs were frequently diagnosed with ADHD. This isn't entirely unexpected: Studies have shown that ADHD can be more prevalent among low-income youth, and that children and adolescents with the disorder are more prone to high-risk behavior. Yet, West felt the students' experiences might also explain conduct easily mistaken for ADHD.

Kuban's course convinced West to first consider the role of trauma in a student's life. "What has been the impact? What kind of family and societal support have they had?" West asks. "If we can work on that level and truly know their story, there's so much power in that."

As a school official, West sometimes refers troubled students to a pediatrician or psychiatrist for diagnosis, and meets with parents to describe how and why adversity might shape their child's behavior. In her private practice, West regularly assesses patients for post-traumatic stress disorder instead of, or in addition to, ADHD.

Though stimulant medications help ADHD patients by increasing levels of neurotransmitters in the brain associated with pleasure, movement, and attention, some clinicians worry about how they affect a child with PTSD, or a similar anxiety disorder, who already feels hyper-vigilant or agitated. The available behavioral therapies for ADHD focus on time management and organizational skills, and aren't designed to treat emotional and psychological turmoil.

Instead, West teaches a traumatized child how to cope with and defuse fear and anxiety. She also recommends training and therapy for parents who may be contributing to or compounding their child's unhealthy behavior. Such programs can help parents reduce their use of harsh or abusive discipline while improving trust and communication, and have been shown to decrease disruptive child behavior.

Szymanski uses a similar approach with patients and their parents. "I think any traumatized child needs individual therapy but also family therapy," she says. "Trauma is a family experience; it never occurs in a vacuum."

Yet finding a provider who is familiar with such therapy can be difficult for pediatricians and psychiatrists, Szymanski says. Though some hospitals have centers for childhood trauma, there isn't a well-defined referral network. Even then, insurance companies, including the federal Medicaid program, may not always pay for the group sessions commonly used in parent training programs.

Faced with such complicated choices, Szymanski says it's no surprise when clinicians overlook the role of trauma in a child's behavior and focus on ADHD instead.

While there are few recommendations now for clinicians, that will likely change in the coming years. The American Academy of Pediatrics is currently developing new guidance on ADHD that will include a section on assessing trauma in patients, though it won't be completed until 2016.

Dr. Heather Forkey, a pediatrician at University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center, who specializes in treating foster children, is assisting the AAP. Her goal is to remind doctors that inattentive and hyperactive behavior can be traced back to any number of conditions-just like chest pains don't have the same origin in every patient. Ideally, the AAP will offer pediatricians recommendations for screening tools that efficiently gauge adversity in a child's life. That practice, she says, should come before any diagnosis of ADHD.

When speaking to traumatized children inappropriately diagnosed with ADHD, she offers them a reassuring explanation of their behavior. The body's stress system, she says, developed long ago in response to life-or-death threats like a predatory tiger. The part of the brain that controls impulses, for example, shuts off so that survival instincts can prevail.

"What does that look like when you put that kid in a classroom?" Forkey asks. "When people don't understand there's been a tiger in your life, it looks a lot like ADHD to them."
This story was produced for ACEs Too High

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Rebecca Ruiz is a reporter based in Oakland. She has written for NBC News, Forbes, and The American Prospect.

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How Childhood Trauma Could Be Mistaken for ADHD

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Some experts say the normal effects of severe adversity may be misdiagnosed as ADHD. Dr. Nicole Brown's quest to understand her misbehaving pediatric patients began with a hunch. Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas reveals two distinct portraits in a single painting. The incredible, transformative art changes as you walk from either side of it by gradually shifting faces as you do so. In one piece, Marilyn Monroe turns into Albert Einstein while another painting showcases a young woman aging many decades into an older version of herself. Each portrait stands alone as its own artwork, but in moving between the two ends, a transitional third painting emerges as well.

Cadenas' artworks use rigid vertical strips to produce their transformations. He paints a different person on either side of the strips so that when you view the work from an angle, you see the subject as they were intended. Walking towards the center of the piece, however, converges the subjects and their characteristics are blended. This effect dissipates as you move to the other side of the work.

Duality is an overarching theme of Cadenas' kinetic wall art, and it can be interpreted in many ways. Marylin Monroe and Albert Einstein represent beauty and brains, while the aging woman symbolizes the journey from young to old. The idea of partnership is another conceptual facet of his work. A man and a woman paired together can be read as partners in life, as does a man and his beloved pup. Whichever way you choose to decipher the duality of these pieces, Cadenas' deliberate way of viewing his work is a reminder that we should slow down and enjoy the beauty that comes with it.

Artist Sergi Cadenas creates kinetic wall art that reveals two distinct portraits in a single painting.

Here's how the portraits look on their own:
Art History: The Evolution of Hypnotic Kinetic Sculptures New Kinetic Art Tables Draw Hypnotic Designs in Sand Colorful Kinetic Toy Combines Art and Math to Create Hands-On Fun Sergi Cadenas: Galeria Jordi Barnadas
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Galeria Jordi Barnadas.

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Mesmerizing Kinetic Art Reveals Two Completely Different Portraits in a Single Painting

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Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas reveals two distinct portraits in a single painting. The incredible, transformative art changes as you walk from either side of it by gradually shifting faces as you do so. In one piece, Marilyn Monroe turns into Albert Einstein while another painting showcases a young woman aging many decades into an older version of herself.

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The Sound Shirt was adapted from CuteCircuit's similarly sensitive Hug Shirt, commissioned -- and eventually purchased -- by the Jungen Symphoniker Hamburg, a German orchestra.

"We mapped intuitively how we thought the music would map to the body," CuteCircuit CEO Ryan Genz explained to .
Is There a Music Tech Bubble?
Here's how it works: First, microphones have to be placed throughout the source of the music -- a concert stage, an orchestra pit, etc. The audio is picked up by the shirt's computer system, and translated into vibration through small motors (called actuators) throughout the shirt.

In the Fortune story, Genz detailed the process:
The deeper, heavier bass notes [activate the actuators] down in lower parts of torso, and the lighter sections, like violin and lighter notes, further up on the body, around the neck area and clavicle. As they're watching the orchestra, they can see certain areas are more active than others; they feel soundwaves in specific areas of the body, and within a few minutes understand there is a correlation.
To go along with its virtual hug-transmitting shirt, CuteCircuit has also crafted wearable technology for artists like Katy Perry. To learn more about the Sound Shirt, check the video below. It's available at the Jungen Symphoniker orchestra in Hamburg; CuteCircuit is directing deaf people who are interested to this site.

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Watch This Innovative 'Sound Shirt' Help Deaf People 'Feel' Music

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The Sound Shirt was adapted from CuteCircuit's similarly sensitive Hug Shirt, commissioned -- and eventually purchased -- by the Jungen Symphoniker Hamburg, a German orchestra. "We mapped intuitively how we thought the music would map to the body," CuteCircuit CEO Ryan Genz explained to . Is There a Music Tech Bubble?

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Turning Sign Language into spoken word

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Over 30 million speech impaired people around the globe relies on sign language as a means of communication. But sign language isn't understood by most of the people on the planet, which creates a communication barrier for the people with speech impairment.
Read more This AI-Powered Smart Glove Can Identify Objects by Touch
Roy Allela, a 25-year-old Kenyan man has invented smart gloves that can convert hand gestures of sign language into audio speech. This innovation could change the lives of hearing-impaired people across the world.

Dubbed Sign-IO, the gloves have sensors stitched to each finger. The sensors interpret the word being signed from the bend of the finger.

Allela said challenges faced by his deaf niece inspired him to create the gloves. He also said that the speed at which the signs are vocalized is one of the most important aspects of the smart gloves:

"My 6-year-old niece wears the gloves, pairs them to her phone or mine, then starts signing and I'm able to understand what she's saying," says Allela.

"People speak at different speeds and it's the same with people who sign - some are really fast, others are slow, so we integrated that into the mobile application so that it's comfortable for anyone to use it."

Read more ProGlove Unveils Mark 2, State-of-the-Art Handsfree Barcode Scanner

The Sign-IO delivers give translations in real-time and the gloves can be set to customized interpretation speeds, explains Allela. The device can also be altered to manipulate the pitch, speed and tone of the voice, reports CapeTalk.
WT | Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco on July 9-10
Allela is among 16 young Africans who have been shortlisted by The Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize for inventors from six countries. He says the recognition is a wonderful validation of his work and a great opportunity to put African inventors on the map.

The most innovative wearables event will be back on July 9-10 in beautiful San Francisco at SEMICON West to celebrate the 34th edition of the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference Series. Topics include data analytics in professional sports, prevention, treatment and rehabilitation with wearables, the future of digital health, medication and adherence, smart patches, workflow optimization and workforce safety and much more - featuring international leaders and experts of the wearables industry´s biggest names including Abbott, Autodesk, Datwyler, Kopin, Maxim Integrated, Multek, NFLPA, Omron, SharkDreams, Qualcomm, and many more. Register now to be part of #WTUS19

Cathy Russey ( Google+) is Online Editor at WT | Wearable Technologies and specialized in writing about the latest medical wearables and enabling technologies on the market.Cathy can be contacted at info(at)wearable-technologies.com.

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Kenyan Invents Smart Gloves that Turn Sign Language Gestures into Audio Speech

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Over 30 million speech impaired people around the globe relies on sign language as a means of communication. But sign language isn't understood by most of the people on the planet, which creates a communication barrier for the people with speech impairment.

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FDA Black Box Warning for Kid's Asthma Medicine

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FDA Black Box Warning for Kid's Asthma Medicine

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The FDA issued a black box warning for Singulair, or the generic form called montelukast sodium, after thousands of serious side effects are reported over 12 years.

AUSTIN, Texas - New warnings for a popular asthma and allergy drug after the FDA links the medicine to mental health issues.

The FDA issued a black box warning for Singulair, or the generic form called montelukast sodium, after studying the serious side effects for more than 12 years.

The FDA has received 14,485 reports from patients experience side effects. More than 10,000 of those are considered serious.

Many of those reports are occurring in young children and teenagers. The FDA said the warning is necessary because "we continue to receive reports of serious neuropsychiatric events with montelukast."

There continue to be reports of serious mental health side effects from people taking this medicine, including dozens of suicides.

Most of the time doctors and pharmacists get these warnings, but it's important that parents know about them too. According to the FDA, this is what patients should know:

FDA is requiring a Boxed Warning stating that serious mental health side effects that may include suicidal thoughts or actions have been reported in patients taking the asthma and allergy medicine montelukast (Singulair).

Most reported cases occurred during montelukast treatment, but some occurred after stopping the medicine. In many cases, symptoms resolved after stopping montelukast; however, in some cases, symptoms continued after stopping.

Serious mental health side effects have occurred in patients with and without a history of mental illness.

Talk with your health care professional about the benefits and risks of montelukast, as many other safe and effective allergy medicines are widely available, including over-the-counter ones, without a prescription. These include antihistamines such as loratadine (Alavert, Claritin), fexofenadine (Allegra), cetirizine (Zyrtec), levocetirizine (Xyzal), and diphenhydramine (Benadryl), as well as steroid nasal sprays such as fluticasone (Flonase), triamcinolone (Nasacort), and budesonide (Rhinocort). Alternatively, allergen immunotherapy, also known as allergy shots, has been shown to decrease symptoms of allergic rhinitis. A pharmacist or other health care professional can help you decide which might be best.

Stop taking montelukast and notify a health care professional right away if you or your child experience behavior or mood-related changes while taking the medicine. These may include:

agitation, including aggressive behavior or hostility

attention problems

bad or vivid dreams

depression

disorientation or confusion

feeling anxious

hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not really there)

irritability

memory problems

obsessive-compulsive symptoms

restlessness

sleepwalking

stuttering

suicidal thoughts and actions

tremor or shakiness

trouble sleeping

uncontrolled muscle movements

Talk to your health care professional about any history of mental illness before starting treatment.

If you have allergies, there are a number of steps you can take to lessen your symptoms. These include avoiding exposure to allergy triggers, keeping indoor air clean, and taking allergy medicines. For more information, please see Allergy Relief for Your Child.

We are requiring a new patient Medication Guide, which you should read every time you receive a prescription for montelukast. The Medication Guide explains the mental health risks and other important things you need to know about the medicine. These include the side effects, what the medicine is used for, how to take and store it properly, and other things to watch out for when you are taking the medicine.

Talk to your health care professional if you have any questions or concerns.

To help FDA track safety issues with medicines, report side effects from montelukast or other medicines to the FDA MedWatch program, using the information in the "Contact FDA" box at the bottom of this page.

Merck, the maker of Singulair, sent us a statement:
"At Merck, we are committed to working with regulators, including the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), to label our products appropriately, enabling physicians to make informed decisions about the products they prescribe. We remain confident in the efficacy and safety of SINGULAIR (montelukast sodium), a medicine that has been prescribed to tens of millions of indicated patients with asthma and allergic rhinitis since its approval more than 20 years ago. We will work with the FDA to update the labeling for SINGULAIR. Today Merck supplies only a small portion of the overall market. If patients have questions regarding the use of montelukast they should consult their physician."

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Black box warning to be added to popular asthma/allergy medicine

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The FDA issued a black box warning for Singulair, or the generic form called montelukast sodium, after thousands of serious side effects are reported over 12 years. AUSTIN, Texas - New warnings for a popular asthma and allergy drug after the FDA links the medicine to mental health issues.

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ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN- Rebecca Cunningham has only one kind of memory from her early childhood: violence. Her father shattered mirrors, tore up the house, and beat and threatened to kill her mother. Cunningham, then less than 5 years old, remembers her older sister trying to protect her.

"When my father would start in with my mother, my sister would cover my eyes and try to hide with me behind the couch," recalls Cunningham, now a 48-year-old emergency physician and researcher at the University of Michigan (UM) here. "The police were in and out of the house a lot. If there had been a gun in my home in those years, my mother certainly would have been killed."

One day Cunningham's father, a lawyer, called her mother threatening to kill her. Her mother changed the locks on their New Jersey house. She sent Cunningham's two older siblings to live with a safely distant foster family. And she bought a handgun.

Did that pistol make Cunningham and her mother safer? Public health experts can't answer that question: A 2003 study that examined whether abused women living apart from their abusers are safer with a gun was inconclusive. No study since has delved into the issue.

It's one of myriad questions about firearms and violence that remain unanswered, largely because of a dearth of funding to explore them. Guns are the second-leading cause of death of children and teens in the United States, after motor vehicle crashes. In 2016, the most recent year for which data are available, they killed nearly 3150 people aged 1 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Cancer killed about 1850. But this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, spent $486 million researching pediatric cancer and $4.4 million studying children and guns, according to its RePORTER database.

That's because gun violence research has been operating under a chill for more than 2 decades. In 1996, Congress crafted an amendment, named for its author, then-Arkansas Representative Jay Dickey (R), preventing CDC-the government's lead injury prevention agency-from spending money "to advocate or promote gun control."

That law was widely interpreted as banning any CDC studies that probe firearm violence or how to prevent it. The agency's gun injury research funding was quickly zeroed out, and other health agencies grew wary. The few dozen firearm researchers who persisted were forced to rely on modest amounts from other agencies or private funders to tackle a massive problem.

Now, there may be early signs of a thaw. In March, in the wake of the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school, Congress wrote that CDC is free to probe the causes of gun violence, despite the Dickey amendment. (The agency has not done so, citing a lack of money.) And annual firearm-related funding from NIH, according to a search of its RePORTER database, roughly tripled after a 2013 presidential directive that was issued in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Just as importantly, the agency began to flag firearm violence in some of its calls for research.

A heavy toll

Firearms are the second-leading cause of death in children in the United States, after motor vehicle crashes. In the decade ending in 2016, more children died from gun injuries than from cancer.

That's why Cunningham is now in charge of the largest firearm research grant that NIH has awarded in at least 30 years. With $4.9 million from NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), she is co-directing a 5-year project to build capacity for researching firearm injuries in children. Cunningham and UM public health expert Marc Zimmerman are leading 27 scientists at a dozen institutions in work they hope will carry the field forward for years after this funding ends in 2022.

The grant is not designed to answer one particular question. Rather, the goal is to lay out what questions need answering first. The researchers are building a user-friendly archive of existing data and launching pilot studies. And they are training the young scientists who they hope will come after them.

Cunningham's grant "is unique" in U.S.- funded gun violence research, and not just for its size, says Garen Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, who co-authored one paper with Cunningham but is not part of this grant. "In the last 20 years this is the first time that an award has been made not just to do a project, but to set up an infrastructure that would allow a lot of projects to be done."

Although gun rights groups continue to insist that public health scientists steer clear of gun violence, some researchers are feeling empowered to push back. Last week, surgeons writing in JAMA Surgery called on CDC to restart its own gun violence research. And last month, the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Fairfax, Virginia, provoked a firestorm when it tweeted that "selfimportant anti-gun doctors" should "stay in their lane." Hundreds of emergency department doctors tweeted back, many including photographs of their scrubs, hands, and shoes bloodied from treating gunshot victims. More than 40,000 health care professionals, including Cunningham, signed an open letter to NRA complaining that the group has hobbled gun violence research, declaring, "This is our lane!"

All the same, there's still little public money for gun research. And given the polarizing politics, Cunningham's team must walk a fine line: probing gun violence without being seen as advocating gun control. But she's betting that this is the beginning of the end of the funding chill. Her forward-looking NIH award "is more than another grant," she says. "[It's] the end of the silencing of a generation of scientists."

In the emergency room

Wearing a white coat and with the requisite stethoscope draped around her neck, Cunningham recently showed visitors around a trauma bay stuffed with monitors, tubing, and tanks at UM's University Hospital, which serves Ann Arbor and its rural surroundings. She works in the emergency department here several times a month. (She is also associate vice president for health sciences research at UM, and the fourth-leading NIH grantee among U.S. emergency room doctors.)

The young trauma patients Cunningham sees here underscore the need for research on guns and children. "The teen suicide survivors that I remember most clearly are kids or young adults who have blown off the front of their face," Cunningham says. "Those are some of the worst trauma patients I have seen because they are awake and utterly miserable. And they are going to have just devastating injuries."

After working her way through college and medical school, Cunningham did her medical residency at UM in the late 1990s. She spent months staffing an emergency department 80 kilometers north in Flint, Michigan, an impoverished city where she saw a different kind of gun violence. After street shootings, she saw victims "shot in the leg, shot in the arm, shot in the belly, shot in the chest ... often multiple gunshot wound victims in one night. More than once, the teen was the second in the family to be killed. I cared for young children caught in crossfire walking to school."

She was often pregnant with one of her three daughters when she had to sit down with a mother to tell her that her child had been shot and killed. It was, she says, "completely senseless."

After her residency, Cunningham began 2 decades of research studying the impacts of violence on youth, but for many years she saw no way to study gun violence in particular. "No mentor of mine would touch it."

In 2010, Cunningham finally published a paper with guns in the title-a survey of handgun access in teens visiting the emergency department in Flint. Four years later, she came across a bigger opportunity.

In August 2014, NIH's child health institute sent out a broad call for team proposals to build research capacity for preventing any prominent cause of childhood injury. As Cunningham read the announcement, one sentence leapt off the page: "Increasingly, attention is being paid to firearm-related injury as a serious public health concern."

She contacted NICHD to make sure she had not misread its intent. She was told she had not. She and Zimmerman's first proposal was sent back for revisions. But on a second try, it received a perfect score from an NIH review panel.

One week later, Donald Trump was elected president. Given that NRA had funneled $30 million to Trump's campaign, NIH officials privately fretted about gun research. "The election makes everything more complicated," one administrator emailed to another. But in September 2017, the grant money arrived, and Cunningham's team went to work, calling itself the Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens (FACTS) Consortium.

Four months later, a 19-year-old former student gunned down 17 students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. "My inbox was flooded with researchers wanting to join FACTS-even to volunteer," Cunningham says. "The idea that the topic is too political to study is passing with the urgency created after Parkland."

A violent childhood

Cunningham's own sense of urgency predates any news event. "My interest in gun violence prevention has ... roots [in] lived experience," she says. After his wife kicked him out in the mid-1970s, Cunningham's father continued to stalk her and 5-year-old Cunningham, banging on the front door and breaking windows. To escape him, her mother began a series of moves to low-rent apartments in other towns. They relied on food stamps while Cunningham attended four schools in 3 years.

"We were terrified," Cunningham says. "I was scared my mother would be killed. She was scared she would be killed. My father told her not infrequently that he had a gun and would find her." The fear only lifted years later, after her father died.

Cunningham says her early experience helps her "understand that people sometimes buy guns when they think the law cannot protect them."

In late October, Cunningham convened the first in-person meeting of the FACTS team in a daylong event in a UM conference room. The roughly two dozen researchers and handful of trainees present included many of the public health scientists actively doing firearm research today: grizzled epidemiologists who are still standing after the 22-year funding drought; surgeons-in-training; data mavens; and clinical psychologists such as Rinad Beidas, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying whether and how counseling parents on gun safety could be incorporated into routine pediatric visits.

"The overarching purpose here is how to rebuild the field," Cunningham told the meeting as it opened. "We want more firearm researchers at the end of this who know what they are doing."

Their animating principle is that gun violence, like any other public health bane, can be tackled scientifically, divorced from any political agenda. "There is a science to injury prevention," Cunningham says. She and others note that decades of studies on motor vehicle safety led to evidence-based policies such as car seat and seat belt laws, which have dramatically reduced childhood motor vehicle fatalities even though many more cars are on the road.

In the case of firearms, Cunningham says, "the person, the gun, the home environment-all are modifiable in some way or another. We have not even started to try to address the ways that make the combination safer."

The scientists discussed 10 candidate pilot projects over 5 hours; Cunningham and Zimmerman will soon decide which will move forward.

One project proposes to enlist focus groups of gun owners to craft effective safe storage messages, aiming to curb teen suicide in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In such rural areas, the rate of suicide by gun is almost twice that in urban areas of the United States. Another proposed study, a survey, would separately ask teens and their gun-owning parents how accessible the household's guns are, to reality check parents' views.

A third proposal makes the chilling assumption that it won't be long until the next mass school shooting. In its aftermath, Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, would study young people's use of social media to characterize post-traumatic stress and anxiety, as well as resilience. Fewer than 1% of gun deaths in children and teens occur in schools. But Ranney believes school shootings may have much broader mental health impacts.

Cunningham, who radiates both affability and the decisiveness of a seasoned emergency physician, ran the meeting as part pep talk, part crash assignment. She shut down digressions and poured on doses of budget reality when suggestions got too ambitious. "This is not a democracy, as I tell my children," she reminded the group.

Given the constraints imposed by the congressional amendment, Cunningham and her team are at pains to emphasize that they are not coming after anybody's guns. The official NIH project description promises to respect "gun ownership as an important part of the cultural fabric of U.S. society."

Cunningham is blunt: "Our goals are not political. We are not aiming to decrease total gun numbers. We respect Second Amendment rights."

A generation of scarcity

During the past 22 years, public funding for gun violence research has been modest. Private funders have tried to compensate.

FOIA/NIH; NIH REPORTER DATABASE

The team has signed up gun-owning stakeholders to advise them. These include groups like Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, based in Lake Grove, Oregon, and individuals like James Berlin, police chief and former SWAT team leader in the Detroit suburb of Roseville, Michigan.

Berlin, in a phone interview, said he has turned down other research groups over the years because "it seemed like they were trying to find facts that fit their foregone conclusions." Cunningham's team struck him differently. "They are actually trying to get the answers" on pediatric gun deaths, he says, "so it doesn't happen in the future." He adds of Cunningham: "She made me feel like my opinion mattered."

But hard-line gun rights groups have refused to work with the team. Only "the most tame" groups have signed on, David Hemenway, a veteran injury prevention researcher at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said at the meeting.

"It's year one," Cunningham replied. "There's more time for more voices." But she acknowledged that local and national NRA chapters had failed to return her team's repeated phone messages and emails. (NRA also did not respond to Science's repeated requests for comment for this article.) The National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, the gun industry's trade association, declined to sign on because of "concern about the 'public health' focus," Bill Brassard, the group's senior communications director, wrote in refusing Cunningham's request.

In a statement provided to Science last month, Brassard added, "Though we do not oppose research per se, too often 'research' from some in the public health field is biased and designed to advance a predetermined antigun policy outcome. ... Gun-related violence is largely a criminal justice matter and not a public health issue."

An uncertain future

For a woman who began life at more risk than most for gun violence, Cunningham has landed well. She divorced-because "marriages are miracles"-then remarried and now co-commands a blended family of five teenagers. She lives on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, on a forested lot with a chicken coop overseen by her daughters. Her 77-year-old mother, who is also happily remarried, lives nearby. She still has the gun, stored away, unloaded.

Like many U.S. parents, Cunningham finds her own children affected by gun violence. "My kids come home after those shootings and they are terrified in school."

But despite powerful public reaction to school shootings, some experts are not as sanguine about the future of gun research as Cunningham. "I don't see this as a turning point," says David Studdert, a health policy expert at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California, who's not part of the FACTS project. And pediatrician Fred Rivara, a FACTS team member and veteran firearm researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, worries about future funding for his young trainees.

However, Wintemute, who has studied gun violence for 30 years, thinks this may be a watershed moment. He notes Cunningham's grant and other new money-his group recently received a $5 million award from the state of California-plus the groundswell of physician activity on Twitter. "It's entirely possible that this is the beginning of a new mobilization," he says.

Cunningham is confident that the problem of gun violence can be solved with science-and with participation from all sides. So, she keeps searching for common ground. "We are not having any conversations here that are an 'us and them' narrative," she told scientists at the meeting. "We are about reducing kids dying."

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Guns kill more U.S. kids than cancer. This emergency physician aims to prevent those firearm deaths

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ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN- Rebecca Cunningham has only one kind of memory from her early childhood: violence. Her father shattered mirrors, tore up the house, and beat and threatened to kill her mother. Cunningham, then less than 5 years old, remembers her older sister trying to protect her.

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Herd of Green "Glacier Mice" Baffle Scientists

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Herd of Green "Glacier Mice" Baffle Scientists

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast

In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something unexpected.

"What the heck is this!" Bartholomaus recalls thinking. He's a glaciologist at the University of Idaho.

Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. "They're not attached to anything and they're just resting there on ice," he says. "They're bright green in a world of white."

Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange moss balls. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herdlike fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.

"The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions," Bartholomaus says. "Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks."

In the 1950s, an Icelandic researcher described them in the Journal of Glaciology, noting that "rolling stones can gather moss." He called them "jökla-mýs" or "glacier mice."

This new work adds to a very small body of research on these fuzz balls, even though glaciologists have long known about them and tend to be fond of them.

"They really do look like little mammals, little mice or chipmunks or rats or something running around on the glacier, although they run in obviously very slow motion," says wildlife biologist Sophie Gilbert, also at the University of Idaho.

Each ball is like a soft, wet, squishy pillow of moss. The balls can be composed of different moss species and are thought to form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. They've been seen in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and South America, although they won't grow on just any glacier - it seems that conditions have to be just right.

Their motion is what interested Gilbert and Bartholomaus, as well as their Washington State University colleague Scott Hotaling.

"Most people who would look at them would immediately wonder, 'Well, I wonder if they roll around out here in some way,' " says Gilbert. "Tumbleweeds come to mind, which are obviously totally different, but also round and roll around."

She notes that the entire surface of the ball must periodically get exposed to the sun. "These things must actually roll around or else that moss on the bottom would die," says Gilbert.

The possibility of their rolling had been noted by other researchers, who previously observed that the balls sometimes could be found teetering on a pedestal of ice. That pedestal might form as the moss ball insulated the ice underneath it, preventing it from melting as fast as the surrounding ice. Scientists suspected that the ball would eventually tip off of the pedestal and roll away.

To track the motion of 30 moss balls in Alaska, Gilbert and Bartholomaus tagged each one with a little loop of wire that had an identifying sequence of colored beads. Over a period of 54 days in 2009, they tracked the location of each ball. They returned to check on them in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

"By coming back year after year," says Bartholomaus, "we could figure out that these individual moss balls were living at least, you know, five, six years and potentially much, much longer."

The movement of the moss balls was peculiar. The researchers had expected that the balls would travel around randomly by rolling off their ice pedestals. The reality was different. The balls moved about an average of an inch a day in a kind of choreographed formation - like a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeests.

"When we visited them all, they were all just sort of moving relatively slowly and initially toward the south," says Bartholomaus. "Then they all started to speed up and kind of start to deviate toward the west. And then they slowed down again and progressed even farther to the west."

The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed that the moss balls weren't going down a slope.

"We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions," says Bartholomaus, "and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind."

That didn't explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight.

"We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."

"It's always kind of exciting, though, when things don't comply with your hypothesis, with the way you think things work," says Gilbert.

The work has charmed other glacier scientists who dote on the adorable moss balls.

"I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven't quite got there yet," says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

She has long admired glacier mice, which she saw while doing fieldwork in Iceland. "They're extremely engaging when you look at them in a great big mass," she says. "It's very hard not to think of tribbles from Star Trek or something like that."

She expects to see more research on them, as the study of life on glaciers has really taken off in recent years. What was once viewed as a cold, sterile world is now known to be full of bacteria and algae and mysterious life forms.

"I was involved in some research a couple of years ago where we estimated that between 5 and 10% of the melt of the Greenland ice sheet in the summertime is related to the growth of algae and bacteria on the surface," says Mottram.

Indeed, tiny critters including simple worms and water bears can even live inside moss balls, according to one study from 2012.

Nicholas Midgley of Nottingham Trent University says that back then, he and his colleague Stephen Coulson dissected moss balls and put accelerometers inside a number of them. "From that we were able to deduce that they were actually rotating," says Midgley.

They did not track where the balls rolled. "That's obviously where the work that's been undertaken and published on the Root Glacier advances our understanding," says Midgley, who notes that "exceptionally few" scientists have ever studied moss balls.

Bartholomaus says he'd like to go back to Root Glacier again and do a good, long hunt for the moss balls that were tagged over a decade ago. He knows that the spot is still loaded with moss balls.

"I did visit them last year," says Bartholomaus. "I didn't find any tags during a quick cursory look, but the moss balls are still there. Presumably they're still rolling around on the glacier, doing their moss ball thing."

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Herd Of Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Baffles Scientists

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something unexpected. "What the heck is this!" Bartholomaus recalls thinking. He's a glaciologist at the University of Idaho. Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss.

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The pros and cons of a cash bail system in America

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The crime rate continues to rise despite so many efforts being done by the governments. There are many reasons why people convict severe criminal offences and end up in jail. Some of the common reasons are unemployment, poverty, personal conflicts, etc. After you get convicted, it becomes crucial to apply for bail and get out of the intense situation. In this article, we will guide you through the pros and cons of cash bonds and bail bonds. However before we dive full throttle in the conversation, it is crucial to understand what cash bonds and bail bonds are.

What is a cash bond?

In simple words, cash bail is the money one pays for the release of the person who has been arrested. Cash bail is usually expensive for it is money that has to be paid on the spot. It is decided by the judge and must be paid on time as soon as one applies for bail. If the accused has a comprehensive criminal history, the money to be paid will be higher. However if the accused has no history of crime, he/she will have to pay a lesser amount.

What is a bail bond?

As the name implies, a bail bond is a payment which is made by the defendant's bond agent on his/her behalf. This means if the accused doesn't appear in court on the hearing dates or turns hostile, the bail bondsman will have to pay the full amount. Bail bonds agents usually have their own commission and fee which has to be paid by the accused. Bail guarantors present themselves in the court as a surety of the fact that the accused will appear in the court on the dates decided.

Pros of Cash Bail:

1. No involvement of a third party

This is perhaps the first benefit of cash bail. If you hire a guarantor that will be another cost on your head since they have their fees. However, if you contact an agency such as a Las Vegas bail bond, the company will charge its own money too. So by paying in cash, you eradicate the need for having the intrusion of a third person.

Paperwork takes time and costs money. Cash bail is defined by the judge, and the money is paid on the spot. As with other methods, one will have to go through the archaic procedure of preparing the papers and all important documents.

3. Win courts' trust

Since you're paying in cash, the court will go the extra mile to put trust in you. As with other options, there will be no cash paid in the beginning. Since you're paying the money in hand, the court will be relieved that you will attend the legal proceedings without missing any or turning hostile.

4. Money is returned if you follow the orders

Though it doesn't happen very often, if you are proved innocent, the court will return your money. However, if you don't adhere to the terms and conditions of the court, you won't be given your money back. Therefore you need to be disciplined enough throughout the trail.

The most difficult thing to manage at the time of bail is money. If you have committed a minor crime, the bail amount wouldn't be as much. However, if you are convicted of a felony, you will have to pay a hefty amount to get the bail. Therefore there are no extra charges included.

Cons of Cash Bail:

1. You have to pay for all the money

Bail payment has to be made on time. You cannot expect the court to give you the privilege of paying in installments. Once the bail amount has been decided, it has to be paid on time without any delay. Failing to do so will result in the cancellation of bail.

2. Refund is returned in check

When the court pays back in the cheque, it takes time to convert that cheque into cash. Furthermore, the bank has its charges which are deducted at the time of receiving cash. Seldom will you come across a situation in which the court of any particular state might pay in cash.

3. IRS will be notified on checks worth $10,000

This means if your payment is more than $10,000, the state government will be notified and you will have tax deductions on that money. So if you have paid $10,000 to the court, you will not be returned the full amount after being proved innocent.

4. Failure to show in court means no refund

This is the major downside of the cash bail. If you turn hostile and don't show up in court, the judge might issue your arrest warrant and will also not return the money.

5. Refund will take a long time

Even if you paid the entire cash within minutes at the time of bail, you might have to wait up to 3 months for a refund. Keep in mind, the courts of law have a lot of cases to cater to therefore everything takes time.

Pros of Bail Bonds:

1. Pay less percentage to the bail agent

This is the first coherent benefit of a bail bond. You will have to pay only 10% of the bail amount to the bail agent. At the time of bail, there are other expenses to look forward to, so you can save money at the beginning.

2. You are not responsible for the defendant's action

Once you hire a bail bond agent, you won't be held accountable by the court if the defendant shows up. This means you won't have to pay the full price to the court in case the bail agent doesn't attend a legal proceeding.

3. Bail bond agents are disciplined

Bail bonds agent males sure the defendant goes to the court and attends all the legal proceedings. If you don't know much about law and miss a court hearing, you will very likely get in trouble and even get arrested. However, the bonds agent will prepare you for everything before time.

4. You can pay money over some time

This is an important benefit of the bail bonds that you don't need to pay the 10% amount on the spot. You can pay that amount in installments over some time. Most companies offer flexible low monthly payment plans which can easily be availed.

5. Bail agent knows the process

If you are naïve to the courts of law and have no information about the legal proceedings, there's no need to worry. A bail agent knows the process and will guide you throughout the verdict. Furthermore, he/she will tell you exactly the way you have to present yourself in court.

Cons of Bail Bonds:

1. The fee paid is non-refundable

Once you pay 10% of the entire money, it is not refundable. Since your bail bonds agent is providing services and putting himself at stake, you won't be given that money back. So in a way, you are paying the company for professional legal services.

2. Third-party is involved

Just as you don't want the intrusion of a third person with cash bail, this time you will have a third party know about your case and help you out. So, the truth be told, you will have your privacy compromised. Even if you want to remain discreet with your case, you will have to spill some part of the truth.

This time more paperwork will be involved since a new bond agent will be putting himself in the front row to protect you in court. Furthermore, if you're hiring somebody from a professional firm, you will have to go through their paperwork to sign for the services.

4. You might get in trouble because of the bonds agent

Though you won't have to pay money in case the bonds agent doesn't show up in court, but you might get in trouble because of his/her behavior. If you are convicted under serious felony charges, you might be rearrested if the bonds agent for quite some time. Furthermore, the court might purr other charges on your head if you have a careless attorney by your side.

Which is better? Cash bail or bail bonds?

As discussed, both have their pros and cons. Most people choose to pay in cash for the other option takes some time. Cash bail is simple and has less paperwork but is anyways a big risk. Bail bonds require the intrusion of a third person and more paperwork, but you have the benefit of having a professional by your side. Therefore, depending on your situation, you can choose any of the two options.

You must weigh the pros and cons of both the types which have been mentioned above and then make your decision accordingly. Just make sure you hire the right attorney for this job for there are many unprofessional and naïve people in the market looking for fresh bait.

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NetNewsLedger - The pros and cons of cash bonds and bail bonds

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The crime rate continues to rise despite so many efforts being done by the governments. There are many reasons why people convict severe criminal offences and end up in jail. Some of the common reasons are unemployment, poverty, personal conflicts, etc. After you get convicted, it becomes crucial to apply for bail and get out ...

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I've Watched This Stenographer Explain Her Job Five Times And I'm Still So Confused

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My Dead Twin is the Mother of my Children | Chimera: The Twin Inside Me | Only Human

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Dollhouses of Death Change Forensic Science

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Dollhouses of Death Change Forensic Science

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These dollhouses depict hangings, suicides, and murders - and they're still used to train forensic scientists in detective work.

Florence Glessner Lee's 19 " Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" are collected as part of a rare public exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As the above video shows, these incredibly intricate (and sublimely creepy) dioramas are fascinating works of art and forensic science.

You can pick apart each dollhouse for interesting clues (a task historian Erin Bush undertook for her Death in Diorama project), parsing the miniature blood stains and tiny knives for hints as to what happened in the house. Or you can simply appreciate the fascinatingly spooky detail behind every object inside.

Paired with these mysteries is the mystery of the nutshell studies' creator - Francis Glessner Lee was an heiress who devoted her life to improving forensic science. As a product of her unusual "hobby," there are two beneficiaries: those who practice forensic science, and the public that can enjoy the unusual art born of one woman's obsession.

You can find this video and all of Vox's videos on YouTube. Subscribe for more episodes.
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The dollhouses of death that changed forensic science

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These dollhouses depict hangings, suicides, and murders - and they're still used to train forensic scientists in detective work. Florence Glessner Lee's 19 " Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" are collected as part of a rare public exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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The Cold War and Project MK-Ultra

In the 1950s and 1960s-the height of the Cold War -the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.

The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Sometimes the test subjects knew they were participating in a study-but at other times, they had no idea, even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.

Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals or prisons in the United States and Canada. Most of these took place between 1953 and 1964, but it's not clear how many people were involved in the tests-the agency kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most MK-Ultra documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.

LSD and Sidney Gottlieb

The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drug's mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.

Under the auspices of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA began to fund studies at Columbia University, Stanford University and other colleges on the effects of the drug. After a series of tests, the drug was deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.

MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, methamphetamine and psilocybin ("magic mushrooms").

HISTORY Vault: 'America's Book of Secrets'

Operation Midnight Climax

Operation Midnight Climax was an MK-Ultra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA "safe houses" where drug experiments took place.

The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then-while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror-watched the drug's effects on the men's behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes' rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.

Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in San Francisco and Marin County, California, and in New York City. The program had little oversight and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.

An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: "Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

The Death of Frank Olson

Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson tumbled to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide.

The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensics team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall. The findings sparked conspiracy theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA.

After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson's family was awarded a settlement of $750,000, and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.

Ken Kesey and Other MK-Ultra Participants

Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.

Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called "Acid Tests."

Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kick-started the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.

Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Ted Kaczynski, better known as the "Unabomber"; and James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster.

Church Committee

In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MK-Ultra to light.

The following year, President Ford-in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government-set up the United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MK-Ultra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.

The Commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.

The Church Committee-helmed by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church-was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra.

These revelations resulted in Ford's 1976 Executive Order on Intelligence Activities that prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject."

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The Cold War and Project MK-Ultra In the 1950s and 1960s-the height of the Cold War-the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953.

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On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper, a.k.a. D.B. Cooper, bought a one-way ticket on a flight bound for Seattle, Washington. While the flight was en-route, he hijacked the plane and made several demands. Later, while the plane was in the air, he jumped out of it with a parachute and the ransom money he had been given. He was never found. This release consists of FBI's investigative files from its search for "Cooper" between November 1971 and May 1992.

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On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper, a.k.a. D.B. Cooper, bought a one-way ticket on a flight bound for Seattle, Washington. While the flight was en-route, he hijacked the plane and made several demands. Later, while the plane was in the air, he jumped out of it with a parachute and the ransom money he had been given.

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John Trumbull / Wikimedia Commons

Was the Constitution designed to make the United States less democratic?

Throughout the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention labored to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new frame of government. While the convention nearly broke down several times over slavery and the apportionment of representation among the states, by late September the delegates had achieved their goal and produced a new constitution-the one Americans still live with. No delegate was completely satisfied with the process or the results; of the 55 who attended the convention only 39 signed the finished document. Overall, though, the signers were pleased with the system they created. James Wilson of Pennsylvania judged it, "The best form of government which has ever been offered to the world." Next, the Constitution was sent to the states to be debated and, the Framers hoped, ratified.

Oxford University Press, 880 pp., $39.95

Few people in the state ratifying conventions shared Wilson's enthusiasm. The proposed government was less democratic than either the Articles of Confederation or the individual state constitutions. For example, the president would be chosen by an Electoral College rather than by citizens themselves; senators would be appointed by state legislatures; the smallest state would have as many senators as the largest; there were no term limits for any office and no means to recall federal officials; the House of Representatives was small (only 65 members originally), meaning that electoral districts would be geographically vast; and the so-called Supremacy Clause seemed to dissolve the sovereignty of the states altogether. Anti-Federalists (those who opposed the Constitution) had good reason to argue that its true purpose was, as one of them put it, the "transfer of power from the many to the few." The democratic impulses of the Revolutionary Era now came to bear in opposition to the Constitution, both in the press and at the ratifying conventions.

In his impressive new book, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, Bancroft Prize-winning legal historian Michael J. Klarman seeks to understand why the Framers produced such an undemocratic plan in the first place, and how they managed to get it approved over strong opposition in the state conventions. At the risk of oversimplifying-the book comes in at more than 800 pages-Klarman argues that the Constitution is undemocratic because it was designed to protect wealthy merchants and landowners from the redistributive tendencies of popular government. "The Constitution was," he writes, "a conservative counterrevolution against what leading American statesmen regarded as the irresponsible economic measures enacted by a majority of state legislatures in the mid-1780s." More specifically, "the Constitution was designed in part to block legislation for tax and debt relief."

How was the Constitution adopted in spite of vigorous and cogent objections from its democracy-loving critics? Klarman argues that the Federalists essentially cheated and strong-armed their way to ratification. The book seems intended as a bracing antidote to the phenomenon that Klarman has elsewhere labeled "constitutional idolatry," his term for "our misguided tendency to blindly worship the Constitution" and the men who wrote it.

The idea that the Constitution was really about money is not new, although it has lost favor in recent decades to "ideological" interpretations that focus on the Framers' moral worldview and political goals. Klarman draws the core of his argument from Woody Holton's 2007 Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, which was inspired in turn by one of the great history books of the 20th century, Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Roughly stated, these books argue that during the period after the Revolutionary War most state constitutions were highly democratic, at least for the era. At the same time, the country was suffering a post-war financial crisis that was ruinous to artisans and small farmers. Not surprisingly, common people began to use their new political influence to create economic policies that were favorable to themselves (and disadvantageous to creditors and wealthy citizens), such as inflationary monetary policy and progressive taxation. The Constitution, according to the economic interpretation, was the 1 percent's revenge, a countermeasure designed to undermine the democratic governments in the states, thereby returning power to wealthy elites and insulating them from popular opinion.

