nature | Ascension Lifestyle

13 Feb 2024
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The ’20-5-3′ Rule Prescribes How Much Time to Spend Outside

The herd of 400-pound caribou was running 50 miles an hour and directly at me. The 30 animals had been eating lichen in the Arctic tundra in Alaska when something spooked them. I was sitting in their escape route. The ground began to vibrate once they cracked 100 yards. At 50 yards, I could see their hooves smashing the ground and kicking up moss and moisture. Then they were at 40 yards, then 35.

I could hear their breathing, smell their coats, and see all the details of their ornate antlers. Just as I was wondering if the rescue plane would be able to spot my hoof-pocked corpse, one of the caribou noticed me and swerved. The herd followed, shaking the earth as they swept left and summited a hillcrest, their antlers black against a gold sky.

That moment when those caribou shook the earth also shook my soul. It was transcendent, wild as a religious experience. And it’s not even the most intense thing I did in Alaska. I experienced savage weather, crossed raging rivers, and faced a half-ton grizzly. My brain was feeling less hunkered down in its typical foxhole—a state I’d compare to that of a roadrunner on meth, dementedly zooming from one thing to the next. My mind felt more like it belonged to a monk after a month at a meditation retreat. I just felt . . . better. The biologist E. O. Wilson put what I was feeling this way: “Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.”

When I returned from the wild, my Zen-like buzz hung around for months. To understand what was happening, I met with Rachel Hopman, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Northeastern University. She told me about the nature pyramid. Think of it like the food pyramid, except that instead of recommending you eat this many servings of vegetables and this many of meat, it recommends the amount of time you should spend in nature to reduce stress and be healthier. Learn and live by the 20-5-3 rule.

20 Minutes

That’s the amount of time you should spend outside in nature, like a neighborhood park, three times a week. Hopman led a new study that concluded that something as painless as a 20-minute stroll through a city botanical garden can boost cognition and memory as well as improve feelings of well-being. “But,” she said, “we found that people who used their cell phone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”

Other research discovered that 20 minutes outside three times a week is the dose of nature that had the greatest effect on reducing an urban dweller’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In nature, our brains enter a mode called “soft fascination.” Hopman described it as a mindfulness-like state that restores and builds the resources you need to think, create, process information, and execute tasks. It’s mindfulness without the meditation. A short daily nature walk—or even a walk down a tree-lined street—is a great option for people who aren’t keen on sitting and focusing on their breath. But turn off your phone—alerts from it can kick you out of soft-fascination mode.

5 Hours

The minimum length of time each month you should spend in semi-wild nature, like a forested state park. “Spending more time in wilder spaces does seem to give you more benefits,” said Hopman.

A 2005 survey conducted in Finland found that city dwellers felt better with at least five hours of nature a month, with benefits increasing at higher exposures. They were also more likely to be happier and less stressed in their everyday lives.

The Finnish government then funded another study in 2014 in which the scientists dumped people in a city center, a city park, and a forested state park. The two parks felt more Zen than the city center. No shocker. Except that those walking in a state park had an edge over the city-park people. They felt even more relaxed and restored. The takeaway: The wilder the nature, the better.

Nature has these effects on the mind and body because it stimulates and soothes us in unusual and unique ways. For instance, in nature you are engulfed in fractals, suggested Hopman. Fractals are complex patterns that repeat over and over in different sizes and scales and make up the design of the universe. Think: trees (big branch to smaller branch to smaller branch and so on), river systems (big river to smaller river to stream and so on), mountain ranges, clouds, seashells. “Cities don’t have fractals,” said Hopman. “Imagine a typical building. It’s usually flat, with right angles. It’s painted some dull color.” Fractals are organized chaos, which our brains apparently dig. In fact, scientists at the University of Oregon discovered that Jackson Pollock’s booze-and-jazz-fueled paintings are made up of fractals. This may explain why they speak to humans at such a core level.

Nature lifts us in other ways, too: Think smells and sounds. The feeling of the sun’s warm rays. Or just the fact that you’re getting out of the stress of your home or office. “It’s probably a mix of a lot of things,” said Hopman. Environments like cities, with their frenetic pace, right angles, loud noises, rotten smells, pinging phones, and to-do lists, don’t offer this.

3 Days

This is the top of the pyramid. Three is the number of days you should spend each year off the grid in nature, camping or renting a cabin (with friends or solo). Think: places characterized by spotty cell reception and wild animals, away from the hustle and bustle.

This dose of the wildest nature is sort of like an extended meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and there are no gurus. It causes your brain to ride alpha waves, the same waves that increase during meditation or when you lapse into a flow state. They can reset your thinking, boost creativity, tame burnout, and just make you feel better.

This is likely why one study found that three days in the wild boosts creativity and problem-solving abilities and another found that U. S. military vets who spent four days white-water rafting were still buzzing off the wild a week later. Their PTSD symptoms and stress levels were down 29 and 21 percent, respectively. Their relationships, happiness, and general satisfaction with their lives all improved as well.

When I returned from Alaska, my wife and I moved to the edge of the desert in Las Vegas. She wanted a shorter commute, and I wanted more access to nature. I now walk my dogs through red-rock trails for at least 20 minutes daily and on Sunday do a long trail run deep into the canyons to rack up my five-hour quota for the month. This summer, I’m planning a weeklong backcountry fly-fishing trip in Idaho’s Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness Area. Hoping I’ll return less frazzled, fitter, and feeling more alive.

