Walking gives the brain a ‘step-up’ in function for some

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER

It has long been thought that when walking is combined with a task – both suffer. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester found that this is not always the case. Some young and healthy people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking by changing the use of neural resources. However, this does not necessarily mean you should work on a big assignment while walking off that cake from the night before.

“There was no predictor of who would fall into which category before we tested them, we initially thought that everyone would respond similarly,” said Eleni Patelaki, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory and first author of the study out now in Cerebral Cortex. “It was surprising that for some of the subjects it was easier for them to do dual-tasking – do more than one task – compared to single-tasking – doing each task separately. This was interesting and unexpected because most studies in the field show that the more tasks that we have to do concurrently the lower our performance gets.”

Improving means changes in the brain

Using the Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, researchers monitored the brain activity, kinematics and behavior of 26 healthy 18 to 30-year-olds as they looked at a series of images, either while sitting on a chair or walking on a treadmill. Participants were instructed to click a button each time the image changed. If the same image appeared back-to-back participants were asked to not click.

Performance achieved by each participant in this task while sitting was considered their personal behavioral “baseline”. When walking was added to performing the same task, investigators found that different behaviors appeared, with some people performing worse than their sitting baseline - as expected based on previous studies - but also with some others improving compared to their sitting baseline. The electroencephalogram, or EEG, data showed that the 14 participants who improved at the task while walking had a change in frontal brain function which was absent in the 12 participants who did not improve. This brain activity change exhibited by those who improved at the task suggests increased flexibility or efficiency in the brain.

“To the naked eye, there were no differences in our participants. It wasn’t until we started analyzing their behavior and brain activity that we found the surprising difference in the group's neural signature and what makes them handle complex dual-tasking processes differently,” Patelaki said. “These findings have the potential to be expanded and translated to populations where we know that flexibility of neural resources gets compromised.”

Edward Freedman, Ph.D., associate professor of Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute led this research that continues to expand how the MoBI is helping neuroscientists discover the mechanisms at work when the brain takes on multiple tasks. His previous work has highlighted the flexibility of a healthy brain, showing the more difficult the task the greater the neurophysiological difference between walking and sitting. “These new findings highlight that the MoBI can show us how the brain responds to walking and how the brain responds to the task,” Freedman said. “This gives us a place to start looking in the brains of older adults, especially healthy ones.”

Impact on aging

Expanding this research to older adults could guide scientists to identify a possible marker for ‘super agers’ or people who have a minimal decline in cognitive functions. This marker would be useful in helping better understand what could be going awry in neurodegenerative diseases.

Additional authors include John Foxe, Ph.D., and Kevin Mazurek, Ph.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center. This research was supported by the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Pilot Program, the University of Rochester CTSA award number KL2 TR001999 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health. Recordings were conducted at the University of Rochester Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (UR-IDDRC).

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JOURNAL

Cerebral Cortex

DOI

10.1093/cercor/bhac227 

Economists Show International Trade Can Worsen Income Inequality

By PETER DIZIKES, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 19, 2022

MIT economists studying individual income data in Ecuador found that international trade generates income gains that are about 7 percent greater for those at the 90th income percentile, compared to those of median income, and up to 11 percent greater for the top percentile of income. Credit: MIT News

Using Ecuador as a case study, economists show international trade widens the income gap in individual countries.

International trade intensifies domestic income inequality, at least in some circumstances, according to a new empirical study that two MIT economists helped co-author.

The research, focusing on Ecuador as a case study, digs into individual-level income data while examining in close detail the connections between Ecuador’s economy and international trade. The study finds that trade generates income gains that are about 7 percent greater for those at the 90th income percentile, compared to those of median income, and up to 11 percent greater for the top percentile of income in Ecuador.

“Earnings inequality is higher in Ecuador than it would be in the absence of trade.”

“Trade in Ecuador tends to be something that is good for the richest, relative to the middle class,” says Dave Donaldson, a professor in the MIT Department of Economics and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. “It’s pretty neutral in terms of the middle class relative to the poorest. The [largest benefits] are found both among those who have founded businesses, as well as those who are well off and work as employees. So, it’s both a labor and capital effect at the top.”

The study also identifies the dynamics that generate this outcome. Ecuadorian exports, mostly commodities and raw goods, tend to help the middle class or those less well-off, while the country’s import activities generally help the already well-off — and overall, importing has a bigger effect.

“There is a horse race between the export channel and the import channel,” says Arnaud Costinot, also a professor in the MIT Department of Economics and co-author of the paper. “Ultimately, what is quantitatively more important in the data, in the case of Ecuador, is the import channel.”

The paper, “Imports, Exports, and Earnings Inequality: Measures of Exposure and Estimates of Incidence,” appears online in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Rodrigo Adao, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Paul Carillo, a professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University; Costinot, who is also associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics; Donaldson; and Dina Pomeranz, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Zurich.