Klarman's contribution to the economic interpretation is twofold. First, he simply digs deeper into the primary sources than any of his predecessors. Beard acknowledged that his own work was "fragmentary," designed merely "to suggest new lines of historical research." And while many scholars have taken up the suggestion, no one has so carefully sifted the constitutional debates of the entire decade of the 1780's and brought them into a single cohesive interpretation focused on economics.

The Constitution, according to the economic interpretation, was the 1 percent's revenge.

Second, Klarman is more interested than his predecessors in the effects of the slave economy on the Constitution. It was evident from the beginning that the interests of slave owners had an outsized influence on the shape of the finished work, in obvious points like the Three-Fifths Compromise and Fugitive Slave Clause and in less obvious such as the Electoral College, which gave slave states a larger say in electing the president that their voting population alone would have warranted. Klarman takes the reader deep into the economic and political calculations of the southern delegates, many of whom were morally opposed to slavery and believed that it impoverished their own citizens, but who also personally benefitted from it and knew that their states would reject the Constitution if it seemed to undermine the institution. Klarman shows that nearly every clause of the Constitution was written and rewritten in fear of losing the support of slave-holding interests.

Much can be said in favor of Klarman's overall interpretation. There is no question that many of the men who attended the Constitutional Convention had become disillusioned with democracy in the post-revolutionary period. Even aside from their concerns about debt relief and taxation, the political developments of the 1780s seemed to them catastrophic. "Our credit as a nation is sinking," said Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman. "The resources of the country could not be drawn out to defend us against a foreign invasion, nor the forces of the Union to prevent a civil war." If things continue on their present course, said Edmund Randolph of Virginia, "The union will be dissolved, the dogs of war will break loose, and anarchy and discord will complete the ruin of this country." In the summer preceding the Constitutional Convention, Rufus King of Massachusetts said plainly, "It is not possible that the public affairs can be in a much worse situation."

While some of the blame could be put on the Articles of Confederation, which gave the central government insufficient power to organize national affairs, many observers thought the deeper problem was democracy itself. The American people did not seem to be up to the task of broadly based self-government. "We have," George Washington wrote, "probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation." Pennsylvania physician Benjamin Rush was less diplomatic. "What is the present moral character of the citizens of the United States?" he asked during the ratification controversy. "I need not describe it.... Nothing but a vigorous and efficient government can prevent their degenerating into savages." "Democracy," he insisted, "is the devil's own government." By the late-1780s it had become conventional wisdom among political elites that, as Elbridge Gerry put it, "the evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy." The Constitution was designed to reverse the democratic trajectory of American politics.

The problem with the economic interpretation, however, is that it tends to conflate elitism with selfishness. There's no doubt that a primary goal of the Constitution was, in Klarman's words, "to constrain the influence of public opinion upon government." But this anti-democratic aim served many purposes. Protecting the Federalists' wealth was perhaps one of them; for example, the Constitution forbids states from printing paper money and thereby inflating their currency. But, like Beard before him, Klarman gives little direct evidence that financial concerns were a primary motive when, as the quotations above suggest, much more was at stake in the minds of the people who wrote and supported the Constitution. Most of the Federalists believed, sincerely and with justification, that the United States was on the verge of widespread bankruptcy and a civil war or foreign invasion that would be disastrous for rich and poor alike. With national security, national unity, national economic development, and the future of republican government itself in the balance, it's not quite believable that the Framers were primarily guided by a concern with interest rates on their war bonds and other such matters.

Moreover, once the Constitution was ratified, the new federal government's policies were advantageous to poorer Americans. By assuming the states' war debts and paying them off through import duties, the Treasury Department stabilized purchasing power and reduced the tax burden on typical Americans by up to 90 percent. It's hard to see class warfare driving these institutions and policies. If the Framers had wanted to design a central government with the aim of exploiting the poor for their own advantage, they would have found no shortage of models around the globe. Instead, they created a novel framework for economic policy that led to unprecedented prosperity and security in the decade after ratification. In Philadelphia, for example, the daily wages of laborers doubled between 1790 and 1796. George Washington did not exaggerate in his 1795 address to Congress when he noted, "Our agriculture, commerce, and manufactures prosper beyond former example."

The breakdown of American governance in the 1780s also helps explain why the Constitution was ratified in spite of legitimate criticism by its opponents. Even Anti-Federalists saw that the Articles of Confederation were leading to poverty and war. Thomas Jefferson is an instructive example. He had the strongest Anti-Federalist instincts of any eminent American, later writing of the constitutional system,

It must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

Yet he supported the Constitution throughout the ratification debates and "sincerely rejoice[d]" at its eventual approval by the states. The question for him was not whether the Constitution was too aristocratic-it was-but whether that was a price worth paying to save the union. Many Anti-Federalists calculated along the same lines and, once they were confident a Bill of Rights would be added, assented to the Constitution as the best option in bad circumstances.

The idea that the Constitutional Convention was a coup d'état has circulated for a long time, although Klarman doesn't say from where exactly he draws it. Robin Einhorn, for one, defended the proposition in her excellent review of Holton's Unruly Americans, and Klarman's work often reads like the book Einhorn thinks Holton should have written. In the end, however, I believe the coup thesis is more misleading than helpful. We cannot say that the Framers illicitly seized the power of the federal government; there was no government to seize. And only a few of them held office in the new national administration in any case. Moreover, Anti-Federalists like James Monroe and George Clinton went on to win the highest positions in the system they had initially opposed. No family, or cabal, or interest group, or political party grasped power through the drafting and ratification process.

More importantly, the Framers submitted their plan to the citizens for approval. The American founding was, in this sense, the opposite of a coup. While it's true, as Klarman discusses at length, that the Federalists engaged in dirty politics at some of the ratifying conventions, he also makes clear that the Anti-Federalists were at least as guilty. There is no evidence that, had it been a clean fight, the Federalists would have fared any worse, or the Anti-Federalists any better. Moreover, the Framers demanded that the Constitution should be voted up or down at special ratifying conventions rather than by the state legislatures. And most states, in turn, lowered their voting qualifications for this one election-choosing delegates to the conventions. If the complex process of drafting and ratifying the Constitution is to be given an abstract label, it seems closer to a plebiscite than a coup.

Nonetheless, the Anti-Federalists were correct that one effect of the Constitution would be the "transfer of power from the many to the few." And not everyone among the "many" was willing to accept it. While the ratification process was notably open for its time, it was not open enough, and the result was not unanimous enough, to win universal legitimacy for the Constitution. The Civil War broke out less than 80 years later, when individual citizens and states in the south wished to reclaim their powers from the federal government. The "excess of democracy" that concerned Elbridge Gerry again became a national problem. This time, deliberation and voting would not answer the purpose.

Matthew C. Simpson is a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Mexico.

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John Trumbull / Wikimedia Commons Was the Constitution designed to make the United States less democratic? Throughout the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention labored to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new frame of government.

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(NEWSER) - What's the likelihood your spouse will cheat on you? University of Connecticut professor Christin Munsch attempts to answer that question through an economic lens in a study published today in American Sociological Review. Munsch looks at how likely it is a breadwinner will cheat-as well as how likely it is an economically dependent spouse will do the same. Her "counterintuitive" finding, per the : Men and women who are economically dependent on their partner are more likely to cheat, with men three times more inclined to do so. For women: Those who are totally economically dependent have a 5.2% probability of cheating, compared to 3.4% for those who brought home equal income and just 1.5% for total breadwinners. For completely financially dependent men, the probability of cheating was much higher: 15%. As for how common that scenario may be, CNN points to a Pew Research Center report that found that 15% of married mothers outearned their husbands in 2011.

Men were actually least likely to cheat (2.9%) when they brought home 70% of the couple's pooled income. Infidelity increases from there, with men who are the sole breadwinners having a 4% chance of cheating. "These men are aware that their wives are truly dependent and may think that, as a result, their wives will not leave them even if they cheat," Munsch tells the Wall Street Journal. She arrived at her conclusions by crunching data of 2,757 straight people in the same relationship for at least a year as gathered by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth between 2001 and 2011. As the survey's name suggests, those considered were young: between the ages of 18 and 32. What Munsch thinks her findings indicate: "We don't really like inequity, and there's probably something about masculinity that means men really don't like it." (How to tell if your number of sex partners is "normal.")

This story originally appeared on Newser:

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Study: Who's more likely to cheat in a relationship

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(NEWSER) - What's the likelihood your spouse will cheat on you? University of Connecticut professor Christin Munsch attempts to answer that question through an economic lens in a study published today in American Sociological Review . Munsch looks at how likely it is a breadwinner will cheat-as well as how likely it is an economically dependent spouse will do the same.

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It was observed that in early 2018, several newspapers raised a concern about the negative effects of social media applications, such as Snapchat and Instagram, on users related to the choice of plastic surgeries. Several plastic surgeons have shared ...

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fatal brain-eating amoeba may have come from woman's neti pot - cnn

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Fatal brain-eating amoeba may have come from woman's neti pot

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A Seattle woman rinsed her sinuses with tap water. A year later, she died of a brain-eating amoeba.

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What is causing radio flashes from space?

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What is causing radio flashes from space?

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SEATTLE, WASHINGTON- A new Canadian radio telescope, not yet fully operational, has already detected more than a dozen of the mysteriously brief blasts from deep space known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). One is only the second known to flash repeatedly, researchers reported here today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The early results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) suggest the scope is well on its way to adding hundreds or even thousands of FRBs to the 60 or so already known-hopefully revealing the source of these powerful millisecondslong pulses in the process.

"This really points to the fact that CHIME is set to revolutionize the field of FRBs," says Sarah Burke-Spolaor of West Virginia University in Morgantown, who was not involved in the research.

FRBs are one of the hottest topics in astronomy. Researchers not only want to figure out what they are, they also want to use them to gather information about the matter that resides in the vast reaches between galaxies. As they journey through deep space, FRB pulses get spread out by all the electrons they meet, revealing information about the density of the intergalactic medium. That would be valuable input for models of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. "FRBs could be a good way to understand the evolution of our universe," says Vishal Gajjar of the University of California, Berkeley, also not a member of the CHIME team.

FRBs were first detected in 2007 by telescopes in Australia. For years, skeptical astronomers dismissed them as local effects or instrumental glitches. Because FRBs are rare, only wide-field telescopes have a chance of catching one. But these survey scopes tend not to be sensitive enough to learn much about them. And because FRBs occur in the blink of an eye, it's too late to bring another, more sensitive, telescope to bear on it.

Astronomers began to take FRBs seriously when, earlier this decade, teams figured out that the pulses came from distant galaxies. That discovery was based on the structure of the pulses themselves: Among the range of frequencies that make them up, longer wavelength photons lag behind the shorter ones, thanks to the drag of intergalactic matter. The amount of lag in an arriving pulse is too great for the FRB to be from a source within the Milky Way. Previously, some scientists thought explosive events in our galaxy such as supernovae or neutron star mergers might be responsible for the bursts.

But in 2012, an FRB was found by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that was later shown to repeat. This ruled out one-off sources like mergers or supernovae that would be consumed in the process-for that FRB at least. Further observations with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia told researchers that the burst, known as FRB 121102, came from a highly magnetic environment. In 2017 researchers used the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and the European VLBI Network-a continent-wide array-to pin down its location to a small star-forming galaxy 3 billion light-years away.

But what spawns FRBs remains a mystery. There are almost as many theories as there are FRB detections. An online list now has 47 entries, including neutron star-white dwarf mergers, lightning on pulsars, and alien light-sails. But with only 60 FRBs, astronomers have little to go on. Finding more FRBs-and more repeaters-will let researchers statistically analyze them, and perhaps even determine which types of galaxies spawn them.

CHIME, originally designed to map clouds of interstellar hydrogen to understand the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, aims to help. The telescope, near Penticton in British Columbia in Canada, is comprised of four, fixed 100-meter-long parabolic troughs that look straight up and scan the whole visible sky more than 24 hours.

Construction was finished in 2017. In July and August 2018, while parts of the system were still being tested, CHIME bagged 13 new FRBs over 3 weeks, including the second repeater. "It was a happy surprise, with an element of relief, too," says Ingrid Stairs of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, one of the leaders of the CHIME FRB team. Previously, no FRBs had been found at frequencies below 700 megahertz (MHz), and scientists were worried that not many FRBs would be visible in CHIME's 400- to 800-MHz range. Shriharsh Tendulkar of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, lead author of one of two CHIME papers published today in Nature, says they want to detect across as broad a range of frequencies as possible, both to catch more FRBs and to better understand what is producing them.

Burke-Spolaor says the second repeater is exciting because it confirms their existence and heralds more discoveries. Researchers can't yet tell whether repeaters are a distinct type of FRB or a stage in their long evolution: Single FRBs, for example, could actually be repeaters that have slowed with age and burst too rarely for us to see repeats. The two known repeaters show noticeable similarities, with more structure in their pulses-a series of subbursts-than all but one of the single FRBs. "The striations in the pulses are so rich in information," Burke-Spolaor says. "Finding more repeaters is very important because they are easier to localize [to a source galaxy]." CHIME's results support the idea that FRBs come from dense star-forming regions and perhaps from within old supernova remnants.

Researchers are already looking forward to the haul that CHIME should return when it comes online later this year. Gajjar says: "We should get busy."

doi:10.1126/science.aaw6156

Daniel is Science 's senior correspondent in the United Kingdom, covering astronomy, physics, and energy stories as well as European policy.

More from News

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Canadian telescope finds mysterious radio flashes from deep space

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SEATTLE, WASHINGTON- A new Canadian radio telescope, not yet fully operational, has already detected more than a dozen of the mysteriously brief blasts from deep space known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). One is only the second known to flash repeatedly, researchers reported here today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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Bernice Sandler, the "godmother of Title IX" who died Saturday at the age of 90, is being remembered this week for her lifelong fight to reverse decades of institutional bias in U.S. schools and open new paths for women and girls.

It all started in an elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., when Sandler was a determined little girl nicknamed Bunny. She was offended by the way the boys got to do all the classroom activities.

"For example, running a slide projector," says Marty Langelan, who was Sandler's friend and colleague for nearly 50 years.

"You know, simple everyday things. You know, 'Oh, we'll have the boys do this.' If it was important, the boys did it," Langelan says. "And she told her mother back then, when she was a schoolgirl, that she was going to change the world, that this was wrong.

"And boy, she sure did."

Langelan, who runs a business helping corporations and agencies prevent harassment, says she never saw Sandler angry at anyone but that her friend had moral anger about injustice.

In 1969, Sandler was teaching part-time at the University of Maryland and was vying for one of seven full-time teaching jobs in her department. She was shut out. Writing about the incident in 1997, Sandler said that when she asked a friend on the faculty why she had been passed over, he said her qualifications were excellent.

"But let's face it," he said, "you come on too strong for a woman."

"My reaction? I went home and cried," she wrote, describing the regret she felt at having spoken up during meetings.

Sandler didn't see herself as being part of the feminist movement - it was her husband who first described the school's rejection as "sex discrimination," she recalled.

Sandler wrote that she had been "somewhat ambivalent" about the feminist movement. But that changed when she searched and was rejected for two more jobs, including one where she was told she was "just a housewife who went back to school." It was too much to rationalize.

"I began to think about the ramifications of discrimination and the burgeoning women's movement and to explore how the law treated sex discrimination," she wrote. "Knowing that sex discrimination was immoral, I assumed it would also be illegal."

Back then, discrimination in education was rampant, with academic departments refusing to hire women, grad programs denying admission to women, and offering scholarships to men only. So Sandler researched the strategies of black civil rights activists, hoping to apply them to women's rights in academia.

Finally, she found a small opening she could use to pry open U.S. discrimination laws - it was in just one small part of a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report.

The report was about a presidential executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion and national origin.

"There was a footnote, and being an academic, I quickly turned to the back of the report to read it," Sandler wrote.

The footnote said that in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson had amended Executive Order 11246 to include discrimination based on sex. And because most universities and colleges had federal contracts, the order applied to them, she reasoned.

"Even though I was alone, I shrieked aloud with my discovery," Sandler wrote.

Sandler called the Department of Labor's office of federal contract compliance. "I was immediately connected to the director, Vincent Macaluso, who had been waiting for someone to use the Executive Order in regard to sex discrimination," she wrote. "We met, and together we planned the first complaint against universities and colleges, and the strategies to bring about enforcement of the Executive Order."

As her efforts gained momentum, Sandler helped the Women's Equity Action League start a national campaign to file complaints against widespread sex discrimination at universities. Early in 1970, they filed a class-action complaint against all universities and colleges in the country.

To bolster their case, Sandler asked women in academia to share details about their departments, particularly the status of women and their ratio to men. She collected pages and pages of documentation about an unfair system.

Sandler formed alliances with members of Congress, including Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan, who gave the first speech in Congress about discrimination against women in education. Another key ally was Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, who chaired the subcommittee that dealt with higher education.

In the summer of 1970, Green held congressional hearings on women's education and employment, setting the foundation for what would become Title IX. As The New York Times reports, Green "hired Sandler to join her subcommittee staff to put together the written record of the hearings."

Since it was signed by President Nixon, the law known as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has charted the evolution of sex equality in America. Initially intended to shatter gender quotas for hiring and admissions, it became a vital weapon against limits on opportunities for women and girls.

"That's the power of Title IX," Sandler told NPR's Tovia Smith in 2014. "It's a hammer that's there, and schools know this and are busy scrambling to change their policies, and that makes me smile."

Title IX has often been associated with college sports, but the statute has a much broader scope. As the Department of Education states, Title IX "applies to 16,500 local school districts, 7,000 postsecondary institutions, as well as charter schools, for-profit schools, libraries, and museums."

Under the law, schools and other organizations are barred from discriminating in a wide range of areas, from recruiting and admissions to financial aid and employment. The legislation covers sexual harassment on campus, how pregnant students or those with children are treated, and even bars potential employers from asking about a job applicant's marital status.

Sandler has said she didn't initially anticipate the impact of the law she helped bring about. As she recalled in 2012, "I remember saying, 'Isn't this great news? On field day [when schools let students compete in athletics rather than attend class] ... there's going to be more activities for girls. Isn't that nice?' "

Even after Title IX took effect, Sandler remained a force for gender equity, filing complaints against hundreds of institutions. And she helped schools hew to the rules, delivering thousands of speeches about sex discrimination on college campuses. She was a consultant for The Citadel when that military school sought to integrate women into its corps of cadets.

In recent years, Sandler said she was happy with the changes for which she and her allies fought. She told NPR that she beamed with pride to see female athletes walk "with their heads up and feeling like, 'Yeah, I can handle this world.' "

For 20 years, Sandler was the director of the Association of American Colleges' project on women's status in education. She was also a senior associate at the Washington, D.C.-based Women's Research and Education Institute.

In 2013, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Bernice "Bunny" Sandler leaves behind two daughters, three grandkids and countless girls and women in sports and academia who are forever indebted.

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How Bernice Sandler, 'Godmother Of Title IX,' Achieved Landmark Discrimination Ban

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Bernice Sandler, the "godmother of Title IX" who died Saturday at the age of 90, is being remembered this week for her lifelong fight to reverse decades of institutional bias in U.S. schools and open new paths for women and girls.

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10 companies control what we eat and drink

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10 companies control what we eat and drink

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It's not always easy to connect the dots between the food we consume and the people who grow it, or the impact of growing and processing that food on the health of our planet.

But a campaign called Behind the Brands, led by Oxfam International, an advocacy organization dedicated to fighting poverty, is trying to make the inner workings of the 10 biggest food companies in the world more visible.

They include General Mills, Associated British Foods, Danone, Mars, Coca-Cola, Mondelez, Unilever, PepsiCo, Nestle and Kellogg. Those companies, as you can see from the infographic, control much of what we consume.

Oxfam's goal is to nudge them by scoring them on a scale of 1 to 10 on a whole host of fronts, from worker rights to climate change.

We sat down to talk with Chris Jochnick, one of the architects of this campaign and Oxfam America's director of private sector development. We touched on how social media is giving activists more power, why big food companies respond to pressure, and whether corporate executives are his friends or his enemies.

We also wanted to know: Will the promises that these companies make really translate into concrete changes on, say, cocoa farms in West Africa?

If you listen to our conversation above, you'll hear Jochnick explain some of the tactics he and others have used to influence corporate leaders.

Those tactics include speaking up as shareholders at annual meetings or earnings calls, and staging public events, such as the one featured in this YouTube video of activists in Time Square drawing attention to the plight of female cocoa farmers in Africa.

These efforts led to agreements with three large chocolate companies - Mars, Mondelez and Nestle - who have committed to doing more to help the female cocoa farmers in their supply chains escape poverty.
Credit for photo on the SoundCloud audio: iStockphoto

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Can Oxfam Nudge Big Food Companies To Do Right?

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It's not always easy to connect the dots between the food we consume and the people who grow it, or the impact of growing and processing that food on the health of our planet.

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Smart dress shows how women are groped over a HUNDRED times in club

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3D-Printed Bionic Hands are Changing Kids' Lives | Freethink Superhuman

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Open Insulin Project: creating a generic insulin

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Former CIA Operative Explains How Spies Use Disguises | WIRED

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Graham Dugoni was at a music festival in San Francisco in 2012 when he witnessed something that disturbed him. A man was dancing, uninhibited, perhaps drunk, losing himself in the moment. Some strangers thought it was funny, so they filmed it and uploaded it to YouTube.

It's the kind of thing that happens a thousand times a day. But it bothered Dugoni. Traditionally, as he saw it, people at such festivals would come together to commune, to share a collective feeling that those not present would never be able to participate in (see: Woodstock, 1969, or any Grateful Dead show from the 1960s to the 1990s).

But now, everyone had a smartphone. You had to act cool. And that old group intimacy? It was gone.

"That was a keystone moment for me," said Dugoni, 31, and it raised a key question. "What degree of privacy can we expect in a public sphere?"

The topic is complicated, but the answer he came up with was simple: Ditch the phones.

He founded a company, Yondr, whose small, gray pouches swallow phones and lock them away from the fingers and eyes of their addicted owners. Since it started in 2014, hundreds of thousands of the neoprene pouches have been used across North America, Europe and Australia.

People entering a school, courtroom, concert, medical facility, wedding or other event are asked to slip their phones into the pouches when they enter. Once locked, the phones stay with their owners until they are ready to leave the premises, and then the devices are released from their tiny prisons at an "unlocking base." The pouches can be rented for a single event or on extended leases. They are now used in more than 600 U.S. schools.

[The connection between teen smartphone use and happiness]

The effects are immediate: At first, people seem agitated and unsure of what to do with their hands. But then they adjust. "In line at the concession stand, you'll overhear people talking about the artist and the show, and then about the fact that they're having this conversation because they don't have phones," Dugoni said. "You'll see people fully engaged with each other talking, and the feel of it is radically different."

At San Lorenzo High School in California, which this school year began requiring students to Yondr (yes, it's a verb) their phones from the beginning of first period until the end of the last, the difference has been stark. Grades have gone up, and discipline problems have plummeted, said principal Allison Silvestri. Referrals for defiance and disrespect are down 82 percent, she said, adding that before Yondr, most of them stemmed from arguments between students and teachers over phone use in class.

There's also another effect:

"The campus is really loud now," Silvestri said. "Students are interacting, talking to each other, reading, kicking a ball, socializing - because they're not standing in a circle texting each other."

A college soccer player and jazz pianist with a keen interest in philosophy, Dugoni worked briefly in finance in Atlanta, which led him to investigate the nature of anxiety. Studying Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and the German American philosopher Albert Borgmann taught him that stress about technology is not a new thing.

[Are you phubbing right now? What it is and why science says it's bad for your relationships]

"The role of technology in society is something that people have been circling around for a long time," he said. "It's a source of unarticulated angst in our society, a deep-seated thing that no one knows how to address. So phones are a hyperbolic representation of a deep theme."

Dugoni compares the advent of the smartphone with the development of the phonetic alphabet or the newspaper in its momentousness. "I don't think people realize how radically different it is to be a human being with a phone in your pocket," he said. "If it becomes something that's going to hollow out the meaning in your life, that's something we're going to have to address. ... All we're saying is, step into a phone-free zone; see what that's like for a while."

At this point, more than three-quarters of adults in the United States possess a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. It has become "a path of least resistance," Dugoni said, even as it erodes age-old group dynamics. "If you send a text to somebody who's not in the room, what you're doing is extending your energy and bringing someone else into the fold. If everybody is doing that, the energy gets extended to the point where the perspective is changed and you can't really bring it back."

Locking away phones has been the rule at Dave Chappelle shows for years, and people are increasingly being asked to Yondr at parties and other informal events, said Carla Sims, Chappelle's publicist. In the absence of phones, performers "know they're not going to be bombarded with requests for photos, and they're not going to have a lot of cellphones in their face while they're trying to do improv," she said, adding that audience members also like not having everyone in front of them holding phones up.

[Using your phone as an alarm clock can set the tone for an anxiety-ridden day]

In the end, Dugoni wants people to ask themselves: What is the point of all those instantaneous texts, shares and likes?

"If you think of this phone as the ultimate expression of technological efficiency where things are easier, cheaper, faster all the time, I think it comes down to what are the limits of a purely efficiency-driven mode of life? What people really enjoy has nothing to do with efficiency. You can play a melody faster, but that doesn't make sense. What does it mean to be more efficient in our social interactions? Is that something we want? Does that make sense at all?"

Dugoni is not alone; even as smartphone saturation has increased, the cultural tide has been shifting, with studies linking happiness to less screen time, and former tech executives speaking out about technology's addictive qualities. People's response to Yondr has also become more positive, Dugoni said, adding, "The only people who weren't positive about it were the people in Silicon Valley, which was how I knew it was a good idea."

But some are better at using it than others. "In Scandinavia, people will be more rule followers, versus doing a show with a bunch of VIPs on a Friday night in L.A., where they're more squirrelly and everyone is someone's uncle" and therefore wants an exception to the no-phone rules, Dugoni said.

Perhaps ironically, those who embrace the concept most quickly are young people who don't remember a world without cellphones. Dugoni sees people his age as a bridge between them and older people.

[How some Americans are turning to the Japanese practice of forest bathing to unplug]

"I think my generation, the onus is on us to lay down a lifeline for kids coming up, because if you're a young person coming up, if you're a sensitive, sharp young person, you know something's out of whack," he said. "Can it have something to do with people interacting with a screen eight hours a day and the experiences you're having not coming from your primary experience?"

Does he think people will one day look back on unfettered smartphone use in the way we now look at smoking on airplanes?

"That's a great comparison, if a little loaded," he said. What he'd like to see is not the disappearance of the devices but a change in the social etiquette regarding their use.

"So our grandkids will say, 'Wait, you could take a picture of anyone anytime and post it wherever you wanted? Well, of course you can't. That's an invasion of privacy.' "
Read more: Senator invites custodian to State of the Union: 'He works hard behind the scenes' Husband with Alzheimer's forgot he was married to his wife of 38 years. He proposed, and they married again. This family grew up picking cotton. Decades later, they returned to the place they sharecropped - as homeowners

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This simple solution to smartphone addiction is now used in over 600 U.S. schools

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Graham Dugoni was at a music festival in San Francisco in 2012 when he witnessed something that disturbed him. A man was dancing, uninhibited, perhaps drunk, losing himself in the moment. Some strangers thought it was funny, so they filmed it and uploaded it to YouTube.

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Some immunotherapy approaches rely on stimulating the immune system throughout the body. Others target naturally occurring checkpoints that limit the anti-cancer activity of immune cells. Still others, like the CAR T-cell therapy recently approved to treat some types of leukemia and lymphomas, require a patient's immune cells to be removed from the body and genetically engineered to attack the tumor cells. Many of these approaches have been successful, but they each have downsides - from difficult-to-handle side effects to high-cost and lengthy preparation or treatment times.

"All of these immunotherapy advances are changing medical practice," Levy said. "Our approach uses a one-time application of very small amounts of two agents to stimulate the immune cells only within the tumor itself. In the mice, we saw amazing, bodywide effects, including the elimination of tumors all over the animal."

Cancers often exist in a strange kind of limbo with regard to the immune system. Immune cells like T cells recognize the abnormal proteins often present on cancer cells and infiltrate to attack the tumor. However, as the tumor grows, it often devises ways to suppress the activity of the T cells.

Levy's method works to reactivate the cancer-specific T cells by injecting microgram amounts of two agents directly into the tumor site. (A microgram is one-millionth of a gram). One, a short stretch of DNA called a CpG oligonucleotide, works with other nearby immune cells to amplify the expression of an activating receptor called OX40 on the surface of the T cells. The other, an antibody that binds to OX40, activates the T cells to lead the charge against the cancer cells. Because the two agents are injected directly into the tumor, only T cells that have infiltrated it are activated. In effect, these T cells are "prescreened" by the body to recognize only cancer-specific proteins.

Cancer-destroying rangers

Some of these tumor-specific, activated T cells then leave the original tumor to find and destroy other identical tumors throughout the body.

The approach worked startlingly well in laboratory mice with transplanted mouse lymphoma tumors in two sites on their bodies. Injecting one tumor site with the two agents caused the regression not just of the treated tumor, but also of the second, untreated tumor. In this way, 87 of 90 mice were cured of the cancer. Although the cancer recurred in three of the mice, the tumors again regressed after a second treatment. The researchers saw similar results in mice bearing breast, colon and melanoma tumors.

I don't think there's a limit to the type of tumor we could potentially treat, as long as it has been infiltrated by the immune system.

Mice genetically engineered to spontaneously develop breast cancers in all 10 of their mammary pads also responded to the treatment. Treating the first tumor that arose often prevented the occurrence of future tumors and significantly increased the animals' life span, the researchers found.

Finally, Sagiv-Barfi explored the specificity of the T cells by transplanting two types of tumors into the mice. She transplanted the same lymphoma cancer cells in two locations, and she transplanted a colon cancer cell line in a third location. Treatment of one of the lymphoma sites caused the regression of both lymphoma tumors but did not affect the growth of the colon cancer cells.

"This is a very targeted approach," Levy said. "Only the tumor that shares the protein targets displayed by the treated site is affected. We're attacking specific targets without having to identify exactly what proteins the T cells are recognizing."

The current clinical trial is expected to recruit about 15 patients with low-grade lymphoma. If successful, Levy believes the treatment could be useful for many tumor types. He envisions a future in which clinicians inject the two agents into solid tumors in humans prior to surgical removal of the cancer as a way to prevent recurrence due to unidentified metastases or lingering cancer cells, or even to head off the development of future tumors that arise due to genetic mutations like BRCA1 and 2.

"I don't think there's a limit to the type of tumor we could potentially treat, as long as it has been infiltrated by the immune system," Levy said.

The work is an example of Stanford Medicine's focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill.

The study's other Stanford co-authors are senior research assistant and lab manager Debra Czerwinski; professor of medicine Shoshana Levy, PhD; postdoctoral scholar Israt Alam, PhD; graduate student Aaron Mayer; and professor of radiology Sanjiv Gambhir, MD, PhD.

Levy is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute and Stanford Bio-X.

Gambhir is the founder and equity holder in CellSight Inc., which develops and translates multimodality strategies to image cell trafficking and transplantation.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant CA188005), the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Boaz and Varda Dotan Foundation and the Phil N. Allen Foundation.

Stanford's Department of Medicine also supported the work.

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Cancer 'vaccine' eliminates tumors in mice

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Some immunotherapy approaches rely on stimulating the immune system throughout the body. Others target naturally occurring checkpoints that limit the anti-cancer activity of immune cells. Still others, like the CAR T-cell therapy recently approved to treat some types of leukemia and lymphomas, require a patient's immune cells to be removed from the body and genetically engineered to attack the tumor cells.

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Soon, Your Doctor Could Print a Human Organ on Demand

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Soon, Your Doctor Could Print a Human Organ on Demand

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At a laboratory in North Carolina, scientists are working furiously to create a future in which replacement organs come from a machine

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Research: How You Feel About Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Class

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Research: How You Feel About Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Class

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Research: How You Feel About Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Class

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It's often assumed that getting a college education or a job in a professional workplace means that a student or employee has finally "made it" and can leave her social class background behind. The reality, however, is often quite different.

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A home away from homeLuxurious accommodations were the staples of America’s Gilded Age asylums, which offered state-of-the-science treatment — for the rich only.

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A home away from homeLuxurious accommodations were the staples of America’s Gilded Age asylums, which offered state-of-the-science treatment — for the rich only.

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Luxurious accommodations were the staples of America's Gilded Age asylums, which offered state-of-the-science treatment - for the rich only.

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7 young adults went undercover as high-school students and found that life as a teenager today is nothing like they remember

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7 young adults went undercover as high-school students and found that life as a teenager today is nothing like they remember

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A&E

Seven young adults went undercover as students at a Kansas high school for the documentary series "Undercover High."

The volunteers, ages 21 to 26, made themselves look younger, and one of them even got braces to look the part.

They discovered issues students were going through that even the administration didn't know about.

You couldn't pay most people to relive their high school experiences.

But that's exactly what seven young adults did for the new A&E documentary series " Undercover High," which premieres Tuesday.

The show follows the seven participants, ages 21 to 26, as they pose as students at Highland Park High School in Topeka, Kansas, during the spring 2017 semester.

The goal of the program is to expose the challenges of students and school staff, as well as provide administrators details students would ordinarily never share with them.

"I always wonder, what is a student not telling us that they will only tell a peer?" Tiffany Anderson, the superintendent of Topeka Public Schools, said in an early episode.

Over the semester, the young adults were exposed to bullying, sexual harassment, poverty, violence, and drug addiction, among other issues. And in some cases, administrators did not realize the extent of the problems.

"All of those topics are discussed at some level at school, but between students, the insight is just much deeper than what we would have gained otherwise," Anderson told Business Insider.

The participants tried to look like convincing high-school students. The men shaved to look younger, while one woman, a 25-year-old named Erin, was even fitted with braces. They took a full course load and did assignments like the rest of the students.

A&E

Although the group received psychological training before the semester, nothing could prepare them for what they experienced.

As early episodes of the show indicate, cell phone use is rampant among students at the school, and social media became a greater source of pressure and stress than it had been for participants who graduated as recently as five years ago.

"The kinds of challenges that I experienced in high school along with my peers are now 24/7 issues because of technology, computers, cell phones, and social media," Shane Feldman, an undercover student who graduated from high school in 2012, told Business Insider. "There's no real escape."

Issues involving social media arose quickly for the participants. One woman, a 22-year-old named Lina, caught wind of a group text in which more than 20 male students were making alarming sexual remarks about her soon after she arrived at the school.

"I think my heart kind of stopped for a minute," she said.

She later informed the school's principal, who discovered that some of the people in the group text weren't even students in the school district.

"Undercover High" is an effort between A&E and Lucky 8 productions. The companies previously collaborated on the show "60 Days In," which follows citizens who go undercover as inmates in an Atlanta jail and is now in its fourth season.

The first episode of "Undercover High" airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET, followed by a segment featuring a psychotherapist and an adolescent psychologist who were advisers on the show, as well as a member of a crisis text line and some of the undercover students.

Watch a preview of the series:

SEE ALSO: Regular people went undercover in an Atlanta jail as part of an experiment - and for the first time in 4 years, someone blew their cover

NOW WATCH: Inside the best high school in America, which costs $53,000 a year

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7 young adults went undercover as high-school students and found that life as a teenager today is nothing like they remember

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Seven young adults went undercover as students at a Kansas high school for the documentary series "Undercover High." The volunteers, ages 21 to 26, made themselves look younger, and one of them even got braces to look the part. They discovered issues students were going through that even the administration didn't know about.

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Wealth Inequality in America:  Why the Rich Keep Getting Richer and Everyone Else Gets Poorer

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Wealth Inequality in America:  Why the Rich Keep Getting Richer and Everyone Else Gets Poorer

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We equate wealth with "net worth," the sum total of your assets minus liabilities. Assets can include everything from an owned personal residence and cash in savings accounts to investments in stocks and bonds, real estate, and retirement accounts. Liabilities cover what a household owes: a car loan, credit card balance, student loan, mortgage, or any other bill yet to be paid. In the United States, wealth inequality runs even more pronounced than income inequality.
The Richest Americans Household Wealth The Racial Wealth Divide
The Richest Americans

As ordinary people around the world suffer from the health and economic impacts of the pandemic, billionaires have actually seen their fortunes expand. According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $2.071 trillion (70.3 percent) between March 18, 2020 and Ocobter 15, 2021, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $5.019 trillion. Of the more than 700 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Elon Musk) saw an 123 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $349 billion to $779 billion. We will be regularly updating this analysis here.

The most visible indicator of wealth inequality in America today may be the Forbes magazine list of the nation's 400 richest. In 2018, the three men at the top of that list - Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett - held combined fortunes worth more than the total wealth of the poorest half of Americans. You can find more background on these numbers in our report, Billionaire Bonanza 2020

In 1982, the "poorest" American listed on the first annual Forbes magazine list of America's richest 400 had a net worth of $220 million in 2022 dollars. The average member of that first list had a net worth of $670 million. In 2022, rich Americans needed a net worth of at least $2.77 billion to enter the , and the average member held a net worth of over $10 billion, nearly 15 times the 1982 average after adjusting for inflation.

Inequality is skyrocketing even within the Forbes 400 list of America's richest. As of May 2023, the net worth of the richest member of this group was 38 times larger than the net worth of the richest member in 1982 (in today's dollars). , just eight men have held this spot: shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig (1982), oil executive Gordon Getty (1983-1984), Walmart founder Sam Walton (1985-1988), media company owner John Kluge (1989-1991), Microsoft founder Bill Gates (1992-2017, except 1993), investor Warren Buffett (1993), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (2018-2021), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (2022).

According to IPS analysis of Saez and Zucman data, as America's richest .01 percent have accumulated more wealth, they have paid a smaller share of total U.S. taxes. In 2018, the tax share of the top .01 percent was close to what it was in 1953. By contrast, their share of the nation's wealth nearly quadrupled during that period, rising from 2.5 percent to 9.6 percent.

Household Wealth

Over the past three decades, America's most affluent families have added to their net worth, while those on the bottom have dipped into "negative wealth," meaning the value of their debts exceeds the value of their assets, according to National Bureau of Economic Research data.

Over the past century, the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that the share of America's wealth held by the nation's wealthiest has changed markedly. That share peaked in the late 1920s, right before the Great Depression, then fell by more than half over the next three decades. But the equalizing trends of the mid 20th century have now been almost completely undone. At the top of the American economic summit, the richest of the nation's rich now hold as large a wealth share as they did in the 1920s.

The rich don't just have more wealth than everyone else. The bulk of their wealth comes from different - and more lucrative - asset sources, as the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts data shows. America's top 1 percent, for instance, holds more than half the national wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds. Most of the wealth of Americans in the bottom 90 percent comes from their homes - the asset category that took the biggest hit during the Great Recession. These Americans also hold just around three-quarters of America's debt.

The Racial Wealth Divide

The median Black family, with just over $3,500, owns just 2 percent of the wealth of the nearly $147,000 the median White family owns, according to our " Racial Wealth Divide " report. The median Latino family, with just over $6,500, owns just 4 percent of the wealth of the median White family. Put differently, the median White family has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.

Families that have zero or even "negative" wealth (meaning the value of their debts exceeds the value of their assets) live on the edge, just one minor economic setback away from tragedy. Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that while the racial wealth gap has improved slightly, an estimated 28 percent of Black households and 26 percent of Latinx households had zero or negative wealth in 2019, twice the level of whites.

As with total wealth, home ownership is heavily skewed towards white families, our 2023 report with the National Community Reinvestment, Still a Dream , shows. Between 1960 and 2020, the rate of Black home ownership increased but the gap in ownership rates between Black and white families widened, from 26 percentage points to 30. Structural barriers, including lower incomes, higher rates of mortgage denials, and racial segregation, deny many Black families the opportunity to acquire this wealth-building asset.

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The United States exhibits has more inequality and disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation.

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A New Documentary Calls Into Question The Simpson's 'Apu'

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A New Documentary Calls Into Question The Simpson's 'Apu'

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One of the most difficult tasks in Hollywood is to get someone who is successful to admit they are dead wrong.

That's a lesson comic Hari Kondabolu learned the hard way, while making his compelling, layered, highly entertaining documentary airing on truTV Sunday, The Problem with Apu.

On the surface, it's kind of a comedy primal scream: a passionate exploration of why the Indian character on The Simpsons, Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, is racist.

Beneath that, a tension simmers, pulling viewers through the film. It's rooted in a quest Kondabolu undertakes similar to Michael Moore's hunt for General Motors' CEO Roger Smith during his debut film Roger & Me; Kondabolu wants to talk about Apu with the white man who has voiced the character for more than 20 years, actor Hank Azaria.

But what really emerges - as Kondabolu sits down with former Simpsons producer Dana Gould, and culls comments Azaria has made about the character in other, less critical spaces - is an essential truth about Hollywood.

Success justifies everything. Especially when that success comes at the expense of people who are not the mostly white, mostly male powerbrokers who define comedy in America.

Kondabolu builds his case logically, with a cheeky flair. We see where the idea for the film started, as a bit from his standup act complaining about Apu. That became a standout commentary on the late night show where he once worked as a writer, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. (He says Bell told him, "If you don't do this, I will fire you," which was pretty good motivation.)

The comic, a New York-born son of Indian immigrants, lists Apu's hurtful qualities with a rueful precision: Goofy. Servile. Devious.

He is a character whose humor almost completely springs from his sing-song, stereotypically outlandish accent. For years, Apu was one of the most prominent Indian characters on prime time TV - a mugging, persistent example of the derisive way many Americans viewed Indian immigrants. And in the film, when Kondabolu asks a roomful of young, South Asian performers whether they got bullied by people who called them Apu, nearly everyone raises their hand.

Yes, as the film notes, The Simpsons stereotypes lots of characters. But there were plenty of other working class fathers and rich people on television in 1989 to counter Homer Simpson and Montgomery Burns. Not so with South Asian characters, especially back then.

(And there's one thing Kondabolu doesn't note: The Simpsons doesn't build black characters around essential stereotypes in the same way, as if producers recognize the danger of trafficking in such images about African-Americans.)

The Problem with Apu educates while it entertains, featuring House of Cards alum Sakina Jaffrey explaining the awful accents South Asian actors are often asked to adopt. She defines it as "patanking," a dismissive word that imitates the sound of an Indian accent to non-Indian ears.

Whoopi Goldberg shows up to talk about blackface and harmful racial caricatures, referencing her extensive collection of racist art, posters and kitschy items she calls "negrobilia."

Kondabolu digs up two different stories on how Apu was created.