Original article here

05 Feb 2024
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What was it like when the last antimatter disappeared?

Things happen fast in the earliest stages of the Universe. In the first 25 microseconds after the start of the hot Big Bang, a number of incredible events have already occurred. The Universe created all the particles and antiparticles — known (as part of the Standard Model) and unknown (including whatever makes up dark matter) — it was ever capable of creating, reaching the highest temperatures it ever attained. Through a still-undetermined process, it created an excess of matter over antimatter: just at the 1-part-in-a-billion level. The electroweak symmetry broke, allowing the Higgs to give mass to the Universe. The heavy, unstable particles decayed away, and the quarks and gluons bound together to form protons and neutrons.

But that only gets us so far. At these early stages, there may be protons and neutrons in the Universe, as well as a high-energy bath of photons and neutrinos-and-antineutrinos, but we’re still a long way from the Universe as we recognize it today. In order to get there, a number of other things must occur. And the first of those, once we have protons and neutrons, is to get rid of the last of our antimatter, which is still incredibly abundant.

You can always make antimatter in the Universe, so long as you have the energy for it. Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc², works two ways, and it works equally well for both applications.

It can create energy from pure matter (or antimatter), converting mass (m) into energy (E) by reducing the amount of mass present, such as by annihilating equal parts matter with antimatter.
Or it can create new matter from pure energy, so long as it also makes an equivalent amount of the antimatter counterparts for each matter particle it creates.

These annihilation-and-creation processes, so long as there’s enough energy for creation to proceed smoothly, balance out in the early Universe.

Early on, when the Universe was very hot, this process easily allowed us to create all of the particles and antiparticles contained within the Standard Model, as even the most massive particle (or antiparticle) known — the top quark — can be created quite easily: so long as there’s more than ~175 GeV of energy (the rest-mass energy of the top quark and antiquark) available for new particle (or antiparticle) creation with each typical collision that occurs.

So that’s how the hot Big Bang starts off: with this hot particle-antiparticle soup made up of all allowable species. In the earliest stages, it’s the heaviest particle-antiparticle pairs that disappear first. It takes the most energy to create the most massive particles and antiparticles, so as the Universe cools, it gets progressively less and less likely that the quanta of energy that interact can spontaneously create new particle/antiparticle pairs.

By the time the Higgs gives mass to the Universe, this primordial particle/antiparticle soup is too low in energy to create top quarks or W-and-Z bosons. Shortly thereafter, it becomes no longer possible to spontaneously create:

bottom quarks,
tau leptons,
charm quarks,
strange quarks,
or even muons (in that order).

Right around that same time that muons and antimuons annihilate and decay away, quarks-and-gluons bind together into neutrons and protons, while antiquarks bind together into antineutrons and antiprotons.

While there was plenty of energy available to create free up/anti-up and down/anti-down quarks, the onset of what we call “confinement” (or the hadron era) in the Universe means that such interactions are no longer possible; you must create whole protons/antiprotons or neutrons/antineutrons, which are much more massive that the quarks that compose them. The energy available in the Universe is far too low for that to occur, so all the antimatter, in the form of antiprotons and antineutrons, annihilates away with as much matter as it can find.

However, since there is somewhere around 1 extra proton (or neutron) for every 1.4 billion proton/antiproton pairs, we’re left over with a small excess of protons and neutrons.

All of the proton/antiproton and neutron/antineutron annihilations give rise to photons — the purest form of raw energy — along with all the prior annihilations that gave rise to photons as well. Photon-photon interactions are still going strong at this early, energetic stage, and they can spontaneously produce both neutrino-antineutrino pairs and electron-positron pairs. Even after we make protons and neutrons, and even after all the antiprotons and antineutrons have disappeared, the Universe is still rife with antimatter: in the form of antineutrinos and positrons.

It’s important to remember, even at this relatively late stage in the game (tens of microseconds after the start of the hot Big Bang), how hot and dense things still truly are. The Universe has had just a fraction of a second go by since the Big Bang, and particles are packed tighter everywhere than they are, today, within the center of our Sun. The ambient temperatures would have to be measured in the trillions of degrees: more than 100,000 times as great as in the Sun’s core. And perhaps most importantly, there are a slew of interactions constantly occurring that can transform one type of particle into another.

Today, we’re used to the weak nuclear interactions occurring spontaneously in one context alone: that of radioactive decay. Higher-massed particles, like a free neutron or a heavy atomic nucleus, emit daughter particles that are less massive, giving off some energy in accord with that same equation Einstein put forth: E = mc². But at these stages of the Big Bang, even after the electroweak symmetry breaks, the weak interactions continue to play a more important role than simply being responsible for radioactive decays for some time.

In the hot, dense, early Universe, there’s a second role for the weak interaction to play, enabling protons and neutrons to convert into one another. So long as the Universe is energetic enough, here are four extreme reactions that occur spontaneously:

p + e– → n + νe,
n + e+ → p + νe,
n + νe → p + e–,
p + νe → n + e+.