Commodities out, machinery in

The effect of international trade on a nation’s income distribution is hard to pinpoint. Economists cannot, after all, devise a country-size experiment and study the same nation, both with and without trade involvement, to see if differences emerge.

As an alternate strategy, the scholars developed an unusually detailed reconstruction of trade-related economic activity in Ecuador. For the period from 2009 to 2015, they examined revenue from 1.5 million firms with a tax ID, and income for 2.9 million founders and employees of those firms. The scholars collected revenue data, payments to labor, and divided up individual income data according to three levels of education (ending before high school, high school graduates, and college graduates) across all 24 provinces in Ecuador.

Digging further, the research team compiled customs records, VAT (Value-Added Tax) data on purchases, and domestic firm-to-firm trade data, to develop a broad and detailed picture of the value of imports and exports, as well as business transactions that occurred domestically but were related to international trade.

Overall, oil accounted for 54 percent of Ecuador’s exports in the period from 2009 to 2011, followed by fruits (11 percent), seafood products (10 percent), and flowers (4 percent). But Ecuador’s imports are mostly manufactured products, including machinery (21 percent of imports), chemicals (14 percent), and vehicles (13 percent).

This composition of imports and exports — commodities out, manufactured goods in — turns out to be crucial to the relationship between trade and greater income inequality in Ecuador. Firms that employ well-educated, better-paid individuals also tend to be the ones benefitting from trade more because it allows their firms to buy manufactured goods more cheaply and flourish, in turn bolstering demand for more extensively educated workers.

“It’s all about whether trade increases demand for your services,” Costinot says.

“The thing that is happening in Ecuador is that the richest individuals tend to be employed by firms that directly import a lot, or tend to be employed by firms that are buying a lot of goods from other Ecuadorian firms that import a lot. Getting access to these imported inputs lowers their costs and increases demand for the services of their workers.”

For this reason, ultimately, “earnings inequality is higher in Ecuador than it would be in the absence of trade,” as the paper states.

Reconsidering trade ideas

As Costinot and Donaldson observe, this core finding runs counter what some portions of established trade theory would expect. For instance, some earlier theories would anticipate that opening up Ecuador to trade would bolster the country’s relatively larger portion of lower-skilled workers.

“It’s not what a standard theory would have predicted,” Costinot says. “A standard theory would be one where [because] Ecuador has [a] relatively scarcity, compared to a country like the U.S., of skilled workers, not unskilled workers, as Ecuador turns to trade, the low-skilled workers should be the ones benefitting relatively more. We found the opposite.”

Additionally, Donaldson notes, some trade theories incorporate the idea of “perfect substitution,” that like goods will be traded among countries — with level wages resulting. But not in Ecuador, at least.

“This is the idea that you could have a country making a good and other countries making an identical good, and ‘perfect substitution’ across countries would create strong pressure to equalize wages in the two countries,” Donaldson says. “Because they’re both making the same good in the same way, they can’t pay their workers differently.” However, he adds, while “earlier thinkers [economists] didn’t think it was literally true, it’s still a question of how strong that force is. Our findings suggest that force is quite weak.”

Costinot and Donaldson acknowledge that their study must take into account a variety of complexities. For instance, they note, about half of Ecuador’s economy is informal, and cannot be measured using official records. Additionally, global “shocks” can affect trade patterns in a given country at a given time — something they test for and incorporate into the current study.

And while trade patterns can also change more gradually, the data from the 2009-2015 time period are stable enough to suggest that the researchers identified a clear and ongoing trend in Ecuador.

“People don’t change jobs very often, and the income distribution does not change very much,” Donaldson says. “We did make sure to check that — within the sample, the stability is very high.”

A global pattern?

The study also naturally raises the question of whether similar outcomes might be found in other countries. In the paper, the authors list many other countries to which their methods could be applied.

“Ecuador is definitely very different from the United States, but it’s not very different from many middle-income countries that are mostly exporting commodities in exchange for manufactured goods,” Costinot says. Donaldson, for his part, is already working on a similar project in Chile.

“That pattern of participation [in global trade] is important, and exporting could be very different across countries,” Donaldson says. “But it would be very easy to know, if you just found the data.”

Reference: “Imports, Exports, and Earnings Inequality: Measures of Exposure and Estimates of Incidence” by Rodrigo Adão, Paul Carrillo, Arnaud Costinot, Dave Donaldson and Dina Pomeranz, 2 March 2022, The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjac012

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Center for Economic Policy Research, the U.K. Department for International Development, and the European Research Council.

New Understanding of Earth’s Architecture: Updated Maps of Tectonic Plates

By UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE JUNE 19, 2022

New tectonic plate model with boundary zones in darker shading. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide 

New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes.

“We looked at the current knowledge of the configuration of plate boundary zones and the past construction of the continental crust,” said Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide who led the team that produced the new models.