Azaria is shown during an interview in a comedy club saying that Simpsons producers asked him to do an Indian voice, quipping, "How offensive can you make it?" But Simpsons producer Mike Reiss told the Cracked podcast that the character was originally just called "store clerk" with directions that he specifically not be Indian - to avoid a comedy cliché - until Azaria cracked up the table reading by saying "35 cents please" in Apu's lilting dialect.

Later, Azaria is shown in an interview with the Archive of American Television saying that he was also inspired by Peter Sellers in the 1968 film The Party - where Sellers, a white British actor, donned brown makeup to play an Indian man. Brownface, if you will.

One of The Problem with Apu's most eye-opening moments, however, comes from Dana Gould. He insists that, for The Simpsons, "The bottom line was always 'What's funnier?'" Later, Gould asks, "How much do you want to tear at the fabric of the show? Do you want to pull Apu, a beloved character out of the Kwik-E-Mart...just for the sake of updating that character to be less anachronistic?"

In other words: Who cares if it's racist? It's successful.

"This is the insidiousness of racism," Daily Show alum Aasif Mandvi tells Kondabolu about the pressure to just accept the stereotypes fueling popular, problematic characters like Apu, "The person who is subjected to it, winds up buying into it as a cultural norm."

The Problem with Apu often unfolds like a movie-length Daily Show segment - and that's a compliment - deftly outlining the stereotypes South Asian people still struggle with in media depictions.

But the attitude it exposes among Hollywood producers and performers, reveals the ugly truth of why these stereotypes persist. Until the pain of indulging the stereotype outweighs the success, wealth, and power that comes from feeding it, the awful images will remain.

Let's hope Kondabolu's film is a step toward making the pain a lot sharper, when it comes to characters like Apu.

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A New Documentary Calls Into Question The Simpson's 'Apu'

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One of the most difficult tasks in Hollywood is to get someone who is successful to admit they are dead wrong. That's a lesson comic Hari Kondabolu learned the hard way, while making his compelling, layered, highly entertaining documentary airing on truTV Sunday, The Problem with Apu.

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When 'Miss' Meant So Much More: How One Woman Fought Alabama — And Won

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When 'Miss' Meant So Much More: How One Woman Fought Alabama — And Won

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June 1963. Gadsden, Ala. Mary Hamilton, 28, stood in a courtroom before a judge.

She was a black civil rights activist, arrested for nonviolent protest. And the judge was losing his patience.

The atmosphere in Gadsden that summer "was truly frightening and terrifying," says Colin Morris, a history professor at Manhattanville College. "The Klan was highly active. On more than one occasion there had been attacks in Gadsden."

But Hamilton wasn't frightened. She was furious. She refused to answer the prosecutor's questions.

"I won't respond," she said, "until you call me Miss Hamilton."

It wasn't just about an honorific. It was about respect and racial equality. Her demand was an act of defiance that would eventually bring her name before the U.S. Supreme Court and set a precedent for how witnesses are addressed in courtrooms today - with equal courtesy.
"We're finally fighting back!"

Segregation was in the details as much as it was in the bold strokes ... And in segregation the idea was to remind African-Americans and people of color in general, in every possible way, that we were not equal, that we were inferior, that we were not capable. And language becomes a very powerful force to do that.

Hamilton grew up in Iowa and Colorado. For a while she thought she'd be a nun - then she discovered socialism, and through socialist groups, learned about the work civil rights groups were doing in the South.

She was light-skinned, like many of her relatives. Some members of Hamilton's family passed as white, but Hamilton refused. "She was disgusted that anyone would pass," says her daughter, Holly Wesley. "She identified very strongly as black."

When Hamilton heard about the burgeoning civil rights movement, she was elated.

"It's happening! We're finally fighting back!" she recalled thinking, in an oral history she taped years later with her friend Sheila Michaels. "We're gonna fight back, we're not gonna take it any more!"

She joined the Congress of Racial Equality - a major civil rights organization at the time - and became a Freedom Rider. In 1961, with other Freedom Riders, she was arrested in Jackson, Miss. She remembered sweltering jails, invasive and unnecessary vaginal exams, and disrespectful policemen and jailers - one of whom "just couldn't understand" a black woman like Hamilton answering him with polite noncompliance. "He lost his composure," she said. But other men got angry.

In the years that followed, Hamilton traveled all over the South, organizing for the civil rights movement, registering voters and rising up the ranks at CORE, becoming a field secretary and eventually Southern regional director - a rare level of authority for a woman. Along the way, again and again, she was arrested at protests.

She recalled looking one jailer in the eye, sensing that he wanted to rape her, and telling him he'd have to kill her first. Meanwhile, she also had to fight off pervasive sexual harassment from other activists within the movement.

Violence, too, was everywhere. She was beaten again and again. Another jailer threw her in an elevator and ran it up and down again and again. He told her to scream, saying no one would hear her. Hamilton says she was silent - "out of sheer meanness and spite," she recalled.

Her resistance was nonviolent - polite, quiet, still. But it wasn't passive, and it wasn't calm.

"Dr. King called my mother Red, and not for her hair but for her temper," Wesley says. "For a nonviolent movement ... she was one to get pissed off."

Hamilton's friend Sheila Michaels, a fellow activist and former roommate, recalled her as a "dashing woman with great authority" who could charm and terrify people in equal measure.

"She was generally conceded to be the worst-tempered woman in the Nonviolent Movement," Michaels said. "But she was also an organizer whom others followed to the ends of the earth."

Mary Hamilton was constantly confusing and infuriating men in authority by standing up to their disrespect.

In Lebanon, Tenn., when a mayor visited her cell and referred to her as "Mary," Hamilton corrected him. It was Miss Hamilton. Hamilton and Michaels recalled the moment in their oral history:"And if you don't know how to speak to a lady," Hamilton told the mayor, "then get out of my cell."

At the time, throughout the '60s, many white people - particularly in positions of authority - refused to use honorifics like "Miss," "Mrs." or "Mr." to refer to black people.

Barbara McCaskill, an English professor at the University of Georgia, studied the narratives of black Americans and the civil rights movement. She said her own mother vividly remembered being denied the honorific "miss" as a young woman.

"Segregation was in the details as much as it was in the bold strokes," McCaskill says. "Language is significant because language calls attention to whether or not we value the humanity of people that we are interacting with. And in segregation the idea was to remind African-Americans and people of color in general, in every possible way, that we were not equal, that we were inferior, that we were not capable. And language becomes a very powerful force to do that."

Which brings us to Gadsden, Ala. In 1963, Hamilton was arrested for picketing and brought before the court for sentencing. Once again, officials refused to call her Miss Hamilton.

She refused to answer. The judge - muttering lewd comments about what he'd like to do to her if she were in his kitchen - ordered her to answer the prosecutor and apologize. But Hamilton was buoyed by rage at the judge's dismissiveness, and by the support of the lawyer assisting her.

She refused. She was fined and sentenced to a few days in jail for contempt of court.

Her lawyers appealed the case, saying that the prosecutor and judge had denied Hamilton her constitutional rights by treating her differently from the way they treated white witnesses. Eventually her case landed before the Supreme Court in Hamilton v. Alabama.

The justices issued a summary reversal, overruling the Alabama courts without even calling for oral arguments. Their brief decision effectively said that a court could not address black witnesses differently than white ones.

"A desegregation decision, basically," says historian Colin Morris. "And that case, that precedent, stands - and is the law of the land up to the present day."
"She was our hero"
By the time the Supreme Court ruled in 1964, Mary Hamilton was nearing the end of her time as an activist. After years of draining work and repeated beatings, her health was suffering, and she was exhausted.

Her story made headlines across the country, and her face was on the cover of Jet magazine. But as the years went by, and Hamilton became a union organizer and teacher, her name largely faded from memory. By the time she died in 2002, her passing and her legacy received little attention.

Michaels remembered her friend in a speech shortly after Hamilton's death. She described her old roommate "streaking through the bayous & pine thickets of the deep South; organizing, organizing, in her white Plymouth Valiant. For if ever there was a steed aptly named to carry an hero into battle, it was Mary's Valiant. And she was our hero, cast in the heroic mold."

Michaels, who died this summer, fought her own fight over honorifics - she led the crusade for women to be able to go by "Ms." as an alternative to Miss or Mrs.

In fact - as NPR noted in an obituary for Michaels - she was originally inspired by a piece of mail to her roommate, Hamilton:

"The two women met through The Congress of Racial Equality in New York. They moved in together around 1961, and spent the next few years living, traveling, protesting and registering voters together. (And having plenty of fun, too. 'We partied a lot. I mean, we had great parties,' Michaels said in [an] oral history.)

"The fateful piece of mail arrived that first year of their friendship and activism. It was a left-wing magazine addressed to Ms. Mary Hamilton, but it was Michaels who was struck by inspiration. Those two little letters ...

" 'Wow, wonderful! Ms. is me!' Michaels thought, according to a 2000 interview with Japan Times.

" 'The first thing anyone wanted to know about you was whether you were married yet,' Michaels told The Guardian in 2007. 'I'd be damned if I'd bow to them.' Going by 'Ms.' suddenly seemed like a solution; a word for a woman who 'did not "belong" to a man.'

When Michaels first made her observation about "Ms.," Hamilton wasn't very impressed. As Michaels remembers it, she said something like, "Sheila, we have much more important things to do."

But she also knew honorifics were important. Just a few years later, she was fighting her court battle over her own.

Both women fought for the world to address them on their own terms, battling over language in addition to their work for legal change. But they were fighting from different places. Hamilton had to go to court just to earn the honorific Miss - while Michaels was advocating to move beyond Miss.

And the world remembered their achievements differently. Hamilton's case, the "Miss Mary" case, made headlines in its time but largely faded from memory. Michaels' role in advocating for "Ms." was little known when it happened, but became recognized as a linguistic turning point decades later and was feted at her death.

But Michaels, for her part, sought to carry and share Mary Hamilton's story. She painstakingly recorded her life history and spoke about her to the press - and in that speech, shortly after Hamilton's death.

"Even in a field of extraordinary and heroic women, Mary's career had been singular," Michaels said. "Even where women could suddenly find themselves militant leaders, her career had been meteoric."
Hear more about Mary Hamilton's life - plus the story about how NPR discovered the connection between Hamilton and Michaels and a conversation about what we remember about the civil rights movement and why it matters - in the full podcast episode.

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When 'Miss' Meant So Much More: How One Woman Fought Alabama - And Won

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June 1963. Gadsden, Ala. Mary Hamilton, 28, stood in a courtroom before a judge. She was a black civil rights activist, arrested for nonviolent protest. And the judge was losing his patience. The atmosphere in Gadsden that summer "was truly frightening and terrifying," says Colin Morris, a history professor at Manhattanville College.

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Pioneering HIV Researcher Mathilde Krim Remembered For Her Activism

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Pioneering HIV Researcher Mathilde Krim Remembered For Her Activism

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With the death of biologist Mathilde Krim on Monday, at the age of 91 at her home in New York, the world lost a pioneering scientist, activist and fundraiser in AIDS research. She is being widely praised this week for her clarity, compassion and leadership.

Amid the panic, confusion and discrimination of the HIV epidemic's earliest days, Krim stood out - using science and straight talk, in the 1980s and beyond, to dispel fear, stigma, and misinformation among politicians and the public.

"She has likely literally saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives because of what she did during the initial days and years of the epidemic," says Corey Johnson, speaker of the New York City Council. "Every single one of us living with HIV today who are on medicines, where now we can live and thrive - it's because of people like Dr.Mathilde Krim."

Born in Italy in 1926, Krim received her doctorate in biology from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She became a steadfast activist for human rights early on, lived in Israel for a time and moved to the United States in the late 50s.

She was studying viruses and cancer when the AIDS epidemic emerged in the early 1980s and was among the first scientists to raise funds for research to develop AIDS treatment, working with celebrities like actress Elizabeth Taylor and others. Krim was the founding chair of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (now called the Foundation for AIDS Research) and went on to raise millions of dollars to finance basic research, clinical trials of drugs and other treatments and AIDS awareness programs.

Colleagues say Krim had a knack for helping people talk about HIV/AIDS rationally.

"She did it in a very grandmotherly way but also in a very direct and honest way," says Kevin Robert Frost, current CEO of the Foundation for AIDS Research. Krim facilitated much-needed public discussions of sex, drug use and homosexuality, Frost says.

"She was able to address all of those things and sweep aside the stigma and discrimination ... in a way that I think very few people could have at the time," he says.

While most lawmakers were silent, Frost says, discrimination against people with AIDS was rampant in housing, employment and even medical care. Krim fought for laws to ban such discrimination, campaigned for needle exchange programs to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS among drug users, and promoted public campaigns that advocated safe sex practices, such as condom use.

Long-time AIDS activist and author, Peter Staley, who was an early member of the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an international direct action advocacy group, calls Krim's approach to public health groundbreaking.

"She recognized human nature for what it was - with all its faults and beautiful diversity - and she realized that using science and the traditional public health approach was the way to save lives," says Staley. "You throw out the moralizing - the finger wagging - and you save lives. And she did this again and again and again, fighting HIV stigma and homophobia."

Krim received 16 honorary doctorates; in 2000 President Bill Clinton presented her with the nation's highest civilian honor - the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Frost remembers Krim with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that "a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." Frost says he greatly mourns Krim's passing, but it's also a joy to remember somebody "who could devote themselves so completely to the people around them."

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Pioneering HIV Researcher Mathilde Krim Remembered For Her Activism

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With the death of biologist Mathilde Krim on Monday, at the age of 91 at her home in New York, the world lost a pioneering scientist, activist and fundraiser in AIDS research. She is being widely praised this week for her clarity, compassion and leadership.

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Repeated Head Hits, not Just Concussions, May Lead to a Type of Chronic Brain Damage

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Repeated Head Hits, not Just Concussions, May Lead to a Type of Chronic Brain Damage

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We live in an age of heightened awareness about concussions. From battlefields around the world to football fields in the U.S., we've heard about the dangers of when the brain rattles around inside the skull, and the possible link between concussion and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

A number of high profile NFL stars have developed CTE, and increasingly parents worry about how concussions may affect their children who play sports. The injury even has become part of popular culture, thanks to the 2015 film titled - " Concussion."

But now a high-powered team of researchers says all that focus on concussions may be missing the mark.
It's really about hits
A study published online Thursday in Brain, a journal of neurology, presents the strongest case yet that repetitive hits to the head that aren't concussions - meaning there's no loss of consciousness or other symptoms that can include headaches, dizziness, vision problems or confusion - do cause CTE.

"We've had an inkling that subconcussive hits - the ones that don't [show] neurological signs and symptoms - may be associated with CTE," says Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the study. "We now have solid scientific evidence to say that is so."

And this evidence, he says, leaves researchers "terrifically concerned."

"The concussions we see on the ball field or the battlefield or wherever - those people are going to get attention," Goldstein says, "because it's obvious they've had some sort of injury. We're really worried about the many more people who are getting hit and getting hurt - their brain is getting hurt - but are not getting help because we can't see the evidence on the outside that their brain is actually hurt. It's a silent injury."

Translating Goldstein's concern to the football field, Chris Nowinski, who heads the Concussion Legacy Foundation, says, "we see the hard hits all the time, where a guy pops up and smiles and [signals] a first down, and [we think], 'OK, that hit was fine.' But what this study says is no, that hit probably wasn't fine, and that poor guy can't feel the damage that's happening in his brain right now."
Tracking hits to the head instead
Goldstein says about 20 per cent of known cases of CTE had no record or report of concussion.

"It suggested that maybe concussion isn't the index or metric that we should be following," he says. "Rather, maybe it's something about the hits and number of hits that might be important. That's what we wanted to nail here."

The study was seven years in the making and involved researchers from Boston University, where Goldstein works, as well as scientists from the Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Oxford University in the UK.

The researchers analyzed human brains - from teenagers and young adults who'd been exposed to mild head impact, didn't die from that, but died from another cause soon after. They found early evidence of brain pathology consistent with what's seen in CTE, including abnormal accumulation of tau protein. CTE is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by that kind of abnormal accumulation around small blood vessels in the brain. The disease can cause brain cell death, cognitive deficits and dementia.

The researchers also conducted experiments that recreated sports-related head impact and military-related blast exposure on laboratory mice.

"It took us many years to do this," Goldstein says. "We see in our animals - even after a small number of hits, even one - very early evidence of pathologies associated with CTE."

And, they noted, the brain pathology was unrelated to signs of concussion in the mice, such as altered arousal and impaired balance. Goldstein says the scientists nailed what they wanted to - strong evidence linking head impact to CTE, independent of concussion.
Still, concussion is part of the picture
While the study downplays the role of concussions in the ultimate development of CTE, the familiar symptoms - headaches, fogginess, or problems with concentration, memory, balance and coordination, even without a loss of consciousness, are still important signs the brain has been hurt.

"I want to be very clear on this," Goldstein says. "This is in no way to minimize concussions."

Nowinski, from the Concussion Legacy Foundation, is a former high school and college football player who says even now, at 39, he deals with symptoms of acute post-concussion syndrome, including lingering headaches, sleepwalking and nausea during intense exercise.

"We're not taking concussions out of the equation," Nowinski says. "Concussions are still very bad." They can still cause acute brain injury that leads to long-term symptoms, he says, independent of whether they spark a neurodegenerative disease.

"We still have to respect and address [concussions], even more than we have in the past."
Pushing the science ahead
Dr. Julian Bailes isn't a household name. Not like, say, actor Alec Baldwin. But the two are linked on this issue - Baldwin played Bailes in the movie Concussion. The real Bailes chairs the department of neurosurgery at Northshore University Health System in Chicago; he wasn't involved with Goldstein's study, but followed the work and calls it "good science."

"It's a comprehensive study," he says, "and I believe it adds a lot to our knowledge and the medical literature concerning this topic."Bailes says the work dovetails with findings he and others published in 2013.

"We've known for a few years that it's not just the known or diagnosed concussions that may increase risk for [CTE]," Bailes says. "It's probably the exposure. It's how many hits to the head that have occurred and at what velocity and what extent."

He notes the first case of CTE for an NFL player, discovered by his colleague Dr. Bennet Omalu, was the late center Mike Webster who "played football 27 years and never had a known or diagnosed concussion."

Still, Bailes thinks the study published Thursday adds to the evolving narrative about head impact and the long-term consequences. "It certainly adds to our science and our understanding," Bailes says. "And hopefully it adds to greater protection, greater safety and the ability for all ages to enjoy contact sports."

The NFL Players Association agrees, saying in a statement:

"We stood firm against an [expanded] 18-game schedule and insisted on changes to the work rules in 2011 to limit contact of all types to protect players, and this study reinforces we made the right decision. We have been in close touch with the researchers at Boston University, who are also members of our Mackey-White Health and Safety committee, and we will review this study carefully to consider future changes to improve the health and safety of our players."

Delay start of tackle football for kids?
Goldstein and Nowinski aren't so sure young kids should be playing contact sports.

"The longer you play, and the earlier you start playing, you'll suffer more head hits [and put yourself at] greater the risk for CTE," Goldstein says. "That's what all the evidence [in the study] was suggesting."

He and Nowinski believe student athletes shouldn't play tackle football until high school.

But Bailes disagrees.

For the past seven years he's served as the volunteer chairman of the medical advisory committee for Pop Warner, one of the oldest and largest youth football organizations in the U.S.

Bailes doesn't believe the study offers evidence that early exposure to head hits makes a football player more likely to develop CTE. Six years ago, he notes, Pop Warner became the first football organization at any level to legislate against having head contact drills in practice. Since that time, from the NFL on down, Bailes says, there's been a marked reduction in styles of practice or techniques that lead to gratuitous head contact. And new rules at all levels have helped eliminate egregious open field head hits or head targeting, he says.

Urging kids to play flag-football until high school wouldn't actually provide the solution people seek, Bailes says. High school is when the real risk to student athletes begins.

"That's where the players become man-sized and run fast and have high velocity collisions and hundreds of them a year," Bailes says. As to the question of where to draw the line in terms of what age kids should start playing tackle football - "this study doesn't answer that," Bailes says. "There's been no answer to that question."

It's an individual choice, he believes - parents and kids need to consider the risks and benefits.

Bailes thinks playing football before the age of 14 or 15 can have many benefits.

And, he notes, everything is relative.

"There are about 10 people who drown every day in the U.S.," he says, citing CDC statistics, "and we're not calling to outlaw swimming."
Brain injuries that transcend football - and sports
The debate over when, even if kids should play tackle football will continue as the science of head injury evolves.

Both Bailes and Goldstein are a big part of that evolution. Right now CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but both scientists are working, independently of each other, on a test intended to detect CTE in living brains. Such a test would help determine how widespread the disease is and, beyond that, how to develop treatment.

In the meantime, Goldstein hopes his study finds applications not just in football, but in other sports, like soccer and lacrosse, where contact and collisions include hits to the head.

And beyond sports, Goldstein says, hits to the head affect the most vulnerable segments of society. He has a long list.

"Intimate partners who are having repetitive head injuries," he notes," domestic violence victims, homeless, children at risk, people in our prison systems. [With] all of these people, we need to take the focus off concussion and find out if they have injured brains."

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Repeated Head Hits, Not Concussions, May Be Behind A Type Of Chronic Brain Damage

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We live in an age of heightened awareness about concussions. From battlefields around the world to football fields in the U.S., we've heard about the dangers of when the brain rattles around inside the skull, and the possible link between concussion and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

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In order to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, Communist guerrilla troops known as Viet Cong (VC) dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, including an extensive network running underneath the Cu Chi district northwest of Saigon. Soldiers used these underground routes to house troops, transport communications and supplies, lay booby traps and mount surprise attacks, after which they could disappear underground to safety. To combat these guerrilla tactics, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces trained soldiers known as "tunnel rats" to navigate the tunnels in order to detect booby traps and enemy troop presence. Now part of a Vietnam War memorial park in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the Cu Chi tunnels have become a popular tourist attraction.

Digging the Cu Chi Tunnels

Communist forces began digging a network of tunnels under the jungle terrain of South Vietnam in the late 1940s, during their war of independence from French colonial authority. Tunnels were often dug by hand, only a short distance at a time. As the United States increasingly escalated its military presence in Vietnam in support of a non-Communist regime in South Vietnam beginning in the early 1960s, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops (as Communist supporters in South Vietnam were known) gradually expanded the tunnels. At its peak during the Vietnam War, the network of tunnels in the Cu Chi district linked VC support bases over a distance of some 250 kilometers, from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.

Did you know? "Tunnel rats," as American soldiers who worked in the Cu Chi tunnels during the Vietnam War were known, used the evocative term "black echo" to describe the experience of being in the tunnels.

As the United States relied heavily on aerial bombing, North Vietnamese and VC troops went underground in order to survive and continue their guerrilla tactics against the much better-supplied enemy. In heavily bombed areas, people spent much of their life underground, and the Cu Chi tunnels grew to house entire underground villages, in effect, with living quarters, kitchens, ordnance factories, hospitals and bomb shelters. In some areas there were even large theaters and music halls to provide diversion for the troops (many of them peasants) and their supporters.

War in the Cu Chi Tunnels

In addition to providing underground shelter, the Cu Chi tunnels served a key role during combat operations, including as a base for Communist attacks against nearby Saigon. VC soldiers lurking in the tunnels set numerous booby traps for U.S. and South Vietnamese infantrymen, planting trip wires that would set off grenades or overturn boxes of scorpions or poisonous snakes onto the heads of enemy troops. To combat these guerrilla tactics, U.S. forces would eventually train some soldiers to function as so-called "tunnel rats." These soldiers (usually of small stature) would spend hours navigating the cramped, dark tunnels to detect booby traps and scout for enemy troops.

In January 1966, some 8,000 U.S. and Australian troops attempted to sweep the Cu Chi district in a large-scale program of attacks dubbed Operation Crimp. After B-52 bombers dropped a large amount of explosives onto the jungle region, the troops searched the area for enemy activity but were largely unsuccessful, as most Communist forces had disappeared into the network of underground tunnels. A year later, around 30,000 American troops launched Operation Cedar Falls, attacking the Communist stronghold of Binh Duong province north of Saigon near the Cambodian border (an area known as the Iron Triangle) after hearing reports of a network of enemy tunnels there. After bombing attacks and the defoliation of rice fields and surrounding jungle areas with powerful herbicides, U.S. tanks and bulldozers moved in to sweep the tunnels, driving out several thousand residents, many of them civilian refugees. North Vietnamese and VC troops slipped back within months of the sweep, and in early 1968 they would use the tunnels as a stronghold in their assault against Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

Tourism in the Cu Chi Tunnels

In all, at least 45,000 Vietnamese men and women are said to have died defending the Cu Chi tunnels over the course of the Vietnam War. In the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese government preserved the Cu Chi tunnels and included them in a network of war memorial parks around the country.

Visitors to Vietnam can now crawl through some of the safer areas of the tunnels, view command centers and booby traps, fire an AK-47 rifle on a firing range and even eat a meal featuring typical foods that soldiers living in the tunnels would have eaten.

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In order to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, Communist guerrilla troops known as Viet Cong (VC) dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, including an extensive network running underneath the Cu Chi district northwest of Saigon.

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In the early 1970s, with a countercultural revolution in full swing, an unlikely figure became the No. 1 enemy of the state - Timothy Leary, the so called "High Priest of LSD." Leary was a former Harvard psychologist who left the ivory tower behind to spread the gospel of psychedelics. After breaking out of a California prison, he went on the run, sparking a madcap manhunt for a bumbling fugitive.

Steven L. Davis and Bill Minutaglio's new book asks whether Leary really was "the most dangerous man in America," as President Richard Nixon claimed. The story follows Leary as he hops from country to country, trying to stay one step ahead of the Nixon administration.

"He's kind of, you know, a Mr. Magoo on acid, if you will," Minutaglio says. "He's just tripping his way through life, and circumstances happen. He opens one door and then plummets nine stories but somehow or other lands on a trampoline and goes to another floor."

Interview Highlights
On Leary's escape from his 10-year prison sentence for possession of two marijuana cigarettes
He's a 50-year-old, middle-aged guy, not in the greatest shape in the world, and he manages to escape from a pretty strong security prison in California by dangling over a wire - a telephone wire - and pulling himself out of the prison that many others tried to escape from. He gets picked up by underground activists; he puts on a disguise that allows him to escape the country, including using fake passports; and then embeds himself in the most unlikely way with extremely scary, dangerous, tending-toward-violence, members of the Black Panther Party who are living in exile in Algeria, of all places. ... He escapes to Europe and then suddenly turns into this other sort of wild, living-above-the-cloud-line, European aristocrat experience, where he's hanging out with Andy Warhol, royalty. ... Allen Ginsberg shows up for a split second. His life was - you know, in our acknowledgements in the book, the first line says, "We'd like to thank Timothy Leary for leading a very interesting life."
On why Nixon viewed Leary as the "most dangerous man in America"
You know, a lot of people had called Nixon that, so maybe he was doing some diversionary politics there. Nixon needed a poster child - someone to vilify in his burgeoning war on drugs. But it really was a matter of misdirection. The war in Vietnam was still raging, and there was a lot of violence and aggressive activism on the streets of the country. And we stumbled across, in doing some research, a tape where Nixon at the White House with many of his infamous colleagues - a lot of the Watergate-era folks - had gathered around and said, "You know what? To salvage your approval ratings, to misdirect attention away from this flagging war in Vietnam, a stagnant economy, your swooning poll numbers, we need to find a villain, a guy in a black hat, and why not choose Timothy Leary? He's sort of the godfather of the countercultural revolution. And we can make him public enemy No. 1."

The other thing that was working in the background was that Nixon really was convinced that there was something going on out there - there was a disturbance in The Shire, to steal a line from The Lord Of The Rings. I guess that makes him Sauron. But he was looking out from the tower and he saw revolution in the streets. Things were unhinged; the social fabric was unraveling. And I think he wanted to find, again, you know, somebody symbolically whom he could kind of pin all of this on and essentially identify him as not only a drug kingpin but the leader of, sort of, the domestic terrorist movement.
On John Lennon writing "Come Together" for Leary's campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan
Leary, almost as a joke, had run for the governor's office in California. And that was an early warning, kind of missile system attack in some ways, against Nixon and Reagan. They were going, "What is happening?" People were getting interested and beginning to think about voting for him. And yeah, his campaign slogan was, you know, "Why can't we come together? Why don't we rally together?" And he was friends with John Lennon, and John Lennon said, "Well, let me help you out with a campaign song. Let me sketch out something called 'Come Together.' " You know, it was really based on Timothy Leary's life and campaign.
On how much of this story Leary himself knew by the time he died in 1996
I met him in the early 1980s when we had a very robust discussion in a dark bar in Houston that lasted for several hours, as far as I could remember. And he told me then that he just couldn't figure out really what had happened to him, but he was one of these people that I think just enjoyed uncertainty, if that makes sense. He really embraced the next adventure, and maybe that's part of, not to get too deep into my theories on the use of LSD, but I think that's why he advocated its use and proselytized about it.

He considered it a sacrament at the end of the day; really, you know, a tool for spiritual discovery. And I think it just led to other portals, other doors, and I know that's beginning to sound like I'm proselytizing as well. But he didn't know what had happened to him, but I think he sort of expected it because he embraced uncertainty and assumed that whatever came next would be really unusual.

So the book ends in some way with a nod to the fact that Leary had wanted to have his ashes blasted into outer space, which in fact did happen. I like the fact that when they were blasted into outer space, his ashes were commingled with the ashes of Gene Roddenberry, the inventor of Star Trek. And then when the capsule that was holding his ashes disintegrated, Timothy Leary's ashes filtered all over the planet. And I think that was his last kind of cosmic joke and also, in a way, his sense of continuing adventure - you know, little pieces of him were far-flung and cast to the wind. I don't know that he had the full grasp and understanding that Richard Nixon had essentially put a poster of Timothy Leary up on the wall of the Oval Office and was tracking him like a hellhound around the world. I think even he would have been mildly surprised at the depth and the cunning to which Nixon, you know, applied that effort.
Noah Caldwell and Jolie Myers produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Sydnee Monday and Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.

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Nixon's Manhunt For The High Priest Of LSD In 'The Most Dangerous Man In America'

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In the early 1970s, with a countercultural revolution in full swing, an unlikely figure became the No. 1 enemy of the state - Timothy Leary, the so called "High Priest of LSD." Leary was a former Harvard psychologist who left the ivory tower behind to spread the gospel of psychedelics.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Floating Islands of Trash

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Floating Islands of Trash

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in the ocean, seas, and other large bodies of water.

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Have you ever heard of the tuatara? It's a reptile that decapitates birds with its saw-like jaws, lives to about 100 years old, and can remain active in near-freezing temperatures.

It's also the sole survivor of a lineage as old as the first dinosaurs.

May 2017 marks 150 years since the tuatara was first recognised not to be a lizard.

Most tuatara exist on windswept offshore New Zealand islands, where they spend their days in burrows or basking lazily in the sun.

In the evening they are more active, and use their large eyes to spot a variety of prey such as beetles, spiders and snails. They also occasionally eat lizards, frogs, baby tuatara and birds - the headless bodies of birds are not infrequently reported from their island homes.

Although capable of bursts of speed, tuatara have a reputation for slowness. They grow slowly, they reproduce slowly and they live for a long time.

Interestingly, they are most active at cool temperatures (5-18℃) that would put many other reptiles out of action. New Zealand lizards have similar traits, suggesting that these characteristics are relatively recent adaptations to local conditions.

The tuatara is often referred to as having a third eye because of a light-sensitive organ on the top of its head, similar to the ones found in many lizards.

Ancient isolation

Ancestors of the tuatara have probably been on land associated with New Zealand since it separated from the rest of the Gondwana supercontinent about 80 million years ago. During that time, they have had to cope with big changes in the region's shape and size (New Zealand may have been mostly submerged 23 million years ago) and, until recently, a cooling climate.

Recent fossils from the past few thousand years show that tuatara were widespread across the mainland until humans arrived (with Pacific rats) about 750 years ago.

Tuatara are now threatened by climate change. This is because the sex of a tuatara is determined by the temperature that their eggs experience - rising temperatures will skew populations towards males.

Mainland reintroductions to cooler latitudes will hopefully reduce this problem. Captive breeding programs are also showing signs of success.

A special place in biodiversity

The initial claim that the tuatara is not a lizard was based on anatomical differences such as the presence of a second row of upper teeth, which is not seen in any lizard.

Subsequent genetic and fossil discoveries have confirmed that the tuatara has a separate heritage.

We now know that the tuatara is the only living member of Rhynchocephalia, a reptile group that was diverse and widespread between 240 million and 60 million years ago. Its fossil relatives included small carnivores with scissor-like jaws, large chunky herbivores, and even aquatic forms with crushing tooth plates.

The tuatara is often referred to as a " living fossil" or even a "living dinosaur". Although these labels are not helpful scientifically, they reflect a widespread appreciation that the tuatara has a special place in the animal kingdom.

The animal group known as " amniote vertebrates" includes more than 30,000 species divided between six major radiations: mammals ( 5,416 species), turtles ( 341), crocodylians ( 25), birds ( at least 15,845), lizards and snakes ( 10,078), and ( tuatara).

Marc E H Jones

As the only living member of Rhychocephalia, and only living cousin to Squamata (lizards and snakes), the tuatara has an important role to play in understanding the evolution of all animals with backbones.

Recent contributions to science

Despite several hundred research articles on the tuatara, we are still learning new things about this species all the time.

The origin of male genitals

Recent examination of tuatara embryos suggests that although adult male tuatara lack external genitalia (that is, they have no external penis), their ancestors did possess a penis of some kind.

This evidence in turn supports a hypothesis that external genitalia originated just once within amniotes (mammals, birds, crocodiles, lizards, tuatara) but has since undergone dramatic modification and was even lost in some groups of birds as well as an ancestor of the tuatara.

Biomechanics of biting

The frame-like skull of the tuatara has also become an important subject for biomechanics.

Sophisticated computer models have been used to predict muscle activity, bite force, sensory feedback from the jaw joints and stress distribution in the bones during biting.

These models have also shown that the shearing action of the lower jaw involves tooth on tooth contact and that the soft-tissue connections between bones are important for spreading stress around the skull more evenly.

How kneecaps developed

Recently, X-ray micro CT scans of several tuatara specimens helped established which sesamoid bones - structures at joints such as the knee cap - are likely to be relatively ancient and which are relatively new.

Culture, myths and legends

The tuatara is a national icon in New Zealand, where it has appeared on the five cent coin and several postage stamps.

Further afield, it has also given its name to a brewery, musical group, a DC super hero, a backpackers accommodation, a tour company, a scientific journal, a company selling mobile phone covers, and, with no hint of irony, a V8 sports car that can reach a top speed of 444km per hour.

Tuatara are highly important to māori culture. The word "tuatara" is itself māori, meaning "peaks on back" (referring to the crest along its neck and back). Tuatara are regarded as "taonga" (treasure), viewed as guardians of knowledge, and sometimes associated with bad omens.

A curious urban legend associated with the tuatara is that of the cenaprugwirion, a "curious 1-ft-long lizard-like reptile supposedly inhabiting burrows in and around Abersoch in North Wales".

Before tuatara were protected in 1895, they were commonly imported to Europe as pets and curios. Some have suggested these animals might represent escaped tuatara from that time.

Tuatara are frequently in the news. During the 1980s, wild population of tuatara were targeted by poachers who were suspected to be selling them in exchange for drugs.

Henry the tuatara acquired celebrity status when he became a dad at 111 and met Prince Harry several years later.

Follow the hashtag #150NotALizard to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of tuatara appreciation.
Places to see tuatara include Chester Zoo (UK), Dallas Zoo (USA), Aquarium Berlin (Germany), Taronga Zoo (Australia) and Southland Museum Invercargill (New Zealand).

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Not a lizard nor a dinosaur, tuatara is the sole survivor of a once-widespread reptile group

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Have you ever heard of the tuatara? It's a reptile that decapitates birds with its saw-like jaws, lives to about 100 years old, and can remain active in near-freezing temperatures. It's also the sole survivor of a lineage as old as the first dinosaurs.

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At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't listening to the Führer now.

They wanted one thing - to be rescued. Only very few, 1,252 to be precise, made it off the steamer alive, of the well over 10,000 - mostly women and children, but also navy sailors. The ship had been hit by three Soviet torpedoes within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.

The solace offered by the Wilhelm Gustloff was enormous for the passengers who boarded the ship at Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had wanted to embark on ship in the port near Gdansk, in what is today Poland. The Red Army was on their heels and their thoughts were of Nemmersdorf. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and there were already rumors circulating of the draconic revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.

Red Army factions had already reached German territory by late 1944

Nazi cruise liner turned rescue ship

At 208 meters (680 feet), the Gustloff wasn't the largest ship used to transport wounded soldiers and civilians. But it was by far the most well known. It was the Nazis' luxury liner, christened by none other than Hitler in 1937. Its name came from a killed Nazi officer, and it was initially reserved for high-ranking National Socialists to take vacations in the Mediterranean or along the western Norwegian coastline. By the end of the war, however, the ship had taken on an entirely different role - for its last journey.

The civilian escape via the Baltic Sea belongs to one the most impressive chapters in German WWII military history. Historians have estimated that around 2.5 million people were rescued by ship out of the German eastern zones. A comprehensive study has been published about the operation titled "Rescue Mission Baltic Sea 1944/1945: One of Humanity's Great Deeds." One of the main German officers credited with the success of the operation is Admiral Karl Dönitz, who would succeed Hitler as chancellor following the Führer's suicide in a Berlin bunker at the close of the war.

The tragic end of the Gustloff, just one of dozens of ships used in the Baltic rescue operation, wasn't inevitable, experts have contended, singling out three fatal decisions as responsible for the disaster. Firstly, there was no convoy to offer protection, and since the ship carrying some 1,000 soldiers was intended to reach Kiel as quickly as possible, there was also no flank protection.

A small torpedo boat was all the protection the ship was given. Sea mines were feared along the Baltic coast, so the planned route was to traverse the open sea. Finally, since the Gustloff hadn't been used in over four years, Captain Wilhelm Peterson only dared a speed of 12 knots, instead of the possible 15.

These three factors contributed to what would become a death sentence for most of the ship's passengers. If the ship were escorted by a convoy, been provided flank protection, and traveled at a faster speed, experts have said the Soviet submarine S-13 would never have been able to hit the Wilhelm Gustloff with its torpedoes.

A sitting duck

Seven decades on, some details of the disaster still remain a mystery, however. Was sabotage to blame when a suspicious radio message warning of sea mines reached the command bridge, just before the first torpedo hit? In order to avoid a collision amid heavy snowfall, Captain Peterson had turned on the ship's position lights: 90 minutes with bright lighting, but no minesweepers. The Gustloff was a sitting duck.

There is much to support the theory that German POWs - "turned by the Soviets" and positioned behind enemy lines via parachutes - were behind the false reports. For Heinz Schön, that is a horrible thought. He was 18 years old at the time, onboard the Gustloff as an aspiring naval pay clerk. Although he was one of the very few survivors, he is reticent to call the sinking of the Gustloff a war crime. It was ultimately carrying soldiers, sailing under enemy colors and armed. The firing of the torpedoes in no way contravened martial law.

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70 years on, little known about the Wilhelm Gustloff sinking | DW | 30.01.2015

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At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't listening to the Führer now.

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Babies were snatched off the streets by strangers in passing cars. Or taken from day-care centers or church basements where they played. Or stolen from hospitals, right after birth, passed from doctor to nurse to a uniformed "social worker" - before vanishing in an instant.

Some were dropped into dismal orphanages; others were sent to a new family, their identities wiped, no questions asked. Most would never see their birth parents again.

While it sounds like something out of Dickens or the Brothers Grimm, this happened in the United States in the 20th century. Thousands of times.

She was the mastermind behind a black market for white babies.

It was the dark handiwork of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, a supposedly charitable organization, led by a woman named Georgia Tann.

Tann was a pied piper without scruple; she was the mastermind behind a black market for white babies (especially blond, blue-eyed ones) that terrorized poor Southern families for almost three decades. It's estimated that over 5,000 children were stolen by Tann and the society between 1924 and 1950 and that some 500 died at the society's hands as a result of poor care, disease and, it is suspected, abuse.

Particularly vulnerable were newborns. In 1945 alone, as many as 50 children perished in a dysentery outbreak. The precise figure, like so many terrible details about the society, is not known.

Tann had various means of procuring babies and children for her wealthy customers. She bribed nurses and doctors in birthing wards, who would then tell new parents that their babies had been stillborn.

Her organization was quick to snatch babies born in prisons and mental wards. Older children were grabbed off the street by Tann's agents and were told their parents had died. To cover their tracks, the society falsified adoption records and destroyed any trace of these children's origins.

Lisa Wingate brings these shocking crimes and their long-term emotional impact to light in her affecting new novel, " Before We Were Yours " (Ballantine Books), out now. The book tells the story of two families - the wealthy, connected Staffords and the dirt-poor "river gypsy" Fosses.

Though her tale is fictional, it stems from the true, terrible events of the Tennessee tragedy. Tann and her associates would tear apart one family to benefit another, creating wounds not easily healed. The loss would linger, like a phantom limb, for generations.

Tann would tell adoptive parents that the children were "blank slates," Wingate tells The Post. "What really resonated with me is that they're not. Foster kids, adopted kids, they're not blank slates. They're people. And they have genetic tendencies and . . . talents and abilities that are all their own."

Tann's background was a privileged one. She was born in 1891 in Hickory, Miss., where her father was a district court judge. One of Judge Tann's responsibilities was dealing with homeless children who were wards of the state. Georgia's older brother, Rob Roy Tann, may have been one of these children, adopted by the Tann family.

Tann had designs on a career in the law, but her father deemed that profession too "masculine" for his only daughter. Forced to study music, she taught for a time before finding a job in the nascent field of social work in 1916.

Working as a field agent for the Mississippi Children's Home-Finding Society in Jackson, she may have gotten a taste for the power that she would later wield over so many families. She began placing poor children in adoptive homes, without the consent of both birth parents.

Child welfare laws weren't as strict as they are today, allowing Tann to wheel and deal in her role. But Tann was not careful with her work, nor with covering up her trail, and at least one birth parent sued for return of her children.

It seemed Mississippi was not the right market for a baby-resale business. Judge Tann had connections in Memphis, and after a brief foray in Texas, his daughter moved there to work for the Tennessee Children's Home Society in 1924.

Soon after, she launched her adoption racket. To drum up business, Tann placed advertisements aimed at potential adoptive parents in newspapers.

One featured a photo of smiling, towheaded infants with the caption, "Want a Real, Live Christmas Present?" As if children were dolls or puppies.

Foster kids, adopted kids, they're not blank slates. They're people. And they have genetic tendencies and . . . talents and abilities that are all their own.

Tann presented herself as a kindly matron and pioneer of a new kind of social work - all the while destroying lives and families. Tann was abetted by the famously corrupt political machine in Memphis, headed by E.H. "Boss" Crump.

Crump, also a transplanted Mississippian, was the sometime mayor and leader of politics in the city for much of the first half of the 20th century.

He developed a cozy patronage relationship with Tann - she paid him off and brought the fame of her society to Memphis. He in turn protected her from prying investigations, while city police ignored the complaints of families who'd lost children to Tann and sometimes even helped Tann seize kids.