In these equations, p is for proton, n is for neutron, e– is for electron, e+ is for positron (antielectron), while νe is an electron-neutrino and νe is an electron-antineutrino.

You’ll also notice that, when it comes to these four equations, equations #1 and #3 are simply the inverse of one another, while equations #2 and #4 are also the inverse of one another. This is an indication to us that these reactions can proceed either forward (e.g., where protons and electrons interact, resulting in a neutron and neutrino) or backward (e.g., where neutrons and neutrinos interact, resulting in a proton and electron), so long as the weak interactions and the amount of available energy both allow these reactions to proceed.

So long as temperatures and densities are high enough, all of these reactions occur spontaneously and at equal rates. Under these conditions:

the weak interactions are still important,
there’s a strong enough coupling between protons/neutrons and electrons/positrons/neutrinos/antineutrinos,
there’s enough matter and antimatter for these reactions to occur frequently,
and there’s enough energy to create higher-massed neutrons out of lower-massed protons.

While protons/neutrons form and the excess antiprotons/antineutrons are all gone only a few tens of microseconds after the start of the hot Big Bang, the aforementioned conditions are all met for about the first full second after the Big Bang. During this time, everything is in equilibrium, and the Universe interconverts protons-and-neutrons at will, giving us about a 50/50 split between protons and neutrons while this is the case. Each time you convert a proton into a neutron, it’s just as easy to convert a neutron into a proton, and these reactions happen at about the same overall net rate.

But this doesn’t remain the case forever, or even for that long. As the energy inherent to each particle drops, it becomes just a little bit more energetically favorable to produce a proton than a neutron from these interactions. The neutron, remember, is just a little bit more massive than the proton, and is even a little more massive than a proton and an electron combined. As a result, when the temperature of the Universe drops to a value that corresponds to that energy difference, the proton population begins to slightly dominate the neutron population. This occurs right around the time the Universe reaches an age of one second after the Big Bang.

But then, at that moment, two additional things happen in rapid succession, forever altering the course of the Universe.

The first is that the weak interactions freeze out, meaning that the proton-neutron interconversion interactions stop occurring. These interconversions required neutrinos to interact with protons and neutrons at a certain frequency, which they could so long as the Universe was hot and dense enough. When the Universe gets cold and sparse enough, the neutrinos (and antineutrinos) no longer interact, meaning that the neutrinos and antineutrinos we’ve made at this point simply ignore everything else in the Universe. They should still be around at present, with a kinetic energy that corresponds to a temperature (assuming neutrinos are massless, which they aren’t quite) of just 1.95 K above absolute zero.

On the other hand, the Universe is still energetic enough that when two photons collide, they can still spontaneously produce electron-positron pairs, and where electron-positron pairs annihilate into two photons. This continues for just a tiny bit longer: until the Universe is about three seconds old (as opposed to the one second freeze out for neutrinos). This “second additional thing,” occurring just slightly after the weak interactions freeze out, means that all the matter-antimatter energy that was tied up in electrons and positrons goes exclusively into photons, and not into species of neutrinos-and-antineutrinos, when they annihilate.

This annihilation, of electrons and positrons into photons, represents the Universe losing the last of its antimatter. After this event, only antineutrinos, which already stopped interacting with the other particles in the Universe something like ~2 seconds ago, remain and persist up through and including the present day.

This has a big implication for the temperature of the leftover photon background — known today as the Cosmic Microwave Background — that it should be exactly (11/4)1/3 times hotter than the neutrino background: a temperature of 2.73 K instead of 1.95 K. Believe it or not, we’ve already detected both of these backgrounds and measured their temperature (for photons) or temperature-equivalent (for neutrinos/antineutrinos), and they match with these explicit predictions from the Big Bang perfectly.

The Cosmic Microwave Background, although it was first detected in 1964, required a very high precision set of measurements to determine its temperature. Although many efforts and improvements occurred throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the CMB’s temperature was only first measured to this incredible precision back in 1992, with the first data release of NASA’s COBE satellite.

However, the neutrino background imprints itself onto the CMB and in the large-scale structure of the Universe only in a very subtle way, and the evidence for that neutrino background and its properties wasn’t first detected until 2015. When it was finally discovered, the scientists who did the work found a phase shift in the Cosmic Microwave Background’s fluctuations that enabled them to determine, if neutrinos were massless today, how much energy they’d have at this early time.

Their results? The Cosmic Neutrino Background had an equivalent temperature of 1.96 ± 0.02 K, in perfect agreement with the Big Bang’s predictions. Later work, in 2019, found additional evidence for the Cosmic Neutrino Background imprinted in the Universe’s large-scale structure, but with less precision than the CMB method.

You might wonder why it’s worth belaboring such a tiny detail in the early Universe, and the answer is profound. Because of the brief amount of time that:

the weak interactions were important (during the first ~1 second after the hot Big Bang),
and antimatter also persisted (during the first ~3 seconds after the hot Big Bang),

the Universe is not evenly split, 50/50, between protons and neutrons any longer. Rather, the split has shifted substantially: to be more like 85/15, in favor of protons over neutrons. With the neutrinos and antineutrinos completely decoupled from all the other particles in the Universe, they simply move through space freely, at speeds indistinguishable (but slightly lower than) the speed of light. Meanwhile, the positrons (i.e., antielectrons) are all gone, and so are most of the electrons.