“The continents were assembled a few pieces at a time, a bit like a jigsaw, but each time the puzzle was finished it was cut up and reorganized to produce a new picture. Our study helps illuminate the various components so geologists can piece together the previous images.

“We found that plate boundary zones account for nearly 16 percent of the Earth’s crust and an even higher proportion, 27 percent, of continents.”

“Our new model for tectonic plates better explains the spatial distribution of 90 per cent of earthquakes and 80 per cent of volcanoes from the past two million years whereas existing models only capture 65 percent of earthquakes.”

— Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide

New models showing the Earth’s architecture. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide

The team produced three new geological models: a plate model, a province model, and an orogeny model.

“There are 26 orogenies – the process of mountain formation – that have left an imprint on the present-day architecture of the crust. Many of these, but not all, are related to the formation of supercontinents,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“Our work allows us to update maps of tectonic plates and the formation of continents that are found in classroom textbooks. These plate models which have been assembled from topographic models and global seismicity, have not been updated since 2003.”

The new plate model includes several new microplates including the Macquarie microplate which sits south of Tasmania and the Capricorn microplate which separates the Indian and Australian plates

“To further enrich the model, we added more accurate information about the boundaries of deformation zones: previous models showed these as discrete areas rather than wide zones,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“The biggest changes to the plate model have been in western North America, which often has the boundary with the Pacific Plate drawn as the San Andreas and Queen Charlotte Faults. But the newly delineated boundary is much wider, approximately 1500 km, than the previously drawn narrow zone.

“The other large change is in central Asia. The new model now includes all the deformation zones north of India as the plate bulldozes its way into Eurasia.”

A tale told by the continents. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide

Published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, the team’s work provides a more accurate representation of the Earth’s architecture and has other important applications.

“Our new model for tectonic plates better explains the spatial distribution of 90 percent of earthquakes and 80 percent of volcanoes from the past two million years whereas existing models only capture 65 percent of earthquakes,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“The plate model can be used to improve models of risks from geohazards; the orogeny model helps understand the geodynamic systems and better model Earth’s evolution and the province model can be used to improve prospecting for minerals.”

Reference: “New Maps of Global Geological Provinces and Tectonic Plates” by Derrick Hasterok, Jacqueline A. Halpin, Alan S. Collins, Martin Hand, Corné Kreemer, Matthew G. Gard and Stijn Glorie, 31 May 2022, Earth-Science Reviews.
DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104069

The work included researchers at the Universities of Adelaide, Tasmania, Nevada-Reno, and Geoscience Australia

419-Million-Year-Old Chinese Fossil Shows Human Middle Ear Evolved From Fish Gills

JUNE 20, 2022

The 3D braincase of Shuyu. Credit: IVP

The human middle ear—which houses three tiny, vibrating bones—is key to transporting sound vibrations into the inner ear, where they become nerve impulses that allow us to hear.

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

“These fossils provided the first anatomical and fossil evidence for a vertebrate spiracle originating from fish gills.” — Prof. GAI Zhikun

Some 20^th century researchers, believing that early vertebrates must possess a complete spiracular gill, searched for one between the mandibular and hyoid arches of early vertebrates. Despite extensive research spanning more than a century, though, none were found in any vertebrate fossils.

Now, however, scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have found clues to this mystery from armored galeaspid fossils in China.

Their findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution on May 19, 2022.

According to Prof. GAI Zhikun from IVPP, first author of the study, researchers from the institute successively found over the last 20 years a 438-million-year-old Shuyu 3D braincase fossil and the first 419-million-year-old galeaspid fossil completely preserved with gill filaments in the first branchial chamber. The fossils were found in Changxing, Zhejiang Province and Qujing, Yunnan Province, respectively.

The 3D virtual reconstruction of Shuyu. Credit: IVPP

“These fossils provided the first anatomical and fossil evidence for a vertebrate spiracle originating from fish gills,” said GAI.

A total of seven virtual endocasts of the Shuyu braincase were subsequently reconstructed. Almost all details of the cranial anatomy of Shuyu were revealed in its fingernail-sized skull, including five brain divisions, sensory organs, and cranial nerve and blood vessel passages in the skull.

“Many important structures of human beings can be traced back to our fish ancestors, such as our teeth, jaws, middle ears, etc. The main task of paleontologists is to find the important missing links in the evolutionary chain from fish to humans. Shuyu has been regarded as a key missing link as important as Archaeopteryx, Ichthyostega and Tiktaalik,” said ZHU Min, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The first 419-million-year-old galeaspid fossil completely preserved with 

gill filaments in the first branchial chamber. Credit: IVPP

The spiracle is a small hole behind each eye that opens to the mouth in some fishes. In sharks and all rays, the spiracle is responsible for the intake of water into the buccal space before being expelled from the gills. The spiracle is often located towards the top of the animal allowing breathing even while the animal is mostly buried under sediment.