Tann's most useful co-conspirator was Camille Kelley, a juvenile court judge in the city. Like Tann, Kelley pretended to act in the best interests of children. With the stroke of a pen, Kelley would remove parental rights and transfer them to Tann, clearing a path for adoption.

Tann was essentially waging class war. She held to the belief that there were two kinds of people: the poor, whom she viewed as incompetent parents, and the wealthy. She fattened her own coffers in the process.

The big money came from interstate adoptions, especially to New York and LA, for which the agency would charge as much as $5,000. Most of that fee was pocketed by Tann, who was given to traveling in chauffeured Packards.

Among the Tennessee Children's Home Society's clientele was that paragon of maternal love Joan Crawford, who adopted her twin daughters, Cathy and Cynthia, through the organization in 1947. Mid-century Hollywood power couple June Allyson and Dick Powell used the agency to adopt their daughter, Pamela. Lana Turner, Pearl S. Buck and New York Gov. Herbert Lehman were also clients. And future pro wrestler Ric Flair was among Tann's abductees.

As word of Tann's tactics started to spread, even some adoptive parents started to object. But, in many cases, Tann had these people over a barrel - they were complicit in her operation and feared losing their children. Whispers and accusations went nowhere.

For years, she was too prominent, too well connected, for anything to stick.

In the mid-1940s, Tann was diagnosed with uterine cancer and could sense that her adoption racket was beginning to unravel. Boss Crump's political influence was starting to wane.

Gordon Browning, a Crump enemy, was elected governor in 1948. When rumors of Tann's baby racket reached his ears, he saw a way to humiliate his political rival. In the final months of Tann's life, Browning appointed a special investigator to look into her practices. Such was Tann's remaining influence that the state's case against her was announced only days before her death, in September 1950.

Even then, the brunt of the accusations against Tann had to do with her pocketing money from a state-funded enterprise, rather than kidnapping.

Georgia Tann was 59 years old when she died at home of cancer. She never had to face the music for her terrible crimes. She left no money to children's causes, nor to the Tennessee Children's Home Society. The home was closed two months later.

Word of Tann's shocking crimes became national news. "Dead Director Blamed in Baby Black Market," reported the Chicago Tribune. But though Tann had placed children in every state, few attempts were made at the time to connect birth parents with their children.

A version of the Tann story was told in the 1993 made-for-TV movie "Stolen Babies" (Mary Tyler Moore stars as the infamous baby-dealer), and a more thorough account of her crimes can be found in the non-fiction book " The Baby Thief " by journalist Barbara Bisantz Raymond.

Shortly after Tann's death, her co-conspirator Kelley announced her retirement from her judgeship. Protected by the Crump machine, she, too, avoided prosecution and died in 1955 from a stroke.

It's estimated that over 5,000 children were stolen by Tann.

Boss Crump preceded Kelley in death by a year. Memphis drivers honor the former mayor by taking Crump Boulevard across town from Route 55 to Route 78.

Today, the legacy of Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children's Home Society is a painful and complicated one.

Ironically, an accidental benefit of her work was popularizing adoption for parents unable to conceive. Before Tann, adoption in the United States was uncommon, but after she became known, the stigma over the practice was largely lifted.

At the same time, a damaging legal procedure was put in place: Tann championed the practice of closed, secretive adoptions. Adoption records were sealed, and adopted children were barred from learning the identities of their birth parents.

This legislation is still in place in many states. Tellingly, Tennessee was the first state to lift these laws, in 1999.

Meanwhile, the emotional cost of Tann's decades-long scheme is incalculable. Thousands of families were torn apart; parents never saw their children again and siblings were permanently separated. Lisa Wingate's novel tells of one such family.

"If you'd invented that story, it would seem so far-fetched that you would think, 'That could never happen. Not in this country,'" Wingate says. "And yet, it did, and it did for a long time."

For Wingate, this story "still matters today, because there are still so many kids that need that one advocate, that one place to be, that one person who will step in." She continues, "We do have to still be watching for things that are not aboveboard or are corrupt, where children are being used for profits of one kind or another. That's on all of us, as a public."

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This woman stole children from the poor to give to the rich

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Babies were snatched off the streets by strangers in passing cars. Or taken from day-care centers or church basements where they played. Or stolen from hospitals, right after birth, passed from doctor to nurse to a uniformed "social worker" - before vanishing in an instant.

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Multitasking Costs Efficiency, Raises Risks

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Multitasking Costs Efficiency, Raises Risks

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Subtle "switching" costs cut efficiency, raise risk.

What the research shows

Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity. Although that shouldn't surprise anyone who has talked on the phone while checking E-mail or talked on a cell phone while driving, the extent of the problem might come as a shock. Psychologists who study what happens to cognition (mental processes) when people try to perform more than one task at a time have found that the mind and brain were not designed for heavy-duty multitasking. Psychologists tend to liken the job to choreography or air-traffic control, noting that in these operations, as in others, mental overload can result in catastrophe.

Multitasking can take place when someone tries to perform two tasks simultaneously, switch . from one task to another, or perform two or more tasks in rapid succession. To determine the costs of this kind of mental "juggling," psychologists conduct task-switching experiments. By comparing how long it takes for people to get everything done, the psychologists can measure the cost in time for switching tasks. They also assess how different aspects of the tasks, such as complexity or familiarity, affect any extra time cost of switching.

In the mid-1990s, Robert Rogers, PhD, and Stephen Monsell, D.Phil, found that even when people had to switch completely predictably between two tasks every two or four trials, they were still slower on task-switch than on task-repeat trials. Moreover, increasing the time available between trials for preparation reduced but did not eliminate the cost of switching. There thus appear to be two parts to the switch cost -- one attributable to the time taken to adjust the mental control settings (which can be done in advance it there is time), and another part due to competition due to carry-over of the control settings from the previous trial (apparently immune to preparation).

Surprisingly, it can be harder to switch to the more habitual of two tasks afforded by a stimulus. For example, Renata Meuter, PhD, and Alan Allport, PhD, reported in 1999 that if people had to name digits in their first or second language, depending on the color of the background, as one might expect they named digits in their second language slower than in their first when the language repeated. But they were slower in their first language when the language changed.

In experiments published in 2001, Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, conducted four experiments in which young adults switched between different tasks, such as solving math problems or classifying geometric objects. For all tasks, the participants lost time when they had to switch from one task to another. As tasks got more complex, participants lost more time. As a result, people took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs were also greater when the participants switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got up to speed faster when they switched to tasks they knew better.

In a 2003 paper, Nick Yeung, Ph.D, and Monsell quantitatively modeled the complex and sometimes surprising experimental interactions between relative task dominance and task switching. The results revealed just some of the complexities involved in understanding the cognitive load imposed by real-life multi-tasking, when in addition to reconfiguring control settings for a new task, there is often the need to remember where you got to in the task to which you are returning and to decide which task to change to, when.

What the research means

According to Meyer, Evans and Rubinstein, converging evidence suggests that the human "executive control" processes have two distinct, complementary stages. They call one stage "goal shifting" ("I want to do this now instead of that") and the other stage "rule activation" ("I'm turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this"). Both of these stages help people to, without awareness, switch between tasks. That's helpful. Problems arise only when switching costs conflict with environmental demands for productivity and safety.

Although switch costs may be relatively small, sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch, they can add up to large amounts when people switch repeatedly back and forth between tasks. Thus, multitasking may seem efficient on the surface but may actually take more time in the end and involve more error. Meyer has said that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time.

How we use the research

Understanding the hidden costs of multitasking may help people to choose strategies that boost their efficiency - above all, by avoiding multitasking, especially with complex tasks. (Throwing in a load of laundry while talking to a friend will probably work out all right.) For example, losing just a half second of time to task switching can make a life-or-death difference for a driver on a cell phone traveling at 30 MPH. During the time the driver is not totally focused on driving the car, it can travel far enough to crash into an obstacle that might otherwise have been avoided.

Meyer and his colleagues hope that understanding switching costs and the light they shed on "executive control" may help to improve the design and engineering of equipment and human-computer interfaces for vehicle and aircraft operation, air traffic control, and many other activities using sophisticated technologies. Insights into how the brain "multitasks" lend themselves to a range of settings from the clinic, helping to diagnose and help brain-injured patients, to the halls of Congress, informing government and industrial regulations and standards.

This research is also taken into account by states and localities considering legislation to restrict drivers' use of cell phones.

Sources & further reading

Gopher, D., Armony, L. & Greenspan, Y. (2000). Switching tasks and attention policies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 308-229.

Mayr, U. & Kliegl, R. (2000). Task-set switching and long-term memory retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1124-1140.

Meuter, R. F. I. & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(1), 25-40.

Meyer, D. E. & Kieras, D. E. (1997a). A computational theory of executive cognitive processes and multiple-task performance: Part 1. Basic mechanisms. Psychological Review, 104, 3-65.

Meyer, D. E. & Kieras, D. E. (1997b). A computational theory of executive cognitive processes and multiple-task performance: Part 2. Accounts of psychological refractory-period phenomena. Psychological Review, 104, 749-791.

Monsell, S., Azuma, R., Eimer, M., Le Pelley, M., & Strafford, S. (1998, July). Does a prepared task switch require an extra (control) process between stimulus onset and response selection? Poster presented at the 18th International Symposium on Attention and Performance, Windsor Great Park, United Kingdom.

Monsell, S., Yeung, N., & Azuma, R. (2000). Reconfiguration of task-set: Is it easier to switch to the weaker task? Psychological Research, 63, 250-264.

Monsell, S. & Driver, J., Eds. (2000). Control of cognitive processes: Attention and Performance XVIII. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Rogers, R. & Monsell, S. (1995). The costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 207-231.

Rubinstein, J., Evans, J. & Meyer, D. E. (1994). Task switching in patients with prefrontal cortex damage. Poster presented at the meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, March, 1994. Abstract published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1994, Vol. 6.

Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E. & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 763-797.

Yeung, N. & Monsell, S. (2003). Switching between tasks of unequal familiarity: The role of stimulus-attribute and response-set selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 29(2): 455-469.

American Psychological Association, March 20, 2006

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Psychologists who study cognition when people try to perform more than one task at a time have found that the mind and brain were not designed for heavy-duty multitasking.

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He carried a sword into battle in WWII

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Daily

Jack Churchill: World War II Warrior

As befitted his love of things Scottish, Jack Churchill carried the basket-hilted claymore (technically a claybeg, the true claymore being an enormous two-handed sword). Later on, asked by a general who awarded him a decoration why he carried a sword in action, Churchill is said to have answered: "In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."

The war-diary of 4th Infantry Brigade, to which Churchill's battalion belonged, commented on this extraordinary figure. "One of the most reassuring sights of the embarkation [from Dunkirk] was the sight of Captain Churchill passing down the beach with his bows and arrows. His high example and his great work ... were a great help to the 4th Infantry Brigade."

During the retreat, Churchill took command of his company when his company commander was wounded, and it was during this fighting that he spitted his hapless German soldier with, as the chronicles of Henry V's wars would put it, "a cloth-yard shaft." One of his brother officers, an old friend, saw him about that time chugging across the Flanders plain on a small motorcycle, his bow tied to the frame, arrows sticking out of one of the panniers on the back, a German officer's cap hanging on the headlight. "Ah!" said Churchill, spotting his friend, "Hullo Clark! Got anything to drink?"

Once Churchill had dismounted, his friend noticed dried blood smeared across one ear and asked Churchill about the injury. German machine gun, said Churchill casually. His men had shouted at him to run but, he said, he was simply too tired. He won his first Military Cross during the retreat to the Channel, when he hitched six trucks together to salvage a disabled British tank; although in the end he could not save the tank, he did rescue a wounded British officer.

His close call did not seem to impress Churchill in the least. Then and afterward, he seemed to be one of those extraordinary men who thrive on danger and fear it not at all. Some fellow soldiers are said to have called him "Mad Jack," and the nickname was not altogether undeserved.

Becoming a Commando

Churchill made it to Dunkirk, allegedly by bicycle, his bow and arrows hanging from the frame. From that terrible beach he was lifted back to England-so was his Manchester friend-courtesy of the gallantry of the Royal Navy and a horde of civilian boats and ships, and it was there he heard of a new organization being formed. It sounded like precisely the sort of outfit Churchill was cut out for. Requests for volunteers for this new duty were somewhat vague, but they promised aggressive service at least, and that was good enough for Churchill. Whatever a commando was, he would be one.

His training in Scotland produced an unexpected dividend for Churchill. There he met Rosamund Denny, the daughter of a Scottish ship building baronet. They were married in Dumbarton in the spring of 1941, a happy marriage that would produce two children and last until Churchill's death 55 years later.

Churchill took to Commando operations like a duck to water, including the icy water of Scottish lochs. He was at home on the steep hills, in the rain and the mud. He lived and breathed training, leading, driving, setting the example, praising excellence, and damning sloth and carelessness. His ad hoc lectures to his soldiers were couched in the plain language his men understood and liked, for instance: "There's nothing worse than sitting on your bum bottom doing nothing just because the enemy happens to leave you alone for a moment while he has a go at the unit on your flank. Pitch in and support your neighbor any way you can.... "

Sword and Pipes Always At-Hand

There was also a bit of a downside to Jack Churchill. On those happy occasions when the Commandos were not in the field at night, he was sometimes given to awakening everybody in the billet hotel at Largs, Scotland, shattering the night with pipe music. No piper could possibly understand why some of the world would rather sleep than listen to martial piping however expert, and he was no exception. His comrades could only grit their teeth and hope that he would soon tire or think of something else quieter to do.

The Commandos' eternal training ended on December 27, 1941, with the brilliantly successful assault on the German garrison at Vaagso, the Norwegian town on Nord Fiord. Churchill commanded two companies in the attack, charged with taking out the German shore batteries on Maaloy Island, which lay in the fiord opposite Vaagso town. In vintage Mad Jack fashion, he stood in the lead landing craft as it forged in toward the shore, his pipes screaming The March of the Cameron Men.

He then waded ashore at the head of his men, sword in hand, and charged ahead, as one account put it, "into the thick smoke, uttering warlike cries." Maaloy and its battery fell quickly. Churchill and his men killed or took prisoner the garrison, including two women who, as one account of the raid genteelly put it, "might be described as camp followers." While heavy fighting continued for a while in Vaagso itself, the landing force would not be troubled by the cannon of Maaloy. Jack Churchill's signal to the raid commander was terse: "Maaloy battery and island captured. Casualties slight. Demolitions in progress. Churchill."

Earning His Second Military Cross

The Commandos had stung the Germans badly. In time the Norwegian garrisons would be heavily reinforced with troops critically required elsewhere. The German garrison at Vaagso had ceased to exist, and the raiders took back with them some 100 prisoners and about 70 volunteers for the free Norwegian forces. The expedition had also sunk about 15,000 tons of shipping and destroyed not only docks and warehouses but the vital fish oil plants so important to German ammunition production and to dietary supplements for the German armed forces. And German troops near any coastline would not sleep quite as well as they had before Vaagso.

As the raiders prepared to leave Vaagso and Maaloy, a British demolition charge exploded so close to Churchill that it "blew him up," in the words of one account. Another story says that a demolitions man "thoughtlessly blew down a wall he happened to be leaning against." Still another version, which sounds eminently Churchillian, relates he was celebrating the raid's success with a bit of liberated Moselle wine when the charge went off and a chunk of broken bottle slashed into Churchill's forehead.

Whatever happened, Churchill had another wound-or at least a sort of wound-to show for his successful leadership at Maaloy. As he himself joked later, "I had to touch it up from time to time with Rosamund's lipstick to keep the wounded hero story going." He also had his second Military Cross.

"Commando!"

Commanding Number 2 Commando in the autumn of 1943, Jack Churchill won the Distinguished Service Order for an astonishing exploit during the Salerno landings. Ashore in command of No. 2 Commando (also present were some other Churchills-his brother Tom and Captain Randolph, son of the Prime Minister), Churchill led his men in heavy and confused fighting around the town of Marina. Their mission was to destroy German ability to place artillery fire on the western half of the Bay of Salerno. Churchill directed the final counterattack, which broke the last German attempt to destroy the Commando beachhead.

During the ferocious Salerno fighting, Number 2 Commando found itself fighting as line infantry, as did its American counterparts, the Rangers, in a role for which neither Commandos nor Rangers were designed. Casualties were heavy, but the Commandos beat back every German attack. For Churchill, the high point of the fighting was the night attack on a town called Piegoletti (sometimes Piegolelli). He organized his men into six parallel columns and, since the heavy undergrowth ruled out any chance of a silent advance, sent them charging through the darkness shouting "commando!" The yelling not only minimized the risk of Commandos shooting each other in the gloom, but also confused the German defenders, to whom this fierce shouting seemed to come from all directions in the blackness of the night. The attack carried all its objectives and bagged 136 prisoners.

"A Bit Errol Flynn-ish"

Churchill himself was far in front of his troopers. Sword in hand, accompanied only by a corporal named Ruffell, he advanced into the town itself. Undiscovered by the enemy, he and Ruffell heard German soldiers digging in all around them in the gloom. The glow of a cigarette in the darkness told them the location of a German sentry post. What followed, even Churchill later admitted, was "a bit Errol Flynn-ish."

The first German sentry post, manned by two men, was taken in silence. Jack Churchill, his sword blade gleaming in the night, appeared like a demon from the darkness, ordered "Haende hoch!" and got results. He gave one German prisoner to Ruffell, then slipped his revolver lanyard around the second sentry's neck and led him off to make the rounds of the other guards. Each post, lulled into a sense of security by the voice of their captive comrade, surrendered to this fearsome apparition with the ferocious mustache and the naked sword.

Altogether, Churchill and Corporal Ruffell collected 42 prisoners, complete with their personal weapons and a mortar they were manning in the village. Churchill and his claymore took the surrender of ten men in a bunch around the mortar. He and his NCO then marched the whole lot back into the British lines.

Mad Jack to the Adriatic

As Churchill himself described the event, it all sounded rather routine: "I always bring my prisoners back with their weapons; it weighs them down. I just took their rifle bolts out and put them in a sack, which one of the prisoners carried. [They] also carried the mortar and all the bombs they could carry and also pulled a farm cart with five wounded in it....I maintain that, as long as you tell a German loudly and clearly what to do, if you are senior to him he will cry 'Jawohl' and get on with it enthusiastically and efficiently whatever the ... situation. That's why they make such marvelous soldiers..."

Churchill's next assignment took him to the Adriatic, where British units and Tito's Yugoslav partisan forces struck at the German garrisons along the Dalmatian coast. In January 1944, Churchill, leading No. 2 Commando, about 1,000 Yugoslav partisans, and some antiaircraft and machine gun attachments became commandant of the island of Vis, the last Dalmation island not in German hands. From Vis, the campaign against the German-held Adriatic islands was carried on at sea by the Royal Air Force and by small boats of the Royal Navy. Ever ready for raids and excursions, Churchill sent some of his Commandos along with the Navy as boarding parties, to swarm over the side of any ship carrying supplies to the enemy.

Small groups of Commandos also landed by night to harass the German garrisons on other Dalmatian islands. The commander of one such party, Lieutenant B.J. Barton, discovered that the German commandant on the island of Brac was much given to mistreatment of the island population. Barton, disguised as a Yugoslav shepherd, hid his Sten gun in pieces inside a load of wood on a donkey, slipped into the German headquarters village, erased the commandant, and got away clean.

Who were the badasses of history you haven't heard of?
Check out our all-time list of
The Men & Women Who Turned the Tide of War

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"Mad Jack" Churchill-A Rare Breed of Warrior

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Daily As befitted his love of things Scottish, Jack Churchill carried the basket-hilted claymore (technically a claybeg, the true claymore being an enormous two-handed sword). Later on, asked by a general who awarded him a decoration why he carried a sword in action, Churchill is said to have answered: "In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."

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Robinson, Matthew MacKenzie "Mack" (1912-2000) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

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While at Pasadena Junior College, Mack excelled in track-and-field, especially in sprints and the long jump; he would set national junior college records in the 100m, 200m, and the long jump. The 1932 Olympics games in Los Angeles inspired Mack to train for the succeeding games.

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Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Three days after smog forced authorities in Delhi, India, to cancel a major sporting event, people in London are remembering one of the deadliest days of air pollution on record: the Great Smog of 1952.

On December 5, 1952, a zone of high atmospheric pressure parked itself over London, bringing still air and bitter cold to the British capital. A high layer of warm air worked like a lid, trapping thick yellowish black smog over the city for four days, killing at least 4,000 and perhaps as many as 12,000 people (it's difficult to measure the exact death toll from specific air pollution events, because many of the effects are long-term). The smog reduced the whole city to a hazy twilight visibility and even worked its way into people's homes.

The main ingredient in the noxious pea soup was burning coal. Four years later, Parliament passed the Clean Air Act of 1956. The law regulated the burning of coal in some areas of London and moved coal-burning power stations away from the city. Other legislation has followed since, but London remains one of the world's hardest cities to take a deep breath in. The Guardian reports that someone dies at least once an hour in London from health problems linked to breathing polluted air, like congestive heart failure and emphysema.

But the problem extends far beyond London. Most of the world's largest cities are shrouded in smog. How bad is it? In late 2015, the Chinese government temporarily closed factories and restricted driving in Beijing to clear the capital city's air in preparation for a massive military parade. Amazed residents spent a couple of days snapping photos of clear blue skies, but less than a day after the parade, dense smog settled back over the city as if it had never left.

Atmospheric scientists actually recognize an international smog season, when air pollution tends to spike around the world, and Smog Day, the anniversary of the Great Smog, unsurprisingly falls right in the midst of it. All that foul air is taking a major toll on public health. About 7 million people a year die from diseases linked to air pollution, according to the World Health Organization. That, in turn, has an economic impact in medical expenses and lost productivity.

The old cliche rings true: those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. But if we can learn from the Great Smog 65 years later, we can clear the air and turn a profit. The Lancet's Commission on Pollution and Health reports that shifting to alternative energy sources, investing in mass transit, and taking other steps to cut air pollution yields an economic return of about $30 for ever dollar spent. That makes air quality an excellent investment, especially since it also boosts your odds of living longer to enjoy it.

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Take A Deep Breath And Remember The Great Smog Of 1952

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Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Three days after smog forced authorities in Delhi, India, to cancel a major sporting event, people in London are remembering one of the deadliest days of air pollution on record: the Great Smog of 1952.

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https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/

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Why Are There So Few Women in Computer Science?

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Mother is Deported, Separated from Children and Husband

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Mother is Deported, Separated from Children and Husband

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What happens when ICE separates a mother from her children

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One family tries to build a new life apart after their mother is deported to Mexico.

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Birth rates in China rose to their highest level since 2000 last year, despite a fall in the number of women of childbearing age, say officials.

The increase follows the relaxation of China's strict one-child policy a year ago.

There were 17.86 million births in 2016, an 7.9% increase on 2015, according to National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) statistics.

More than 45% of the babies born in 2016 had one or more older siblings.

"While the total number of women of childbearing age fell by five million, the number of births increased significantly, showing that the family planning policy adjustments were extremely timely and extremely effective," said the NHFPC's Yang Wenzhuang.

He said that by 2020, there were expected to be between 17 and 20 million births every year.

1.6 average number of births per woman in China, 2010-15

1.9 average births per UK woman

231m people aged over 60 - up from 222m in 2015

908m people of working age - down from 911m in 2015

Getty

Officials estimate that by 2050 there will be an extra 30 million extra of working age in China.

Chinese officials credited the one-child policy with reducing overpopulation, poverty and environmental degradation.

Separate data by China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) counted a slightly higher figure of 18.46 million births in 2016.

The discrepancy was blamed on different statistical methods - the NBS numbers were based on a sampling survey, while the NHFPC's were based on hospital birth certificate data - but officials said both confirmed a significant upwards trend.

A brutal and futile policy - John Sudworth, BBC News

One-and-a-half million more babies is, by anyone's standards, a lot of babies. But the truth is, it's not enough.

The one-child policy, enforced over decades through mass sterilisations and coerced abortions, was not just brutal, but futile too. When it was introduced in 1979, the birth rate was already in decline.

What the policy did was push fertility over a cliff edge and now China is losing around five million people from its labour force every year, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The new two-child policy - a continuation of the bizarre and intrusive insistence on controlling one of the most basic human rights - is proof if any were needed of the Communist Party's ability to put dogma ahead of the national interest.
What was China's one-child policy? U-turn may not bring prosperity 'I wished I could give my daughter a sibling'

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China birth rate up after one-child change

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Birth rates in China rose to their highest level since 2000 last year, despite a fall in the number of women of childbearing age, say officials. The increase follows the relaxation of China's strict one-child policy a year ago. There were 17.86 million births in 2016, an 7.9% increase on 2015, according to National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) statistics.

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An American pioneer in the field of cryptology-the study of writing and solving secret codes- William Friedman is known for his distinguished career as an expert codebreaker with the U.S. Army during World Wars I and II. But although Friedman is one of the biggest names in cryptanalysis-he coined the word itself-historians often skip over the fact that his wife, Elizebeth, was every bit as skilled a codebreaker. Her accomplishments have been (sometimes deliberately) kept from the spotlight.

The youngest of nine kids in a Quaker family, Elizebeth Friedman (née Smith) was born in rural Indiana in 1892. (Her mother spelled her name unusually, swapping out the a for another e, reportedly because she disliked the nickname "Eliza.") Young Elizebeth was bright and displayed a talent for languages, and was determined to go to college despite the discouragement of her father-so determined that she eventually ended up borrowing tuition from him at a 6 percent interest rate. After starting out at Ohio's Wooster College in 1911, she finished her degree at Hillsdale College in Michigan, majoring in English lit. She also studied German, Greek, and Latin at Hillsdale, and it was there that she discovered her lifelong love for Shakespeare.

After graduation and a brief spell as a substitute principal at an Indiana high school, Elizebeth traveled to Chicago in 1916 and visited the Newberry Library, where Shakespeare's First Folio was on display. There-having quit her principal job out of boredom-she asked the librarians if they knew of any research or literature jobs available. Within minutes, she was being introduced to the eccentric George Fabyan, who ran a 500-acre private research facility called Riverbank in nearby Geneva, Illinois. At the time, Fabyan also employed a scholar named Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who was trying to prove that Sir Francis Bacon had actually written Shakespeare's plays. Gallup needed a research assistant. Elizebeth was taken to Riverbank for an interview, and a few days later, she was hired.

At Riverbank, Elizebeth worked on a cipher that Gallup claimed was hidden in Shakespeare's sonnets and supposedly proved Bacon's authorship. Riverbank also employed the Russian-born William Friedman, a Cornell-educated geneticist, to work on wheat, although he became increasingly drawn to the Shakespeare project. William and Elizebeth fell in love and were married in May 1917, one month after the U.S. entered World War I.

Riverbank was one of the first institutes to focus on cryptology, and in the early days of the war, the War Department relied upon Riverbank almost exclusively. "So little was known in this country of codes and ciphers when the United States entered World War I, that we ourselves had to be the learners, the workers and the teachers all at one and the same time," Elizebeth wrote in her memoir.

But the Friedmans sometimes worked for other governments, too. After a recommendation from the U.S. Department of Justice, Scotland Yard brought them a trunk full of mysterious messages the British suspected were being used to facilitate insurrection in India, which was then a British colony. By cracking the codes, written in blocks of numbers, the Friedmans exposed the Hindu-German Conspiracy-in which Hindu activists in the U.S. were shipping weapons to India with German assistance. The resulting trial was one of the largest and most expensive in U.S. history at that time, and it ended sensationally when a gunman opened fire in the courtroom, killing one of the defendants before being killed by a U.S. Marshal. Unaware of the Friedmans' codebreaking work, he apparently believed the defendant had snitched.

The war ended in 1918, but Elizebeth and William continued their work for the military, and in 1921, they moved to Washington, D.C. to focus on military contract work full-time. Elizebeth loved the change of scenery, going from the rural countryside to the city-she recalled going to the theater several times a week when she first arrived in D.C.

After a period spent working for the Navy, she left the paid workforce for a few years to start raising her children, Barbara and John. But in 1925, the Coast Guard came calling, asking for her help on Prohibition-related cases. Soon she was cracking encrypted radio messages used by international liquor-smugglers who hid booze in shipments of jewelry, perfume, and even pinto beans.

Elizebeth proved to be a pivotal asset to the Coast Guard during Prohibition. She was the star witness in a 1933 trial following the bust of a million-dollar bootleg rum operation in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Coast. When asked in court to prove how "MJFAK ZYWKB QATYT JSL QATS QXYGX OGTB" could be decoded to "anchored in harbor where and when are you sending fuel?"-just one of perhaps thousands of coded messages that formed key evidence in the trial-Elizebeth asked the judge to find her a chalkboard. She proceeded to give the court a lecture on simple cipher charts, mono-alphabetic ciphers, and polysyllabic ciphers, then reviewed how, over the course of two years, she and her team painstakingly intercepted and deciphered the radio broadcasts of four illicit distilleries in New Orleans, explaining what each transmission meant. Special Assistant to the Attorney General Colonel Amos W. Woodcock later wrote that Elizebeth's obvious proficiency "made an unusual impression."

Just a year later, Elizebeth again proved invaluable to the Coast Guard in the "I'm Alone" case, in which a ship flying a Canadian flag was sunk by the Coast Guard after refusing to acknowledge a "heave to and be searched" signal. After Canada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. for $380,000, including damages for the ship, its cargo (which included liquor), and personnel losses, Elizebeth came to the rescue: She was able to solve 23 separate encoded messages from the ship that proved the I'm Alone was actually owned by American bootleggers, despite its Canadian decoy flag. The main charges against the U.S. were dismissed, and the Canadian government was so impressed with Elizebeth's work that it asked the U.S. for her help in catching a ring of Chinese opium smugglers. Her testimony later led to five convictions.

Elizebeth and William weren't just code-breakers by day. Their personal fascination with cryptology permeated their whole lives, in work and in play, and built a unique bond between them. The pair used ciphers in family gatherings with their children, and developed various codes to communicate with one another as well throughout their long relationship. They were even known to host dinner parties where the menus were encoded -in order to proceed to the next course, their guests would have to solve the puzzles.

With the start of WWII, Elizebeth began working for the Coordinator of Information, an intelligence service that served as the forerunner to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. While William won huge acclaim for leading the team that figured out Japan's Purple Encryption Machine-a discovery that gave the U.S. government access to diplomatic communications prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor-Elizebeth's successes were less publicized. In fact, researchers have described hitting a " brick wall" when trying to find more details of her wartime activities. But according to Jason Fagone, author of the recent biography The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Elizebeth spent the war as a Nazi spy hunter for the FBI, breaking German codes and working closely with British intelligence to bust Axis spy rings. J. Edgar Hoover wrote her out of the story once the war had ended, classifying her files as top-secret and taking the credit for himself.

One piece of Elizebeth's work for the FBI is slightly better-known, however: Her code-cracking expertise was key in solving the "Doll Woman Case" of 1944, wherein Velvalee Dickinson, an antique doll dealer based in New York City, was convicted of spying on behalf of the Japanese government. Elizebeth's work helped prove that letters Dickinson had written, though seemingly about the condition of antique dolls, actually described the positions of U.S. ships and other war-related matters and were intended for the hands of Axis officials. As Fagone notes, although newspapers of the day wrote breathlessly about Dickinson as "the War's No. 1 woman spy" and how her codes were cracked by "FBI cryptographers," Elizebeth was never mentioned.

Elizebeth retired in 1946, a year after World War II ended, and William did the same the following year. In 1957, after many years of research, they finally published their masterwork on the bard, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, which won awards from several Shakespeare research facilities. In contradiction to Gallup's theories, the Friedmans denied that Francis Bacon had written any works known as Shakespeare's, and they even buried a cheeky message to that effect on one of the pages-an italicized phrase that when deciphered reads: "I did not write the plays. F. Bacon."

After William's death in 1969, Elizebeth dedicated large amounts of her time to compiling and documenting her husband's work in cryptology, rather than celebrating her own extraordinary achievements in the field. The fruits of her effort would eventually become part of the George C. Marshall Research Library, named after the WWII-era Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

Elizebeth herself died on Halloween 1980 and was interred with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. Inscribed on their double gravestone is a quote, not by William Shakespeare, but commonly attributed to Francis Bacon: " KNOWLEDGE IS POWER." It too is a cipher -when decrypted, it reads "WFF," William Friedman's initials.

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Franz Anton Mesmer, the Man Who Invented Hypnotism

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An American pioneer in the field of cryptology-the study of writing and solving secret codes- William Friedman is known for his distinguished career as an expert codebreaker with the U.S. Army during World Wars I and II.

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Conservationists can't afford to become complacent. When it comes to rescuing endangered species, progress is an ongoing effort. Still, we can take comfort in the knowledge that many life forms which were once on the brink of extinction or endangerment have made tremendous comebacks with our help. Just look at what happened to these 25 plants and animals.

1. THE BALD EAGLE

For much of the twentieth century, this American icon was in jeopardy. Habitat loss, overhunting, and the widespread use of DDT-an insecticide which weakens avian eggshells-once took a major toll on bald eagles. By 1963, the species population in the lower 48 states had fallen from an estimated 100,000 individuals to just 417 wild pairs. To turn things around, the U.S. government passed a series of laws, including a 1973 ban on DDT that was implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These efforts paid off; today, approximately 10,000 wild breeding pairs are soaring around in the lower 48.

2. THE ARABIAN ORYX

The Arabian oryx is a kind of desert antelope indigenous to the Middle East. Reckless hunting devastated the species, which became essentially extinct in the wild during the early 1970s. However, a few individual animals were still alive and well in captivity. So, in the 1980s, American zoos joined forces with conservationists in Jordan to launch a massive breeding program. Thanks to their efforts, the oryx was successfully reintroduced to the Arabian Peninsula, where over 1000 wild specimens now roam (with a captive population of about 7000).

3. THE GRAY WOLF

Even well-known conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt used to vilify America's wolves. Decades of bounty programs intended to cut their numbers down to size worked all too well; by 1965, only 300 gray wolves remained in the lower 48 states, and those survivors were all confined to remote portions of Michigan and Minnesota. Later, the Endangered Species Act enabled the canids to bounce back in a big way. Nowadays, 5500 of them roam the contiguous states.

4. THE BROWN PELICAN

Louisiana's state bird, the brown pelican, is another avian species that was brought to its knees by DDT. In 1938, a census reported that there were 500 pairs of them living within the Pelican State's borders. But after farmers embraced DDT in the 1950s and 1960s, these once-common birds grew scarce. Things got so bad that, when a 1963 census was conducted, not a single brown pelican had been sighted anywhere in Louisiana. Fortunately, now that the era of DDT is over, the pelican's back with a vengeance on the Gulf Coast and no longer considered endangered.

5. ROBBINS' CINQUEFOIL

Noted for its yellow flowers, Robbins' cinquefoil-or Potentilla robbinsiana-is an attractive, perennial plant that's only found in New Hampshire's White Mountains and Franconia Ridge. Collectors once harvested the cinquefoil in excessive numbers and careless backpackers trampled many more to death. In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service re-routed hiking trails away from the flower's wild habitats. This, along with a breeding program, rescued the Robbins' cinquefoil from the brink of extinction.

6. THE AMERICAN ALLIGATOR

With its population sitting at an all-time low, the American alligator was recognized as an endangered species in 1967. Working together, the Fish and Wildlife Service and governments of the southern states the reptiles inhabit took a hard line against gator hunting while also keeping tabs on free-ranging communities. In 1987, it was announced that the species had made a full recovery.

7. THE NORTHERN ELEPHANT SEAL

Due to its oil-rich blubber, the northern elephant seal became a prime target for commercial hunters. By 1892, some people were beginning to assume that it had gone extinct. However, in 1910, it was discovered that a small group-consisting of less than 100 specimens-remained at large on Guadalupe Island. In 1922, Mexico turned the landmass into a government-protected biological preserve. From a place of security, that handful of pinnipeds bred like mad. Today, every single one of the 160,000 living northern elephant seals on planet Earth are that once-small group's descendants.

8. THE HUMPBACK WHALE

Did you know that the world's humpback whale population is divided into 14 geographically-defined segments? Well, it is-and in 2016, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) informed the press that nine of those clusters are doing so well that they no longer require protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The cetaceans' comeback is a huge win for the International Whaling Commission, which responded to dwindling humpback numbers by putting a ban on the hunting of this species in 1982. (That measure remains in effect.)

9. THE RED WOLF

After the red wolf was declared "endangered" in 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rounded up every wild member of the species they could find and put them all into captivity. By then, the canid's formerly wide geographical range had been reduced to a small portion of coastal Texas and Louisiana. FWS officials only managed to locate 17 wolves-14 of whom helped kick off a successful breeding program. Meanwhile, the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But thanks to those original 14 animals, we now have a captive red wolf population of 200. The FWS has also used their stock to release additional wolves into national wildlife refuges.

10. THE WHITE RHINO

Make no mistake: The long-term survival of Earth's largest living rhino is still very uncertain because poachers continue to slaughter them en masse. Nevertheless, there is some good news. Like black-footed ferrets and northern elephant seals, white rhinos were once presumed to be extinct. But in 1895, just under 100 of them were unexpectedly found in South Africa. Thanks to environmental regulations and breeding efforts, more than 20,000 are now at large.

11. THE WILD TURKEY

It's hard to imagine that these poultry birds were ever in any real trouble, and yet they looked destined for extinction in the early 20th century. With no hunting regulations to protect them, and frontiersmen decimating their natural habitat, wild turkeys disappeared from several states. By the 1930s, there were reportedly less than 30,000 left in the American wilderness. Now, over 6 million are strutting around. So what changed? A combination of bag limits set by various agencies and an increase in available shrublands.

12. THE BLACK-FOOTED FERRET

North America's only indigenous ferret is a prairie dog-eater that was written off as "extinct" in 1979. But the story of this animal took a surprising twist two years later, when a Wyoming pooch gave a freshly-dead one to its owner. Amazed by the canine's find, naturalists soon located a wild colony. Some of these ferrets were then inducted into a breeding program, which helped bring the species' total population up to over 1000.

13. THE CALIFORNIA CONDOR

Since 1987, the total number of California condors has gone up from 27 birds to about 450, with roughly 270 of those being wild animals. With its 10-foot wingspan, this is the largest flying land bird in North America.

14. THE GOLDEN LION TAMARIN

A flashy, orange primate from Brazil's Atlantic Forest, the golden lion tamarin has been struggling to cope with habitat destruction. The species hit rock-bottom in the early 1970s, when fewer than 200 remained in the wild. A helping hand came from the combined efforts of Brazil's government, the World Wildlife Federation, public charities, and 150 zoos around the world. There's now a healthy population of captive tamarins tended to by zookeepers all over the globe. Meanwhile, breeding, relocation, and reintroduction campaigns have increased the number of wild specimens to around 1700-although urban sprawl could threaten the species with another setback. But at least the animal doesn't have a PR problem: Golden lion tamarins are so well-liked that the image of one appears on a Brazilian banknote.

15. THE ISLAND NIGHT LIZARD

Native to three of California's Channel Islands, this omnivorous, four-inch reptile was granted federal protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1977. The designation couldn't have come at a better time, as introduced goats and pigs were decimating the night lizard's wild habitat in those days. But now that wild plants have been reestablished under FWS guidance, more than 21 million of the reptiles are believed to be living on the islands.

16. THE OKARITO KIWI

Small, flightless, island birds usually don't fare well when invasive predators arrive from overseas. (Just ask the dodo.) New Zealanders take great pride in the five kiwi species found exclusively in their country, including the Okarito kiwi, which is also known as the Okarito brown or rowi kiwi. These animals have historically suffered at the hands of introduced dogs and stoats. But recently, there's been some cause for celebration. Although there were only about 150 Okarito kiwis left in the mid-1990s, conservation initiatives have triggered a minor population boom, with about 400 to 500 adult birds now wandering about-and that population is growing by two percent a year. Taking note of this trend, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has just declared that the Okarito kiwi is no longer endangered.

17. THE BROWN BEAR

Let's clear something up: The famous grizzly bear technically isn't its own species. Instead, it is a North American subspecies of the brown bear ( Ursus arctos), which also lives in Eurasia. Still, grizzlies are worth mentioning here because of just how far they've come within the confines of Yellowstone National Park. In 1975, there were only 136 of them living inside the park. Today, approximately 700 of them call the place "home," a turn of events that led to the delisting of Yellowstone's grizzlies as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act earlier this year.

18. THE THERMAL WATER LILY

With pads that can be as tiny as one centimeter across, the thermal water lily is the world's smallest water lily. Originally discovered in 1985, it was only known to grow in Mashyuza, Rwanda, where it grew in the damp mud surrounding the area's hot spring. Or at least it did. The thermal water lily seems to have disappeared from its native range. Fortunately, before the species went extinct in the wild, some seeds and seedlings were sent to London's Royal Botanic Gardens. There, horticulturalists figured out a way to make the lilies flower in captivity, and managed to saved the species.

19. THE PEREGRINE FALCON

When a peregrine falcon dives toward its airborne prey, the bird-eating raptor has been known to hit speeds of up to 242 miles per hour. The species endured a plummet of a different sort when DDT dropped America's population. In the first few decades of the 20th century, there were around 3900 breeding pairs in the United States. By 1975, the number of known pairs had been whittled down to 324. Things got better after the insecticide was banned, and according to the FWS, somewhere between 2000 and 3000 peregrine falcon couples currently patrol the skies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

20. PRZEWALSKI'S HORSE

There are a few different subspecies of wild horse, all of which are endangered. One variant is the Przewalski's horse ( Equus ferus perzewalskii) from Mongolia. It completely vanished from that nation during the 1950s, but by then assorted zoos around the world had started breeding them. From 1992 to 2004, some 90 captive-born horses were released into Mongolia. They thrived and around 300 are living out there today.

21. THE NORTH AMERICAN BEAVER

No one knows how many of these buck-toothed rodents were living on the continent before European fur traders showed up. But after two centuries of over-trapping, incentivized by the lucrative pelt trade, the number of North American beavers had shrunk to an abysmal 100,000 in 1900. Their fortunes reversed when restocking programs were implemented in the U.S. and Canada. Nowadays, somewhere between 10 and 15 million beavers live in those countries. Given their landscaping talents, many property owners have come to see the furballs as pests.

22. THE CAFÉ MARRON

Rodrigues Island in the Indian Ocean once gave biologists a chance to raise the (near) dead. This landmass is the home of a small tree with star-shaped flowers called the café marron. It was thought that the plant had long since died out when a single specimen was found by a schoolboy named Hedley Manan in 1980. As the only surviving member of its species known to mankind, that lone plant assumed paramount importance. Cuttings from the isolated café marron were used to grow new trees at England's Royal Botanical Gardens. Right now, there are more than 50 of these plants-and all of them can have their ancestry traced straight back to that one holdout tree.