When the dust clears, what’s left over are exactly as many electrons as there are protons, keeping the Universe electrically neutral. There are over a billion photons for every proton or neutron, with another background of about 70% as many neutrinos-and-antineutrinos as photons. The Universe is still hot and dense, but it’s cooled tremendously in just the first 3 seconds. Now that all the antimatter is gone, the raw ingredients to begin building the Universe as we know it are finally in place.

Original article here

27 Jan 2024
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Laundry Is A Top Source Of Microplastic Pollution – Here’s How To Clean Your Clothes More Sustainably

Microplastics are turning up everywhere, from remote mountain tops to deep ocean trenches. They also are in many animals, including humans.

The most common microplastics in the environment are microfibers – plastic fragments shaped like tiny threads or filaments. Microfibers come from many sources, including cigarette butts, fishing nets and ropes, but the biggest source is synthetic fabrics, which constantly shed them.

Textiles shed microfibers while they are manufactured, worn and disposed of, but especially when they are washed. A single wash load can release several million microfibers. Many factors affect how many fibers are released, including fabric type, mechanical action, detergents, temperature and the duration of the wash cycle.

My research focuses on coastal ecology and water pollution, including work in New York and New Jersey marshes and estuaries that are heavily affected by human activities. Here are some things to know about reducing microplastic pollution from your washing machine.

From Fabric To Water And Soil

Once garments release microfibers in washing machines, the fibers enter the wastewater stream, which generally goes to a wastewater treatment plant. Advanced treatment plants can remove up to 99% of microfibers from water. But since a single laundry load can produce millions of fibers, treated water discharged from the plant still contains a huge number of them.

Microfibers that are removed during treatment end up in sewage sludge – a mix of solid materials that is processed to remove pathogens. In many cases, treated sewage sludge is applied to soil as a fertilizer. This allows microfibers to enter air and soil, and to be transferred to soil organisms and up the terrestrial food web or taken up by crops.

Microplastics that wash into rivers, lakes and bays can have many harmful effects. They may be consumed by fish and other aquatic animals, affecting their biochemistry, physiology, reproduction, development or behavior. These microplastics contain chemical additives, including substances like phthalates and bisphenol A that can leach out and may have health effects in humans and animals, including effects on the endocrine system.

Textile microfibers also contain additional chemicals that have been shown to be toxic, such as fabric dyes, anti-wrinkle agents and flame retardants. In addition, contaminants that are present in the water, such as metals and pesticides, can stick to microplastic particles, turning them into a veritable cocktail of contaminants that may be transferred into animals that eat them.

Washing More Sustainably

Not all fabrics shed microfibers at the same rate. A loosely woven fabric that feels fluffy or fuzzy, such as fleece, sheds more than a tightly woven one. While garments made of natural fibers, such as cotton and wool, would appear to be a solution, unfortunately they also shed microfibers that can pick up pollutants in the environment.

Some textile scientists and manufacturers are developing fabrics that shed less than existing ones, thanks to features such as longer fibers and coatings to reduce shedding. Meanwhile, here are some ways to reduce microfiber shedding from your laundry:

Do laundry less often. Washing full loads instead of partial loads reduces release of microfibers because garments are exposed to less friction during the wash cycle.
Use cold water, which releases fewer microfibers than hot water.
Use less detergent, which increases microfiber release.
Use a front-loading washing machine, whose tumbling action produces less microfiber release.
Dry laundry on a clothesline. Running clothes in dryers releases additional microfibers into the air from the dryer vent.

Several types of products collect microfibers in the washer before they are released with wastewater. Some are laundry bags made of woven monofilament, a single-polyamide filament that does not disintegrate into fibers. Laundry is washed while enclosed in the bag, which traps microfibers that the garments release. A study of one such product, Guppyfriend, found that it collected about one-third of released microfibers.

Another device, the Cora Ball, is a plastic ball with spines topped with soft plastic discs that capture microfibers. It reduces microfibers by about 25% to 30%, but may not be suitable for loose knits because it can snag on threads and damage clothing.

Filter Your Washwater

Several brands of external filters are available that can be retrofitted onto existing washing machines. External filters can remove up to 90% of microfibers from rinse water. Their average cost is about US$150. Owners need to clean the filters periodically and dispose of the collected microfibers with other solid waste, not down the drain, which would put them back into the wastewater stream.

In a 2021 study, researchers installed washing machine filters in 97 homes in a town in Ontario, Canada, which represented about 10% of the households in the community. They found that this significantly reduced microfibers in treated water from the local treatment plant.

Some companies are now manufacturing washers with built-in microfiber filters. France has enacted a requirement for all new washing machines to be equipped with filters by 2025, and Australia has announced that filters will be required in commercial and residential washers by 2030.

In the U.S., a similar requirement was passed by the California legislature in 2023, but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, saying he was concerned about the cost to consumers. An economic study commissioned by Ocean Conservancy found that filters would increase the price of washing machines by only $14 to $20 per machine. Several states are considering regulations that would require filters in washers.

In my view, requiring manufacturers to add filters that can trap microfibers to washing machines is a reasonable and affordable step that could rapidly reduce the enormous quantities of microfibers in wastewater. The eventual solution will be reengineered textiles, which won’t shed, but it will take some time to develop them and move them into clothing supply chains. In the meantime, filters are the most effective way to tackle the problem.