In the Polypterus, the most primitive, living bony fish, the spiracles are used to breathe air. However, fish spiracles were eventually replaced in most non-fish species as they evolved to breathe through their noses and mouths. In early tetrapods, the spiracle seems to have developed first into the Otic notch. Like the spiracle, it was used in respiration and was incapable of sensing sound. Later the spiracle evolved into the ear of modern tetrapods, eventually becoming the hearing canal used for transmitting sound to the brain via tiny inner ear bones. This function has remained throughout the evolution to humans.

“Our finding bridges the entire history of the spiracular slit, bringing together recent discoveries from the gill pouches of fossil jawless vertebrates, via the spiracles of the earliest jawed vertebrates, to the middle ears of the first tetrapods, which tells this extraordinary evolutionary story,” said Prof. Per E. Ahlberg from Uppsala University and academician of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Reference: “The Evolution of the Spiracular Region From Jawless Fishes to Tetrapods” by Zhikun Gai, Min Zhu, Per E. Ahlberg and Philip C. J. Donoghue, 19 May 2022, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2022.887172

Sharks may be closer to the city than you think, new study finds

Unlike big land predators, the ocean’s top predators don’t avoid urban areas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE

 

VIDEO: A GREAT HAMMERHEAD EXPLORING THE SHALLOWS OFF MIAMI BEACH CRUISES UNDER A SWIMMER. view more 

CREDIT: VIDEO CREDIT: JMAC / JASON MCINTOSH

MIAMI— The world’s coastlines are rapidly urbanizing, but how this increased human presence may impact species living in the ocean is not fully understood. In a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, researchers tracked the movements of three shark species, bull, nurse and great hammerhead, in relation to the city of Miami. Given the chemical, light, and noise pollution emanating from the coastal metropolis, researchers expected sharks to avoid areas close to the city, but that’s not what they found.

Some animals, like pigeons and racoons, thrive in cities. These species, known as “urban exploiters,” often become dependent on human garbage for food. Other animals, known as “urban adapters,” may show some use of urbanized areas, but still largely rely on natural areas. On the other hand, some species such as land predators such as wolves are very sensitive to human disturbance. These “urban avoiders” avoid big cities.

“Few studies have investigated the movements of ocean predators in relation to urbanization, but since other studies have shown that land predators are urban avoiders, we expected sharks to be too,” said Neil Hammerschlag, director of the UM Shark Research and Conservation Program and lead author of the study. “We were surprised to find that the sharks we tracked spent so much time near the lights and sounds of the busy city, often close to shore, no matter the time of day.” The researchers concluded that the behaviors of the tracked sharks resembled that of “urban adapters”. The study speculates sharks could be attracted to shore from land-based activities, such as the discarding of fish carcasses.

The relatively high use of urban-impacted areas by the tracked sharks may have consequences for both sharks and humans. “By spending so much time close to shore, sharks are at risk of exposure to toxic pollutants as well as fishing, which could impact their health and survival,” said Hammerschlag. While shark bites on humans are rare, the study also pinpoints areas close to shore that could be avoided by human water users to reduce probability of a negative shark encounter, promoting human-shark coexistence.

The study, titled “Urban Sharks: Residency patterns of marine top predators in relation to a coastal metropolis” was published June 16, 2022 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

The study’s authors include: Neil Hammerschlag, Mitchell Rider from the UM Rosenstiel School, and Robbie Roemer, from Ocearch; Austin J. Gallagher from Beneath the Waves; and Lee Gutowsky from Trent University.

This research was funded through support from the Ocean Tracking Network, the Disney Conservation Fund, the Save Our Seas Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southeast Fisheries Science Center, the Batchelor Foundation, the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation, Ruta Maya Coffee, the International Seakeepers Society, and through a grant ‘Implementing a Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) in South Florida to Advance Ecosystem-Based Management’ funded under the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP, RFP ONR BAA #N00014-18-S-B007, in partnership with NOAA, BOEM, and NASA) and the US Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Program Office.

  

CAPTION

Researchers release an acoustically tagged nurse shark into waters off Miami, Florida, to investigate shark residency patterns in relation to coastal urbanization.

CREDIT

Robbie Roemer.

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JOURNAL

Marine Ecology Progress Series

DOI

10.3354/meps14086 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Urban Sharks: Residency patterns of marine top predators in relation to a coastal metropolis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jun-2022

Edelman CEO on letter to Congress: ‘We need gun safety’
 2nd Amendment ‘is just kind of an excuse for delaying’

Adriana Belmonte
·Senior Editor
Mon, June 20, 2022

The recent wave of mass shootings across the country has renewed partisan debates over gun control and the scope of the Second Amendment, which reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Edelman CEO Richard Edelman was one of 200 U.S. CEOs recently signed a letter demanding that Congress take action on gun safety in the form of new legislation.

"This is 10 years after Sandy Hook, and status quo just won't do," Edelman recently said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "Somehow, falling back on the rights of citizens to bear arms is just kind of an excuse for delaying what is inevitably in the interests of the communities."