23. THE WEST INDIAN MANATEE

A docile, slow-moving marine mammal with a taste for sea grasses, the Floridian subspecies of the West Indian manatee is a creature that does not react well to razor-sharp propellers. Collisions with boats are a significant threat, and the danger won't go away altogether. Still, the passage of tighter boating regulations has helped the Sunshine State rejuvenate its manatee population, which has more than tripled since 1991.

24. THE BURMESE STAR TORTOISE

The pet trade did a number on these guys. Beginning in the 1990s, wildlife traffickers harvested Burmese star tortoises until they effectively became " ecologically extinct" in their native Myanmar. Luckily, conservationists had the foresight to set up breeding colonies with specimens who'd been confiscated from smugglers. The program started out with fewer than 200 tortoises in 2004; today, it has more than 14,000 of them. "Our ultimate objective is to have about 100,000 star tortoises in the wild," Steve Platt, a herpetologist who's been taking part in the initiative, said in a Wildlife Conservation Society video.

25. THE GIANT PANDA

Here we have it: the poster child for endangered animals everywhere ... except that the giant panda is no longer endangered. Last year, the IUCN changed its status from "endangered" to "vulnerable." There's still a chance that we could lose the majestic bamboo-eater once and for all someday, but the last few years have offered a bit of hope. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of wild pandas saw a 17 percent increase. The welcome development was made possible by enacting a poaching ban and seeing an explosion of new panda reserves. It's nice to know that, with the right environmental policies, we can make the future brighter for some of our fellow creatures.

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Conservationists can't afford to become complacent. When it comes to rescuing endangered species, progress is an ongoing effort. Still, we can take comfort in the knowledge that many life forms which were once on the brink of extinction or endangerment have made tremendous comebacks with our help.

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http://mentalfloss.com/article/58468/most-amazing-lie-history

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Why do we get letter grades in school at all? And whatever happened to E?

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If the heart in the Functional Materials Laboratory at ETH Zurich University were in a patient in an operating room, its vital signs would not be good. In fact, it would be in heart failure. Thankfully, it's not in a patient-and it's not even real. This heart is made of silicone.

Suspended in a metal frame and connected by tubes to trays of water standing in for blood, the silicone heart pumps water at a beat per second-a serious athlete's resting heart rate-in an approximation of the circulatory system. One valve is leaking, dripping onto the grate below, and the water bins are jerry-rigged with duct tape. If left to finish out its life to the final heartbeat, it would last for about 3000 beats before it ruptured. That's about 30 minutes-not long enough to finish an episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Nicolas Cohrs, a bioengineering Ph.D. student from the university, admits that the artificial heart is usually in better shape. The one he holds in his hands-identical to the first-feels like taut but pliable muscle, and is intact and dry. He'd hoped to demonstrate a new and improved version of the heart, but that one is temporarily lost, likely hiding in a box somewhere at the airport in Tallinn, Estonia, where the researchers recently attended a symposium.

Taking place over the past three years, the experimental research is a part of Zurich Heart, a project involving 17 researchers from multiple institutions, including ETH, the University of Zurich, University Hospital of Zurich, and the German Heart Institute in Berlin, which has the largest artificial heart program in Europe.

A BRIDGE TO TRANSPLANT-OR TO DEATH

Heart failure occurs when the heart cannot pump enough blood and oxygen to support the organs; common causes are coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. It's a global pandemic, threatening 26 million people worldwide every year. More than a quarter of them are in the U.S. alone, and the numbers are rising.

It's a life-threatening disease, but depending on the severity of the condition at the time of diagnosis, it's not necessarily an immediate death sentence. About half of the people in the U.S. diagnosed with the disease die within five years. Right now in the U.S., there are nearly 4000 people on the national heart transplant list, but they're a select few; it's estimated that upwards of 100,000 people need a new heart. Worldwide, demand for a new heart greatly outpaces supply, and many people die waiting for one.

That's why Cohrs, co-researcher Anastasios Petrou, and their colleagues are attempting to create an artificial heart modeled after each patient's own heart that would, ideally, last for the rest of a person's life.

Mechanical assistance devices for failing hearts exist, but they have serious limitations. Doctors treating heart failure have two options: a pump placed next to the heart, generally on the left side, that pumps the blood for the heart (what's known as a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD), or a total artificial heart (TAH). There have been a few total artificial hearts over the years, and at least four others are in development right now in Europe and the U.S. But only one currently has FDA approval and CE marking (allowing its use in European Union countries): the SynCardia total artificial heart. It debuted in the early '90s, and since has been implanted in nearly 1600 people worldwide.

While all implants come with side effects, especially when the immune system grows hostile toward a foreign object in the body, a common problem with existing total artificial hearts is that they're composed of hard materials, which can cause blood to clot. Such clots can lead to thrombosis and strokes, so anyone with an artificial heart has to take anticoagulants. In fact, Cohrs tells Mental Floss, patients with some sort of artificial heart implant-either a LVAD or a TAH-die more frequently from a stroke or an infection than they do from the heart condition that led to the implant. Neurological damage and equipment breakdown are risky side effects as well.

These complications mean that total artificial hearts are "bridges"-either to a new heart, or to death. They're designed to extend the life of a critically ill patient long enough to get on (or to the top of) the heart transplant list, or, if they're not a candidate for transplant, to make the last few years of a person's life more functional. A Turkish patient currently holds the record for the longest time living with a SynCardia artificial heart: The implant has been in his chest for five years. Most TAH patients live at least one year, but survival rates drop off after that.

The ETH team set out to make an artificial heart that would be not a bridge, but a true replacement. "When we heard about these problems, we thought about how we can make an artificial heart that doesn't have side effects," he recalls.

USING AN ANCIENT TECHNIQUE TO MAKE A MODERN MARVEL

Using common computer assisted design (CAD) software, they designed an ersatz organ composed of soft material that hews closely to the composition, form, and function of the human heart. "Our working hypothesis is that when you have such a device which mimics the human heart in function and form, you will have less side effects," Cohrs says.

To create a heart, "we take a CT scan of a patient, then put it into a computer file and design the artificial heart around it in close resemblance to the patient's heart, so it always fits inside [the body]," Cohrs says.

But though it's modeled on a patient's heart and looks eerily like one, it's not identical to the real organ. For one thing, it can't move on its own, so the team had to make some modifications. They omitted the upper chambers, called atria, which collect and store blood, but included the lower chambers, called ventricles, which pump blood. In a real heart, the left and right sides are separated by the septum. Here, the team replaced the septum with an expansion chamber that is inflated and deflated with pressurized air. This action mimics heart muscle contractions that push blood from the heart.

The next step was to 3D-print a negative mold of the heart in ABS, a thermoplastic commonly used in 3D printing. It takes about 40 hours on the older-model 3D printers they have in the lab. They then filled this mold with the "heart" material-initially silicone-and let it cure for 36 hours, first at room temperature and then in an oven kept at a low temperature (about 150°F). The next day, they bathed it in a solvent of acetone, which dissolved the mold but left the printed heart alone. This process is essentially lost-wax casting, a technique used virtually unchanged for the past 4000 years to make metal objects, especially bronze. It takes about four days.

The resulting soft heart weighs about 13 ounces-about one-third more than an average adult heart (about 10 ounces). If implanted in a body, it would be sutured to the valves, arteries, and veins that bring blood through the body. Like existing ventricular assist devices and total artificial hearts on the market, it would be powered by a portable pneumatic driver worn externally by the patient.

FROM 3000 TO 1 MILLION HEARTBEATS

In April 2016, they did a feasibility test to see if their silicone organ could pump blood like a real heart. First they incorporated state-of-the-art artificial valves used every day in heart surgeries around the world. These would direct the flow of blood. Then, collaborating with a team of mechanical engineers from ETH, they placed the heart in a hybrid mock circulation machine, which measures and simulates the human cardiovascular system. "You can really measure the relevant data without having to put your heart into an animal," says Cohrs.

Here's what the test looked like.

"Our results were very nice," Cohrs says. "When you look at the pressure waveform in the aorta, it really looked like the pressure waveform from the human heart, so that blood flow is very comparable to the blood flow from a real human heart."

Their results were published earlier this year in the journal Artificial Organs.

But less promising was the number of heartbeats the heart lasted before rupturing under stress. (On repeated tests, the heart always ruptured in the same place: a weak point between the expansion chamber and the left ventricle where the membrane was apparently too thin.) With the average human heart beating 2.5 billion times in a lifetime, 3000 heartbeats wouldn't get a patient far.

But they're making progress. Since then, they've switched the heart material from silicone to a high-tech polymer. The latest version of the heart-one of which was stuck in that box in the Tallinn airport-lasts for 1 million heartbeats. That's an exponential increase from 3000-but it's still only about 10 days' worth of life.

Right now, the heart costs around $400 USD to produce, "but when you want to do it under conditions where you can manufacture a device where it can be implanted into a body, it will be much more expensive," Cohrs says.

The researchers know they're far from having produced an implantable TAH; this soft heart represents a new concept for future artificial heart development that could one day lead to transplant centers using widely available, easy-to-use design software and commercially available 3D-printers to create a personalized heart for each patient. This kind of artificial heart would be not a bridge to transplantation or, in a few short years, death, but one that would take a person through many years of life.

"My personal goal is to have an artificial heart where you don't have side effects and you don't have any heart problems anymore, so it would last pretty much forever," Cohrs says. Well, perhaps not forever: "An artificial heart valve last 15 years at the moment. Maybe something like that."

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This Soft Artificial Heart May One Day Shorten the Heart Transplant List

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If the heart in the Functional Materials Laboratory at ETH Zurich University were in a patient in an operating room, its vital signs would not be good. In fact, it would be in heart failure. Thankfully, it's not in a patient-and it's not even real. This heart is made of silicone.

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Every week of the year, in rural Summertown, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, retired Navy man Russ McKamey terrorizes people. McKamey Manor is a haunted house, but it's nothing you'd send your kid to for Halloween. It's billed to interested parties as "live your own horror movie."

McKamey spends as much time talking people out of the haunt as he does allowing them to come in. "'You really don't want to do this'-that's my tagline," McKamey tells Mental Floss. With his gravel-throated voice and quickness to laugh, his professed love of Turner Classic Movies and musicals, it's hard to imagine this father of two dreaming up these horror shows. He combines what he says are mind control techniques from " MK Ultra"-a notorious CIA project-and general hypnosis techniques with harrowing, gruesome stunts to break people down physically and mentally. "You will hallucinate when you're here," he chuckles. "You will be putty in my hands."

Though McKamey keeps the full details of the haunt under wraps, he posts short movies on his website of participants in horrifying scenarios: A young woman pants and shivers in a tiny chamber, her face distorted by a plastic mouth guard that stretches her cheeks garishly apart. A person appears to be strangled by a boa constrictor. A young man lies bloody in a room of knives where a masked man eats raw intestines and comes at him with a drill.

McKamey insists "it's all smoke and mirrors" and "under control," and that no one is ever seriously injured other than "cuts, bruises, and strains." But, he says, the physical challenges and mental terror are real. He even keeps an EMT on hand. This is why his selection process is so rigorous: "After they contact me, I don't even take them seriously until they get a letter from their doctor saying they're mentally and physically cleared to participate."

He only does one haunt per week, limited to two people at a time-surely a disappointment to the more than 40,000 people who apply to visit every year. (For 19 years, McKamey Manor was located in San Diego, California; it's only been in Tennessee for four months.) If they pass the initial screening, he runs a criminal background check on them. The day of the haunt he does a drug screening of the participants, who then have to sign a 40-page legal waiver in which they agree to a laundry list of all the possible horrors that could happen to them and release McKamey and crew from any liability.

Participants start out in " Holly's Playhouse," where they undertake a series of physical challenges. If they make it through that potentially hours-long ordeal, McKamey drives them two hours to another location in Huntsville, Alabama, where, he says, "it gets very mental and very serious."

While the participants don't know explicitly which experiences will occur in any given haunt, they sign off on the possibility that any of them could, ranging from having to escape from a coffin buried under 12 feet of dirt to having a fingernail pulled out with a pair of pliers. (Yes, really, though it's very rare and only done at the request of the participants.) They have a safe word they can use at any time to stop the experience.

Because of all this preparation, McKamey insists that nobody who comes to his haunt is an unsuspecting victim: "You've got to jump through serious hoops to get here. You've got to really want to do this."

Every show is personalized to the people coming through. Participants give McKamey permission to contact family, friends, and coworkers to probe deep into their fears. "We go for the gut wrenching-what really scares somebody," McKamey says.

The "winner" of the haunt-anyone who makes it through to the end, which can take long as 10 hours-wins $1000.

In the nearly two decades that McKamey has been operating his house of horror, nobody has ever completed the haunt.

On September 30, Sean Morin, a former military paratrooper and "horror junkie," and his wife, Kinsey, who will graduate from the police academy on Halloween, were the chosen two that McKamey-with the help of his girlfriend, Holly, and several volunteer actors-deigned to terrorize. The Morins, of Rossville, Georgia, were determined that they would be the first ones to survive every horror at McKamey Manor and take home that $1000.

"I'm pretty confident in making it through," Kinsey told Mental Floss on the day of their haunt.

Sean was excited. "I like the thrill of being scared: the surprises, the jump scares, the whole atmosphere of being immersed in an alternate reality," he said. For him, the adrenaline release relieves stress, anxiety and clears his head: "It's an escape from the hoopla of everyday routines."

Sean and Kinsey aren't alone in their love of being scared. And while McKamey Manor may be the most extreme version of a haunted house around, it's far from the only one.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

THE NEUROCHEMISTRY OF FEAR

Taking pleasure in fear is actually quite normal, it turns out. According to Kate Brownlowe, neuropsychiatrist and section chief of neurobehavioral health in the department of neurology and psychology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, being afraid is essential to human survival. "On an evolutionary basis, people who had a good fear response to things that were dangerous were far more likely to survive in the wild," she tells Mental Floss.

When your brain senses a threat of danger, often before your conscious mind has even had time to process it, a little almond-shaped structure in each lobe of the brain called the amygdala sends out excitatory signals that trigger your sympathetic nervous system into a fight-or-flight response. Corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH), cortisol, and adrenaline surge into your blood, your heart rate increases, your pupils dilate, and you begin to sweat, creating a strong state of arousal, or alertness, to prepare you for action. New research has even recently identified neural pathways that process fear, involving the hippocampus, actively involved in memory, which may shed light on how to intervene upon trauma and PTSD.

However, once your brain has determined that you will not die from this threat, or that the threat is largely over, your frontal lobes take over. "The experience of your brain calming itself down is actually very pleasurable," Brownlowe says, which may be why people come back for more. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks into "rest-and-digest" mode, which releases the feel good neurotransmitter dopamine. There's also psychological benefit-surviving a scare can "reset the thermostat for people" so that things which had seemed intimidating may be easier to deal with in the future. "It's easier for the frontal lobe to calm down the fear response because you already have that belief: that expectation that you're going to be OK," Brownlowe says.

Belief may play a big part in how scared we get, in fact. "There's no fear without belief," Craig April, Ph.D., therapist and founder of the April Center for Anxiety Attack Management in Los Angeles, tells Mental Floss. In his treatment of people with anxiety disorders, April devotes much of the work to challenging people's beliefs about what evokes their fear, and helping them change those beliefs through cognitive behavioral therapy.

"Life is so uncertain, and uncertainty always brings some measure of fear," he says. He believes that people may be drawn to horror and fear-inducing events as a way of trying to gain mastery over that which scares us in our own lives: "When going to a haunted house or movie, our brains have a sense that this is a controlled environment, so even though there's a lot of uncertainty, if we faced those fears, it can be empowering."

Unless, of course, you have damage to your amygdala, in which case it is possible for your fear center to go down like a power line in a storm. In one rare case documented in 2010, a woman with lesions on her amygdala, identified only as "SM," lost her ability to feel fear. She might be McKamey Manor's ideal candidate, for when researchers at the University of Iowa exposed her to live snakes and spiders (to which SM expressed a lifelong hatred), took her on a haunted tour of Waverly Hills Sanatorium, and showed her a series of horror films, she remained unmoved and unafraid. She was actually drawn to the most poisonous of the snakes and spiders. Moreover, she was also still able to "exhibit other basic emotions and experience the respective feelings."

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN HORROR AND IMAGINATION

While fear is a deeply intrinsic part of every mammal's ability to stay alive, horror may be a strictly human phenomenon, as McKamey Manor makes sure to play upon. In a 2014 paper published in the journal Social Research, philosopher and author of the book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen Asma looks to horror master H.P. Lovecraft to delineate the difference between horror and fear. "Lovecraft argues, in his 1927 Supernatural Horror in Literature, that good horror evokes a unique subjective emotion, which he refers to as 'cosmic fear,'" Asma writes. "There is something in the horror experience, Lovecraft claims, that resonates a deep instinctual awe of the unknown."

Most mammals experience fear in relationship to "specific enemies," he says, namely other creatures and forces that can kill them. But in humans, with our comparatively larger neocortexes, "we can take our memories, ideas, goals, and emotions offline, so to speak, and entertain them in a parallel universe of mental space." In other words, our ability to imagine increases our ability to feel horror.

This might explain why researchers from Indiana University Media School found that the brains and emotions of people who play horror games like Resident Evil or Amnesia: The Dark Descent can't distinguish between "fake" fear and real fear. In keeping with April's theory, the researchers suggest that people seek out fear in controlled experiences, such as playing video games. When you know an experience can't harm you, there's a temporary rush, and then a period of relief when the thrill is over. While the experience itself might be fake, the fear is real.

And not only is it real in your mind, it's real in your blood. If you've ever described your experience of a scary movie as "bloodcurdling," you are more correct than you know. The term dates back to medieval times and is based on the concept that fear or horror would 'run the blood cold' or 'curdle' blood," according to a 2015 study out of Leiden University Medical Centre in Germany, published in the medical journal BMJ.

Researchers set out to test the truth of this by studying the effects of fear on markers of blood coagulation in participants watching movies. The researchers took blood samples before and after the subjects watched two 90-minute movies, one educational and the other horror. They also had participants answer a questionnaire to determine if they were scared by the horror movie. They found that coagulant factor VIII levels before and after watching the horror movies were higher than for the educational movie.

Researchers from the Aarhus University School of Communication and Culture in Denmark who presented at the 29th Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in 2017 suggest that there's an evolutionary explanation for these responses, in that "horror may be analyzed as a simulation technology that allows users to attain adaptive experience with perceived threat and negative emotion in a safe environment," they write.

GORE, DISGUST, AND RISK

Not all fear is created equal, of course. McKamey Manor capitalizes on blood and gore-no matter how fake-as a big sell to horror junkies. Gore is a key component of contemporary horror movies, ranging from the grotesque assaults of the Nightmare on Elm Street films featuring the terrifying Freddy Krueger to the popular guts-and-gore Saw slasher films of today.

While it might seem unlikely for the average person to take pleasure in viscera and violence, a 2014 study in the Journal of Communication found that movies and shows with gory and disgusting scenes have a higher likelihood of holding an audience's attention than those without. Researchers at University of Central Florida exposed 120 participants to images that fell into three categories of disgust: body envelope violations (a "core disgust," in which an individual's skin has been penetrated or harmed in such a way that leads to injury or death); body products (another core disgust, dealing with fluids and wastes produced by a body, such as vomit and feces); and sociomoral disgust (which occurs when watching people engaged in hate speech or sexual abuse).

When the researchers introduced stimuli via TV or movies that elicited one of these forms of disgust, it turned on the sympathetic nervous system, creating a state of readiness much like that involved in fight-or-flight. The core disgusts are especially effective at flipping the switch on.

The authors theorize that there is an evolutionary bias toward disgust, because it "would better equip humans to avoid harmful substances. Disgust-related contaminants are often tied to survival opportunities like food and sex, providing even more motivation for one to correctly identify potential threats."

On a primal level, gore tells the animal part of our brains that there is something serious that requires our attention.

With all this evidence for the functions of fear, why do some people actively seek out being afraid while others do not? According to Frank Farley, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the former president of the American Psychological Association, tolerance or avoidance of fear-inducing events is shaped by "a recipe of ingredients" that includes brain processes, genetics, social experiences and influences, childhood upbringing, and the culture or community in which a person lives.

Farley has spent 40 years identifying what he calls "T Type" personalities (T is for "thrill"). All of us exist on a spectrum of "sensation seeking," a well-understood psychological principle, he tells Mental Floss. Those with high sensation-seeking needs are your horror junkies and thrill seekers: "T types thrive in the realm of uncertainty." These are the people who climb Mount Everest, despite high risk of death. Who like to throw themselves out of planes or slackline over canyons. While these types undertake a high degree of personal risk, Farley credits them with being highly "inventive, creative and innovative."

"You're never going to do great creative things in this world unless you're a risk taker," he says. These are Big T types, which he calls "the change agents, adventurers, pushing the envelope all the time."

On the other end of the spectrum are the Small T types-those of us who are risk averse or avoidant-who are "holding onto the handrails of life."

The people who fly from all over the country to partake in McKamey Manor's horrors are likely Big T types.

HAUNT, INTERRUPTED

After nearly two decades, McKamey still finds himself fascinated by people's draw to his haunt. The local community thinks of him as "evil," he says-and he claims to have gotten death threats. "People think in order to do this I must be some psychopath. If you actually knew me, you just say, 'You're actually just a good guy.'"

This good guy managed to absolutely terrify former paratrooper Sean and cop-to-be Kinsey. Despite their confidence before crossing the threshold of McKamey Manor, the couple did not make it through the haunt. In fact, they only held up through one entire stunt out of hundreds.

While McKamey won't disclose the full details of the experience that did them in, he describes it as a "height stunt." Sean and Kinsey were blindfolded, their ears were covered with noise-canceling headphones, and their mouths were plugged with an uncomfortable plastic mouth guard. For Sean, the deprivation of his senses combined with the uncertainty of how far he might fall added up to a complete loss of control. "There was no way I was going to be able to gain control of myself with my senses being taken away," Sean says.

Of the experience, McKamey says, "Physically it's not that tough, but your mind will always be your worst enemy."

There were also points at which Sean was scared he would have to stop "for an emergency reason, like water going into my lungs." (Water is a constant in almost all the experiences for its power to wear down one's mental and physical resources, McKamey says.)

During the transition between the height stunt and the next one, Sean ran into a tree with such force, he nearly knocked himself out. It was at that point that he felt he couldn't go on.

"I was disappointed in myself," Sean admits.

He calls McKamey Manor a "a great experience"-and he wants to do it again. Undaunted by their failure, he and Kinsey plan to return in the future to try to survive their fears.

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Fright Fest: The Science Behind Why We Love to Be Scared

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Every week of the year, in rural Summertown, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, retired Navy man Russ McKamey terrorizes people. McKamey Manor is a haunted house, but it's nothing you'd send your kid to for Halloween. It's billed to interested parties as "live your own horror movie."

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Picture a beach next to a blue lake under the bright California skies, its water twinkling as the sun catches gentle waves, and birds cruising on the thermals above. As you walk towards the lake, you see that the water levels are low, leaving behind cracked and dry brown mud below the white beach. When you reach what looks like sand from afar, your feet make a crunching sound. You realize it's thousands-no, millions-of bones snapping beneath your sneakers, from fish that were washed ashore, too many for even the birds or wild animals to consume. Wind blows toxic dust into the air from the shoreline, a sulphury smell rises up from the lake, and you realize why the shore is littered with rusted, broken, abandoned structures, and the only human here is you. But if you squint, you could see what it once was-and what it could be again.

This is the Salton Sea.

In December, it will receive its final water transfer from the Colorado River, its only lifeline. After that, it will begin to dry up. Left to its own devices, it would disappear completely. But the state of California plans to help it survive: It's investing $383 million over the next decade to save the Salton Sea-in much reduced form.

This fake lake was created by accident, is heavily polluted, and can't survive on its own. Why bother to save this strange place?

Because not saving it would be even worse.

Located southeast of Los Angeles and directly south of Joshua Tree National Park, the sea is an artificial replacement of an ancient natural lake called Cahuilla. The lake appeared and disappeared over the millennia at intervals of 400 or 500 years depending on how much water it received from the Colorado River, writes George Kennan in his 1917 book The Salton Sea; an account of Harriman's fight with the Colorado River.

The native Cahuilla Indians told Kennan that the lake, located 232 feet below sea level, would periodically fill with water, turning the region into a useful wetland. At its fullest, it covered 2000 square miles and was 300 feet deep. But then it would slowly evaporate in the burning desert sun, its waning waters too salinated by naturally concentrated salts in the landscape to be of use to the Cahuilla. From at least 1540 to 1905, it was completely dry, as many weary '49ers, headed to California during the Gold Rush, could attest.

In 1900, the California Development Company, bankrolled by Harriman's railroad, brought irrigation to the desert. It diverted the Colorado River's water to the Imperial Valley, which sits directly south of the Salton Sea near the U.S.-Mexico border.

It was a bold, impetuous move-and one that paid off. Irrigation canals turned the desert fertile by providing water for farmers. "If anyone had then ventured to predict that this dried-up bed of the Gulf of California, this hot, sterile, and apparently irreclaimable desert would eventually become a beautiful, cultivated valley, producing cotton, barley, alfalfa, dates, melons, and fruit, to the value of 10 or 15 million dollars a year, he would have been regarded as a visionary enthusiast, if not a desert-crazed monomaniac," Kennan writes.

Everything changed in 1905. An extra-snowy winter caused massive snow melt in the spring, and the Colorado River swelled, overwhelming the irrigation channels. Engineers spent months attempting-and failing-to hold the river back by building dikes and bringing in truckloads of earth to dam it. By the time they quelled the flood, a huge amount of water had already flowed into the basin of Lake Cahuilla. This was the birth of the Salton Sea.

In ensuing decades, the sea only grew larger thanks to agricultural runoff, which also deposited salts, minerals, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers in the seabed. Some saw tourism potential in the rising waters, stocking the sea with tilapia and building resorts, restaurants, and homes along the coastline. Just a few hours' drive from Hollywood, the sea was advertised as a "paradise in the desert" or a working-man's Palm Springs. Small towns popped up on its shores: Bombay Beach. Salton Sea Beach. Desert Shores.

In the 1950s, it became a playground for the growing California middle class. Stars like the Beach Boys and Sonny Bono especially loved it; the latter became its champion. After Bono's death in 1998, his widow, Mary, told CNN that he had "wanted his legacy to be saving the Salton Sea." A national wildlife refuge in the area is now named after him.

But the heyday of the Salton Sea didn't last long. As the populations of western states grew, they needed water-not just for crops but for homes, lawns, golf courses, hospitals, and industries. And for that water, they turned to the 1450-mile-long Colorado River, which passes through seven U.S. states and two in Mexico. Forty million people depend on the Colorado. Over the decades, so much water has been siphoned from the river that in most years, it no longer flows to the Gulf of California, as it did for millions of years (with a brief pause, geologically speaking, to create Lake Cahuilla).

Considering these pressures, the Salton Sea is a low priority. Its receding shores have left behind ghost towns, dead trees, toxic dust, and rotting fish.

The decision to cut off the Salton Sea from the Colorado River comes out of a 2003 deal between southern California water authorities and various parties, following an earlier lawsuit; for years, states have been grappling over water allotments from the Colorado River, and California has long been accused by other states of taking more than its fair share. That deal allowed for water for the Salton through 2017. When the last water transfer of 38 billion gallons goes through in December, the Salton will dry up faster than ever.

There are three reasons why this is a problem. First, as the lake bed becomes exposed, the fine particulates in the mud there will be blown into the already dusty skies of Imperial County. Since so much of the water that made up the lake came from agricultural runoff, that dust likely contains accumulated pesticides, DDT, and heavy metals. (The extent of the contamination is still not known, and researchers are just beginning to look at what's in the dust.)

"Those [exposed areas] are creating far more dust than the regular residential desert," Salton City resident Kerry Morrison tells Mental Floss. Morrison is the executive director of EcoMedia Compass, a nonprofit environmental organization, and president of the West Shores Chamber of Commerce, which represents several Salton Sea communities. "During dust storms, I've been down there [by the shore]. It's major," he says.

The dust is wrecking people's lungs. Residents of Imperial County have an asthma rate three times higher than the state average, and the county now has California's highest rate of asthma-associated ER visits.

"It is a crisis. It's an emergency. It needs to be dealt with," Luis Olmedo, executive director of the Comité Cívico Del Valle, an outreach and educational organization in the Imperial Valley, told The Desert Sun.

That crisis, like many of those exacerbated by climate change, is borne by those with the fewest resources. "This is an economic justice issue. The people affected are poor disadvantaged Hispanic communities," Michael Cohen, a senior associate at the water-focused environmental nonprofit Pacific Institute, tells Mental Floss. In a recent study, Pacific Institute estimates that the exposed lake bed could put an additional 100 tons of dust into the air per day through 2045, leading to an estimated cost of almost $40 billion in healthcare due to asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease, which are worsened by air pollution.

Economically, the communities along the Sea are also in decline. The area used to compete with Yosemite for visitors, often besting the National Park for tourists. "We've lost half of our businesses in 10 years," Morrison says. "That's not a future to believe in." But locals think it could still be an economic driver again, albeit a more modest one, if the Sea were returned to even a version of its former glory.

Birds also love the "stinky sea": In the 112 years it has been with us, the Salton has become a major stopover for birds on the Pacific Flyway, which runs from Alaska to Patagonia. But the water becomes more saline as levels drop, and fish die. And without fish, the birds who have come to depend on the area die too.

In the past, they would have had plenty of other options when Lake Cahuilla dried up, but California, like many states, has bulldozed, filled in, or developed most of its natural wetland areas-about 95 percent of them. There aren't other nearby waters for tired birds as they fly thousands of miles along their migration routes. The Salton Sea might be a smelly, salty lake to us, but to the more than 420 species of birds observed there, it's an oasis, as Audubon California notes.

But not all hope is lost for the Salton Sea. There is a 10-year plan from the state of California that is gearing up as the imminent cutoff of the lake from the Colorado River looms. The plan allocates $383 million over a decade (with an initial $80 million in funding already available) to deal with all three issues: dust, birds, and the local economy.

Under this plan, a little more than half of the Salton Sea will remain, surrounded by interconnected ponds, some as large as 500 acres. Each pond will be engineered, with berms to keep water inside and culverts connecting them. They'll be deep enough for fish to reproduce within.

According to Bruce Wilcox, assistant secretary of Salton Sea policy at the state agency California Natural Resources, "The new plan builds habitat in an incremental manner as the sea recedes. It provides a less saline habitat-that helps with the fisheries habitat and the fish-eating birds. It also covers up the exposed playa-that helps with the dust issue." Over the 10-year period, about 40,000 acres of playa-flat, dried-out desert basin that water easily evaporates from-will be covered by water. That's about two-thirds of the area that's projected to become exposed as the Salton Sea dries up.

A healthier and more pleasant sea will be better for the locals and might encourage visitors, Wilcox tells Mental Floss: "It'll look different to people, but I don't think the birds will care."

This fall, California State Resources began digging out the playa to create the first ponds. Whatever the agency learns can be used to make the future ponds as effective as possible.

Morrison calls the 10-year-plan "a good start" that provides an "ark for the animals and gives them a chance." But he says it's not enough, especially because it's not going to improve air quality to the level it needs. He points out that there's no real plan for dust mitigation where people live.

He'd like to see some of the almost $400 million spent on bringing water into the Salton Sea-actual salt water from the Gulf of California. Since the 1970s, some locals have advocated for constructing a 115-mile, border-crossing channel called the Coyote Canal. Part of the canal, covering about one-third of the distance, already exists, serving ranches and farms in Mexico. Under this plan, the canal would be extended from the gulf to a small semi-dry lake called Laguna Salada, and then continue another 40 miles north to the Salton Sea. Because the sea is so far below sea level, the canal would have a downhill run. The plan's advocates see it as an opportunity to restore the Salton Sea to its former glory.

Construction cost estimates vary, but Morrison argues they are similar to what is already being spent. Continuing the canal would involve the Mexican government, ranchers, and farmers whose land would be crossed, but Morrison says both the government and the ranchitos are enthusiastic. Having a water source-even a salty one-would be a boon for the region, including for the native Cocopah people whose culture was focused around the lower Colorado, on both sides of the Mexican border, for 4000 years. Currently, Americans use all the water before it reaches the Mexican border and the Cocopah's land. You can see how its proponents envision it working in the video below.

Morrison also points out that existing geothermal plants on the shores of the Salton Sea could use excess energy to desalinate the seawater, making a true oasis in the desert-complete with fresh water. There's already an experimental program, run by Sephton Geothermal, that does just that, and there are proposals for adding another geothermal plant to those that already exist there.

Both the canal construction and the desalination program were once included in a more ambitious-and more expensive-restoration plan for the Salton Sea area, but neither made it into the current plan.

But geoengineering is harder than nature makes it look. One cautionary tale is the Aral Sea, which straddles the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, it's now a ghost of its former self. For decades during the Soviet era, the rivers that fed it were diverted and dammed for agriculture. It's now "a memory of those who knew it and loved it and saw it slip away," Michael Edelstein writes in his book Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea and Its Lessons for Sustainability.

Owens Lake is another, more local example. The 200-square-mile lake, which had existed for 800,000 years at the foot of the Sierras, was sucked dry by thirsty Los Angelenos in a little more than a decade. By 1926, it was mostly gone. Dust became a problem there, too. A billion dollars later, most of the carcinogenic dust has been mitigated with engineering projects similar to those planned for the Salton Sea. But Owens Lake, once called the American Switzerland, is gone forever.

Will the Salton Sea go the way of the Aral Sea or Owens Lake? Or will the 10-year rescue plan lead to a success story?

As construction begins on the ponds, one thing is for sure: The Salton Sea as we have known it will be gone. "We are looking at a smaller, but more sustainable Salton Sea," Wilcox says. "It will have a smaller footprint, but it's something we can sustain over time."
Editor's note: This story has been updated.

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The $383 Million Plan to Save California's Artificial Desert 'Sea'

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Picture a beach next to a blue lake under the bright California skies, its water twinkling as the sun catches gentle waves, and birds cruising on the thermals above. As you walk towards the lake, you see that the water levels are low, leaving behind cracked and dry brown mud below the white beach.

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What Mike Mullane remembers most clearly about having his first bowel movement in space is the blast of cold air greeting his exposed rectum. Over the course of three week-long NASA shuttle missions in the 1980s-two for Discovery, one for Atlantis-Mullane was forced to answer nature's call six or seven times in zero gravity. Each time, he would have to strip naked, close a flimsy curtain around a titanium commode, position his buttocks to form a perfect seal around a 4-inch opening, and then follow a checklist posted nearby to make sure no fecal particles escaped into the deck-all while his sphincter insisted on clamping shut to escape the freezing temperatures.

"It was a complex operation," Mullane tells Mental Floss. "On Earth, I'm fast. My wife is amazed I can be in and out of the bathroom in one minute for a number two. On the shuttle, it would take 30."

While the industrial toilet was a far cry from five-star hotel room seat warmers and bidets, it also improved by magnitudes the ordeal of emptying one's intestines in zero gravity. Prior to 1972, the men of the Gemini and Apollo missions braved poop bags that they would stick to their rear ends, then manually knead the contents with an antibacterial solution so the gases wouldn't detonate the collection; more than one crew has been terrorized by rogue turds hovering in the air.

Coming up with a practical way of replicating the earthbound poop experience took many years, many engineers, and a whole lot of ingenuity. While few explorers like to discuss it, taking a space dump is its own kind of heroism.

Consider one early-and discarded-solution for waste collection in space, which someone dubbed the "sh*t mitt." Donald Rethke likens it to "those long rubber gloves veterinarians use for insemination." The idea, he tells Mental Floss, was that the astronaut could poop in their own hand and then turn the glove inside-out, creating instant containment of the feces.

Now 80, Rethke is a retired engineer from Hamilton-Standard, a NASA subcontractor working through Northrop Grumman that spent decades refining or pioneering life-support systems for space explorers. Rethke, who embraces his industry nickname of "Doctor Flush," says that handling poop simply wasn't much of a concern due to the brief trips taken by pioneering astronauts: They could just go before they left. But as missions grew longer, it became necessary to address personal waste-urine and bowel movements-without dealing with the discomfort of diapers.

For the 1965-66 Gemini excursions, which were planned to prove humans could survive for several days or weeks in space, astronauts were told to use a condom-like sheath that would direct urine into a bag. For feces, they were to use a pouch with a 1.5-inch opening and an adhesive strip around the edge to help prevent fecal matter from escaping. A fellow crew member would be told to stand by and watch to make sure no waste escaped into the capsule.

"It kind of looked like an upside-down top hat," Mullane says. Though they pre-dated his missions, they were on board his shuttles in case of equipment failure. "We never had to use them, thank God."

But the occupants of Gemini and Apollo did, and most found it unpleasant for reasons unrelated to crapping in a bag. When gravity is lacking, surface tension becomes a dominant force. So urine and feces that would separate from the body on Earth thanks to gravity tend to cling to the skin's surface in space.

"If you stick your finger into a glass of water and lift it up, water flows off," Mullane explains. "But in weightlessness, the attraction of the molecules of the fluid will pull it into a ball. If you leave fluid alone, it will form a perfect sphere. Touch it, and will stick to you."

The same goes for poop. The bags had tiny finger covers built in so users could flick and scrape errant flecks away from their cheeks. Then they'd mix in a chemical to kill the bacteria so the gases wouldn't expand in the sealed bag and create an explosive biohazard.

"Well, it's in a small, like a ketchup, a little plastic container like you find ketchup in in restaurants, in a cafeteria or something, it's like that," Apollo astronaut Russell Sweickhart told a reporter in 1977. "You tear the slit across the top, being careful not to squeeze it so the stuff comes out, and then you drop that into the fecal container, and then seal the fecal container. Then you squeeze it through the, you know, externally, you know, which forces it out of the container, and then you mix it by massaging the fecal bag. It's really fun when it's still warm."

If everything went well, it was merely disgusting. If it didn't, as the following transcript excerpt from the 1969 Apollo 10 mission demonstrates, it could be highly disruptive:

Tom Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air.

John Young: I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.

Gene Cernan: I don't think it's one of mine.

Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.

Young: God Almighty.

"When the Apollo astronauts came back," Rethke says, "they wanted sit-down toilets."

While modesty may not have been an achievable goal, astronauts needed some semblance of routine. (Some shuttles were equipped with kitchen tables, even though nothing in zero gravity could be perched on one.) But the comforts of a domestic commode had little application in space. No water could be used: It would run everywhere. And unlike gravity-assisted toilets, a shuttle john would have to address the surface tension issue that enticed poop to come out in curls instead of straight down, mashing itself against the skin.

The solution, according to Rethke, was gentle suction. "Or, as I like to call it, air entrainment," he says. In its simplest form, it's getting the poop Hoovered away from your bottom using air flow as a substitute for gravity.

Rethke says the idea was already on the table courtesy of General Electric (GE) when Hamilton-Standard began working on a zero gravity toilet, and that his job was one of refinement that lasted through the 1980s and 1990s. "The concept of separating solids from the body was already in the bag, no pun intended. It was just the best way. Most of my effort was how to do that economically."

NASA had previously toyed with a variety of designs, including one 1971 model that was mounted vertically on a wall to conserve space. Another took the feces and pulped it, a model not unlike evacuating into a blender. This, engineers realized, created the potential for fecal "dust," or powdered particles of poop, that could contaminate the cabin of spacecraft. By using air entrainment, hardly anything could escape the bowl-and if it did, it wouldn't be atomized to the point of being a biological hazard. Instead, a fan and vacuum system was used to encourage the waste to settle at the bottom of the waste tube.

Air entrainment made one frustrating demand of its users: proper anal positioning. With a 4-inch opening compared to a conventional toilet's 18 inches, astronauts had to align themselves up perfectly in order to avoid any escaping feces. To train astronauts heading for space, NASA set up a commode with a camera mounted inside. (You were not expected to make a deposit.) Users could gauge their perch based on freckles or other skin marks in relation to the seat. Properly docked, they could poop on target, but it took practice.

"It's hard to know where your a-hole is when the hole is that narrow," Mullane says.

Minor complaints aside, NASA's work was ready in time for the 1973 debut of Skylab, the first space station, and the 1981 launch of Columbia, the first shuttle to reach space. After realizing the pulverizing model wasn't going to work due to the fecal dust issue and other malfunctions that led to problems on 10 of the shuttle's first 11 voyages, a redesigned system less prone to clogging was introduced in the mid-1980s.

Urinating, according to Mullane, was never any big deal. Men and women use a form-fitting cup and gentle suction to empty their bladder. "Pretty simple," he says. "But solid waste, that was kind of like going in a camper toilet."

On the Atlantis and Discovery, the space commode had foot rests and thigh straps so astronauts could remain secure to the seat while doing their business. They'd typically opt to strip naked in the event any soiling occurred. To the right was a hand lever; pushed forward, it slid open the tube underneath their buttocks. "You never wanted to open that before sitting on it," Mullane says. Doing so could release the previous user's residual fecal matter into the air.

Once Mullane was strapped in, he would open the tube cover and feel the rush of cold air hit his rear. The air moved 360 degrees while a fan underneath-loud enough to mask sounds of elimination-pulled waste away from the body and into a container that would store the matter until the shuttle returned. Toilet paper would go in a separate bag. By the time Mullane got dressed, cleaned the toilet's edges, and exited, 30 minutes had passed.

Surprisingly, the intimate size of the shuttle didn't contribute to any fragrant evidence. "They did a really good job of filtration," Mullane says. "You never smelled anything."

Rethke improved on this in the early 1990s by compacting the discarded feces at the bottom, reducing the need for storage space. (To make sure it would stay sealed, Rethke once kept a feces-filled container in his office for a year.)

Small tweaks aside, the space toilet doesn't follow the update schedule of, say, an iPhone. What Rethke redesigned and what Mullane used is, by and large, what's still in use on the International Space Station (ISS) today. But instead of bringing waste back, it's discarded so it burns up in the atmosphere.

Future movements may prove more difficult to handle. With the advent of long-duration travel, possibly to Mars, on the horizon, space exploration will have to deal with the issue of waste management when there's virtually no chance of Earthbound assistance.

"When toilets fail [on Earth], it's a real pain," Mullane says. "Just imagine that on Mars. I have no idea how they're going to do that."

Someone might. In early 2017, the HeroX platform crowned a winner in its Space Poop Challenge, which crowdsourced ways to handle waste in space when an explorer is in a spacesuit and away from a fixed toilet for long periods. The winning idea-a suit hatch that can be used to insert inflatable bedpans and diapers-earned inventor Thatcher Cardon a $15,000 prize. If it works, it'll assist in an integral part of exploring beyond our atmospheric borders. In space, everyone needs to go.

Additional Sources: Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut

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To Boldly Go: The Science Behind Pooping in Space

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What Mike Mullane remembers most clearly about having his first bowel movement in space is the blast of cold air greeting his exposed rectum. Over the course of three week-long NASA shuttle missions in the 1980s-two for Discovery, one for Atlantis-Mullane was forced to answer nature's call six or seven times in zero gravity.

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The cargo ship Batavia set out from the Netherlands in October 1628, bound for the Dutch colony at present-day Jakarta, Indonesia, with more than 300 crew and passengers. For some still-unknown reason, the ship veered off course to the south and smashed into a coral atoll about 50 miles west of the Australian coast.

