What Viral Chatter Tells Us About Bird Flu

In early September, scientists at the University of Florida confirmed that a bottlenose dolphin, found dead in a canal on the Gulf Coast in March, carried a highly pathogenic kind of avian influenza. Its brain was inflamed.

True to its label, this virus is skilled at infecting birds, but it sometimes goes farther afield. A few months after the dolphin’s death, another mammal, a porpoise, was found stranded and weak on the west coast of Sweden. It subsequently died, bearing the same virus. Between these events there was another concerning case in Colorado, when a man tested positive for bird flu. He was a state prison inmate, at work in a prerelease job that involved culling birds on a poultry farm where the infection had struck.

Later analysis questioned whether the Colorado man was truly infected or whether a testing swab had merely picked up a big load of virus in his nose. But he was not the sole human in the past year to test positive for bird flu, specifically H5N1. A 79-year-old man in Britain, who lived closely with about 20 pet ducks, also tested positive for the bird virus around Christmas of 2021.

 

Hoardiculture

When​ Possessed, Rebecca Falkoff’s cultural history of hoarding, came through the letter box, I put it on my desk next to a pile of other books, a tangle of wires left out after an unsuccessful search for a phone charger, a small pocket microscope, a broken reading light, a carrier bag full of travel adapters, a sheaf of loose papers, a selection of penknives, a pair of speakers, the jawbone of a pike, an ancient box of cigars, a blown pigeon egg, a spool of fishing line, several harmonicas, a roll of solder, a broken toy steam engine, the shell of a sea urchin, the tail feather of a ring-necked parakeet, a transparent padlock for practising lockpicking, three empty mugs and a shrivelled apple core.*Falkoff’s book led me to others. I didn’t think I could start writing until I had read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I sought out novels and short stories that feature hoarders (Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which Stepan Plyushkin ‘fishes’ in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising parliamentary career so he can walk around London in search of beautiful shards of pottery) and printed off academic articles in which psychiatrists argued over definitions. For months, the books and papers kept accumulating. I’d shuffle the pile around, read a chapter, underline things, attach a Post-it note. The pile got taller. The pile got dustier.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/jon-day/diary

 

The vital crosstalk between breath and brain

If you’re lucky enough to live to 80, you’ll take up to a billion breaths in the course of your life, inhaling and exhaling enough air to fill about 50 Goodyear blimps or more. We take about 20,000 breaths a day, sucking in oxygen to fuel our cells and tissues, and ridding the body of carbon dioxide that builds up as a result of cellular metabolism. Breathing is so essential to life that people generally die within minutes if it stops.

It’s a behavior so automatic that we tend to take it for granted. But breathing is a physiological marvel — both extremely reliable and incredibly flexible. Our breathing rate can change almost instantaneously in response to stress or arousal and even before an increase in physical activity. And breathing is so seamlessly coordinated with other behaviors like eating, talking, laughing and sighing that you may have never even noticed how your breathing changes to accommodate them. Breathing can also influence your state of mind, as evidenced by the controlled breathing practices of yoga and other ancient meditative traditions.

In recent years, researchers have begun to unravel some of the underlying neural mechanisms of breathing and its many influences on body and mind. In the late 1980s, neuroscientists identified a network of neurons in the brainstem that sets the rhythm for respiration. That discovery has been a springboard for investigations into how the brain integrates breathing with other behaviors. At the same time, researchers have been finding evidence that breathing may influence activity across wide swaths of the brain, including ones with important roles in emotion and cognition.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2022/vital-crosstalk-between-breath-brain

 

The dry-season malaria paradox, a bar to eradication, is solved

The mosquitoes that transmit malaria in Africa have short and merry lives. Six or seven weeks is as much as their adults can manage. To maintain their populations they must lay eggs in water, in which their larvae then grow and pupate. This means such mozzies fly all year round in wet places, but in those that experience pronounced dry seasons, they vanish. In theory, malarial mosquitoes should die out entirely during dry spells that go on for months, for their eggs are insufficiently drought-resistant to last that long. Nevertheless, days after rains return, so too do the mosquitoes.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/10/12/the-dry-season-malaria-paradox-a-bar-to-eradication-is-solved

 

Privatized Universe

There is no limit to human megalomania. One recent example – which went largely unnoticed during this torrid and neurotic summer – was a bizarre exchange between NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and the Chinese authorities. ‘We must be very concerned that China is landing on the Moon and saying: “It’s ours now and you stay out”’, Nelson cautioned in an interview with Die Bild. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry immediately hit back: ‘This is not the first time for the chief of NASA to lie through his teeth and smear China’.

Nelson’s accusation was strange, given that this December will mark fifty years since anyone has set foot on our natural satellite. Since then, moon exploration has been delegated to small, tracked vehicles which scuttle over its rocky outcrops. China has only deployed one such robot, which travelled to the moon’s ‘dark side’ in 2019. So the idea that it could establish sole dominion over an area the size of Asia, suspended in a vacuum at temperatures ranging from 120 degrees Celsius during the day to minus 130 degrees at night, exposed to cosmic radiation and more than 384,000 km from the closest supply base, was somewhat of a stretch.