The corporate leaders — including those of Lyft, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Unilever — called the gun violence epidemic “a public health crisis," according to Axios.

People gather at Riverfront Park for the May Day Second Amendment rally in Salem, Oregon, U.S., May 1, 2021. REUTERS/Alisha Jucevic

"All of this points to a clear need for action: the Senate must take urgent action to pass bold gun safety legislation as soon as possible in order to avoid more death and injury," the letter stated.

A few days after Edelman spoke, the Senate reached an agreement for gun-related measures aimed at preventing future shootings akin to what recently happened in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. However, the specific language of any potential legislation has yet to be written.

A majority of Americans (59%) support prioritizing legislation to control gun violence versus 35% who believe it's more important to protect gun rights, according to a recent Marist Poll.
'I believe in the Second Amendment'

Edelman stressed that he and his fellow chief executives are not seeking to ban all weapons.

“To be clear, what [the letter] said was nothing specific,” Edelman said. “We want something like a red flag law, or we want some limitation on age, or we want something that limits high-capacity ammunition — all of these should be on the table. It’s up to Congress to make the specifics. But we need gun safety.”

He added that “I believe in the Second Amendment, but I want to be sure that guns are used appropriately.”

Current proposals being floated include expanding background checks, expanding red flag laws, and raising the minimum age to buy an assault rifle to 21. Republican opposition is expected, though, as many are instead pushing for legislation to address mental health issues.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speaks at a rally demanding gun control legislation, June 8, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Finding a middle ground

While Edelman has previously been vocal about corporate leaders finding a balance between activism and appeasing stakeholders, he said this letter was about messaging to employees and elected leaders.

“I thought it was interesting the group of CEOs who did sign on,” Edelman said. “It was a mix of tech companies, younger companies, clothing companies, consumer products companies, some service companies like my own. It's a pretty unanimous kind of approach. And corporate America is saying, come on, Senate, do your job. It's time. Find a middle ground. Even if we have to settle for less than optimal from some sides or other — get to legislation.”

According to Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer, “more than 8 in 10 respondents want CEOs to be the face of change, leading on policy, not on politics.”

Edelman's Trust Barometer shows that CEOs are expected to inform policy, not politics. (Chart: Edelman)

For Edelman, signing a public letter calling for gun legislation does exactly that.

“Now, there can be others who are CEOs who contact their [congresspeople] or senators personally, make contributions personally — that's a perfectly plausible approach,” Edelman said. “I'm not saying that every company should use its platform to advance societal issues writ big, whether it's abortion, voting rights, or gun control. But if you are, as a citizen, convinced that this is the right thing, at least as a CEO contact your legislator and say, it's time to pass this legislation. Do it privately. That's fine too.”

The question for CEOs, he added, amounts to: “Is it the right thing to do as a public advocate, which I did yesterday on signing on to the letter, or is it better to do privately with your congressman and senator? That, again, is a perfectly plausible approach if this is going to upset your workforce or your consumer base.”

Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @adrianambells and reach her at adriana@yahoofinance.com

Russia’s World War II Invasion of Finland Eerily Mirrors Ukraine


Virginia Cowles
Mon, June 20, 20222

Geopix/Alamy Stock Photo

The war in Finland had started about three weeks before. When the headlines announced that Helsinki had been bombed I thought it would be another Poland—that the country would be obliterated so quickly there would be little chance of getting there before it was over. Then the papers began recording the amazing feats of the Finns; incredible though it seemed, the Russian “steam-roller” was being held in check.

I made my arrangements to go to Helsinki and left a few days after the New Year’s party. Maureen had a fortune-teller that night, and when he read my hand he said, “You are going on a long trip.” I was impressed until he added, “You will be surrounded by lights, gaiety, and laughter.”

I found none of those things.

It was a strange feeling flying from one war to another. The transition was a gradual one. When you took off from the aerodrome “somewhere in England” and flew over the North Sea in a plane with the windows frosted over so you couldn’t see out, it was very much World War No. 2. It was still World War No. 2 at Amsterdam and Copenhagen; but at Malmo, a port in southern Sweden, the issue began to get shaky. When you asked for the latest war news, the answer was, “Which?” And by the time you reached Stockholm there was no longer any doubt: “The war” meant Molotov cocktails and Soviet bombers.

The Jews Who Fought for Hitler: ‘We Did Not Help the Germans. We Had a Common Enemy’

Stockholm was in a state of tension. The papers carried advertisements calling for volunteers, the restaurants were filled with women canvassing for funds, and the hotels decorated with posters saying, “Defend Sweden by Helping Finland Now.” The war on the Western Front was as remote as China. I stayed there only twenty-four hours; besides a general impression of excitement and confusion I chiefly remember how cold I was. I was wearing a thick suit, fur-lined boots and a sheepskin coat, but the biting wind penetrated my bones. I had a suitcase filled with sweaters, woolen underwear, woolen socks, a ski suit, and a windbreaker. I put on everything except the ski suit and tried not to think what it would be like when I got to the Arctic Circle.