Original story here

05 Dec 2023
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‘What the heck is going on?’ Extremely high-energy particle detected falling to Earth

Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling to Earth that is causing bafflement because it is coming from an apparently empty region of space.

The particle, named Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, is one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected.

Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles. But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

“You trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,” said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery. “That’s the mystery of this – what the heck is going on?”

The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, and equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph. It comes only second to the Oh-My-God particle, another ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that came in at 320 EeV, detected in 1991.

“Things that people think of as energetic, like supernova, are nowhere near energetic enough for this,” said Matthews. “You need huge amounts of energy, really high magnetic fields, to confine the particle while it gets accelerated.”

Toshihiro Fujii, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, said: “When I first discovered this ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, I thought there must have been a mistake, as it showed an energy level unprecedented in the last three decades.”

A potential candidate for this level of energy would be a super-massive black hole at the heart of another galaxy. In the vicinity of these vast entities, matter is stripped back to its subatomic structures and protons, electrons and nuclei are hurled out across the universe at nearly the speed of light.

Cosmic rays, echoes of such violent celestial events, rain down on to Earth nearly constantly and can be detected by instruments, such as the Telescope Array observatory in Utah, which found the Amaterasu particle.

Below a certain energy threshold, the flight path of these particles resembles a ball in a pinball machine as they zigzag against the electromagnetic fields through the cosmic microwave background. But particles with Oh-My-God or Amaterasu-level energy would be expected to blast through intergalactic space relatively unbent by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields, meaning it should be possible to trace their origin.

Tracing its trajectory backwards points towards empty space. Similarly, the Oh-My-God particle had no discernible source. Scientists suggest this could indicate a much larger magnetic deflection than predicted, an unidentified source in the Local Void, or an incomplete understanding of high-energy particle physics.

“These events seem like they’re coming from completely different places in the sky. It’s not like there’s one mysterious source,” said Prof John Belz of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper. “It could be defects in the structure of spacetime, colliding cosmic strings. I mean, I’m just spitballing crazy ideas that people are coming up with because there’s not a conventional explanation.”

The Telescope Array is uniquely positioned to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. It sits at about 1,200m (4,000ft), the elevation sweet spot that allows secondary particles maximum development, but before they start to decay. Its location in Utah’s West Desert provides ideal atmospheric conditions in two ways: the dry air is crucial because humidity will absorb the ultraviolet light necessary for detection; and the region’s dark skies are essential, as light pollution will create too much noise and obscure the cosmic rays.

The Telescope Array is in the middle of an expansion that that astronomers hope will help crack the case. Once completed, 500 new scintillator detectors will expand the Telescope Array across 2,900 km²(1,100 mi²), an area nearly the size of Rhode Island and this larger footprint is expected to capture more of these extreme events.

Original article here

02 Dec 2023
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Been There, Done That! (Are You Sure?)

I bike the same route to my job every morning. Turn right, over a bridge, gentle left, hard left, hard right, check for cars at the 4-way stop, left turn, gentle right, huff and puff up the same long hill… and on I go. I can recite the entire route from memory. Same streets, same houses, same trees, same lake, same parks, all whizzing by as I focus on the road ahead, keeping up my speed to get a good workout and get to work on time.

I vary the return trip a bit at the end of the day because I have more time to explore. But do I get bored with the morning ride? Never! A few days ago, for example, those “same” streets were very much not the same, because it was still dark out, rain was smearing my glasses, and the road was covered in bright yellow, wet autumn leaves. I felt deep gratitude for the “beginner’s mind” that steered carefully and kept my speed under control through those slippery crash hazards. In the moment, I appreciated my bike, my legs, and my bright headlight. It all made me smile, to be awake and aware, and the sun was rising when I pulled into my destination.

Often we think we need something new and different in order to be happy; we think we can only be stimulated by change. Maybe you have walked the path 1,000 times between your home and your car, or the bus stop, or wherever you keep your bicycle. So you think you’ve done it, seen it, nothing is new. You may sigh and say “Been there, done that” and feel unhappy.

But in reality, we’ve never experienced this moment before. Not this one either. Nor this one.

In the eyes of a beginner, our path has many wondrous things to notice, smile at, even celebrate. Because with every moment things are changing. What are you looking at? Are you stopping to look with fresh eyes?

Joanne Friday writes beautifully about this in her story “Freedom from My Own Mind,” in the book Tears Become Rain: Stories of Transformation and Healing Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. When a brain injury after a car accident left her with no memory and the inability to manage her stress hormones, she writes, “I was trapped in a constant state of anxiety and fear.” Spontaneously joining a retreat with the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanne learned the joy of looking with fresh eyes at what was right in front of her. “Since I had no memory of the past and was in fear of going forward in my life with no ability to think or function well, I loved the idea of focusing fully on the present moment.”

This new way of seeing the world also applied to how Joanne viewed her own injured body. Daily walks prescribed by her doctor were torment, as she focused on the pain from her ruptured discs and her mind filled with fear and speculation that she couldn’t return to the healthy self she once knew. But then Joanne tried walking meditation, taking slow steps outdoors and focusing on the miracle of being a part of everything. “The trees exhaled what we inhaled, and we exhaled what the trees inhaled. When we focus on what a miracle this precious lifetime is, we are walking in the kingdom of heaven,” she writes. “I realized that where I chose to place my mind determined my experience. I had a choice!”