What happened over the next few months-culminating in a mysterious and brutal massacre that left at least 125 people dead-is Australia's oldest cold case.

In a story that aired on 60 Minutes Australia, correspondent Liam Bartlett traveled to this "island of horror" where a team of Australian and Dutch scientists is uncovering the nearly 400-year-old skeletons, well preserved in the sand of what is now Beacon Island. They hope to discover what led to the sudden mass slaughter of adults and children.

"We're dealing with a psychopath and some pretty horrible events," Alistair Paterson, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and the leader of the research team, tells Bartlett. "There's nothing like it in Dutch history or Australian history."

The Batavia, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company, was on its maiden voyage. The commander, Francisco Pelsaert, and the captain, Ariaen Jacobsz, detested each other. Jacobsz conspired with Pelsaert's deputy, Jeronimus Cornelisz, to take control of the ship and its load of silver and valuable paintings. But before the mutiny could unfold, the ship crashed into the reef in the early morning of June 4, 1629.

About 100 people died in the wreck, while almost 200 made it to a cluster of islands in the Abrolhos chain-treeless, desert-like stretches of sand without water or food. Pelsaert and Jacobsz sailed for help, hoping to reach their original destination nearly 2000 miles away by boat.

The events of the next three months continue to puzzle and horrify modern researchers. Initially, Jeronimus Cornelisz organized food rations and shelter for the survivors on Beacon Island as a way to cement his leadership. But then, he hoarded the weapons and boats for his own use. He ordered his followers to execute the strong, able-bodied men who could pose a threat to his control over the group. Most of the women and children who would be a drain on supplies were also killed, though some women were kept alive as sexual slaves, Bartlett reports.

"Totally Lord of the Flies," Paterson says.

Cornelisz marooned several men on a nearby island to get them out of the way as the killing rampage continued. But those men, led by a sailor named Wiebbe Hayes, managed to find water and food, and made a primitive protective fort of stone slabs-which still exists as the first European-made structure on Australian soil. In early August, two months after the wreck, Cornelisz and his men attempted to storm Hayes' stronghold and eliminate his band of survivors.

At the last moment, a rescue ship helmed by Pelsaert and Jacobsz appeared on the horizon. Both Hayes and Cornelisz sent out boats to intercept the ship, hoping to establish their version of events as fact and save themselves from punishment. Fortunately, Hayes's men reached the ship first.

Only 80 to 90 survivors out of the Batavia's 300-plus passengers eventually arrived in present-day Jakarta. Cornelisz, who never showed a hint of remorse or offered an explanation for his brutality, was hanged along with his co-conspirators. The bones of his victims, preserved in the island's alkali coral sand for almost four centuries, are now revealing clues to the historical mystery.

"Horrible things happened to these individuals. They clearly were victims," Paterson tells Bartlett. "But the archaeology allows us to get their story told."

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Archaeologists Unearth the Victims of a Mysterious Massacre 400 Years Ago on an Australian Island

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The cargo ship Batavia set out from the Netherlands in October 1628, bound for the Dutch colony at present-day Jakarta, Indonesia, with more than 300 crew and passengers. For some still-unknown reason, the ship veered off course to the south and smashed into a coral atoll about 50 miles west of the Australian coast.

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As the site of the ancient city of Thebes, the modern-day Egyptian city of Luxor is filled with archaeological treasures. But until recently, two forgotten tombs-both located in the necropolis of Dra' Abu el-Naga, an important non-royal cemetery-hadn't been fully explored. Now, National Geographic reports that experts have finally excavated these burial sites and discovered a 3500-year-old mummy, along with ornate funerary goods and colorful murals.

While excavating one of the two tombs, known as Kampp 150, experts found linen-wrapped remains that Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities believes belong to either "a person named Djehuty Mes, whose name was engraved on one of the walls ... [or] the scribe Maati, as his name and the name of his wife Mehi were inscribed on 50 funerary cones found in the tomb's rectangular chamber."

In addition to the mummy, archaeologists discovered wooden statues, masks, earthen pots, a cache of some 450 statuettes, and around 100 funerary cones-conical mud objects, which were often positioned outside a tomb's center, and could have served as identifying markers or as offerings-inside Kampp 150.

The Associated Press reported that the second tomb, known as Kampp 161, is thought to be approximately 3400 years old-about 100 years newer than its neighboring chamber-as its design is characteristic of other such structures dating back to the reigns of Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV.

Inside Kampp 161, archaeologists discovered wooden funerary masks, a decorated coffin, furniture shards, and the mural of a festival or party depicting the tomb's unknown resident and his wife receiving ceremonial offerings.

German scholar Friederike Kampp-Seyfried surveyed and numbered both tombs in the 1990s, which is how they got their names, but she did not fully excavate nor enter either one.

Officials celebrated the rediscovery of the tombs on Saturday, December 9, when they publicly announced the archaeological finds. They hope that discoveries like these will entice foreign travelers to visit Egypt, as political unrest has harmed the country's tourism industry in recent years.

"It's truly an exceptional day," Khaled al-Anani, Egypt's antiquities minister, said in a statement. "The 18th dynasty private tombs were already known. But it's the first time" anyone's ever entered them.

Check out some pictures of the newly revealed relics below.

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Prehistoric Women Were Stronger Than Some of Today's Elite Female Athletes

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As the site of the ancient city of Thebes, the modern-day Egyptian city of Luxor is filled with archaeological treasures. But until recently, two forgotten tombs-both located in the necropolis of Dra' Abu el-Naga, an important non-royal cemetery-hadn't been fully explored.

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http://mentalfloss.com/article/519235/how-underground-urban-farm-stockholm-will-heat-building-above-it

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Like many fortunes, Madam C.J. Walker's started with a dream. As she later explained to a newspaper reporter, Walker was earning barely a dollar a day as a washerwoman when she had a dream about a man who told her how to create a hair-growing tonic. When she awoke, Walker sent away for the ingredients, investing $1.25 in what she eventually dubbed "Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower." The venture would propel her to become one of America's first black female entrepreneurs-and reportedly the first self-made female millionaire in the nation.

Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 to freed slaves on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana, the woman who would become known as Madam C.J. Walker was orphaned by age 7 and married by 14. The couple had one child, Lelia (later known as A'Lelia), but six years into the marriage, Walker's husband died, by some accounts in a race riot. Walker then worked washing clothes while dreaming of building a better life for her daughter. "As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds," she later told The New York Times, "I said to myself: 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?'"

By 1903, Walker had relocated to St. Louis and started to work for an African-American hair care company before then moving to Denver, where she had heard that the dry air exacerbated hair and scalp issues. At the time, such complaints were widespread among African-Americans, in part due to a lack of black-focused products and access to indoor plumbing. By the early 1900s, Walker herself had lost much of her hair.

Then came her dream. "[I] put it on my scalp," she later said of the tonic, "and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out."

In 1905, Walker began selling her solution door-to-door and at church events. She took the product on tour, traveling throughout the South and Northeast and recruiting other door-to-door saleswomen. A year later, she married Charles Joseph Walker and established the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and in 1908 founded Lelia College in Pittsburgh, a beauty parlor and school for training Madam Walker brand ambassadors. Two years later, she relocated her business headquarters to Indianapolis-then a commercial hub-where she and a mostly female cadre of top executives produced Wonderful Hair Grower on an industrial scale.

A'Lelia, however, was not content with the Midwestern milieu. In 1913 she convinced her mother to open an office in New York and decamped to Manhattan, acquiring a stately Harlem townhouse designed by Vertner Tandy, the first registered black architect in the state. The home, later nicknamed the Dark Tower after poet Countee Cullen's "From the Dark Tower," included a Lelia College outpost on the first floor and living and entertaining spaces on the top three. A'Lelia frequently threw lavish parties there, attended by Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.

Walker followed A'Lelia north, where she purchased the adjacent townhouse. Soon, she was a cultural mover and shaker in her own right, joining the NAACP's New York chapter and helping to orchestrate the Silent Protest Parade in 1917, when roughly 10,000 African-Americans marched down Fifth Avenue as a demonstration against the East St. Louis race riots earlier that year, in which dozens of African-Americans had been killed.

"She became politically active and very much an advocate of women's economic independence," Walker's great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles, a journalist and biographer, tells Mental Floss. "She used her national platform to advocate for civil rights."

The same year as the Silent Protest, Walker and a handful of Harlem leaders traveled to the White House to petition for anti-lynching legislation, and donated $5000 to the NAACP's Anti-Lynching Fund-the largest single gift ever recorded by the fund. In 1916, she established the Madam C. J. Walker Benevolent Association, a program that encouraged Walker brand ambassadors to engage in charity work and hygiene education outreach.

As her empire grew, Walker continued to monumentalize her success. In 1916, she bought a four-acre parcel of land in Irvington, New York, and enlisted Tandy to design her a home to rival the nearby estates of Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller. Her determination only swelled in the face of realtors who tried to charge her twice the price of the land to discourage her, and incredulous neighbors who reportedly mistook the hair care baroness for a maid when she arrived at the property in her Ford Model T.

Like her Manhattan residence, the mansion became a popular hang-out for the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Walker also used the home to give back. "She made a blanket invitation to the returning African American soldiers [from World War I] to please come visit the home," Bundles says. It also served as a kind of early safe space for A'Lelia and her largely LGBTQ social network.

But almost as soon as the home was complete, Madam Walker's health began to crumble. Though she was diagnosed with high blood pressure and kidney problems, Walker continued to work and roll out new products. "Like most entrepreneurs she couldn't figure out how to slow down," Bundles says. "She needed to rest, but she couldn't really make herself."

In the spring of 1919, while on a business trip to St. Louis to unveil five new formulas, Walker fell gravely ill and was shuttled back to Irvington in a private car. That May, she died of kidney failure at the age of 51.

Yet her influence would live on. At the time of her death, an estimated 40,000 black women had been trained as Walker saleswomen. In 1927 the Madame Walker Theatre Center opened in Indianapolis, housing offices, a manufacturing center, and a theatre. Her name on the building reflected her unprecedented imprint on black entrepreneurship.

The Madam C.J. Walker brand also survived. In fact, it's recently been revitalized, after black-owned hair care company Sundial acquired it in 2016, debuting two dozen new formulas exclusively at Sephora last spring. "It's very glam," says Bundles, who serves as the line's historical consultant. In a historic deal in November 2017, consumer goods conglomerate Unilever acquired Sundial's $240 million portfolio, and as part of the agreement designated $50 million to empower businesses led by women of color.

Walker's house, known as Villa Lewaro, has had a rockier afterlife, having been owned by the NAACP and then used as an assisted living center for decades. In 1993, stock broker and U.S. ambassador Harold Doley and his wife Helena purchased the property, committing to a years-long restoration process. They've recently secured a protective easement for the site, which prevents future buyers from altering the appearance of the home-a means of preserving the house's history, and that of Madam Walker.

Walker's legacy is also likely to gain a new round of admirers with the recently announced Octavia Spencer-fronted television show about her life, which is based on a biography by Bundles and is allegedly courting distribution by Netflix.

With her brand in full swing and her life story about to be immortalized on the small screen, it seems that even in death, Madam Walker's dream lives on.

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The Queen of Code: Remembering Grace Hopper

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Like many fortunes, Madam C.J. Walker's started with a dream. As she later explained to a newspaper reporter, Walker was earning barely a dollar a day as a washerwoman when she had a dream about a man who told her how to create a hair-growing tonic.

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Researchers have identified the degenerative brain disease known as CTE in a living person, according to a report published this week in the medical journal Neurosurgery.

The paper's lead author, Bennett Omalu, told an audience last month in San Francisco that physicians discovered CTE in Fred McNeill, a former Minnesota Vikings linebacker, during initial testing of a new method to identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the living.

Omalu said his autopsy after McNeill's death two years ago confirmed the CTE testing from UCLA researchers that began in 2012. McNeill, who played 12 NFL seasons after starring at UCLA, died from complications of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). He was 63.

To date, the only way that CTE can be definitively diagnosed is after death. Omalu discovered the first case of CTE when examining the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers star Mike Webster in 2002. Now the San Joaquin medical examiner, Omalu was featured in the movie, "Concussion."

Researchers are working to develop a test for people still alive so they can begin to study the disease more comprehensively.

The McNeill case offers a potential breakthrough in better understanding a disease that has become a central issue for the long-term cognitive health of professional football players and athletes in other contact sports.

Neurologists believe the disease can lead to memory loss, dementia, depression, suicidal behavior and Alzheimer's.

A study by Boston University neurosurgeons reported that 110 of the 111 brains of former NFL players examined had CTE. But researchers need to broaden their studies to the general population to determine why the disease is happening and how it might be treated.

An early breakthrough came two years ago when UCLA researchers published a study of how they identified what appeared to be CTE in 14 former football players with a new diagnostic exam. The UCLA scientists used PET scans and a chemical marker known as FDDNP to measure abnormal brain proteins called tau that are associated with the disease.

But the scan also identifies protein found in Alzheimer's patients, making it difficult for a definitive conclusion. That's one reason Omalu performed a postmortem exam of McNeill to confirm the results.

The UCLA group is working with Omalu and others to see if their radioactive tracer, called a TauMark, is the answer. They hope to get the first FDA approved method to identify CTE in the living.

"We're in the experimental phases," Omalu told an audience last month at the Commonwealth Club of California. "We can't use it as a diagnosis until proven.

"We need a couple million of dollars. What is stopping us is the money. We're ready to roll."

Other medical researchers also are working toward an accepted diagnostic tool for CTE in the living. The National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Neurological Disorders is funding a seven-year, $16 million study. Also, a New York neurologist is working on a technique to detect CTE in the living, according to media reports in September.

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Renowned concussion doctor says he found CTE in living NFL player

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Researchers have identified the degenerative brain disease known as CTE in a living person, according to a report published this week in the medical journal Neurosurgery. The paper's lead author, Bennett Omalu, told an audience last month in San Francisco that physicians discovered CTE in Fred McNeill, a former Minnesota Vikings linebacker, during initial testing of a new method to identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the living.

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Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, a Thai orthopedist who helped design prosthetic limbs for the elephants, said they could not survive without them.

"When she cannot walk, she is going to die," he told The Daily Telegraph in Britain in 2009, when Mosha was fitted with a new prosthesis.

When Mosha received her newest artificial limb last week, he told Reuters: "The way she walked was unbalanced, and her spine was going to bend. That means she would have hurt her cartilages badly and eventually stopped walking. And she would have died because of that."

The Thai Elephant Conservation Center estimates that there are 2,000 to 3,000 elephants living in the wild in Thailand and about 2,700 domesticated ones.

In the past, many elephants in Thailand worked in the logging industry, where their agility and strength made them a valuable asset. But the Thai government banned logging in the nation's forests in 1989, putting them out of work.

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friends of the asian elephant foundation

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Mosha, Thai Elephant Wounded by Land Mine, Gets New Prosthetic Limb

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Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, a Thai orthopedist who helped design prosthetic limbs for the elephants, said they could not survive without them. "When she cannot walk, she is going to die," he told The Daily Telegraph in Britain in 2009, when Mosha was fitted with a new prosthesis.

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the blind musician bringing back the blues

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The blind musician bringing back the blues, Outlook - BBC World Service

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He's just 28 but plays multiple instruments

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Stan Brock is nudging 80. His arms, hard as oak boughs, hint at the black belt he holds in taekwondo. His khakis and dust-stained shoes recall a previous life on horseback as a cowboy in the Upper Amazon. Carefully combed hair nods to a brief career as a movie star in films including Escape from Angola (from the man who brought you Flipper). And the epaulettes and badges signify his role as the flying founder of a charity that has earned him a reputation as, variously, a saint and a "medical monk".

Brock is staying in a hotel during his first visit for decades to Britain, where he grew up, only to run away to Guyana in South America as a teenager. Back in Tennessee, where he now lives, he is homeless and penniless, rolling out his cowboy's mat each night inside the offices of Remote Area Medical (RAM), which he established in 1985. He eats only rice, porridge, bananas and water, and rarely sits down. Yet a singular devotion to his cause has fuelled a mission to prop up the broken healthcare system of the world's richest nation.

Trailed by a film crew, which is documenting his extraordinary life, Brock has been invited to London by the Royal Society of Medicine at a time when healthcare in Britain is emerging as a defining issue before the next general election. Politicians, medical professionals and charities all over the world are fascinated by his work. What began as a mission to parachute doctors and medicine into remotest Guyana, has mushroomed to become the largest operation of its kind in America.

Brock has now organised more than 700 free clinics in convention centres and football stadiums. More than 80,000 volunteer doctors and nurses have provided free, basic, but sometimes life-saving healthcare worth more than £50m to more than half a million Americans, a fraction of a population who cannot afford to be treated or insured. Whole families queue, sometimes for days. This Thanksgiving, RAM, which has seven donated aircraft, will fly 100 dental chairs, 30 lanes of opticians and a small army of heart, women's health and other specialists to a convention centre in New York City, just four miles north of Wall Street.

"You could be blindfolded and stick a pin on a map of America and you will find people in need," Brock says. "We've never gone anywhere in the US where there wasn't a big turnout. Only the geography is different. They're all there to see the dentists, they're all there to see the optician. And even if they don't know it because they're so preoccupied by the pain in their teeth, they all need to see the doctor, too."

Brock, who is 78 and still has a British accent, explains the inspiration for his work with a story about an astronaut. "I had the privilege of having breakfast with Ed Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon," he says. "I told him that when I was a young cowboy, or vaquero, on the Brazil border of British Guyana, where all the cowboys were Indians, the Wapishana people gave me a horse that went bucking across the savannah and had a collision with the side of the corral.

"I was very badly injured but the nearest doctor was 26 days away on foot, through a narrow trail in the rainforest where you couldn't take horses. Ed said: 'Gosh, I was on the Moon and I was only three days from a doctor'. Sure, I said, but for those people who lived in the Upper Amazon, and the 50 million people we're now dealing with in the US, they might as well be on the Moon for the opportunity they have to get the healthcare they need."

Straight off his flight to London, Brock has come to see how free healthcare works in his country of birth. First, a look around a walk-in clinic in Vauxhall, where GPs are amazed to hear that poor Americans should need to rely on a charity that was originally conceived to treat people in the developing world. Then the short journey for dinner to the south London home of Clare Gerada, Britain's most prominent GP and until recently the chair of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Dr Gerada has put on a barbecue and invited doctor friends to meet Brock, whose work she discovered during a trip to Chicago. "Clare is the only British doctor who has had an opportunity to look at the state of affairs over there," Brock says as they greet each other. Dr Gerada recalls her shock during a three-day RAM clinic at Malcolm X College, right inside the city's world-beating medical district. She went in 2010 at the start of the controversial NHS reforms "to see what a privatised medical system would look like", she says.

"I was humbled. These people were queuing all through the night in the rain. People like you and me, young people with families. When I was there, a young man died of a dental abscess. He died from a dental abscess."

Earlier the same day, Ed Miliband had used Prime Minister's Questions to switch the focus of Labour's pre-election campaigning to the NHS during its radical reform under the Coalition. Days later, in a survey of senior NHS leaders by the Nuffield Trust think-tank, almost half thought healthcare would no longer be free at the point of use in England 10 years from now.

"What I learnt from Chicago is that we must never go down the route towards a marketised, competitive healthcare system," Dr Gerada adds. "No matter what people say about the NHS, you will never fear cost. You will never fear that you will die from a dental abscess because you can't afford to seek help."

Brock, with his open-neck khaki shirt, cuts an incongruous figure in the genteel surroundings of Dr Gerada's barbecue. As he tells his stories of men on the Moon and taming horses in the Amazon, cheers drift over south London from the Oval cricket ground. He has become an expert in the complexities and failures of the US healthcare system, and often talks at congressional and senate hearings in Washington. But he has only distant memories of the NHS. What does it mean to him? "It means that at least everybody has a shot," he says.

Recording the scene is Paul Michael Angell, a British documentary maker who is halfway through shooting Medicine Man, a film about Brock. He, too, is fascinated as much by Brock's medical work as he is his own story and unshakable devotion. "Stan's in great shape but he has no house, wife or children," Angell says. "His family is charity and his home is the office. I wanted to know what drives a man to do that and what he feels he has sacrificed."

Brock's story starts in Preston, Lancashire, where he was born into a modest home as the son of a civil servant. When his parents were dispatched to British Guyana, a colony until 1966, Brock was sent to boarding school in Dorset on a free scholarship. He was bullied by his more privileged classmates and, despite dreams of joining the Navy, when he got the chance to visit his parents aged 17, he never came home. He fell in love with the wildlife, including jaguars, as well as the Wapishana tribe, whose land spans the forest and savannahs of the Brazil-Guyana border. He learnt their language, and became a cowboy, eventually running the vast Dadanawa Ranch. When an intrepid American wildlife film-maker visited in the late 1960s with a big camera and wooden tripod, he teamed up with Brock and made him a star.

Brock co-presented Wild Kingdom, which had 30 million viewers every Sunday night. Later, he got his own show: Stan Brock's Expedition Danger. YouTube carries some of his work, including a documentary called M'Bogo Safari, in which he lassoes and then wrestles buffalo from horseback in Zimbabwe, and Escape from Angola, a 1976 film by Ivan Tors, of Flipper fame.

Brock, who wears the same outfit almost 40 years later, shirt still buttoned dangerously low, could have gone on to Hollywood and a comfortable life, but something was stirring beneath his swept-back hair. In 1983, he quit and sold everything he owned. Appalled by the high death rates among the Wapishana from treatable illnesses such as malaria, he returned to establish RAM, an airborne medical service to bring free healthcare to those in need. He still has operations in Guatemala, Haiti and beyond but early on realised that "there are Wapishanas everywhere". Now operations in the US occupy most of his time and budget.

Dentistry and eye care are the most in demand, but typically highlight other, often related, conditions and challenges. Bad teeth lead to a bad diet, and diabetes or hypertension. Bad eyes limit job prospects. "When the patient gets out of the dental chair after a full mouth extraction, or the kid who's got glasses for the first time can see the leaves on the tree and they hug the dentist or the eye doctor, that's a special moment," Brock says.

All the doctors who hang on his words in south London have the same question: is Obamacare, the President's fraught attempt to improve access to treatment, going to solve these problems? He pulls out a photo taken inside a senator's office. Brock stands next to the full text of the Affordable Care Act. The pile of paper towers above him to a height of 10ft. "Nobody has been able to show us where it provides dentistry for adults or eye care and eyeglasses," he says. "I don't take sides politically. I'm not an American, I'm just the voice of the homeless and the under-served. But unless they fix these basic things, we're going to be doing this long after my lifetime."

The scale and spectacle of Brock's operations in big US cities first attracted major media attention in 2007, when The New York Times magazine ran a series of black-and-white photos of a clinic in West Virginia. "They did 12 pages in black and white and it looked like Guatemala," Brock recalls. "You had to read the captions to understand that this was the USA."

Americans of a certain age remembered Brock from his television days, which has helped to raise awareness further. Current affairs shows including 60 Minutes followed and soon donations and voluntary support increased, but funding is always a challenge. RAM receives no Government or big corporate money. "We just ordered $1.6m dollars of additional trucks and medical equipment, and we're not in a position just yet to pay for it," Brock says.

But what has been the cost of this work to Brock? He is a private man but there is talk of an early marriage that failed soon after he founded RAM, when his wife realised that his dedication was uncompromising. Does he regret not having had a family? Usually so quick with an anecdote, Brock pauses for some time. "I'm trying to think of a way to put this," he says. "Would I like to be married? Yes. Would I like to have children...? Yes. But I've got thousands of them now.

"We did house calls on two of them just last week. A disabled 15-month-old living out in a shack in the woods in Tennessee, gonna require lifelong care, with a single mother who was brutally beaten by her husband. One can only do so much. It's been a privilege to have provided care to a lot of people through RAM, but it's a job that's taken me 365 days a year, every year, for the past 29 years and a couple of months."

And he's not about to quit. "For the I-don't-know-how-many years left I have on this earth, this isn't the time to be sitting on the porch looking up at the Smoky Mountains," he says. "I might as well do something." µ
View a trailer of 'Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story' at medicinemanstanbrock.com Remote Area Medicine's website is ramusa.org
Reuse content

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Stan Brock: the British cowboy turned movie star who rescued millions

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Stan Brock is nudging 80. His arms, hard as oak boughs, hint at the black belt he holds in taekwondo. His khakis and dust-stained shoes recall a previous life on horseback as a cowboy in the Upper Amazon.

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The Greatest Marine Disaster (you never heard of)

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The Greatest Marine Disaster (you never heard of)

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- Wilhelm Gustloff - The Greatest Marine Disaster in History

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A Study of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

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The DIY space suit | Cameron Smith | TEDxPortland

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Cameron Smith dives into space settlement, planetary exploration, adaptation and the "Do It Yourself" spacesuit. Understanding our past from the extinction of the Dinosaurs to our present day with the pursuit of Mars colonizations, we must now seriously consider species insurance - through the lens of scale and affordability for all humankind.

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A former soldier says life as a woman in the world's fourth-largest army was so tough that most soon stopped menstruating. And rape, she says, was a fact of life for many of those she served with.

For almost 10 years Lee So Yeon slept on the bottom bunk bed, in a room she shared with more than two dozen women. Every woman was given a small set of drawers in which to store their uniforms. On top of those drawers each kept two framed photographs. One was of North Korea's founder Kim Il-sung. The second was of his now deceased heir, Kim Jong-il.

It was more than a decade ago that she left, but she retains vivid memories of the smell of the concrete barracks.

"We sweat quite a bit.

"The mattress we sleep on, it's made of the rice hull. So all the body odour seeps into the mattress. It's not made of cotton. Because it's rice hull, all the odour from sweat and other smells are there. It's not pleasant."

One of the reasons for this was the state of the washing facilities.

"As a woman, one of the toughest things is that we can't shower properly," says Lee So Yeon.

"Because there is no hot water. They connect a hose to the mountain stream and have water directly from the hose.

"We would get frogs and snakes through the hose."

The daughter of a university professor, So Yeon, now 41, grew up in the north of the country. Many male members of her family had been soldiers, and when famine devastated the country in the 1990s she volunteered - motivated by the thought of a guaranteed meal each day. Thousands of other young women did the same.

"The famine resulted in a particularly vulnerable time for women in North Korea," says Jieun Baek, author of North Korea's Hidden Revolution. "More women had to enter the labour force and more were subject to mistreatment, particularly harassment and sexual violence."

Trusting defectors

Juliette Morillot and Jieun Baek say Lee So Yeon's testimony accords with other accounts they have heard, but warn that defectors have to be treated with caution.

"There is such a high demand for knowledge from North Korea," says Baek. "It almost incentivises people to tell exaggerated tales to the media, especially if that comes with nice pay cheque. A lot of defectors who don't want to be in the media are very critical of 'career defectors'. It's worth keeping this in mind."

Information from official North Korean sources, on the other hand, is liable to be pure propaganda.

Lee So Yeon was not paid for her interview with the BBC.

To begin with, buoyed by a sense of patriotism and collective endeavour, the 17-year-old Lee So Yeon enjoyed her life in the army. She was impressed with her allocated hairdryer, although infrequent electricity meant she had little use for it.

Daily routines for men and women were roughly the same. Women tended to have slightly shorter physical training regimes - but they were also required to perform daily chores such as cleaning, and cooking that male soldiers were exempted from.

"North Korea is a traditional male-dominated society and traditional gender roles remain," says Juliette Morillot, author of North Korea in 100 questions, published in French. "Women are still seen ttukong unjeongsu, which literally translates as 'cooking pot lid drivers', and means that they should 'stay in the kitchen where they belong'."

The hard training and dwindling food rations took their toll on the bodies of Lee So Yeon and her fellow recruits.

"After six months to a year of service, we wouldn't menstruate any more because of malnutrition and the stressful environment," she says.

"The female soldiers were saying that they are glad that they are not having periods. They were saying that they were glad because the situation is so bad if they were having periods too that would have been worse."

Who defects?

Roughly 70% of North Korean defectors are female - a fact some link to higher levels of unemployment among women

More than half are in their 20s or 30s, in part because it is easier for younger people to swim rivers and weather an arduous journey

So Yeon says that the army failed to make provision for menstruation, during her time in the military, and that she and other female colleagues often had no choice but to reuse sanitary pads.

"Women to this day still use the traditional white cotton pads," says Juliette Morillot. "They have to be washed every night when out of men's sight, so women get up early and wash them."

And having just returned from a field visit where she spoke to several female soldiers, Morillot confirms that they often do miss their periods.

"One of the girls I spoke with, who was 20, told me she trained so much that she had skipped her periods for two years," she says.

Though Lee So Yeon joined the army voluntarily, in 2015 it was announced that all women in North Korea must do seven years' military service from the age of 18.

At the same time North Korea's government took the unusual step of saying it would distribute a premium female sanitary brand called Daedong in most female units.

"This may have been a way to atone for conditions of the past," says Jieun Baek. "That statement may have been to overcorrect for this well-known phenomenon that conditions for women used to be bad. It may have been a way to boost morale and get more women to think, 'Wow, we will be taken care of.'"

A premium cosmetic brand Pyongyang Products was also recently distributed to several female aviation units, following a call by Kim Jong-un in 2016 for North Korean beauty products to compete with global brands like Lancome, Chanel and Christian Dior.

Despite this, female soldiers stationed in the countryside don't always have access to private toilets, with some telling Morillot they often have to relieve themselves in front of men, making them feel especially vulnerable.

Military service in North Korea

North Korean women must serve a minimum of seven years in the military, and men are required to serve 10 - this is the longest mandatory service in the world

It's estimated that about 40% of women aged between 18 and 25 are in uniform - a number that is expected to grow, as military service became compulsory for women only two years ago

The government says about 15% of the country's budget is spent on the military, but think tanks say the figure could be up to 40%

Gifted students with special skills - for example in sports and music - may be excused military service

Sexual harassment, say both Baek and Morillot, is rife.

Morillot says that when she broached the subject of rape in the army with serving female soldiers, "most women said it happens to others". None said they had experienced it personally.

Lee So Yeon also says that she was not raped during her time in the army between 1992 and 2001, but that many of her comrades were.

"The company commander would stay in his room at the unit after hours and rape the female soldiers under his command. This would happen over and over without an end."

North Korea's military says that it takes sexual abuse seriously, with a jail sentence of up to seven years for men found guilty of rape.

"But most of the time nobody is willing to testify. So men often go unpunished," says Juliette Morillot.

She adds that silence about sexual abuse in the army is rooted in the "patriarchal attitudes of North Korean society" - the same attitudes that ensure that women in the army do most of the chores.

Women from poor backgrounds recruited into construction brigades, and housed in informal small barracks or huts, are especially insecure, she says.

"Domestic violence is still widely accepted, and not reported, so it is the same in the army. But I should really stress the fact that you have the same kind of culture (of harassment) in the South Korean army."

Lee So Yeon, who served as a sergeant in a signals unit close to the South Korean border, finally left the army at the age of 28. She was relieved to have the chance to spend more time with her family, but also felt she wasn't equipped for life outside the military and struggled financially.

It was in 2008 that she decided to escape to South Korea.

At the first attempt she was caught at the border with China and sent to a prison camp for a year.

On her second attempt, shortly after leaving prison, she swam the Tumen river and crossed into China. There, at the border, she had a rendezvous with a broker, who arranged for her to move through China to South Korea.

Listen to BBC Outlook A Woman Inside North Korea's Army

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Rape and no periods in North Korea's army

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A former soldier says life as a woman in the world's fourth-largest army was so tough that most soon stopped menstruating. And rape, she says, was a fact of life for many of those she served with. For almost 10 years Lee So Yeon slept on the bottom bunk bed, in a room she shared with more than two dozen women.

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CLOSE

PHOENIX -- Isaiah Acosta is a 17-year-old from Phoenix who was born without pathways for oxygen to enter his body.

He also was born without a jaw, has never tasted food and is mute, but communicates through sign language, gestures and primarily texting on his phone.

"He's not scared to be rejected," his mother, Tarah, says, in a video featuring her son. He has been offered a cosmetic jaw and turned it down, she said.

Isaiah also loves hip-hop, writes raps and dreams of being a rapper.

A Phoenix rapper helped make that dream come true as part of a short documentary on Acosta that started going viral immediately after it was released Thursday morning.

Giving Isaiah a voice

"We were talking a little earlier and I definitely agree with you that you should always rise to be able to do what you want and, you know, never let the opinions of others hold you back from achieving your goals," rapper Trap House tells Acosta in the video.

He rapped the lyrics Acosta wrote, serving as his voice:

"I don't care what people think of me / proud and honored that they carry me / jaw gone but I love myself / like a lion to my family / heart beat through a tragedy."

They also recorded a music video for his song and will be appearing at the South by Southwest Music Festival on March 11 with the video's director, Torben Bernhard.

Upworthy's post featuring the video was viewed more nearly half a million times and liked more than 9,000 times in nine hours.

How to support Isaiah

The video and Isaiah's song, "Oxygen to Fly," are part of a special project from Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

You can download the song, which makes a donation to CMN Hospitals, on iTunes, Spotify or at oxygentofly.org.

Acosta posted on Instagram that the song "is helping thousands and thousands of kids and teens around the world at CMNH" and that if he can help one voiceless person, he'll feel like he did what he had to do.

Last August, CMN Hospitals named Acosta the 2016-17 Arizona Champion, which means he's serving as an ambassador for children treated by the network's hospitals. In Phoenix, donations to CMN Hospitals go to the Phoenix Children's Hospital and the Hope Fund.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2mueASS

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Born without a jaw, this teen found a way for people to hear his voice

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CLOSE PHOENIX -- Isaiah Acosta is a 17-year-old from Phoenix who was born without pathways for oxygen to enter his body. He also was born without a jaw, has never tasted food and is mute, but communicates through sign language, gestures and primarily texting on his phone.

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Trump also signed a waiver officially delaying the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for six months, a National Security Council official said. But the State Department's security arm is planning for potentially violent protests at US embassies and consulates.

CNN's Oren Liebermann, who is based in Jerusalem, walks us through what's at stake.

The final status of Jerusalem has always been one of the most difficult and sensitive questions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For years, US policy has been to avoid declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel in the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, as the Palestinians also claim Jerusalem as their capital. It was argued that a unilateral decision would break with international consensus and prejudge an issue that was supposed to be left to negotiations.

Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital has also moved the United States a big step closer to relocating the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which would be seen as cementing Israeli sovereignty over the city.

How would the embassy move work?

In theory, moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem could be simple. There is already a US consulate in Jerusalem -- but the US has decided against simply switching the names on the doors, upgrading the consulate to an embassy in Jerusalem and declaring the Tel Aviv location a consulate.

Instead, Trump directed the State Department "to begin preparations to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem." His directive, Trump said, would allow the State Department to begin hiring architects and building contractors to build an embassy that would be "a magnificent tribute to peace."

But the challenges are not simply logistic. Moving the embassy risks setting off diplomatic crises with Arab states that could include widespread protests outside US diplomatic offices in those and other countries.There was widespread condemnation from the Arab world after Trump's decision was announced.

Give me some history ...

The United Nations partition plan drawn up in 1947 envisaged Jerusalem as a separate "international city." But the war that followed Israel's declaration of independence one year later left the city divided. When fighting ended in 1949, the armistice border -- often called the Green Line because it was drawn in green ink -- saw Israel in control of the western half, and Jordan in control of the eastern half, which included the famous Old City.

When did that change?

During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied East Jerusalem. Since then, all of the city has been under Israel's authority. The city marks "Jerusalem Day" in late May or early June. But Palestinians, and many in the international community, continue to see East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Who lives in Jerusalem?

Roughly 850,000 people live in Jerusalem -- 37% are Arab and 61% are Jewish, according to the independent think tank Jerusalem Institute. The Jewish population includes around 200,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the rest split generally between religious Zionist and secular Jews. Of the city's Arab population, 96% is Muslim; the other 4% is Christian.

The vast majority of the Palestinian population lives in East Jerusalem. Although there are some mixed neighborhoods in Jerusalem where both Israelis and Arabs live, most of the neighborhoods are split.

Have any countries ever had their embassy in Jerusalem?

Yes. Before 1980 a number of countries did, including the Netherlands and Costa Rica. But in July of that year, Israel passed a law that declared Jerusalem the united capital of Israel. The United Nations Security Council responded with a resolution condemning Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and declared it a violation of international law.

So countries moved their embassies out of the city?

Correct. In 2006, Costa Rica and El Salvador were the last to move their embassies out of Jerusalem, joining the rest of the world in locating their embassies in Tel Aviv.

What about consulates?

Some countries do maintain consulates in Jerusalem, including the United States, which has one in the western part of the city. Other countries -- such as Britain and France, for instance -- have a consulate in the eastern part of the city, which serve as their countries' main representation in the Palestinian territories.

What was America's position before Trump's announcement?

The US has never had its embassy in Jerusalem. It has always been in Tel Aviv, with the Ambassador's residence in Herzliya Pituach, about 30 minutes north.

That sounds pretty straightforward ...

Wait a minute, it gets more complicated. In 1989, Israel began leasing to the US a plot of land in Jerusalem for a new embassy. The 99-year lease cost $1 per year. To this day, the plot has not been developed, and it remains an empty field.

OK. Keep going...

In 1995, the US Congress passed a law requiring America to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Proponents said the US should respect Israel's choice of Jerusalem as its capital, and recognize it as such.

So why hasn't the embassy moved before now?

Every President since 1995 -- Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama -- has declined to move the embassy, citing national security interests. Every six months, the President has used the presidential waiver to circumvent the embassy move.

How have Israelis responded to this?

The Israeli government has lauded Trump's pledge to follow through with the embassy move. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump for making the decision and called the move an "important step towards peace, for there is no peace that doesn't include Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel."

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, one of the most outspoken advocates of the move, told CNN that Trump's decision was "the right thing to do, and here in Jerusalem and Israel we applaud the President."

Netanyahu said he hoped other countries will follow the US lead and relocate their envoys.

And what do the Palestinians make of it all?

Palestinian leaders are adamant that an embassy move to Jerusalem would be a violation of international law, and a huge setback to peace hopes.

President Mahmoud Abbas has turned to other world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Jordan's King Abdullah, to help pressure Trump to change his mind. The Palestine Liberation Organization has suggested it would consider revoking its recognition of Israel, and canceling all agreements between Israelis and Palestinians, should the move take place.

In the aftermath of the announcement, Abbas said it would stoke extremism in the region. Hanan Ashrawi, an executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said it meant the "death knell of any peace process."

More immediately, there are fears it could set off a wave of unrest -- perhaps even street protests and violence -- in the Palestinian territories and across the Arab world.

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why declaring jerusalem capital of israel is controversial - cnn

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Why declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel is so controversial

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Trump also signed a waiver officially delaying the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for six months, a National Security Council official said. But the State Department's security arm is planning for potentially violent protests at US embassies and consulates.

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Amazon River Dolphin (Pink Dolphins) | Species | WWF

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The Amazon river dolphin, also known as pink river dolphins, is becoming vulnerable in certain areas due to dams and contamination of rivers and lakes. Help WWF save them.

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Sharing a Bond with my Torturer, Outlook - BBC World Service

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What happened when a former Sudanese child soldier was faced with his once torturer

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Feature

Al-Hatab Square in Aleppo's Old City. Credit... Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times

O ne morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: "Who are you?" A soldier answered: "We're the Syrian Arab Army. It's O.K., you can come out. They're all gone."

The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked brown and rotted. At the soldiers' encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not crossed his threshold in four and a half years.

The man gazed around for a moment as if baffled, his eyes filling with tears. The regime of President Bashar al-Assad had just recaptured the city after years of bombing and urban warfare that had made Aleppo a global byword for savagery. This frail-looking man had survived at the war's geographic center entirely alone, an urban Robinson Crusoe, living on stocks of dry food and whatever he could grow in his small inner courtyard. Now, as he stumbled through an alley full of twisted metal and rubble, he saw for the first time that the front lines, marked by a wall of sandbags, were barely 20 yards from his house.

Three months later, in March, he sat with me under the tall, spindly orange tree in his courtyard and described how he barricaded himself in when the fighting started. He goes by the name Abu Sami, and he has the mild, patient manners of a scholar; he taught at Aleppo University before the war. In the early days of the rebel takeover, he said, his nephews used to drop by with fresh bread and meat. But starting in 2013, the shelling grew worse, and he would go six months or more without seeing another human face. There was no water, no electric light; he gathered rainwater in buckets and boiled it and used a small solar panel to charge his phone. He made vinegar from grapes he grew in the courtyard. He treated his illnesses with aloe and other herbs he grew in pots. Once, when a rotten tooth became too painful, he yanked it out with pliers. He cowered by his bed when bombs shook the house to its foundation.

Most of all, he sustained himself by reading. He carried out a stack of books from his bedroom to show me: treatises by Sigmund Freud, novels by Henry Miller, histories of science and psychology and religion and mythology and cooking, a book on radical theater by the American drama critic Robert Brustein. Some were in Russian, a language he learned as a young man. "I read these things so I wouldn't have to think about politics or current events," he said. He read plays - Shakespeare and Molière were favorites - and in his solitude, he found that he was able to see the entire drama acted out in his mind, as if it were onstage.

He led me upstairs to see his dusty study, where the walls and ceiling were shredded with dozens of small shrapnel holes that let in fingers of sunlight. He picked up a bomb fragment, rolled it in his palm and laughed. He pointed to the house next door, where his neighbor, a quiet man who kept pigeons on the roof, had lived until a group of rebels arrived, shouting, and dragged him from the door. They brought back his corpse half an hour later.

I asked Abu Sami why he never left. He gave the same answer that so many others gave me: because it was his house. And because day after day, year after year, he kept thinking, Surely this war is about to end.

In the eastern Aleppo streets beyond Abu Sami's house, little has changed since the December morning when he rediscovered his ruined city. A narrow alley leads to an open area where a "hell cannon" still sits, the homemade howitzer used by rebels to fire on government-controlled western Aleppo. Beyond it, there are buildings with pancaked roofs, evidence of Russian and Syrian bombs. There are piles of rubble so high that entire streets remain impassable. Throughout the former rebel zone that once proudly called itself "free Aleppo," there are hospitals and schools and houses - it goes on for miles - that have been reduced to uneven heaps of stone and broken concrete, where the faint smell of buried corpses still lingers.

In the United States, the drawn-out siege of Aleppo - where the Syrian regime and its Russian allies repeatedly bombed hospitals and civilian areas - was widely deplored as a war crime comparable to the worst massacres of the Bosnian war during the 1990s. The refusal to intervene, some said, was a defining moral failure of the Obama administration. On the other side, regime supporters saw only the rebels' atrocities and their manipulation of civilians for propaganda. The "fall" of Aleppo, they said, was really the "liberation" of a city from terrorist rule, and a sign that Assad had all but won the civil war.