I took a trip along the coast to Hanko. Here I saw for the first time what continuous and relentless bombing was like. The deep quiet of the snow-bound countryside was broken by the wail of sirens five or six times a day as wave after wave of Soviet bombers—sometimes totaling as many as five hundred—came across the Gulf of Finland from their bases in Estonia, only twenty minutes away. All along the coast I passed through villages and towns which had been bombed and machine-gunned; in Hanko, the Finnish port which the Soviets demanded in their ultimatum, 20 buildings had been hit, and when I arrived, 10 were still burning.

It is difficult to describe indiscriminate aerial warfare against a civilian population in a country with a temperature 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. But if you can visualize farm girls stumbling through snow for the uncertain safety of their cellars; bombs falling on frozen villages unprotected by a single anti-aircraft gun; men standing helplessly in front of blazing buildings with no apparatus with which to fight the fires, and others desperately trying to salvage their belongings from burning wreckage—if you can visualize these things and picture even the children in remote hamlets wearing white covers over their coats as camouflage against low-flying Russian machine-gunners—you can get some idea of what this war was like.

The roads were littered with mattresses, chairs, and household articles that the soldiers had salvaged from the fire. The charred framework of the houses stood out blackly against the snow, but there were no curious pedestrians to inspect the damage, for icy winds from the sea swept through the streets. I have never felt such cold. A 20-year-old army lieutenant detailed to show us through the town forgot to pull down one of his ear tabs, and a few minutes later his ear went dead white. One of the Swedish journalists shouted at him, and he quickly rubbed it with snow. Half frozen, we finally stumbled into a corner café. The proprietor brought us hot meat sandwiches and coffee. While he was serving us, he informed us cheerfully that the top floor of the house was on fire. It had been struck by an incendiary bomb two hours before. His sons were fighting it, and he was confident everything would soon be under control. Somehow it was an odd experience to be sipping coffee in a burning building; also somewhat of a contradiction trying to get warm in a house that was on fire.

The young Finnish lieutenant had spent considerable time in America and spoke English fluently. He was an engineer in ordinary life, and now his job was to detonate unexploded bombs. He told us he had heard only that morning that his house, some distance away, had been bombed and completely destroyed. Fortunately, he had sent his wife and children away the previous week. Apart from a few reserved remarks he did not discuss the war. It was only when we left and wished him good luck that he said, “It will take a miracle to save us, but perhaps a miracle will happen.” Then, almost beneath his breath, “It must happen.” This boy was typical of many Finns with whom we talked. Although they were aware they couldn’t hold out indefinitely in such an unequal struggle, they clung to a stubborn faith that some event, unforeseen though it was, would save them from final destruction.

If you happened to be lunching at the Hotel Torni in Helsinki when the air-raid sirens sounded, you could climb up on the roof and watch the city crawl into its shell. Between the jumble of ice-covered roofs, you saw the people running for cover, the snow trucks pulling up by the roadside, and the police officers taking their positions on the street corners. Soon there was a silence so ominous that you could hear a door bang many blocks away.

The Hotel Kämp was the capital’s war-time center. When I arrived late at night it was deserted. But when I went downstairs the following morning, I found it overflowing with a noisy conglomeration of people; there were Finnish soldiers, women volunteers, politicians, and foreign journalists and photographers of a dozen different nationalities.

Out of the general confusion I managed to find Webb Miller of the United Press and had lunch with him. He had just returned from the Mannerheim Line and was filled with admiration for the Finnish soldiers. “They’re the damnedest fighters I’ve ever seen. They don’t seem to be afraid of anything. And talk about improvisation—they invent their weapons as they go along. They’ve got a new trick which is to tie a mine to the end of a string, then hide in a ditch until one of the Russian tanks comes along and jerk it across the road. I talked with a soldier who’d accounted for three 30-ton tanks this way!”

I pressed Webb with questions about the war and he told me the only way to understand what was happening was to keep in mind that two wars were taking place. The first war was the regular trench warfare, based on Western Front methods, being fought behind the Mannerheim defenses on the Karelian Isthmus; the second war was the guerrilla fighting waged through the forests on all the other fronts in Finland. In the trench war, the Russian attack on the Mannerheim Line had been repulsed; and in the guerrilla war, not only had the Russian thrusts been halted, but the Finns, by brilliant strategy and ferocious courage, had succeeded in wiping out entire divisions.

When at last we reached a rather primitive hotel in the small town of Kajaani, the proprietress looked at us in bewilderment, as though we were part of a traveling circus. Soon, I think she decided a lunatic asylum was more likely, for during the next forty-eight hours her telephone rang with calls from New York, Amsterdam. and Copenhagen, and everybody sat up all night typing out endless stories. Besides Harold Denny and myself, there was Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, Edward Ward of the BBC, Desmond Tighe of Reuter’s, and Ebbe Munck, a Danish journalist.