I was asked recently how we can find happiness in this world that contains so much conflict and suffering. I find happiness because I look for it, right where I am, just like Joanne did. There are tiny flowers on the ground and funny bumper stickers on people’s cars. The person who walks past me has a face, and it might smile if I smile at them. When I look as a beginner looks — as if I haven’t already seen a million flowers, read all the bumper stickers, passed so many faces in my lifetime — I experience these little joys.

My wife still makes me laugh, after 22 years. Yes, we’ve struggled, and we still have our struggles, but because of that we also notice and cherish our happy moments. We’ve never been here before, with all that brought us to this point, with all the challenges swirling in our brains, with whatever is going on in our work lives, our community, and the world. We truly have never been here before. And in this moment at the dinner table, I see her make a silly face, hear her bad pun or her intentionally obtuse question that makes our kids and me stop and wonder if she’s all there.

I could think with exasperation, “Oh there she goes again being silly.” Or look at her and roll my eyes, as our teenage kids sometimes do. But instead I get to laugh at her lightness, as if this is the first time, because it is! What a wonderful feeling when we pause and look in each other’s eyes, and catch the eyes of our kids, and know we are enjoying this moment together.

And that lightness then spreads. Laughter is like yoga, making happy chemicals move around in our brains. Our teenagers may even admit that smiling feels way better than eye rolling. They see my glee at their other mom’s silliness, and it’s contagious. Finding joy isn’t a crime, even when others around us are suffering. I see it as the opposite: Our happiness waters our seeds of compassion because we know that others want happiness too. Instead of getting lost in our own dissatisfaction at the “same old same old,” we can look and see those around us who need our smiling face, open to the possibility of this new moment.

Original article here

28 Nov 2023
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Modern Medicine Has Its Scientific Roots In The Middle Ages − How The Logic Of Vulture Brain Remedies And Bloodletting Lives On Today

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. The “Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought to cure head pain, and wrapping its heart in wolf skin served as an amulet against demonic possession.

“Dark Age medicine” is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. But recent research pushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time.

As a historian of the early Middle Ages, roughly 400 to 1000 C.E., I make sense of how the societies that produced vulture medicine envisioned it as one component of a much broader array of legitimate therapies. In order to recognize “progress” in Dark Age medicine, it is essential to see the broader patterns that led a medieval scribe to copy out a set of recipes using vulture organs.

The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world because it was a religious duty to rationally guard the body’s health.

Reason And Religion

The names of classical medical innovators like Hippocrates and Galen were well known in the early Middle Ages, but few of their texts were in circulation prior to the 13th century. Most intellectual activities in northern Europe were taking place within monasteries, where the majority of surviving medical writings from that time were written, read, discussed and likely put into practice. Scholars have assumed that religious superstition overwhelmed scientific impulse and the church dictated what constituted legitimate healing – namely, prayer, anointing with holy oil, miracles of the saints and penance for sin.

However, “human medicine” – a term affirming human agency in discovering remedies from nature – emerged in the Dark Ages. It appears again and again in a text monks at the monastery of Lorsch, Germany, wrote around the year 800 to defend ancient Greek medical learning. It insists that Hippocratic medicine was mandated by God and that doctors act as divine agents in promoting health. I argue in my recent book, “Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe,” that a major innovation of that time was the creative synthesis of Christian orthodoxy with a growing belief in the importance of preventing disease.

Establishing an intellectual framework for medical study was an accomplishment of early medieval scholars. Doctors faced the risk of being lumped together with those who dealt in sorcery and pagan folklore, a real possibility given that the men who composed the Greek medical canon were pagans themselves. The early medieval scribes responsible for producing the medical books of their age crafted powerful arguments about the respectability and piety of the doctor. Their arguments manifest in illustrations that sanctified the human doctor by setting him parallel to Christ.

This sanctification was a crucial step in including medicine as its own advanced degree program at the first universities that were established around 1200 in Europe. Thus began the licensing of healers: the elite “phisici” – the root of the English word “physician” – trained at the university, along with empirical practitioners like surgeons, herbalists and female healers who claimed a unique authority to treat gynecological illnesses.

Today, religious dogmatism is often equated with vaccine hesitancy and resistance to basic scientific truths like evolution. But deeply religious thinkers of the past often saw rational medicine as an expression of faith, not something endangering it. Herbal remedies were scribbled into the margins of early medieval works on theology, history, church sacraments and more. This suggests that book owners valued such knowledge, and people of all classes were actively exchanging recipes and cures by word of mouth before writing the most useful ones down.

The Body In Nature

Though the Dark Ages is a period from which no case histories survive, we can still form a picture of an average healing encounter. Texts from that period emphasize the need for the doctor to be highly learned, including being well read in philosophy, logic, arithmetic and astronomy. Such knowledge enabled healers to situate their observations of sick bodies within the rules that governed the constant transformations of nature.