The accusation was all the more outlandish given that it was the US, not China, that planned to launch a gargantuan rocket into space on 29 August, completing a few lunar orbits before returning to earth, all for the modest sum of $29bn. This would be the first leg of the Artemis mission – so-called after the Greek goddess of the moon and sister of the Sun-god Apollo – which eventually aims to establish a base worth $93bn on the moon by 2025. In theory, this lunar settlement will one day serve as a launch pad for a human expedition to Mars.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/privatized-universe

 

You’ve Probably Seen Yourself in Your Memories

Pick a memory. It could be as recent as breakfast or as distant as your first day of kindergarten. What matters is that you can really visualize it. Hold the image in your mind.

Now consider: Do you see the scene through your own eyes, as you did at the time? Or do you see yourself in it, as if you’re watching a character in a movie? Do you see it, in other words, from a first-person or a third-person perspective? Usually, we associate this kind of distinction with storytelling and fiction-writing. But like a story, every visual memory has its own implicit vantage point. All seeing is seeing from somewhere. And sometimes, in memories, that somewhere is not where you actually were at the time.

This fact is strange, even unsettling. It cuts against our most basic understanding of memory as a simple record of experience. For a long time, psychologists and neuroscientists did not pay this fact much attention. That has changed in recent years, and as the amount of research on the role of perspective has multiplied, so too have its potential implications. Memory perspective, it turns out, is tied up in criminal justice, implicit bias, and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the deepest level, it helps us make sense of who we are.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/08/memories-third-person-perspective-psychology/671281/

 

Neanderthal family life revealed by ancient DNA from Siberian cave

Ancient DNA from a group of Neanderthals who lived together has given us an unprecedented glimpse of the social structure of these extinct human relatives. Among other things, it suggests that their women moved between groups while the men stayed put.

Researchers have previously tried to work out what the social structure of Neanderthal groups was like from evidence such as the layout of caves and footprints, says team member Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, but the DNA provides direct evidence. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to do something like this using genetics,” says Peter.

He and his colleagues managed to extract DNA from 15 out of 17 pieces of bone or teeth recovered from the Chagyrskaya cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia, Russia. The DNA showed that some pieces came from the same individuals, so the findings represent 11 individuals in total, including several teenagers and children.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2342731-neanderthal-family-life-revealed-by-ancient-dna-from-siberian-cave/

 

Has the pandemic changed our personalities? New research suggests we’re less open, agreeable and conscientious

For many of us, some personality traits stay the same throughout our lives while others change only gradually. However, evidence shows that significant events in our personal lives which induce severe stress or trauma can be associated with more rapid changes in our personalities.

A new study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests the COVID pandemic has indeed triggered much greater shifts in personality than we would expect to have seen naturally over this period. In particular, the researchers found that people were less extroverted, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious in 2021 and 2022 compared with before the pandemic.

This study included more than 7,000 participants from the US, aged between 18 and 109, who were assessed before the pandemic (from 2014 onwards), early in the pandemic in 2020, and then later in the pandemic in 2021 or 2022.

https://theconversation.com/has-the-pandemic-changed-our-personalities-new-research-suggests-were-less-open-agreeable-and-conscientious-191308

 

What Makes Brain Fog So Unforgiving

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.

Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.

Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. It is not a mood disorder: “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/long-covid-brain-fog-symptom-executive-function/671393/

 

Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives

If anything exemplifies the power of measurement in contemporary life, it is Standard Reference Peanut Butter. It’s the creation of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and sold to industry at a price of $1,069 for three 170g jars. The exorbitant cost is not due to rare ingredients or a complex production process. Instead, it is because of the rigour with which the contents of each jar have been analysed. This peanut butter has been frozen, heated, evaporated and saponified, all so it might be quantified and measured across multiple dimensions. When buyers purchase a jar, they can be certain not only of the exact proportion of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars and fibre in every spoonful, but of the prevalence – down to the milligram – of dozens of different organic molecules and trace elements, from copper and magnesium to docosanoic and tetradecanoic acid. Hardly an atom in these jars has avoided scrutiny and, as a result, they contain the most categorically known peanut butter in existence. It’s also smooth, not crunchy.

The peanut butter belongs to a library of more than 1,300 standard reference materials, or SRMs, created by NIST to meet the demands of industry and government. It is a bible of contemporary metrology – the science of measurement – and a testament to the importance of unseen measures in our lives. Whenever something needs to be verified, certified or calibrated – from the emission levels of a new diesel engine to the optical properties of glass destined for high-powered lasers – the SRM catalogue offers the standards against which checks can be made. Most items are mundane: concrete and iron for the construction trade; slurried spinach and powdered cocoa for food manufacturers. But others seem like ingredients lifted from God’s pantry: ingots of purified elements and pressurised canisters of gases, available in finely graded blends and mixtures. Some are just whimsical, as if they were the creation of an overly zealous bureaucracy determined to standardise even the most peculiar substances. Think: domestic sludge, whale blubber and powdered radioactive human lung, available as SRMs 2781, 1945 and 4351.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/26/measurement-why-we-cant-stop-quantifying-our-lives