Both portraits are false and self-serving. The Syrian tragedy started in a moment of deceptive simplicity, when the peaceful protesters of the 2011 Arab Spring seemed destined to inherit the future. Chants for freedom turned quickly to insurrection, bullets and war. But it took some time for outsiders to recognize how different Syria was, how its internal schisms - like tightly coiled springs - would provoke the fears and ambitions of all its neighbors. The Saudis and Turks wanted to replace Assad with a reliable Sunni client, while Iran and Hezbollah held fast to their one foothold in the Arab world. Russia, which intervened decisively in 2015, had its own motives: flouting American designs and protecting a reliable autocrat. The United States, having expected Assad to fall on his own, dithered over support for the rebels.

Aleppo became the rebels' last major urban redoubt. Its fall reconfigured the Syrian battleground: The Saudis and Turks resigned themselves to Assad's rule, and their rivals exulted in a victory that seemed to justify years of blood and treasure. The Assad regime happily stepped out of the limelight as the world's attention turned back to capturing Raqqa, the ISIS capital in Syria's northeast.

One small measure of the regime's confidence was a renewed willingness to let Western journalists - including me - travel the country. I was under the usual police-state surveillance, with a minder from the Information Ministry accompanying me during my travels outside Damascus. But scarcely any Americans had been to Aleppo since the regime's victory in December. The city had become a symbol of sorts, a sprawling commercial hub where every faction seemed to have left its mark. I had been trying to get back there for years; it was a place I loved when I covered the region from Beirut. I wanted to wind back the clock and make sense of how a city that seemed so averse to politics - of any kind - had been torn apart.

Even Syrians have trouble answering that question. In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. "No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition," Joudeh told me. "They know what they don't want, not what they want." In December, he said, "Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, 'We lost Aleppo.' And I would say, 'What do you mean?' It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis." For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad's crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol of Syria's future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding militias - some of them radical Islamists - who hoarded food and weapons while the people starved.

As for the regime's victory there, it probably would not have taken place if Turkey had not withdrawn some of its rebel proxies to focus on fighting the Kurds. Aleppo may have helped the regime's morale, but the war is likely to grind on for years, sustained and manipulated by outside powers. Assad needs them: His army has been decimated by war and desertions. That may help explain his use of chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in early April, which prompted the Trump administration's slap-on-the-wrist missile strike. With his manpower running out, Assad cares more about reinforcing his rule - at any cost - than rehabilitating his reputation in the West, which might have provided loans to help rebuild his shattered country.

All the same, Aleppo was a turning point, and in some ways an emblem of the wider war. Its fall appears to have persuaded many ordinary Syrians that the regime, for all its appalling cruelty and corruption, is their best shot at something close to normality. This is almost certainly true for the Trump administration too. President Trump may call Assad an "animal" and hint at more airstrikes, but he cannot unseat him, because he knows that the alternative is not the kinder, gentler place once dreamed of by opposition activists. It is anarchy, where the warlords rule not from the presidential palace but from every town and every street.

First they stole everything, then they burned everything," Freddy Marrache told me as I stumbled along in the darkness behind him. Above us were vaulted medieval stone roofs, interrupted here and there by huge shell holes. "This was the spice market - it's totally gone. The front line was just here." Underfoot was a slurry of ash and garbage. Marrache, a 48-year-old businessman with a pale, shaved head and an air of quiet alertness, made frequent visits as a child to Aleppo's Old City. The souqs were its crown jewel, a cloacal maze of market stalls packed with spices, fabrics, silks, leather, soaps, gold, meat, fruit, carpets, toilet seats - almost anything. It went on for more than eight miles, one of the largest covered markets in the world. Aleppans used to say that a blind man could find his way through them by following the smells of the merchandise. Then, in 2012, the rebels came, and the souqs became the perfect refuge for urban guerrillas.

Marrache and his sister, Marie-Michelle, had offered to show me the remains of the Khan al Nahassine, a grand old house attached to the souqs that was built in 1539 and has been owned by their family since the 1800s. I first saw it a decade earlier, when their mother, Jenny Poche Marrache, walked me through it. She was then in her 60s, and she had a sour elegance that seemed to match the place. I remember her complaining about Islamists as she chain-smoked and concluding acidly in French, "Soon I'll be dead, and it won't matter." She waited patiently as I stared at the parade of antiquities on every wall: paintings, sculptures, documents, old musical instruments, photographs. That house was a shrine to the old Levantine world of which Aleppo - with its polyglot traders, its mix of Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam - had been the center. Jenny died in 2015, before she could see the extent of the damage to the house.

Everything was gone. Even the copper wiring had been stripped out. The walls were still there, but on the far side some rooms had collapsed into the courtyard after heavy shelling. "You remember the painting that was here?" Freddy asked. I did. It was of a woman in Renaissance dress, the wife of the first Venetian consul in Aleppo. (Aleppo still has honorary consulships for many European countries.) The painting was memorable because it was painted in the same room where it hung; you could recognize the other objects and the shape of the wall. Freddy explained that the painting had turned up in Turkey, like much of what the rebels had stolen across Aleppo. An Istanbul antiques dealer told them that he would sell it back to them for $20,000. When they protested that it was stolen, Freddy told me, the dealer said dismissively, "I get things from Syria every day."

Back in the souqs, I kept trying to superimpose my memories of the place. We passed near the silk merchants' area, now blackened and silent. Before 2011, I used to stop there and visit a flamboyant young trader with a round, cherubic face. He would give me tea and drape me with scarves. His little stall was covered with pictures of gay icons like Judy Garland, a reference that his Syrian partners seemed not to get (or perhaps they just didn't care). I still have his business card, with a picture of Oscar Wilde and the quote: "I can resist everything except temptation." Aleppo in those days was a magnet for footloose journalists and adventure tourists. We would spend hours getting lost in the souqs and then stop for drinks in the dimly lit bar at the Hotel Baron, gazing at its old unpaid bar tab left by T.E. Lawrence, our heads swimming with nostalgia for an era we knew only from books.

Now parts of the city were literally unrecognizable. In al-Hatab Square, once one of the prettier spots in the Old City, I found only a giant, uneven mound of rubble and earth that rose 15 feet above the street, with grass growing in it. I almost stepped on an unexploded Turkish gas bomb surrounded by yellow spring flowers. On the square's edges, half the buildings were destroyed. It was hard to believe this was once an orderly urban setting, lined with restaurants and hotels. The last time I was in Aleppo, in late 2010, I stayed at a beautiful old boutique hotel near the square, the Beit Wakil. I remember the owner taking me down into a dark, earthen-walled subbasement to show me a network of tunnels built centuries earlier. You could travel all the way to the citadel - the great medieval palace that towers over the Old City - without going aboveground, he said. They were built during the 17th century, when intermittent wars often made streets too treacherous to walk. "Perhaps we will need them again," he said.

W hat destroyed Aleppo? It was not the sectarianism that is often held up as a key to the Syrian war. It was not just "terrorism," the word used by regime apologists to fend off any share of blame. Those things played a role, but the core of the conflict in Aleppo, as in much of Syria, was a divide between urban wealth and rural poverty. It is not new. Travelers in the Ottoman era used to describe the shocking gulf between Aleppo's opulence and the countryside surrounding it, where peasants lived in almost Stone Age conditions. Later, this divide mapped onto the city itself, as eastern Aleppo spread and filled with poor migrants. Deeply religious and mostly illiterate, smoldering with class resentment, they became the foot soldiers of a violent insurgency led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s. That rebellion burned for years and culminated in the Syrian regime's notorious massacre of 10,000 to 30,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. Hundreds of people were killed in Aleppo, too, and a siege atmosphere marked the entire city. The Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, who grew up in Aleppo during those years and wrote a novel about it, told me in 2008 that the city's cosmopolitan traditions had helped protect it. But he added: "All this has harmed Syrian society so much. If what happened in the 1980s were to happen again, I think the Islamists would win."

One tragedy of Aleppo is that this rift between rich and poor was slowly mending in the years just before the 2011 uprisings. An economic renaissance was underway, fueled by thousands of small factories on the city's outskirts. The workers were mostly from eastern Aleppo, and the owners from the west. A trade deal with Turkey, whose border is just 30 miles to the north, brought new business and tourists and optimism. I remember sitting at cafe table with two Turkish traders just outside the citadel in late 2009. Tourists thronged all around us, and the two men talked excitedly about how new joint ventures were melting the animosity between their country and Syria. "Erdogan and Assad, they are like real friends," one of them said, referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

This kind of optimism was one reason the revolution took so long to reach Aleppo. All through 2011, as the rest of Syria erupted in protest, its largest city was quiet. But by 2012, in the villages just beyond the city's edges, weaponry was flowing in from across the Turkish border and battalions were being formed. "The countryside was boiling," I was told by Adnan Hadad, an opposition activist who was there at the time and belonged to the Revolutionary Military Council in Aleppo, a group led by Syrian military officers who defected. The council was eager for more European and American recognition and sensitive to Western calls for the preservation of most of Syria's state institutions. But local rural people tended to side with a more Islamist and less patient group called Liwa al-Tawheed. Tawheed's members "considered themselves more authentic" and had begun getting their own funding from Persian Gulf donors, Hadad told me. In the spring of 2012, Tawheed's members began pushing for a military takeover of Aleppo, accusing the council of excessive caution and even secret deals with the regime. The council resisted, saying they should move only when it was clear that the city's people wanted them to. In July, Tawheed took matters into its own hands. Armed insurgents flooded eastern and southwestern parts of the city, taking over civilian houses as well as police stations in the name of the revolution. Hadad considered the move a "fatal mistake," he told me, and resigned from the military council.

By then, eastern Aleppo had become a rebel stronghold. In early 2013, elections for provincial councils took place, giving the rebels a civilian veneer. But the councils, initially funded by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, were soon under pressure from the Nusra Front, the Syrian Qaeda affiliate, and other hard-line groups. Later, ISIS forces captured parts of the city and forced residents to live by their rigid code. In theory, Aleppo was an embattled showplace for the Syrian revolution's aspirations. In fact, most civilians were dependent on a patchwork of armed rebel factions for food and protection. The constant pressure of war left almost no room for a real economy, and many of the city's factories had been repurposed by the rebels as military bases.

Now Aleppo's great economic engine lies in ruins. One afternoon, a 45-year-old factory owner named Ghassan Nasi took me to the industrial area just west of Aleppo called Layramoon. The sounds of the city dissipated as we drove west, and when the car stopped, there was an eerie silence. An entire district that once hummed with 1,000 small factories was now abandoned, most of its buildings shattered and burned. "It is a 100 percent loss here," Nasi said. We walked down a dusty street to his factory, a textile and dyeing house that employed 130 people who worked 24 hours a day in three shifts. The door still had its metal filigree gate and marble steps. "This is where workers stamped in and out," he said.

Inside, the huge factory floor was burned black and strewn with rubble. The rebels had used it to make weapons, he said. His old office had been used to house prisoners. Nasi told me quietly that he collapsed to his knees upon seeing it again last summer. "I lost $10 million in machinery, $4 million in land," he said. "Even if we rebuild, the machinery is gone, and with the sanctions, we cannot buy new machinery." On top of that, there is inflation: The American dollar was worth 47 Syrian pounds before the crisis, and now it trades unofficially at about 520. And Turkey - where much of the Aleppo factories' machinery was transported and sold, often with the collusion of Syrian owners who wanted to avoid losing everything - now sells similar textiles for less. Reviving Syrian industry, and the social glue it might once have provided, is next to impossible.

I asked Nasi what had become of his workers. He said about 70 percent of them joined the rebels. He didn't seem bitter or surprised about this. Some lived nearby, so when the area was divided, they had little choice. As for the others, they were poor and ill educated and religious, and the rebels promised them a lot. "The average salary for workers was about a hundred dollars a week," he said. "The rebels paid more."

F or many Aleppans, caught up in a conflict they had tried to avoid, the only rule was survival. On a warm spring morning in 2013, a 22-year-old man named Yasser lay bleeding in the middle of a street in eastern Aleppo. Moments earlier, he had carried his mother, mortally wounded by a sniper, into his grandparents' car. As he watched the car pull away, three bullets struck his legs and left arm. He collapsed into the street and could not move. Shots rang out over his head: regime soldiers trading fire with rebels on either side of him. The soldiers heard Yasser calling for help and told him to come toward them. "I can't move," he shouted. Then a rebel spoke from a nearby building, promising to help. When he answered, a regime soldier called out, "Who are you talking to?" The rebels quickly warned him not to answer or they would kill him.

"I was very scared of both sides," Yasser told me later. "If I went to one side, the other would kill me." He lay there, his limbs going numb, too frightened to move or speak for more than four hours.

I met Yasser in March in Sha'ar, the most devastated neighborhood in eastern Aleppo. He was short and solidly built, with a snub nose and a gruff manner. He was selling tomatoes and cucumbers from a stand, on a block where many buildings were in ruins. Across the street was a fruit stand, and next to it, a loud generator, set up by the government to supply electricity. Surprising numbers of people walked the streets. This place had been almost completely empty a few weeks earlier, but now that Russian mine-clearing teams had been through and the rubble was mostly pushed aside, Sha'ar's residents were returning to their homes. (More than 100,000 went back to eastern Aleppo between January and March, according to the International Organization for Migration.) Yasser said he was one of the first people to come back, right after what he - like everyone else I met - called the liberation. It was a gesture of defiance, aimed at the rebels. "What we lost, we will get it back," he said. He wore military fatigues, and he told me he re-enlisted in the military after he got out of the hospital in 2013. "My blood type is O-Assad," he said.

Later, Yasser showed me the place where he was wounded. It was the first time he'd been back since it happened, and the block had changed, like most of eastern Aleppo. "There was a checkpoint here, there were sandbags there," he said. He pointed out the first-floor window where an old man had talked to him through curtains as he lay on the street. He showed me the building where he thought the sniper had been hiding, about 100 yards away. He explained how his ordeal had ended: An airstrike hit the building, and the sniper vanished. A man on a motorbike rescued Yasser, carrying him to a house, where someone cleaned his wounds. Later, he was taken to a hospital, where a doctor told him that his mother was dead. The doctor put a needle in his arm and told him to count to three, and he blacked out.

I found Yasser's story credible, and his uncle later backed it up. But as I stood on the street with him, I found myself wondering: Did he really know who shot him? Bullets were coming from each side. As he lay there bleeding, whom was he more frightened of - the rebels or the regime? Yasser clearly knew how his government is portrayed in the West and seemed defensive about it. He told me a rebel group tried to blame the regime for his mother's death. Later, he said, the same group admitted its guilt and offered blood money, which the family refused to take. This seemed less plausible. He walked me down the street to his uncle's house, where he said we would hear another story about what the rebels had done.

Yasser's uncle was a big, heavyset man with a jowly face and a look of weary resignation in his eyes. He welcomed us into his tiny apartment, where he offered me a stool and sat down on his old brass bed. He sighed and apologized for being unable to offer us tea. Then he showed us his scarred arm and told us the story of how his family was devastated in January 2013. He was driving his pregnant daughter to the hospital when machine-gun fire riddled the car, killing his wife instantly and wounding everyone else. He told me rebels from the Free Syrian Army pulled them from the car and rushed them to a nearby hospital. I asked who fired on them. "I don't know," he said.

There was a silence. Until that moment, I had not heard anyone miss an opportunity to blame the rebels. With my government minder looking on, Yasser began asking where the gunfire had come from. Wasn't it from a tall building nearby? Weren't the rebels in that building? The uncle shrugged. "I don't know," he said again. I had the impression that he was profoundly depressed and past caring about what he was supposed to say. Yasser kept pressing. Eventually, the uncle caved in and said, Sure, it was probably the rebels. "My wife died a martyr," he said. "For the F.S.A., I cannot say, because they helped me and my wife. I cannot say how they are with other people." And then quietly, he began to cry.

T here is a billboard hanging over one of Aleppo's main intersections that shows a soldier wearing a helmet, with his entire face shrouded in shadow. Beneath it are the words "Aleppo in Our Eyes." The image stuck with me. Which Aleppo? Whose eyes? In Arabic, the expression conveys affection, but the words also seemed to hint at the city's fragmented loyalties, its atmosphere of enduring suspicion. It wasn't just regime allegiance that made people like Yasser tailor their stories. He refused to be photographed, and when I asked why, he hinted that the rebels might still be able to find and kill him, even after the regime's triumph. Another man described receiving a visit at his home in government-controlled Aleppo from two ISIS members, who calmly blackmailed him and went on their way, unhurried. The city had changed hands so many times that no one could be fully confident whose eyes would be watching them.

On my second day in the city, I went to see the Aleppo Eye Hospital, a sprawling compound that the rebels had used as a military headquarters. As we walked through the burned and shattered building, my government minder and the soldiers guarding the place kept picking up markers of the rebels' Islamist leanings. They weren't hard to find. A fire-blackened car out front still had the Qaeda logo on its hood. Inside, the rebels had put up paper signs to show how they used the rooms: a room where Shariah rulings were handed out by a religious sheikh, a document about Islamic punishments. There was a prison too, and I later met a woman who seems to have been kept there. She had been captured in a rural village, and the rebels killed her husband and then moved her from place to place, intending to trade her for their own prisoners. There were female jailers who beat and cursed her and called her an infidel. She told me she was given a bottle of water to wash herself with once every 10 to 15 days. During the final battle for Aleppo, she often heard the sounds of bombs and mortars exploding nearby, and her jailers would taunt her, saying Assad's bombs will kill you.

As I walked through those ruins, it was clear enough that the rebels who ruled eastern Aleppo had done some awful things there. Yet the whole hospital tour was designed, at least in part, to mitigate or obscure a very uncomfortable fact. The Assad regime repeatedly and deliberately bombed hospitals in the rebel zone, even when there was no reason to suspect that fighters were based there. No one would discuss this with me during my time in Aleppo, even when I did not have the minder with me. Instead, I had to speak to people who fled eastern Aleppo under the terms of the deal to evacuate the city in December, when the regime recaptured it. They were living in Idlib province, to the southwest, which is held by rebels, and I spoke to them by Skype. One was a young man who worked as a nurse at the Omar bin Abdul Aziz Hospital throughout 2016. He told me that the hospital was rendered inoperable 15 times by regime airstrikes. Each time, engineers and doctors would rehabilitate it, only to see it damaged again. When the regime soldiers got too close, they moved to another hospital, called Al Quds. It was so crowded that they sometimes tended the wounded in the street outside.

Stories like this have been amply documented and held up as evidence that the Assad regime is guilty of war crimes on a wide scale. A nongovernmental organization in Europe has been working for years to gather documents that would tie the Syrian leadership to these crimes in a Nuremberg-style trial. That prospect is remote, but there are signs that Assad, too, may be worried about whose eyes are watching him. This month, the State Department released satellite photographs suggesting that the regime is burning the bodies of executed prisoners in a crematory at the Sednaya prison complex, north of Damascus, in an alleged effort to hide evidence. The Syrian regime called these charges a "new Hollywood plot."

O ne afternoon, I was sitting in an Aleppo cafe with a 26-year-old man who had just got out of the army after six years. He served all over the country and had shrapnel wounds on his legs and back. His cellphone rang, and I watched his eyes widen as he absorbed what was obviously bad news. When he got off the phone, he told me that six friends from his old unit had just been killed in Jobar, a suburb of Damascus. The rebels had launched a complex attack using tunnels and multiple suicide bombers. All in all, about 30 regime soldiers had been killed. That attack was the start of a rebel offensive that reached the edge of Damascus's Old City, keeping residents awake much of the night with deafening blasts. The rebels mounted simultaneous assaults to the north, forcing the roads to close for days. I had my own minor brush with the rebel campaign. As I was driving from Aleppo to the Syrian coast, rebels opened fire on the road to our right as we passed near the city of Homs. A soldier yelled at us to move fast, and our driver gunned the engine - we must have hit 100 miles an hour on a tiny two-way road - and told us to duck our heads. The rebels were just a hundred yards away. I heard their shellfire thumping in the distance almost everywhere I went.

It is impossible to live in government-controlled Syria without noticing that there are almost no young men on the street. They are in the army, or they are dead. Veterans must carry their military papers with them or risk on-the-spot re-enlistment. At one checkpoint, government soldiers tried to grab the young Spanish photographer I was working with, who is easily mistaken for a Syrian; they wanted to recruit him. In Latakia, a beach town in the regime's northwestern heartland, I met a 53-year-old businessman named Munzer Nasser, who commands a militia composed almost entirely of older men; there are no young men left in his village. One of its members, he told me, is a 65-year-old whose three sons have all been killed in the war. Behind the Assad regime's atrocities lies a fear of demographic exhaustion. Its rebel opponents have no such worries: They can draw on a vast well of Islamist sympathizers across the Arab world.

These facts translate into a genuine gratitude - in regime-controlled areas - toward Russia, whose military intervention in late 2015 may have forestalled a total collapse. Many Syrians say they feel reassured by the sight of Russian soldiers, because they (unlike the army and its allied militias) are not likely to loot or steal. Some of my contacts in regime-controlled areas are even learning Russian. In Latakia, some people told me that their city might have been destroyed if not for the Russians. The city has long been one of Syria's safe zones, well defended by the army and its militias; there are tent cities full of people who have fled other parts of the country, including thousands from Aleppo. But in the summer of 2015, the rebels were closing in on the Latakia city limits, and mortars were falling downtown. If the rebels had captured the area - where Alawites are the majority - a result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder. Many people in the region would have blamed the United States, which armed some of the rebels operating in the area. In this sense, the Russian intervention was a lucky thing for the Obama administration too. Andrew Exum, who worked in the Pentagon at the time, told me that the military drew up contingency plans for a rapid collapse of the regime. The planning sessions were talked about as "catastrophic success."

Yet Assad's popularity is due not only to his role as the guarantor of a secular order. He has also cannily positioned himself as a unique guardian against his own regime. Just before I arrived in Aleppo in March, a high-ranking Republican Guard commander in the city issued a public order declaring a crackdown on "acts of looting, robbery and assaults on public property and on the freedoms of citizens and their private property." The order was a belated recognition of what had been going on for months: an orgy of looting by the various paramilitary groups that work alongside the Syrian Army, and even by elements of the army itself.

I heard complaints about this everywhere I went. Looting has become so common that it has generated a new word: ta'feesh, to steal furniture. One reporter for the regime-friendly TV channel Al Mayadeen said in a November interview that "this systematic looting has exceeded all limits to include murder as well as stealing and looting." He went on to describe a "rigorously organized" process in which the paramilitary groups followed the Syrian Army and pillaged at will, sometimes "dragging homeowners from their houses and robbing the houses right in front of their eyes." Another common tactic, he said, was to pour gasoline on walls and set a fire "until the tiles on the floors and walls expand due to the heat. Then they put out the fire, remove the tiles and resell them."

The reporter, an Aleppan named Rida al-Basha, described the neighborhoods where this had taken place and named the militias, including the notorious Tiger Forces, whose leaders include well-known thugs. At the end of the interview, Basha said that he had pleaded with the city government and other journalists to expose these crimes, but that everyone was too frightened. After the report, Basha repeatedly said he was threatened with death, and he is said to have fled the country.

Publicly, the Syrian state deplores these crimes, but privately it seems to condone them as a form of compensation for the paramilitary groups, whose support Assad needs to supplement his decimated army. (The rebels do it, too, and sometimes offer an Islamic justification: ghana'im al-harb, the spoils of war.) Only when the looting starts to spin out of control, as it did in Aleppo in January and February, is there a crackdown. But such systematized thievery has become entrenched in an economy that is more corrupt than ever. Regime-allied armed groups often set up checkpoints and extort taxes from farmers and businessmen, making it that much harder to earn a living. "You pay through the nose to transport anything anywhere," I was told by a man who manufactures plastics and has seen most of his profit margin disappear. "Bashar can't do anything about this. He is in survival mode." Meanwhile, war profiteers ( tujjar al-harb - another phrase you hear a lot in Syria nowadays) have become well-known figures. I was amazed to see new, lavish-looking restaurants in Damascus; some of them belong to men who are said to have grown rich from crime. Members of the old Damascus business elite wince when they describe the clientele in these places. One friend told me, "You see a guy in a business suit in a fancy bar talking to a thuggish-looking guy in fatigues, and you understand the conversation without hearing anything." Some of these men are also widely said to sell oil to rebel groups for huge profits.

Late last year, Iran abruptly suspended oil deliveries, which have become a lifeline for Syria. Iran acted because it was angry about the amount of its fuel that was being diverted and sold to rebels by regime-connected middlemen, I was told by a Syrian who has close ties to Hezbollah, Iran's ally. The suspension created a serious fuel crisis in winter. Iran resumed its supplies in mid-February, but Tehran has little choice: It needs Assad as much as he needs it. There are reports of similar tensions with the Russians, who are more interested in brokering an end to the fighting than Assad is. The Syrian businessman put it like this: "Bashar is like a man with two false legs - one is Russia and one is Iran. He keeps hopping from one leg to the other, because the ground he is standing on is very hot."

All this may sound awfully precarious for Assad. But in a sense, it is just a more extreme form of the game Assad and his father have played for decades. The Assad regime arose after an unstable period during the 1950s and '60s, when Syria was shaken by coups and countercoups. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, triumphed in part by managing a constellation of rivals who hated one another but were all dependent on him. They knew that without him at the center, chaos would return, and that would be bad for business. This is truer than ever today. And it has a secondary effect, not unimportant: Many ordinary people now see Assad as their only hedge against a far more toxic kind of chaos.

My Syrian businessman friend told me that he twice gathered about a dozen people for dinner and offered them a hypothetical in strict confidence. It is up to you to name the next president of Syria, he said. Whom would you choose? The guests were all Syrians, and none supported the regime. To his surprise, almost all of them named Assad. When he asked why, the same answer came back again and again: Assad is the only one who can protect us against his own devils.

W hile I was in Syria, I found myself thinking now and again about the vast street demonstrations I saw in Iran in 2009. This was just after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, when millions of people marched peacefully through the streets of Tehran. The crowd drew from every social class, every generation. A peaceful popular movement seemed to have brought the theocratic regime to its knees. Soon after the largest march, on June 15, the police and the Basij militia came out in force, spraying tear gas and beating people with truncheons. Protests went on for months, but eventually they dwindled to a hard core, and the regime crushed the movement with relative ease. I often wondered about all those people I saw in the streets on June 15. At the time, their absence felt a bit like cowardice to me. Now it feels more like a kind of earned political wisdom. They stayed home not because they preferred the regime but because they did not want to risk death. And perhaps because they did not want to see their country torn apart.

Anas Joudeh, the Damascus lawyer, told me that the absence of this kind of wisdom is precisely what doomed Syria. For years, he said, he and his friends cast around looking for someone to blame for the failure of the 2011 revolution. "We often asked, If only this, or if only that," he said. "But now I feel that what happened was destiny. Because there are no political or social forces in Syria. The regime emptied them out. So when the regime looked to make a deal in 2011, there was no one there." I took Joudeh to be saying that the regime might have been willing to share power, in some limited way, if the opposition had been more organized, more conciliatory. Perhaps it is naïve to suggest that the regime could have offered genuine reforms of its own accord. Police states are not known for voluntarily giving up power in the interest of building a better future. Assad has spoken the language of reform ever since he inherited his role from his father in 2000, and he has never followed through on any of it. Still, there is one story that has haunted me.

On March 30, 2011, Assad delivered a televised speech to Syria's rubber-stamp Parliament that is widely viewed in retrospect as a crucial step in the country's descent into war. He had kept silent during the previous two weeks of protest and violence. Some of his advisers and proxies had hinted, in the days beforehand, that he would make historic proposals, offering a hand to the protesters and paving the way for genuine national reconciliation. Much of the region tuned in as Assad walked up a red carpet into the Parliament building past a cheering crowd. But his speech quickly turned into a familiar, embarrassing spectacle, with lawmakers chanting his name and interrupting his speech with fawning accolades. Assad delivered a hard-line speech deriding the protesters as dupes of a foreign-backed plot to destroy the country. He closed on an ominous note, saying: "There is no compromise or middle way in this. What is at stake is the homeland, and there is a huge conspiracy. ... We have never hesitated in defending our causes, interests and principles, and if we are forced into a battle, so be it."

One former regime official told me that he recalls watching the speech with a sense of shock and dismay. He and other high-ranking officials had heard in advance the details of what the speech was supposed to say. It had been drafted, they were told, by Vice President Farouk al-Shara, and it emphasized reconciliation with the protesters. Shara had received input from several other top officials with similar inclinations. This version of the speech even had the support of Hezbollah's leaders, who believed that genuine gestures of compromise could head off a war, the former official said. Other people close to the regime have echoed this account, though there are analysts who are skeptical; it's almost impossible to be sure about what happens in Assad's secretive inner circle.

What is certain is that Assad did not deliver the speech that was expected. Instead, the former official said, he scrapped it at the last minute in favor of a much more aggressive text. "When I heard the speech, my feeling was - we are in for a long fight," the former official told me. "I was in my office. We looked around at each other and did not say a word." He remains convinced that if Assad had given the other speech, the past six years would have unrolled very differently, and oceans of blood might have been spared.

F ew people in Syria have any patience for this kind of wistful talk. Former regime critics like Joudeh now confine themselves to pressing for the smallest-bore reforms: better training for the police and judiciary, more local control in towns and cities, a diminished role for the Baath Party and its outmoded Arab Nationalist bromides. But even this will not happen while the war continues, and it may be even less likely afterward. Assad has a genius for corrupting everyone around him, in ways large and small (some of his advisers are said to be receiving land in bombed-out rebel areas). Even giving in to these mild measures of hope can start to make you feel dirty, as if you had been played for a fool. The alternative, of course, is an ecumenical cynicism toward everyone and everything. This is the default mentality for most Syrians I know.

In my time in Syria, I met one person who seemed to evade both of these traps. I hesitate to use the word "hero," because he would violently reject it. But he held onto a dogged civic idealism that was divorced from hope of any kind. In a sense, he was the inverse of Abu Sami, the professor who shut himself off from the war inside his home. He was a 57-year-old engineer named Tarif Attora, who appeared to be working himself to death running a group called the Aleppo People's Initiative. He and his teams repair water pipes and electricity lines and supply food and medical aid to people in need. They do this in both regime and rebel areas, unlike the White Helmets, the rescue group that was lionized in an Academy Award-winning documentary. He is the only person I know who has the unreserved admiration of both rebel leaders and die-hard regime loyalists.

I met Attora in the initiative's office, where he sat at a battered desk with a vast map of the city - east and west - on the wall behind him. The desk was covered with stacked files and old coffee mugs, and he interrupted our talk several times to bark instructions to site managers. ("Don't strain the lines. You're getting 50. It should be 25 to 30.") He has steel-gray hair that is cut short and flat on the top of his head, and his face - stark, creased with vertical lines, square-jawed - looks a bit like Albert Camus's might have if he lived a decade longer.

The initiative started in July 2012, when Attora gathered roughly 30 engineers and other professionals - all Aleppo residents - to talk about how they could help protect the city. Some were with the opposition, some were not, and there were arguments. They agreed on one thing: the need to keep the lights on and the water running. So they asked the authorities for permission and began reaching out to all the rebel groups. Soon they had hundreds of volunteers working with them and repair crews going everywhere, even the front lines. The state water company supplied pipes and materials, but apart from that, the initiative is entirely self-funding, Attora said. Six of its members have been killed. Many others have been wounded, including Attora.

He told me several harrowing stories about his work in what he called "hot zones." Twice he came close to being killed, and his back is now broken in two places. Jihadi groups were in control of Aleppo's main power plant for more than a year, so he ended up dealing with them a lot. Once, he saw something that left him traumatized for months. He asked me not to report the details, because it might anger the people involved and limit his ability to work with them. Despite the trauma - which still haunts him - he did not want to jeopardize his ability "to continue working in all areas," he said.

I asked Attora why he does it, and he hesitated. He seemed uncomfortable dealing with abstractions. "Freedom doesn't come from destroying the country," he said as he put out what must have been his 10th cigarette since our conversation started and lit another. "Look, people consider me opposition," he said. "But the way I see opposition - it doesn't mean I must destroy my country and put us back 100 years. That kind of opposition is a betrayal of the country, a betrayal of the ideals I've grown up with."

He seemed unsatisfied with his words, and he glanced around the room, as if he were looking for an excuse to stop talking and get back to his engineers. It was getting dark outside. "We all served the politics of other countries in our own land, whether we knew it or not," he said. "Everybody has to wake up. To be brave, to admit they've made mistakes, to come back to the right way."

I stood up to shake Attora's hand and say goodbye. His face cracked into a smile, and the phone rang. He picked it up, and instantly he was at home again, supervising repairs on a power line that would probably be blown up again tomorrow.

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Feature O ne morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: "Who are you?" A soldier answered: "We're the Syrian Arab Army. It's O.K., you can come out. They're all gone." The door opened.

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Blue Baby Surgeon - Never getting credit for ground-breaking surgery.

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Blue Baby Surgeon - Never getting credit for ground-breaking surgery.

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'Technician' showed surgeon what to do
Adviser: Vivien Thomas helped Dr. Alfred Blalock and Dr. Helen Taussig develop the 'blue baby' operation.

Vivien T. Thomas, who was born in New Iberia, La., and raised in Nashville, Tenn., had hoped one day to become a surgeon. A bank failure during the early days of the Great Depression wiped away his medical-school savings and nearly his dream.The son of a contractor, Thomas was so impressed as a youth by his family's physician that he pledged to "be like him." He had scraped together the money for his medical education by working after school and as an orderly in a private infirmary.

In 1929, Thomas enrolled in a premedical course at the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College and, after losing his money in the stock market crash, went to work in 1930 for Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University, who eventually trained him to be his surgical assistant.

At Vanderbilt, both Blalock and Thomas conducted experiments pulmonary hypertension and traumatic shock.

Out of their research came the revelation that shock was associated with loss of fluid and a decrease in blood volume. The importance of this discovery later saved thousands and thousands of lives during World War II, when casualties were treated with massive blood and blood-plasma transfusions.

Blalock, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, was associated with Vanderbilt for 10 years and built a distinguished career and reputation there. He returned to Hopkins as chief of surgery in 1941, bringing Thomas with him.

Doctors' fame

Three years later, Blalock and Dr. Helen Taussig earned international acclaim for their "blue baby" operation on a 14-month-old girl, while Thomas' accomplishments at the time went unoticed. However, the success of the procedure could not have been accomplished without his research and operating-room expertise.

Present throughout the history-making surgery, he was able to advise both Blalock and Taussig because he had performed the same operation, which bypasses constricted vessels leading from the heart, more than 300 times on dogs.

He had worked with them, side by side, in the development of the surgical procedure that eventually corrected the heart defect known as tetralogy of Fallot, or "blue-baby syndrome."

As the operation proceeded, Blalock would occasionally turn to Thomas and ask, "Is that all right, Vivien?" "Are the bites [sutures] close enough together?"

The surgery, which has saved thousands of cyanotic children, corrects the lack of oxygen in the blood that turns a seemingly healthy pink baby blue.

While the operation was a success and the little girl recovered, she later died of complications. However, what they had learned eventually guaranteed an 80 percent success rate in such cases.

"What he has done is help develop some of the most significant surgical procedures in medical history," said The Sun in 1971 of his accomplishments.

When Blalock performed the surgery, "it was Mr. Thomas, the surgical technician, who stood looking over his shoulder offering suggestions and advising about techniques. Unlike the surgeons and other specialists he has worked with for almost half a century, he has no medical classwork behind him and -- no degree," said the newspaper.

Several years earlier, Taussig tried to find a remedy for the constriction of the blood vessels from the heart, when she found a report by Blalock and Dr. Edwards A. Park on the narrowing of the aorta. Their solution was to divert blood past the constriction, and she thought the procedure could be adapted for "blue babies."

"Mr. Thomas began producing 'blue baby dogs,' he says, and spent 'hours and hours in Dr. Taussig's museum of heart specimens, opening them, and closing, looking and thinking," said The Sun.

Thomas later said that the success of the operation on the first patient "blew the field wide open."

"Until then," said The Sun, "surgeons had been wary of working near the heart because of the problems of keeping the blood flowing. Surgical procedures had to be done in less than three minutes. There was no heart-lung machine then."

A career high

Reflecting years later on the corrective surgery, Thomas told The Sun, "It was a high point of my career."

Some days there were three corrective surgeries.

"People came out of the walls," he said, "bringing in their children with no appointments. The Hopkins wasn't set up for it, and the labs weren't geared for that kind of service."

Often working 12- to 16-hour days on blood tests, Thomas confessed that, after a year of such a frenetic pace, he nearly became a patient at Hopkins himself.

Dr. Alan Woods Jr., now retired after a 43-year career at Hopkins, where he worked with Thomas, said from his Guilford home the the other day, "He was one of the best natural surgeons I ever saw in my life.

"The things he could do with his fingers were simply amazing. During surgery, standing behind Dr. Blalock, he'd advise, 'No, no the stitch goes there, it goes this way.' He really was an extremely talented man."

While Thomas later became supervisor of surgical research laboratories at Hopkins and trained hundreds of surgeons, he was himself never allowed to operate on a human.

Both Blalock and Taussig were showered with prizes, while Thomas had to wait decades for the recognition that was so deservedly his.

In 1969, a group of former Hopkins surgical residents, called the "Old Hands Club," commissioned a portrait of Thomas that would be presented to the university and hospital. In 1976, he was awarded an honorary doctorate.

He wrote his autobiography, "Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery," which was being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press at the time of his death in 1985.

At the formal presentation of the portrait Feb. 27, 1971, Dr. C. Rollins Hanlon, director of the American College of Surgeons, said, "From him I learned the valuable surgical lesson that experimental procedures which seemed nearly impossible to execute when first tried might ultimately be performed with ridiculous ease and economy of time and assistants, after the separate steps had been mastered fully. Vivien Thomas was and is a technician in the finest sense of the term, as all well-rounded surgeons must be technicians."

Today, his portrait hangs in the Johns Hopkins Hospital beside that of Blalock, who was his benefactor and most of all his friend.
--Frederick N. Rasmussen
Originally published May 25, 1997

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Vivien Thomas helped develop the 'blue baby' operation at Johns Hopkins

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'Technician' showed surgeon what to do Adviser: Vivien Thomas helped Dr. Alfred Blalock and Dr. Helen Taussig develop the 'blue baby' operation. Vivien T. Thomas, who was born in New Iberia, La., and raised in Nashville, Tenn., had hoped one day to become a surgeon.

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For two weeks in third grade, I preached the gospel of the wild boar. My teacher, the sprightly Mrs. DeWilde, assigned my class an open-ended research project: Create a five-minute presentation about any exotic animal. I devoted my free time before bedtime to capturing the wonders of the Sus scrofa in a 20-minute sermon. I filled a poster as big as my 9-year-old self with photographs, facts, and charts, complete with a fold-out diagram of the snout. During my presentation, I shared my five-stanza rhyming poem about the swine's life cycle, painted the species' desert and taiga habitats in florid detail, and made uncanny snorting impressions. I attacked each new project that year - a sketch of the water cycle, a history of the Powhatan - with the same evangelism.

Flash forward to the fall of my senior year in high school, and my near-daily lunchtime routine: hunched over at a booth in Wendy's, chocolate Frosty in my right hand, copying calculus worksheets from Jimmy and Spanish homework from Chris with my left while they copied my notes on Medea or Jane Eyre. Come class, I spent more time playing Snake on my graphing calculator than reviewing integrals, more time daydreaming than conjugating verbs.

What happened in those nine years? Many things. But mainly, like the majority of my fellow Americans, I fell victim to the epidemic of classroom boredom.

A 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were "engaged" with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10. A 2015 follow-up study found that less than a third of 11th-graders felt engaged. When Gallup asked teens in 2004 to select the top three words that describe how they feel in school from a list of 14 adjectives, "bored" was chosen most often, by half the students. "Tired" was second, at 42 percent. Only 2 percent said they were never bored. The evidence suggests that, on a daily basis, the vast majority of teenagers seriously contemplate banging their heads against their desks.

Some of boredom's progression seems obvious, such as:

An escalating emphasis on standardized tests. Fifth-grade teacher Jill Goldberg, Ed.M.'93, told me, "My freedom as a teacher continues to be curtailed with every passing year. I am not able to teach for the sake of teaching." With lack of teacher freedom comes lack of student freedom, and disengagement and tuning out.

The novelty of school itself fades with each grade. Here I am for another year in the same blue plastic chair, same graffitied fake wooden desk, surrounded by the same faces. Repetition begets boredom (e.g., I haven't had a Frosty in a decade).

Lack of motivation. Associate Professor Jal Mehta says, "There's no big external motivating force in American education except for the small fraction of kids who want to go to the most selective colleges."

The transition from the tactile and creative to the cerebral and regimented. Mehta calls it the switch from "child-centered learning to subject-centered learning." In third grade I cut with scissors, smeared glue sticks, and doodled with scented magic markers. By 12th grade I was plugging in formulas on a TI-83 and writing the answers on fill-in-the-blank worksheets. And research papers stimulate and beget rewards at a thousandth the speed of Snapchat and Instagram.

But who cares? Isn't boredom just a natural side effect of daily life's tedium? Until very recently, that's how educators, academics, and neuroscientists alike have treated it. In fact, in the preface to Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey presents the possibility that boredom might not even exist. What we call "boredom" might be just a "grab bag of a term" that covers "frustration, surfeit, depression, disgust, indifference, apathy." Todd Rose, Ed.M.'01, Ed.D.'07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, says the American education system treats boredom as a "character flaw. We say, 'If you're bored in school, there's something wrong with you.'"

But new research has begun to reveal boredom's dismal effects in school and on the psyche. A 2014 study that followed 424 students at the University of Munich over the course of an academic year found a cycle in which boredom bore lower test results, which bore higher levels of boredom, which bore still lower test results. Boredom accounts for nearly a third of variation in student achievement. A 2010 German study found that boredom "instigates a desire to escape from the situation" that causes boredom. It's not surprising, then, that half of high school dropouts cite boredom as their primary motivator for leaving. A 2003 Columbia University survey found that U.S. teenagers who said they were often bored were more than 50 percent more likely than not-bored teens to smoke, drink, and use illegal drugs. Proneness to boredom is also associated with anxiety, impulsiveness, hopelessness, loneliness, gambling, and depression. Educators and academics, Ed School faculty and alumni among them, have begun to engage with boredom, investigating its systemic causes and potential solutions. Mehta, who's been studying engagement since 2010, says, "We have to stop seeing boredom as a frilly side effect. It is a central issue. Engagement is a precondition for learning," he adds. "No learning happens until students agree to become engaged with the material."

"Yo, Mr. P., I just wanted to let you know on Day One that I'm not a science person."

"Mr. P., I'm not very good at science."

"Science is not my favorite subject, Mr. P."

Every year for 14 years, Victor Pereira Jr. (pictured, right), heard this from a handful of his students during the first week of his ninth- and 10th-grade science classes. After falling behind in specific subjects throughout elementary and middle school, students "were full of preconceived notions" of their capabilities, says Pereira, who taught at South Boston's Excel High School before becoming a lecturer at the Ed School and master teacher in the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program. Engaging the students who are already discouraged was an uphill battle.