There was no way to perceive the internal state of the body via technology – instead, healers had to be excellent listeners and observers. They sought to match the patient’s description of suffering with signs that manifested externally on the body. The inside of the flesh could not be seen, but the fluids the body excreted – sweat, urine, menstrual blood, mucus, vomit and feces – carried messages about that invisible realm to the outside. The doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis relied on reading these “excreta” in addition to sensing subtle changes in the pulse.

Medieval people were detailed investigators of the natural world and believed the same forces that shaped the landscape and the stars operated inside bodies formed from the same four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Thus, as the moon’s waxing and waning moved the ocean tides, so did it cause humors inside the body to grow and decrease.

The way the seasons withered crops or provoked tree sap to flow might manifest in the body as yellow bile surging in the summer, and cold, wet phlegm dripping in the winter. Just as fruit and meats left untouched began to rot and putrefy, so did dregs and undigested material inside the body turn poisonous if not expelled. Standing water in ponds or lakes generated slime and smell, and so were liquids sitting stagnant in the body’s vessels seen as breeding grounds for corrupt vapors.

In this sense, the menstrual cycle was representative of all bodies, undergoing internal transformations according to seasonal cycles and periodically purged in order to release pent-up fluids.

According to this logic, health depended above all on maintaining the body’s relationship to the physical environment and ensuring that substances were passing through their proper transformations, whether it was food turning into humors, blood disseminating throughout the body, or excess fluids and wastes leaving the body. Bloodletting was a rational therapy because it could help rebalance the fluids and remove toxins. It was visible and tangible to the patient, and, to the extent that we now better understand the placebo effect, it may well have offered some kind of relief.

Fasting, purging, tonics and, above all, monthly dietary regimens were also prominent tools healers used to prevent and relieve sickness. Several medical books, for instance, specified that consuming drinks with cinnamon in November and pennyroyal in August could recalibrate the body’s temperature in winter and summer because one drink was warming while the other was cooling.

Some medieval remedies – such as one produced from wine, cow bile, garlic and onion to heal eye infections – were later proven to be likely effective in treating sickness. But whether these remedies worked isn’t the point. For medieval doctors, vulture brains and cow bile operated according to the same logic that continues to inform research today: Nature operates in mysterious ways, but rational deduction can unlock the hidden mechanisms of disease. The M.D. has direct roots in the Dark Age elevation of “human medicine.”

Before mocking medieval doctors, consider how popular juice cleanses and detox regimens are in the 21st century. Are we really so far from humoral medicine today?

24 Nov 2023
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Best time ever to be alive on planet Earth!

I believe we are living in the most extraordinary time ever with breakthroughs happening on many levels:

Our intelligence is expanding and in many cases fusing with what I call infinite intelligence. This results in spontaneous knowing of things beyond our learning and training.
We are now able to embody our greater beings, with a capacity to create who we want to become as opposed to being trapped within the confines of our genetics and our past.
Vibrational frequency is rising across the whole planet, resulting in an upleveling of consciousness, which in turn generates deeper appreciation for and connection with all life.
Some of us are now experiencing freedom from reactive emotional response, finding joy in emotive moments that power breakthroughs.
We’re discovering and enhancing our bodies’ miraculous ability, all while embodying a new vitality fuelled by universal life source power.
We’re recognising that death is not the end, but instead the beginning of the next grand adventure where joyful freedom reigns.
We’re making friends with the universe. On the one hand through technology like the James Webb Telescope. On the other hand through our own deepening connection with the inherent intelligence behind Creation.
And how about the increasing beauty and power of Nature and the animal kingdoms! Cross species love. Breath-taking GREEN. An understanding that Water is intelligent … see Veda Austin’s work with water. Even an increasing ability to work with what I call ‘the weather gods’ to help fulfill the greater purpose of Nature’s movements with as little harm to life as possible. Some might call this shamanic. I call it a deepening alchemical partnership with the miraculousness of Life.
An unleashing of genius all around the world, leading to exciting new innovations that bring solutions we could hardly have dreamed were possible.
Source fills the air we breathe and the cells we dwell within. We are interwoven to one another and to all life now through what I call the internal Source ‘mycelium’ network.

We are quantum leaping by the day into new horizons of possibility. Elevating ourselves into next levels of being. Enhancing our abilities to create life as never before. Best time ever to be alive on planet Earth!

About the Author:

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

16 Nov 2023
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Signs You’re Moving Into a High-Vibe Version of Reality

You feel calm inside … and that calmness offers an ease of genius flow and vitality.
You have emotive bursts popping up from inside.
Sometimes they’re purposeful and other times you might cry over nothing at all. I believe this is your power offering itself to you to elevate the world.
You fall in love with nature, animals, people, the Earth.
You see wonders everywhere you look. And you want to put more of that wonderfulness into the world around you for others to thrive upon.
It becomes effortless to energetically zing others up. The more you do this, the greater you feel.
You see the potential in people and situations and aim straight for the new possibilities on offer in every circumstance.
You feel younger than your years and look in the mirror to find that’s showing up in you physically too.
You love easily with zero concern for a broken heart because this kind of love comes from a greater place with greater purpose and offers itself readily to all.
You understand things at greater levels, eliminating the reactive responses that come along with a lack of comprehension of greater purpose at play.
You feel more like the greater being you really are, finding ways to live this here on Earth.
You discover you can talk to animals, trees, oceans, the universe, etc. and they energetically talk back to you with brilliant insights into how life is unfolding right now. We are increasingly interconnected as Source beings in a symbiotic version of reality.
You become an alchemical elevancer of Life naturally and instinctively.