Kajaani served as GHQ for the Central Command. There in the slender waistline of Finland, some of the fiercest battles of the war were taking place. During the previous seven weeks, over a hundred thousand Russian troops had crossed the frontier, in repeated attempts to cut Finland in two. But the Finns had repulsed the onslaughts with some of the most spectacular fighting in history; they had annihilated entire divisions and hurled back others 30 and 40 miles to the border from where they started.

To understand how they did it, you must picture a country of thick-snow-covered forests and ice-bound roads. You must visualize heavily armed ski patrols sliding like ghosts through the woods; creeping behind the enemy lines and cutting their communications until entire battalions were isolated, then falling on them in furious surprise attacks. In this part of Finland skis outmaneuvered tanks, sleds competed with lorries, and knives even challenged rifles.

The evening we arrived in Kajaani we dined with General Tuompo, the brilliant 50-year-old ex-journalist general, who had only begun his military career 10 or 12 years previously and who, before the Finnish war was over, took a toll of nearly 85,000 Russian lives. He arranged for us to visit a front-line position on the Russian–Finnish frontier, where we saw the patrols at work and had our first taste of Soviet artillery fire. We started off with the idea of, perhaps, accompanying one of the Finnish border patrols on a quick jaunt into Russia and back. Not that any of us imagined the frozen Russian landscape would prove interesting, but we all thought it would be fun to step into the Soviet Union without the formality of getting a visa.

Accompanied by a Finnish army lieutenant, we left at four o’clock in the morning, hoping to arrive at the front before dawn. But the roads were so slippery our car skidded into the ditch three times, delaying us considerably; it gave us a small idea of what the mechanized Russian units were up against. We approached the village of Suomussalmi just as dawn was breaking, and here I witnessed the most ghastly spectacle I have ever seen.

It was in this sector that the Finns, a few weeks previously, had annihilated two Russian divisions of approximately 30,000 men. The road along which we drove was still littered with frozen Russian corpses, and the forests on either side had become known as “Dead Man’s Land.” Perhaps it was the beauty of the morning that made the terrible Russian debacle all the more ghastly when we came upon it. The rising sun had drenched the snow-covered forests, their trees like lace valentines, with a strange pink light that seemed to glow for miles. The landscape was marred only by the charred framework of a house; then an overturned truck and two battered tanks. Then we turned a bend in the road and came upon the full horror of the scene. For four miles the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun carriages, maps, books, and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood and the color of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes.

All were frozen in the positions in which they had died. I saw one with his hands clasped to a wound in his stomach; another struggling to open the collar of his coat; and a third pathetically clasping a cheap landscape drawing, done in bright, childish colors, which had probably been a prized possession that he had tried to save when he fled into the woods. They were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of grotesque wooden corpses; in the ditches, under the trees, and even in dugouts beneath the snow where they had tried to escape from the fury of the attack. I learned, with a shock, that they had been members of the 44th Division—the same division that just a year ago I had seen swinging along the country roads in the Ukraine.

How had the Finnish Army, with a force of scarcely more than 300,000 men, been able so far to stem the sweep of the Russian tide? I think it was due first to a free people fighting, with a courage never surpassed, against an Asiatic despotism for their homes, their liberties, and their lives; second, to the brilliant strategy of the Finnish military leaders; third, to the natural obstacles of the terrain which was broken by 70,000 lakes and three-quarters covered with forests; fourth, to Soviet blunders.

From a military point of view, the Russian onslaught will be studied as one of the most fantastic campaigns in history. All through the north the Russian High Command ignored the elementary necessity of keeping open its lines of communication. Thousands of Russian soldiers were sent into the wilds of Finland to be isolated from their bases and swallowed up by the forests. This extraordinary stupidity was hard to understand. The only explanation was that Russia had reckoned on a blitzkrieg lasting only a few days and had organized the campaign accordingly. The first divisions had been equipped with an enormous amount of propaganda, banners and pennants, which they had expected to distribute among a vanquished people; and in the north, a division entered with a brass band, actually expecting to be welcomed by the people it had been sent to “liberate.” The reason the Kremlin was so grossly misinformed as to the political stamina of Finland may have been due to the fact that Soviet observers were afraid to reveal the true state of affairs for fear of being shot as saboteurs.

For days I was haunted by the scene of those frozen, twisted bodies of the 44th Division. But the story of this division (one of those, incidentally, which invaded Poland in September) was typical of the whole blundering strategy for which the dictatorship of the proletariat now paid freely with the lives of the proletariat. It had crossed into Finland on Dec. 30 to relieve the 163rd Division, which was cut off, without supplies, near the small village of Suomussalmi. It marched 20 miles along a hard, snow-packed road cut through the heart of the forest, but was unable to join forces with the other, six miles away, across a roadless country. The Finns succeeded in first routing the 163rd, then turned their attention to the 44th; they cut off its supplies, and five days later attacked and annihilated the entire division.