For comparison, Pereira remembers observing a second-grade science teacher's lesson and leaving the class deflated. "Those kids were curious, they listened intently, and they were excited to take chances." In second grade, he says, "you can use your common language and experiences from your everyday life to explain what's happening and engage in the science lesson." However, as students advance in science, learning its progressively technical terminology "requires almost learning another language." Technicality can breed boredom and frustration, which breeds more boredom.

As Rose puts it, "The friction is cumulative." For example, the best predictor for how students will fare in algebra is how they fared in prealgebra. A downward spiral emerges: "You're not doing well, and you're going to keep not doing well," Rose says. "And then that becomes a part of how you see yourself as a learner."

Rose has a master's and doctorate from the Ed School, but he also had a 0.9 GPA in high school before he dropped out, primarily from boredom. He says he grew weary of the "poor design of the learning environment that creat-ed so many barriers to me being able to learn." For one, because of his "pretty poor working memory," he often forgot to bring home his homework or forgot to bring the homework he completed back to school. He says he was never taught skills like planning and organizing, and failed because the grading rubric neglected his style of learning. Eventually, "I couldn't see why I should be there. They didn't know why I should be there. We both agreed."

Sam Semrow, Ed.M.'16, can relate. She attended a public high with a 10/10 rating on greatschools.com in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, but what she calls the "lack of individualized understanding of who we were as students" discouraged her. She read novels through math class, skipped days, contemplated dropping out, and barely graduated with a 1.8 GPA.

Rose has proposed a solution. In his book The End of Average, he illustrates that classrooms are falsely designed to cater to the "average learner." Fourth-graders take tests and read texts written at a "fourth-grade reading level" that assume an "average" fourth-grader's knowledge of rock formations and the Civil War and the "average" fourth-grader's cognitive development. In reality, Rose says, "that average fourth-grader doesn't exist." Each student is much more "jagged" in his or her skill-set - advanced in memory, underdeveloped in organization, say, or vice versa. By designing for the average of everyone, the classroom is ideal to no one. And in this design, boredom runs rampant, and there's no room for a cure.

"If you see human potential as a bell curve and there are only some kids who are going to be great and most kids are mediocre, then engagement really wouldn't matter," Rose says. "But if you really believe that all kids are capable, then you would build environments that really worked hard to sustain engagement and nurture potential."

Rose suggests adding much more choice to the classroom. Allow exams to be written or taken orally. Assign students more hands-on projects, in which they become in control of their own learning. New research bolsters his theory. Since 2011 Mehta and current doctoral student Sarah Fine, Ed.M.'13, have been studying "deeper learning" (learning that is both challenging and engaging; see sidebar) at more than 30 American high schools, and they have found that schools with the most project-based curricula tend to foster the fewest bored students.

Of course, no teacher can assign and grade 30 individual projects and create 30 individual lesson plans every day. Rose suggests schools more often exploit digital, scalable technologies that can deliver readings and assignments tailored to specific types of learners. With boredom, Rose says, "the focus is on the curriculum first. I think we can talk to teachers about it second. Let's do something for them instead of asking more of them.

Still, teachers can staunch boredom. Mehta and Fine (read sidebar) discovered that even in underperforming schools where boredom was near universal, "there were individual teachers who were creating classrooms where students were really engaged and motivated." These teachers trusted students to sometime control the class. They tried to learn from their students as much as they taught. They weren't afraid to go off script.

In some ways it's no surprise Spanish and calculus were my worst subjects senior year: They had the most monotonous curricula and the dullest teachers. In Spanish we spent weeks watching the "educational" and horrendously acted soap opera La Catrina and more weeks slogging through call-and-response lessons recorded 20 years earlier, on cassette. I had by then ruled out a career in math, and my teacher did little to explain the pertinence of limits and derivatives in my life beyond that I may fail another test. My English and U.S. history teachers, however, inspired me to thrive. Mr. Howell had us imagine how Huckleberry Finn's Jim and Pap would interact if they were guests on Da Ali G Show and helped us identify fallacies by having us debate the war in Iraq. And Mr. Rice culminated each chapter of American history with a class-wide debate in which we each assumed the role of a different figure from that period, bonus points for showing up in costume.

Of course, there's value in teaching students to suck it up and work. As Mehta (pictured, left) notes, learning any discipline or gaining any skill requires a certain amount of "necessary boredom. ... If you want to be a great violinist, you've got to practice your scales. You want to play basket-ball? You've got to shoot your free throws." An overemphasis on engagement, Emory professor Mark Bauerlein writes in " The Paradox of Classroom Boredom" in Education Week, may inadvertently "stunt students in preparation" for college, where pushing through tedious work - like memorizing equations for organic chemistry - is required to advance. "In telling [students], 'You think the material is pointless and musty, but we'll find ways to stimulate you,' high school educators fail to teach them the essential skill of exerting oneself even when bored."

"The problem," Mehta says, "is that we haven't created trajectories where students see the meaning and purpose that would make the necessary boredom endurable." The problem is relevance.

Every teacher and academic I talked to kept coming back to relevance. Semrow says she grew bored because for most subjects, "I didn't see what it meant for my life." Few teachers contextualized their lessons. "Especially for 17- and 18-year-olds, we're dealing with a lot of issues about what's next for us." The curriculum rarely addressed how trigonometry and human anatomy fit into her future. But Semrow says she graduated by the grace of the few teachers who did stress relevance.

Pereira says that the examples of how biology fit into his students' lives - for example, explaining the water cycle through the Flint, Michigan, water crisis - often "weren't good enough. They're not in teenage language." To counter that, he often let students "give better examples that translate to the larger group." And when the class seemed particularly bored, he made room for in-class adjustments to reignite the lesson. For example, when he started a photosynthesis lesson one day, students sighed, "We already know this." But one student brought up a news article about scientists who were experimenting with growing plants in space. Pereira then decided the students would design their own photosynthesis experiment testing various wavelengths and light intensities, and then present their data in a form of a letter of recommendation to NASA.

Rose adds that high schools rarely take advantage of an adolescent's cognitive development. Teenagers "take on identities; they're more socially oriented. This is the first time when abstract ideas can be motivating. They become more politically engaged and think about things like justice. Yet we're still keeping them in the kind of education system... that wants nothing from them in terms of their own ideas. School has already decided what matters and [what it] expects from you. It's like an airplane: Sit down, strap in, don't talk, look forward. Why would it be meaningful?"

The beauty of relevance, Rose says, "is that it's free. If you're an educator or curriculum developer, and you saw your responsibility to ensure every kid knew why they were doing what they were doing, you can do that tomorrow."

Of course, impassioned teachers who communicate the relevance of their lessons often aren't enough. Jill Goldberg, Ed.M.'93, who teaches fifth grade at a public school in Newtonville, New York, has been shaping her lessons to be more interesting and relevant for the past 24 years. Still, her students fiddle with pencils, scribble notes to friends, and "practically have drool coming out of their mouths." She tells them, "I wish there was a full-wall mirror behind me ... so you could see what your faces and body language convey to me."

Goldberg lays some blame on parents. When she asks her students why they're in school, "they tell me it is because their parents work and so this is where they need to be during the day. Some say it's like their 'job' to go to school. ... No child ever [says] that learning and being educated is important. No one ever says that they love to learn new things no matter what the subject. No parents or students seem to believe that pure learning for the sake of learning is the goal.

"Why do my students' parents work?" Goldberg adds. "They most likely tell their children that they work in order to make money in order to live the life they want to live. But do they love their work? Why have they chosen the field in which they work? Are these adults who are inspired to make the world a better place?"

Rose (pictured, right), however, cautions against casting too much blame on parents. "Even though it feels right, it will excuse [society] from the responsibility of how we rethink our own environments in the classroom."

For example, poor scheduling also cultivates boredom. Seven a.m. start times for high school often mean rising at dawn to catch the bus, which means much less sleep than the National Sleep Foundation's recommended eight to 10 hours a night, which means severely diminished alertness. In most high schools, regardless of the subject, the day's first classes have the worst average grade. Schools that have bumped start times an hour later have seen the number of Ds and Fs cut in half.

Mehta adds that "having students take six or seven classes of 45 or 50 minutes at a time basically gives them enough time to just start to do something before the period ends." Often, much of that time is spent reviewing homework and menial tasks, exacerbating boredom. Semrow notes that "being in school longer would have given teachers more free time to reach out to me" to get to know her strengths and weaknesses as a learner.

Educators and scientists have yet to agree on a definition of boredom, let alone unearth its exact causes and cures in the classroom. The most exhaustive book on the subject to date, Boredom in the Classroom: Addressing Student Motivation, Self-Regulation, and Engagement in Learning, is 72 pages long. As Dean James Ryan recently wrote in Education Week, "Boredom ought to be considered much more seriously when thinking about ways to improve student outcomes. ... I would think it is in all of our interests at least to confront this stubborn fact of school rather than simply to accept boredom as inextricably linked to learning."

"But the biggest shift we need," Rose believes, is much more elemental. "We need to get away from thinking that the opposite of 'bored' is 'entertained.' It's 'engaged.'" It's not about pumping cartoons and virtual reality games into the classroom, it's about finding ways to make curriculum more resonant, personalized, and meaningful for every student. "Engagement is very meaningful at a neurological level, at a learning level, and a behavioral level. When kids are engaged, life is so much easier."

Zachary Jason is a Boston-based writer who writes for Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, and The Guardian.
Read about Rose's Read "Why the Periphery Is Often More Powerful Than the Core" by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, Ed.M.'13 End of Average Illustration by Todd Detwiler; Photos by Tim Llewellyn research in our Fall 2015 issue.
Read Dean Ryan's blog post on boredom in Education Week.

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For two weeks in third grade, I preached the gospel of the wild boar. My teacher, the sprightly Mrs. DeWilde, assigned my class an open-ended research project: Create a five-minute presentation about any exotic animal. I devoted my free time before bedtime to capturing the wonders of the Sus scrofa in a 20-minute sermon.

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On April 10, 1917, an 18-year-old woman named Grace Fryer started work as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) in Orange, New Jersey. It was four days after the US had joined World War I; with two soldier brothers, Grace wanted to do all she could to help the war effort. She had no idea that her new job would change her life - and workers' rights - forever.

The Ghost Girls

With war declared, hundreds of working-class women flocked to the studio where they were employed to paint watches and military dials with the new element radium, which had been discovered by Marie Curie a little less than 20 years before. Dial painting was "the elite job for the poor working girls"; it paid more than three times the average factory job, and those lucky enough to land a position ranked in the top 5% of female workers nationally, giving the women financial freedom in a time of burgeoning female empowerment. Many of them were teenagers, with small hands perfect for the artistic work, and they spread the message of their new job's appeal through their friend and family networks; often, whole sets of siblings worked alongside each other in the studio.

Radium's luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the "ghost girls" - because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plant so they'd shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock their suitors dead.

Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only 3.5 centimeters wide. The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point - a practice called lip-pointing, or a "lip, dip, paint routine," as playwright Melanie Marnich later described it. Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little of the glowing green paint.

Truth and Lies

"The first thing we asked [was] 'Does this stuff hurt you?'" Mae Cubberley, who instructed Grace in the technique, later remembered. "Naturally you don't want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you. Mr. Savoy [the manager] said that it wasn't dangerous, that we didn't need to be afraid."

But that wasn't true. Ever since the glowing element had been discovered, it had been known to cause harm; Marie Curie herself had suffered radiation burns from handling it. People had died of radium poisoning before the first dial painter ever picked up her brush. That was why the men at the radium companies wore lead aprons in their laboratories and handled the radium with ivory-tipped tongs. Yet the dial painters were not afforded such protection, or even warned it might be necessary.

That was because, at that time, a small amount of radium - such as the girls were handling - was believed to be beneficial to health: People drank radium water as a tonic, and one could buy cosmetics, butter, milk, and toothpaste laced with the wonder element. Newspapers reported its use would "add years to our lives!"

But that belief was founded upon research conducted by the very same radium firms who had built their lucrative industry around it. They ignored all the danger signs; when asked, managers told the girls the substance would put roses in their cheeks.

The First Death

In 1922, one of Grace's colleagues, Mollie Maggia, had to quit the studio because she was sick. She didn't know what was wrong with her. Her trouble had started with an aching tooth: Her dentist pulled it, but then the next tooth started hurting and also had to be extracted. In the place of the missing teeth, agonizing ulcers sprouted as dark flowers, blooming red and yellow with blood and pus. They seeped constantly and made her breath foul. Then she suffered aching pains in her limbs that were so agonizing they eventually left her unable to walk. The doctor thought it was rheumatism; he sent her home with aspirin.

By May 1922, Mollie was desperate. At that point, she had lost most of her teeth and the mysterious infection had spread: Her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and even some of the bones of her ears were said to be "one large abscess." But worse was to come. When her dentist prodded delicately at her jawbone in her mouth, to his horror and shock, it broke against his fingers. He removed it, "not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out." Only days later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.

Mollie was literally falling apart. And she wasn't the only one; by now, Grace Fryer, too, was having trouble with her jaw and suffering pains in her feet, and so were the other radium girls.

It was literally boring holes inside them while they were alive.

On September 12, 1922, the strange infection that had plagued Mollie Maggia for less than a year spread to the tissues of her throat. The disease slowly ate its way through her jugular vein. At 5 p.m. that day, her mouth was flooded with blood as she hemorrhaged so fast that her nurse could not staunch it. She died at the age of 24. With her doctors flummoxed as to the cause of death, her death certificate, erroneously, said she'd died of syphilis, something her former company would later use against her.

As if by clockwork, one by one, Mollie's former colleagues soon followed her to the grave.

The Cover-Up

The young women's employer, USRC, denied any responsibility for the deaths for almost two years. After suffering a downturn in business because of what they saw as "gossip" that wouldn't go away, in 1924 they finally commissioned an expert to look into the rumored link between the dial-painting profession and the women's deaths.

"Mr. Savoy said that it wasn't dangerous, that we didn't need to be afraid."

Unlike the company's own research into radium's beneficence, this study was independent, and when the expert confirmed the link between the radium and the women's illnesses, the president of the firm was outraged. Instead of accepting the findings, he paid for new studies that published the opposite conclusion; he also lied to the Department of Labor, which had begun investigating, about the verdict of the original report. Publicly, he denounced the women as trying to "palm off" their illnesses on the firm and decried their attempts to get some financial help for their mounting medical bills.

The Light That Does Not Lie

With the report hushed up, the women's biggest challenge was proving the link between their mysterious illnesses and the radium that they'd been ingesting hundreds of times a day. Though they themselves discussed the fact that their work must be to blame, they were fighting against the widespread belief that radium was safe. In fact, it was only when the first male employee of the radium firm died that experts finally took up the charge. In 1925, a brilliant doctor named Harrison Martland devised tests that proved once and for all that radium had poisoned the women.

It was only when the first male employee of the radium firm died that experts finally took up the charge.

Martland also explained what was happening inside their bodies. As early as 1901, it had been evident that radium could harm humans dramatically when applied externally; Pierre Curie once remarked that he would not want to be in room with a kilo of pure radium because he believed it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and "probably kill [him]." Martland discovered that when radium was used internally, even in tiny amounts, the damage was many thousands of times greater.

That ingested radium had subsequently settled in the women's bodies and was now emitting constant, destructive radiation that "honeycombed" their bones. It was literally boring holes inside them while they were alive. It attacked the women all over their bodies: Grace Fryer's spine was "crushed" and she had to wear a steel back brace; another girl's jaw was eaten away to "a mere stump." The women's legs shortened and spontaneously fractured, too.

Eerily, those damaged bones also began to glow from the radium embedded deep within them: the light that does not lie. Sometimes, the moment a woman realized she had radium poisoning was when she caught sight of herself in a mirror in the middle of the night - for a ghost girl was reflected there, shining with an unnatural luminosity that sealed her fate.

For Martland had also realized that the poisoning was fatal. And now that it was inside of them, there was no way of removing the radium from the girls' beleaguered bones.

The Fight

Despite the radium industry's attempts to discredit Martland's pioneering work, it hadn't reckoned with the courage and tenacity of the radium girls themselves. They started banding together to fight against the injustice. And there was an altruistic motive to their battle - after all, dial painters were still being employed all across the United States. "It is not for myself I care," Grace Fryer commented. "I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example."

It was Grace who led their fight, determined to find a lawyer even after countless attorneys turned her down, either disbelieving the women's claims, running scared from the powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation. At that time, radium poisoning was not a compensable disease - it hadn't even been discovered until the girls got sick - and the women were also stymied by the statute of limitations, which ruled that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most girls did not start to sicken until at least five years after they started work; they were trapped in a vicious legal circle that could seemingly not be squared. But Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account.

Eventually, in 1927, a smart young lawyer named Raymond Berry accepted their case, and Grace (along with four colleagues) found herself at the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama. By now, however, time was running out: The women had been given just four months to live, and the company seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings. As a consequence, Grace and her friends were forced to settle out of court - but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning, just as Grace had planned.

The New Jersey radium girls' case was front-page news, and it sent shockwaves across America. In Ottawa, Illinois, a dial painter by the name of Catherine Wolfe read the coverage with horror. "There were meetings at [our] plant that bordered on riots," she remembered. "The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work."

Yet the Illinois firm, Radium Dial, took a leaf out of USRC's book and denied responsibility. Although the firm's medical tests proved that the Illinois women were showing clear symptoms of radium poisoning, it lied about the results. It even placed a full-page ad in the local paper: "If we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would at once have suspended operations." Its actions to hush up the scandal went as far as interfering in the girls' autopsies when the Illinois workers began to die: Company officials actually stole their radium-riddled bones in their callous cover-up.

Making History

If the women weren't killed by the same jaw problems that had taken Mollie Maggia, they eventually suffered from sarcomas - huge cancerous bone tumors that could grow anywhere on their bodies. One dial painter, Irene La Porte, died from a massive pelvic tumor that was said to be "larger than two footballs."

The radium industry hadn't reckoned with the courage and tenacity of the radium girls themselves.

In 1938, Catherine Wolfe (Donohue after her marriage) developed a grapefruit-sized tumor that bulged on her hip. Like Mollie Maggia before her, she lost her teeth and had to pick pieces of her jawbone out of her mouth; she constantly held a patterned handkerchief to her jaw to absorb the ever-seeping pus. She had also seen her friends dying before her, and that rather steeled her spirit.

When Catherine started her fight for justice, it was the mid-1930s: America was in the grip of the Great Depression. Catherine and her friends were shunned by their community for suing one of the few firms left standing. Though close to death when her case went to court in 1938, Catherine ignored her doctors' advice and instead gave evidence from her deathbed. In doing so, and with the help of her lawyer, Leonard Grossman (who worked pro bono), she finally won justice not only for herself, but for workers everywhere.

The Legacy

The radium girls' case was one of the first in which an employer was made responsible for the health of the company's employees. It led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now operates nationally in the United States to protect workers. Before OSHA was set up, 14,000 people died on the job every year; today, it is just over 4,500. The women also left a legacy to science that has been termed "invaluable."

But you won't often read their names in the history books, for today the individual radium girls have largely been forgotten. Drawing on the women's own words from their diaries, letters, and court testimonies, my new book, The Radium Girls, attempts to redress the balance - because it was through their strength, suffering, and sacrifice that workers' rights were won. We all benefit from their courage.

Grace Fryer and Catherine Donohue - to name just two - are women we need to honor and salute as fearless champions. They shine through history with all that they achieved in their too-short lives. And they shine in other ways, too. For radium has a half-life of 1,600 years...and it is still embedded in their bones. The ghost girls will be glowing in their graves for a good while yet.

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The Forgotten Story Of The Radium Girls, Whose Deaths Saved Thousands Of Lives

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On April 10, 1917, an 18-year-old woman named Grace Fryer started work as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) in Orange, New Jersey. It was four days after the US had joined World War I; with two soldier brothers, Grace wanted to do all she could to help the war effort.

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Sue Palmer is a psychologist who realised how dangerous technology could be to young children

She's shocked about how even the tiniest have become slaves to screens

Excessive screen-time can lead to obesity, aggression and depression

When the little girl pointed at the sweets at the checkout, her mother said: 'No, they're bad for your teeth.' So her daughter, who was no more than two, did what small children often do at such times. She threw a tantrum.

What happened next horrified me. The embarrassed mother found her iPad in her bag and thrust it into her daughter's hands. Peace was restored immediately.

This incident, which happened three years ago, was the first time I saw a tablet computer used as a pacifier. It certainly wasn't the last. Since then, I've seen many tiny children barely able to toddle yet expertly swiping an iPad - not to mention countless teenagers, smartphone in hand, lost to the real world as they tap out texts.

It's ten years since the publication of my book, Toxic Childhood, which warned of the dangers of too much screen-time on young people's physical and mental health.

My fears have been realised. Though I was one of the first to foresee how insidiously technology would penetrate youngsters' lives, even I've been stunned at how quickly even the tiniest have become slaves to screens - and how utterly older ones are defined by their virtual personas.

Indeed, when my book came out, Facebook had just hit our shores and we were more concerned with violent video games and children watching too much TV. Seems like ancient history, doesn't it?

Today, on average, children spend five to six hours a day staring at screens. And they're often on two or more screens at once - for example, watching TV while playing on an iPad.

Because technology moves so fast, and children have embraced it so quickly, it's been difficult for parents to control it. And when it comes to spending a childhood in front of a screen, this generation are like lab rats. The long-term impact is not known.

Even before iPads hit the market in 2010, experts were warning that 80 per cent of children arrived at school with poor co-ordination, due to a sedentary lifestyle.

Along with colleagues in the field of child development, I'd seen a rise in prescriptions for Ritalin, a drug for attention deficit and hyperactivity - a four-fold increase in less than a decade.

And we'd collected a mass of research showing links between excessive screen-time and obesity, sleep disorders, aggression, poor social skills, depression and academic under-achievement.

It's little wonder, then, that the boom in iPads and smartphones has coincided with further deterioration in the physical and mental health of children of all ages.

Sadly, we're seeing the rise of the 'techno-tot' for whom iPads have become the modern-day equivalent of a comfort blanket.

Recent research found 10 per cent of children under four are put to bed with a tablet computer to play with as they fall asleep.

One study of families owning them found a third of children under three had their own tablets. Baby shops even sell 'apptivity seats' into which a tablet can be slotted to keep toddlers entertained.

Few know that the late Apple boss Steve Jobs didn't let his own children have iPads. I wish he had gone public on this as other parents might have followed suit.

Because the earlier children are hooked on screens, the more difficult it is to wean them off.

This is not the only worry. It's not just what children get up to onscreen that affects their overall development. It's what screens displace - all the activities they're not doing in the real world.

Today's children have far fewer opportunities for what I call 'real play'. They are no longer learning through first-hand experiences how to be human and are much less likely to play or socialise outdoors or with others.

One of the most depressing examples of a totally screen-based childhood involved a ten-year-old in London. The overweight, pasty-faced little lad told me: 'I sit in my room and I watch my telly and play on my computer . . . and if I get hungry I text down to my mum and she brings me up a pizza.'

The change in children's play has happened in little more than a couple of decades. While many parents feel uneasy about all that screen-time, they haven't tackled it as they've been so busy keeping up with changes in their own lives.

And anyway, it's happening to children everywhere - so surely it can't be bad for them?

But real play is a biological necessity. One psychologist told me it was 'as vital for healthy development as food or sleep'.

If the neural pathways that control social and imaginative responses aren't developed in early childhood, it's difficult to revive them later. A whole generation could grow up without the mental ability to create their own fun, devise their own games and enjoy real friendships - all because of endless screen-time.

It's getting out and about - running, climbing, making dens and so on - that allows little children to gain physical skills. Playing 'let's pretend' is a creative process requiring lots of personal input.

Real play develops initiative, problem-solving skills and many other positive traits, such as a can-do attitude, perseverance and emotional resilience. It's vital for social skills, too.

By playing together, youngsters learn to get along with other people. They discover how others' minds work, developing empathy.

And, as real play is driven by an innate desire to understand how the world works, it provides the foundation for academic learning.

Real play is evolution's way of helping children develop minds of their own - curious, problem- solving, adaptable, human minds.

The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends no screen-time for children under two and a maximum two hours a day there-after. This is not just due to a proven link between screen-time and attention disorders, but because it eliminates other activities essential for building healthy bodies and brains.

Babies are born with an intense desire to learn about their world, so they're highly motivated to interact with people and objects around them - the beginning of real play.

That's why they love it when we play silly games with them, such as peekaboo, or they manage to grasp some household object. This is what helps them develop physical co-ordination and social skills.

But when little ones can get instant rewards from high-tech devices, they don't need to bother with real play.

Images on a screen can be just as fascinating as the real world, and even a very small child can learn to control the images with a clumsy swish of podgy fingers.

Each time babies or toddlers make something happen on screen, they get the same sort of pleasure hit as they would from a cuddle or a splash in the bath.

When they can get instant rewards by swiping a screen, why bother with play that demands physical, social and cognitive effort?

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield says: 'We cannot park our children in front of screens and expect them to develop a long attention span.'

She also worries about the effects of technology on literacy. 'Learning to read helps children learn to put ideas into logical order,' she says. 'On the other hand, staring at a screen puts their brains into suspended animation.'

Dr Aric Sigman, who has amassed a huge database of research linking children's screen-time to ADHD, autism and emotional and behavioural disorders, also points to the conflict between screen-based activity and reading.

'Unlike screen images, words don't move, make noises, sing or dance. Ultimately, screen images render the printed word simply boring at a crucial phase when the child's mind is developing,' he says.

Yet another problem with too much screen-gazing is that it doesn't develop resilience.

Real play gives children opportunities to learn how to cope with challenges for themselves. Finding how to learn from their mistakes, picking themselves up when they take a tumble and sorting out squabbles with playmates all help develop the self-confidence that makes children more emotionally resilient.

This is vital for mental health, especially in our high-pressure world. So I wasn't surprised when this month Childline warned Britain is producing deeply unhappy youngsters - sad, lonely, with low self-esteem and an increasing predilection to self-harm.

The charity painted a bleak portrait of our children's emotional state, blaming their unhappiness on social networking and cyber-bullying.

It's understandable parents feel unable to tackle their children's social media use. After all, it has spread like a virus. In 2012, just six years after Facebook arrived here, it was the favourite website of ten-year-old girls.

That year I interviewed three 15-year-old girls in Yorkshire who have been on Facebook since the age of ten. They said they didn't enjoy it as much as 'when we were young' because 'running our own PR campaigns' - as they wittily described the constant need to make their lives sound glamorous and exciting - was exhausting and they often felt miserable when others seemed to be having more fun.

But they couldn't give up the social media site as it would put them out of the social loop. 'There's lots of cyber-bullying,' one said. 'So you've got to try to be like everyone else.'

But we can't go on letting our children 'be like everyone else' when it's damaging them. If the next generation is to grow up bright, balanced and healthy enough to use technology wisely, parents need to take action.

And that means limiting screen-time, spending time together as a family and making sure get children out to play.

Some say children need to use technology because that's the way the world is going. But there's no need to give little children high-tech devices.

Modern technology develops at a phenomenal rate - any IT skills that children learn before the age of seven will be long past their sell-by date by the time they reach their teens.

But self-confidence, emotional resilience, creative thinking, social skills and the capacity for focused thought will stand them in good stead whatever the future brings.

TABLET ADDITION WRECKED A CHRISTENING

An updated version of Toxic Childhood by Sue Palmer (Orion, £8.99) is out now.

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Why the iPad is a bigger threat to our children than anyone realises

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Sue Palmer is a psychologist who realised how dangerous technology could be to young children She's shocked about how even the tiniest have become slaves to screens Excessive screen-time can lead to obesity, aggression and depression When the little girl pointed at the sweets at the checkout, her mother said: 'No, they're bad for your teeth.'

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It's overcast in Possilpark, one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow. Outside the pound shops and bookmakers on the high street, Barbara Harris, founder of US charity Project Prevention, is giving out flyers. She hands one to James, a wiry man in his 20s. "I'm from a nonprofit organisation," she tells him. "If you know any drug addicts or alcoholics who could get pregnant, we will pay them £200 to be on long-term birth control."

"I'm a drug addict!" James declares. "You'd give me £200? But I'm a guy..."

"You can have a vasectomy," Harris replies, quick as a flash.

His eyes widen. "Two hundred pounds! You don't get the money today, though, do you?"

"No, you don't get the money until after. Do you know any women who are pregnant and using drugs around here?"

"There are hundreds of women like that around here." He gestures up the road. "Go to the health centre - that's where you'll see them." Harris leaves James studying the flyer. He's grinning, incredulous.

She asks to leave flyers at the NHS health centre reception, but the manager is out, so she's told she'll have to come back. She sticks a few in the railings outside, and props four or five in the soil of a nearby flowerbed. The flyers are hand-cut, on yellow card. There's a photo of a tiny newborn covered in tubes above the slogan, "Every baby deserves a sober start."

Harris doesn't think addicts should have children, and her charity is using cash incentives to make sure they don't. In the 12 years since Project Prevention launched in the US, she has paid 1,307 people $300 to be sterilised, and given money to many more in exchange for long-term contraception. In total, Harris has bought the fertility of more than 3,000 Americans with drug and alcohol problems - only 47 of them men. Now she's turning her attention to Britain.

"To me, it's about preventing child abuse," she says. "This is legal child abuse." Babies are being born in withdrawal, underweight, with serious medical problems, she says, and if they survive, they are destined to a bleak future. "What's the quality of life they're going to have? How many problems are they going to have? The cycle will keep repeating itself. But it's preventable. It's just common sense to me."

It isn't common sense to everyone, though. It feels profoundly unsettling to be walking around one of Britain's poorest districts with a woman who's promising people serious money in exchange for their fertility. As we leave the health centre, I think about how Harris's website says her mission is "to reduce the number of substance-exposed births to zero". If she managed to achieve that goal here, a lot of people in Possilpark wouldn't be able to have children.

In the US, Project Prevention has been compared to the Nazis' eugenics programme, but Harris isn't bothered by her critics. "They are willing to call me Hitler, but what are they doing to help? Are they willing to adopt any of these children that they think should continue to be born? If they're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. Everybody talks about the right of the woman - what about the rights of the children? They are the victims."

Addicts who decide to take advantage of Harris's offer call the project's hotline and leave their details. They are sent paperwork to take to their doctor, who must verify their drug or alcohol problem. Once they have been sterilised or had a long-term contraceptive fitted, the doctor signs papers to confirm it. When Project Prevention gets the papers back, the addicts get their money. It's a lump sum for those who choose sterilisation; those who go for less permanent birth control are paid in instalments, as long as they can prove the contraceptive is still in place.

Many female addicts opt for sterilisation by tubal ligation. I wonder whether that's because they get the cash sooner, but Harris insists it's because they've already had children and simply don't want more. "Of the last 20 women who've been sterilised, there's been an average of six pregnancies per woman, which I feel is more than enough to keep the human race going," she says. "But a lot of the girls that come to us are 22, 23, 24, and they've probably had two or three children. Those are the ones we're really excited to get, because at least you know they're not going to have another 10 by the time they're in their 30s."

American addicts learn about the programme from flyers and posters, through social workers, prison and probation officers, and from each other. "They get a $50 fee if they refer another addict," Harris says. "That's been a really smart thing that we implemented - who knows drug addicts better than drug addicts?"

She tells me about one occasion when she "went after" a Detroit woman she'd read about in the paper. Her 13th baby had just been taken off life support and she was refusing sterilisation because she wanted more children. "I said, no, she's not going to have any more kids, not if I've got anything to do with it. I called Detroit and asked my volunteers to find her. They offered her $500 to get tubal ligation. The day she had it, I celebrated."

How can she celebrate tracking someone down and forcing sterilisation on her? "I'm proud of it," she beams. "That woman has no right to have her 14th baby. I guarantee that anybody who cares about kids would do the same thing."

Will such an extreme approach take off in the UK? We certainly face similar problems. Official figures show that more than 1,200 newborns are hospitalised every year with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and thousands more are born with alcohol-related problems, often to mothers who have had other children taken into foster care. Two-thirds of children in care have parents with addiction issues; the figure rises to 80% in Scotland. Harris has come to Possilpark because a local woman, a grandmother caring for her heroin-addicted daughter's children, heard her on the radio and emailed saying it was the worst place in the UK for substance abuse. Isn't she scared to be approaching people on the street, in a place she doesn't know at all? She is, at 58, quite slow on her feet and with an accent that makes her rather incongruous here. "We'll be fine," she says.

Harris wasn't always so confident. As a child, she was so shy she barely spoke in class, and left high school without graduating. By 1989, she was a waitress in California with six sons - two with her husband, Smitty, four from their previous relationships - but she craved a daughter. "I knew the only way I was getting a girl would be if I ordered one."

She and Smitty adopted Destiny, an eight-month-old baby born testing positive for addiction to crack, heroin and angel dust. Her birth mother was a long-term drug addict who'd had one child a year for the previous five years, all of them living in different homes. Four months later, Harris got a call telling her Destiny's mother had a newborn boy. Did she want him? They decided to adopt him, too, so Destiny could grow up with her brother.

"I went to the hospital and picked up Isaiah, and he was a mess. Light bothered him, noise bothered him, he couldn't keep food down, he'd sleep for 15 minutes and then wake up screaming. My husband and I had to take shifts with him for a couple of months until he finally adjusted. That's when I got mad. I thought, how could you do this to a baby? Knowing it was the sixth baby she'd done this to - I was beside myself."

Two more children, Taylor and Brandon, were born to the same mother in quick succession, and Harris and Smitty took them on, too. After adopting the four drug-exposed babies, now aged 20, 19, 18 and 17, Harris launched her crusade. First, she tried to have a bill passed in California that would force women who gave birth to substance-exposed babies to be sterilised or put on long-term birth control. The bill wasn't passed, but Harris didn't give up.

"I thought, well, everybody likes money, so how about I just offer drug addicts money to use birth control?" A lawyer from the Los Angeles children's court gave Harris her first donation - $400 - and she put up some posters around LA and Orange County, where she was living. Within a week she had two takers.

Project Prevention now receives more than half a million dollars a year in donations. "I've never had to go looking for money in 12 years," Harris says. "Money has always come to me. People hear about what we're doing and they think it makes sense." One of her biggest donors is the billionaire Republican Richard Scaife, a key financier of the US right.

Harris, however, isn't the rightwing religious zealot many imagine her to be. She believes in God, but doesn't attend church regularly and doesn't see Project Prevention as "God's work". She has been accused of racism because her programme has been heavily used by African-Americans, but her husband is black and her children are either black or mixed race. She is in favour of abortion, but not when used by drug addicts instead of contraception. And although she says she's never tried drugs herself, many close to her have: her father took speed, her brother was a crystal meth addict, and Smitty's brother has been using crack and living on LA's Skid Row for the past 15 years.

The children help run Project Prevention from the family home in Concord, North Carolina. They go on family excursions in a 30ft Project Prevention motor home, adorned with images of critically ill babies under slogans such as "She has her daddy's eyes and her mother's addiction". "It gets people talking," Harris says. "I've had my kids' friends come along, too. We just go out and they pass out flyers. They enjoy it. It's a good experience for my kids because they've seen it for themselves and they know it's nowhere they want to go."

I wonder if she feels compassion for the addicts whose fertility she has bought. What about those who come off drugs and want to start a family? "I think I'm more caring than someone who just ignores what they're doing. These women don't want to be having babies that are taken away from them, because that's something they're going to have to live with for the rest of their lives. If I was strung out on drugs, I'd hope that somebody would stop my irresponsible behaviour."

If anyone regrets being sterilised, one of Harris's donors has promised to pay for the procedure to be reversed. "That's never happened so far," she assures me. She makes it sound simple, but it can be difficult to restore a woman's fertility after tubal ligation. "If it's not reversible, then I don't mind. If you have that regret, that's no different from getting Aids while you're prostituting - it's just something that happened during your addiction, it's a consequence of your acts. I'd feel worse if they didn't get sterilised and they had more kids whose lives were destroyed."

D'Adria Bond, 36, has no regrets - so far. She had tubal ligation a couple of weeks ago after giving birth to a baby girl, Miracle, in a Virginia drug treatment centre. She's been pregnant 11 times by 10 different men, resulting in one miscarriage, four abortions and six children. The only child she has custody of is Miracle. Bond had been using crack and alcohol since 1996, but got clean in January, when she was four months pregnant. "I was spending anywhere from $400 to $500 a week on drugs, and I was stealing to support my addiction," she says. "I came to this drug treatment programme from jail."

Her social worker gave her a Project Prevention application form, but she claims the choice to be sterilised was hers alone. "With my history and my past... I love my baby, I love her to death, and I have a lot of things I need to take care of. I think if I kept having babies, that would hinder me."

While Bond says she wants to spend her $300 on starting a new life with her daughter, Harris accepts that many others will use their Project Prevention money to buy drugs. "That's their choice." She sighs, wearily. "The babies don't have a choice."

Project Prevention has arrived in the UK because of a single donation. The benefactor heard an interview with Harris in February and immediately sent her $20,000. He's a wealthy industrial designer, originally from Washington DC, who's lived in the UK for 10 years with his English wife and two children. He cautiously agreed to an anonymous interview - he's worried that being openly associated with Project Prevention could cause problems for his family.

He has personal reasons for supporting Harris: he was adopted as a baby, and when he tried to trace his birth mother a few years ago, she refused contact. As far as he knows, she didn't have addiction problems, but it's the not knowing that gives him sympathy for Harris's cause. "When I hear of all these kids in foster care, being brought up in very unfortunate circumstances, that resonates with me," he says. He regularly donates to Médecins Sans Frontières, Save The Children, the NSPCC and Amnesty, and sees no conflict between their values and those of Project Prevention. "If there were public services out there taking care of this problem, that would be terrific, but they're not. Until such time as municipal governments can get their hands around this, this kind of programme certainly produces the results."

When Harris announced she was coming to Britain, she received hundreds of messages of support. She shows me emails from child protection solicitors, care workers, policemen and doctors all congratulating her for bringing the campaign over here. She promises all UK donations will be paid to British addicts.

Harris thinks the British are ideal candidates for her approach. After all, we already use money to change people's behaviour: charities paid sex workers to stay off the streets during the time of the 2006 Ipswich murders, she says, and the NHS gives Scottish smokers £50 a month if they quit. But the problem is those cash incentives don't result in permanent, life-changing consequences: once you're sterilised, you can never have children. The British Medical Association will meet in September to discuss the ethics of Harris's campaign, but she's not waiting for anyone's approval. Her 0800 number has been active for weeks. "If someone takes a flyer today, I'll pay them."

Outside the Salvation Army centre on Clyde Street, we meet 35-year-old Emily. She has a broken arm and a bloodied chin, and is so high she can hardly speak. She's also seven months pregnant. This will be her fourth child: her 11-year-old is with her mother, her seven-year-old with her sister and her four-year-old is up for adoption.

"The drugs drag you down. That's what it is," she sobs. "I don't know what I can do."

"I appreciate you letting us talk to you," Harris says, gently.

Emily's looking at the yellow flyer, trying to focus. Does she think it's a good offer?

"Yes, because I don't want to have any more children. I do, but I don't. Right? Because I've lost my third one. It's hard. I want more but I know they'll probably take them away."

It feels terrible to leave Emily outside the Salvation Army, confused and distraught, with nothing more than a flyer. "She wasn't crying because she was a drug addict; she was crying because she's got kids and she's not going to get them back," Harris says.

If she had tubal ligation, her life would still be terrible, I say - she just wouldn't be having more children. "Her life would be better because she wouldn't have to go through any more heartache."

But someone such as Emily is in no position to make serious, life-changing decisions. Shouldn't Harris be encouraging her to have drug treatment instead of buying her fertility? "We could spend all the money we have on drug treatment but the women would still be out there having babies." She sighs. "For every drug-exposed child we can prevent from being conceived, that's millions of dollars that can be used for drug treatment."

Addaction, one of the UK's largest providers of drug treatment, has described her approach as "morally reprehensible and irrelevant", because sex education and contraceptive advice is already part of British rehabilitation programmes. Harris is unconvinced. "Some of these women start taking drugs when they are 17, and they might not seek out drug treatment until 10 or 20 years later. So what do you do during those 10 or 20 years?"

What about the question of informed consent? The addicts may not be in a fit state of mind to give it, so Harris leaves it to doctors to judge whether their patient is able to make a rational decision about something as life-changing as sterilisation. But the doctors aren't told by Project Prevention that their patient will be getting money in exchange for the procedure, so they aren't fully informed of the addict's motivations when they make their assessment. Harris sees no problem with this. "If they want to tell their doctor, that's their choice - we don't communicate with doctors."

"What this is doing is selectively punishing disadvantaged women for being disadvantaged, instead of recognising that their addiction problems have arisen because of issues around their social marginalisation," says Dr Mary Hepburn, consultant obstetrician at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, who has worked with vulnerable women for more than 20 years. "Women may be good or bad parents for lots of reasons, and most want to have children. There is no group in society that we try to prevent from having children."

You don't know the individual's circumstances, Hepburn points out. "Maternal addiction is not incompatible with adequate childcare. There are lots of other mothers who have parenting difficulties. Why is she selecting people with addiction issues?"

The day Harris leaves the UK, a Scottish newspaper runs a front-page story about her visit to Possilpark: "Mum's Fury After Being Approached In The Street And Offered £200 To Get Sterilised." The report concerns a woman who claims she is not a drug user, yet was stopped by Harris. It says Strathclyde police are calling for anyone who has been approached to contact them.

Project Prevention's British volunteers are twitchy. Their spokesperson, Sara Stocks, wishes Harris had never gone to Glasgow. "Some approaches don't travel," she says, carefully. "What is actually enthusiasm and commitment can look a bit hard-headed, gung-ho and careless when it comes across the Atlantic." Project Prevention UK will be different, she tells me, with a focus on cooperation with existing health, drug and social workers, and a managed media policy.

Like all crusaders, however, Harris is convinced her ends justify her means. Her next project, she says, will be in Haiti. "We're going to offer depo [contraceptive] injections every three months to women in exchange for food cards. The women in Haiti are having children they can't even feed, so why are they getting pregnant? Just think about how much suffering that's going to prevent."

My jaw drops. "Step out of your job here," she implores me. "Give me one logical reason why somebody should conceive a child they can't feed!"

Then she begins talking about women in Africa who have Aids, "My thinking is, why are they having these babies? I'm sorry - tell me that you don't agree! If you know you have Aids, why are you getting pregnant and having babies that you know are going to have Aids? Babies are suffering. It's preventable."

The money behind Harris's campaign gives her enormous power, and she wants to deploy this against some of the most disenfranchised and vulnerable people on the planet. Can't she see how dangerous it is for one person to be able to decide who does and who doesn't have children? "I have the power to prevent child abuse," she says calmly. "It's huge power, and it's power for good. Nobody can convince me otherwise."

* Some names have been changed

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Should drug addicts be paid to be sterilised?

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It's overcast in Possilpark, one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow. Outside the pound shops and bookmakers on the high street, Barbara Harris, founder of US charity Project Prevention, is giving out flyers. She hands one to James, a wiry man in his 20s. "I'm from a nonprofit organisation," she tells him.