May grace, genius and greatness flow through us all now with wonder and joy.

About the Author:

05 Nov 2023
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Crows Are Self-Aware and ‘Know What They Know,’ Just Like Humans

In what now feels like an annual update, crows are even more surprisingly smart than we thought. But do they have true consciousness? Research shows that crows and other corvids “know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds,” according to STAT. This is considered a cornerstone of self-awareness and shared by just a handful of animal species besides humans.

In new research published in Science, German scientists put crows through a series of puzzling tasks. During those tasks, the scientists measured neural activity in different kinds of neurons with the goal of tracking how crows were sensing and reasoning through their work. They sought to study a specific kind of thinking called sensory consciousness, and they chose birds in particular as an evolutionary history pivot.

The task is simple, but involves some high-level brain stuff:

“After the crow initiated a trial, a brief visual stimulus of variable intensity appeared. After a delay period, a rule cue informed the crow how to respond if it had seen or had not seen the stimulus. [A] red cue required a response for stimulus detection (“yes”), whereas a blue cue prohibited a response for stimulus detection.”

“Sensory consciousness, the ability to have subjective experience that can be explicitly accessed and thus reported, arises from brain processes that emerged through evolutionary history,” the researchers write. “Today, the neural correlates of consciousness are primarily associated with the workings of the primate cerebral cortex, a part of the telencephalic pallium that is laminar in organization. Birds, by contrast, have evolved a different pallium since they diverged from the mammalian lineage 320 million years ago.”

The birds performed in a way that affirms their sensory consciousness, which scientists say could mean the “neural correlates of consciousness” date back to at least the last time birds and mammals shared that brain section:

“To reconcile sensory consciousness in birds and mammals, one scenario would postulate that birds and mammals inherited the trait of consciousness from their last-common ancestor. If true, this would date the evolution of consciousness back to at least 320 million years when reptiles and birds on the one hand, and mammals on the other hand, evolved from the last common stem-amniotic ancestor.”

In an analysis in the same issue of Science, another researcher, Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, makes a critique of the study’s hypothesis. The structure being studied, she says, could resemble another structure because of physical properties more than a shared evolution or an indication of extremely early consciousness. The size of the structures matter a great deal, too.

“[T]he level of that complexity, and the extent to which new meanings and possibilities arise, should still scale with the number of units in the system,” Herculano-Houzel explains. “This would be analogous to the combined achievements of the human species when it consisted of just a few thousand individuals, versus the considerable achievements of 7 billion today.”

Original article here

11 Sep 2023
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Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed.

According to current understanding, there are four fundamental forces in nature, three of which – the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces – are explained by the standard model of particle physics.

However, the model does not explain the other known fundamental force, gravity, or dark matter – a strange and mysterious substance thought to make up about 27% of the universe.

Now researchers have said there could be another, fifth, fundamental force of nature.

Dr Mitesh Patel, from Imperial College London, said: “We’re talking about a fifth force because we can’t necessarily explain the behaviour [in these experiments] with the four we know about.”

The data comes from experiments at the Fermilab US particle accelerator facility, which explored how subatomic particles called muons – similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier – move in a magnetic field.

Patel says the muons behave a bit like a child’s spinning top, in rotating around the axis of the magnetic field. However, as the muons move, they wobble. The frequency of that wobble can be predicted by the standard model.

But the experimental results from FermiLab do not appear to match those predictions.

Prof Jon Butterworth of University College London, who works on the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, said: “The wobbles are due to the way the muon interacts with a magnetic field. They can be calculated very precisely in the standard model but that calculation involves quantum loops, with known particles appearing in those loops.

“If the measurements don’t line up with the prediction, that could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the loops – which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force.”

The findings follow previous work from FermiLab that showed similar results.

But Patel said there was a “fly in the ointment”, noting that between the first results and the new data, uncertainty has increased around the theoretical prediction of the frequency.

That, he said, could shift the situation. “Maybe what they are seeing is standard scientific thinking – the so-called standard model,” Patel said.

There are other issues. Butterworth said: “If the discrepancy is confirmed, we will be sure there is something new and exciting but we won’t be sure exactly what it is.

“Ideally the discrepancy would inform new theoretical ideas that would lead to new predictions – for example, of how we might find the particle that carries the new force, if that’s what it is. The final confirmation would then be building an experiment to directly discover that particle.”

The experiments at Fermilab are not the only ones to suggest the possibility of a fifth force: work at the LHC has also produced tantalising findings, albeit with a different type of experiment looking at the rate at which muons and electrons are produced as certain particles decay.

But Patel, who worked on the LHC experiments, said those results were now less coherent.

“They are different experiments, measuring different things, and there may or may not be a connection,” he said.

Butterworth added that the unexpected frequency of the muons’ wobbles was one of the longest-standing and most significant discrepancies between a measurement and the standard model.

“The measurement is a great achievement, and very unlikely to be in error now,” he said. “So if the theory predictions get sorted out, this could indeed be the first confirmed evidence for a fifth force – or something else strange and beyond the standard model.”

Original article here