Before we left Kajaani, one of the Finnish press officers took us to an internment camp at Pelso, where we heard a version of the battle from a high-ranking officer of the 44th Division, who had been captured by the Finns. The officer was a clean-shaven man of middle age who had served with the Red Army for 22 years. The Finnish warden requested that we withhold his name and rank, and informed the prisoner he was not obliged to answer any questions unless he wished.

The officer, however, gave an account of the battle which dovetailed completely with the Finnish version. He said the division was cut off on Jan. 2 and was without food until the final debacle on Jan. 7. The only supplies they received were six bags of hard tack dropped by plane. He told us that on Jan. 2 several of the officers begged the commanding general, Vinogradov, to retreat, but the latter replied it was impossible without an order from the Kremlin. And the order came too late.

The officer made three points of interest: He declared that the army had been misinformed as to Finnish resistance, many of the leaders actually believing they were entering to liberate Finnish people, that the army was badly organized for a severe campaign, and that the Russian troops, superstitious by nature, were particularly unsuited to the Finnish terrain as they were mortally afraid of the dark forests.

When I questioned him regarding the commissar system, he replied evasively that the commissars were necessary to infuse the soldiers with the proper spirit. I asked what he thought the final outcome of the war would be, and he hesitated; it was only when the warden bade him give an honest opinion that he replied he felt the Soviet Union, with its preponderance of men and material, was bound to conquer in the end.

Out of the 44th Division of 18,000 men there were only a few hundred survivors. We went through the jail and talked with them, accompanied by the warden and a Russian interpreter. In the first room there was a group of 30 or 40 dressed in their brown tunic uniforms and high felt boots. Many had frozen hands and feet, wrapped in bandages; but compared to their comrades, lying in heaps along the roadside, they were lucky.

When I questioned them about the war, they replied that they had been mobilized to repel a Finnish invasion of Russia. Some of them said they now realized they had been grossly misinformed, but I was astounded to find that many of them were still unaware of the fact that they had been captured on Finnish territory; they thought the battle of Suomussalmi had been fought “somewhere in the North of Russia.”

When we questioned them about general conditions in Russia, a small, wiry little man with a black beard became the self-appointed spokesman of the group by silencing his comrades with menacing looks. With typical Slav cunning, he answered the questions in a manner which he thought best likely to please. He denounced the Soviet Union with such an exaggerated emphasis and paid the Finns compliments of so lavish a nature that his replies were obviously worthless.

The second room into which I was taken was filled with Russian lorry drivers who had been in the Army Service Corps attached to the 44th Division. Most of them, I discovered, had never had military training of any kind; they were merely truck drivers picked up off the streets of Kiev. They spoke bitterly of the fact that they had been mobilised and, pointing to one of the group, said, “And look at Feodor. He is over 40 years of age with a wife and many children.” Feodor seemed pleased to have the spotlight turned on him and nodded his head emphatically, declaring that, indeed, he was 42 years old and had never heard the sound of a gun until he found himself driving a supply truck on the Suomussalmi front.

The most amazing story of all, however, was from the Russian nurse with whom I talked. This 23-year-old girl, the only woman prisoner in Finland, was captured when the Finns routed the 163rd Division. She was a girl of medium size, with broad Slavic features and eyes which were filled with sadness. She wore a wool dress provided for her by the Finns; her only other clothes were the man’s army uniform she had been wearing when captured.

Faber and Faber

A few months before, she had been living quietly in Leningrad with her husband and small child; then she received a mobilization order. Thinking it was only for the autumn maneuvers, she was not particularly worried. In November, however, she was attached to the 163rd Division and a month later forced to cross into Finland. Although miserable and frightened, she was sent, with two other nurses, to a front-line first-aid post. The other nurses were wounded and removed to a field hospital behind the lines; when the retreat came, the girl was unable to get back to the base and for twenty-four hours wandered through the woods with a Russian doctor. The pair were finally picked up by a Finnish patrol on the shores of a lake.

The bodies of the other two nurses were later found by the Finns in the field hospital—an old farmhouse—alongside the corpses of hundreds of soldiers. Ebbe Munck, who had visited this hospital four days after the retreat, told me it was a ghastly sight. The yard at the back of the house was piled with naked bodies; when patients had died, the Russian doctors had simply thrown the corpses out of the window to make way for newcomers. Inside, hundreds of wounded men had died in their beds; when the order to retreat came, they had been abandoned. Ebbe said a man had even been left, half cut open, on the operating table.

When the Finnish warden heard this story, he remarked bitterly, “And that’s the civilization they want to bring to Finland.”

From the book LOOKING FOR TROUBLE: The Classic Memoir of a Trailblazing War Correspondent by Virginia Cowles, Foreword by Christina Lamb. Copyright © 1941 by Virginia Cowles. To be published on Aug. 9, 2022 by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.