Cows Gone Wild: The Cattle of Heck

Returning large, wild herbivores to Europe could help maintain soil health and discourage invasive species, but these cows have some political baggage…

Heck cows
via Wikimedia Commons

By: Matthew Wills
March 13, 2022

The European rewilding movement has some bovine baggage. In 2009, when a breed of cattle called Heck were imported into England from Germany to be let loose on private land in Devon, the British tabloids ran amuck with “Nazi Cows” and “Herd Reich” headlines.

What the Heck was going on?

“To be clear from the outset, although the histories of Heck cattle make them symbolically charged, their material form and political deployment are not now ‘Nazi’ in character. Nor, of course, is rewilding Europe in the twenty-first century a fascist endeavor.”

So explain geographers Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen in the context of returning large wild herbivores to Europe. Big herbivores are the “naturalistic grazing” component of rewilding efforts. Able to survive outdoors in all weather, such wild grazers keep invasive species at bay, beneficially break up the soil, and recycle nutrients through their fertilizing dung—and, ultimately, their corpses.
The problem is that Europe doesn’t have any large wild herbivores anymore.

The problem is that Europe doesn’t have any large wild herbivores anymore. Once the aurochs, with a range encompassing much of Eurasia and North Africa, did all this. The animals were the ancestors of Bos taurus, the species that makes up all modern breeds of cattle. Artistic representations of aurochsen (the plural of aurochs in both German and English) are found in caves dating back 36,000 years. The last remaining wild “ur-oxen” survived in Polish forests until remarkably recently, before clear-cutting, hunting, and competition from domesticated cattle led to their extinction around 1627.

Almost a century ago, two German brothers started an attempt to back-breed various strains of hardy cattle to get something like an extinct aurochs. The sons of a famous director of the Berlin Zoo, Lutz and Heinz Heck started their efforts in Weimar Germany. They both ran zoos in the 1930s and became enthusiastic Nazis, with the full support of the Nazi Party behind their efforts. They dreamed of herds of wild cattle roaming the eastern European plains, a landscape murderously depopulated of non-Germans.

The Hecks didn’t, in fact, “recreate” an aurochs. They did come up with hardy breed of cattle that, thanks to an influx of Spanish fighting bulls, proved to be fairly aggressive. Some of these survived WWII. Starting in the 1980s, “under very different political circumstances” descendants of these Heck cattle were imported and introduced in the Oostvaardersplassen, an early rewilding project in the Netherlands that called for big, de-domesticated herbivores.

Lorimer and Driessen offer a more nuanced approach to the “genealogy of rewilding” than the hysterical tabloids, arguing that there are a “multiplicity of rewildings past and present,” only some of which are tainted by “reactionary tendencies.”

The authors do note that manifestos of rewilding “are often ahistorical and apolitical.” There are, for example, “various ontologies, geographies, and epistemologies of wilderness in Europe.” Defining “wild,” “wilderness,” and “rewilding” are important baselines. Considering that all “claimed returns to the wild are fundamentally political endeavors with fraught spatial histories,” rewilding definitely warrants critical thought and a historical grounding.

Meanwhile, the Tauros Programme is attempting to back-breed cattle to as close to aurochsen as genetically possible. Other rewilding projects simply use existing heritage breeds of cattle as proxies for aurochs. Knepp Farm, whose story is told in Isabella Tree’s Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm, uses old English longhorns.

English longhorns aren’t quite wild cattle, but they’re also much hardier than the usual domesticated breeds. They roam the property year around, functioning as de facto ecological engineers, not least in dropping cowpies that become overrun with multiple species of dung-beetles that have otherwise disappeared from farms, whose cows have to be pumped full of drugs just to get by.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

From "Nazi Cows" to Cosmopolitan "Ecological Engineers": Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle
By: Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol. 106, No. 3 (May 2016), pp. 631-652
Association of American Geographers

Grunts, boops, chatters and squeals — fish are noisy creatures

FishSounds is an online database of recordings of the noises created by fish, like this Bocon toadfish. (Shutterstock)


THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 13, 2022 

While they may lack some of the melodic qualities of birds or whales, there are almost 1,000 species of fish that use sounds to communicate, and possibly many more.

Yet, despite nearly 150 years of contemporary scientific research into fish sound production, there was no global inventory of fish species known to make sounds. Until now. Fish are one of the largest groups of sound-producing vertebrates, with speculated sound production abilities in thousands of the 34,000 fish species globally.

Our research team, led by Audrey Looby, conducted a systematic review examining almost 3,000 references. We extracted data from more than 800 different studies to determine that 989 fish species have been shown to produce active sounds globally. We used our findings to create FishSounds, an online database cataloguing fish sounds.
Wait, fish make sounds?

While fish sound production may not be as widely recognized as it is for birds, frogs, bats or whales, people have known fish could make sounds for a very long time. Fish sound production and possible fish hearing were discussed by Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. And looking at the common names of many fishes — like grunts, croakers and drums — it is clear fishers have known about their sounds for a long time, too.

A BBC Earth report on fish sounds.

Fish also have a wide diversity of mechanisms for their sound production. Instead of vocal cords, fish may have adapted bony structures that they can rub or click together, while others use their swimbladder like a drum. Some fish even make sounds by expelling air out of their backsides. Yes, communication through “fish farting.”

Fish may use sound to communicate information about reproduction, their territory or their food. Because sound travels faster in water than in air, fish can hear signals across greater distances, and faster than they could through sight, smell or taste.

For some examples, listen to the complex calls of the Bocon toadfish, the ticks of the sablefish and a chorus of freshwater drums.

Thanks to our review, we are now able to detail which and how many fish species have been documented to use sound for communication. Actively soniferous — sound-producing — fishes have been found in marine, freshwater and brackish (slightly salty, like where rivers meet saltwater) environments in almost every region globally. They have also been found throughout the fish taxonomic tree, in 133 of the 549 fish families.

Listening to fish

Many other animals, including birds, dolphins and crabs may eavesdrop on fish sounds to eat, avoid being eaten and navigate to suitable habitats.

Underwater animals aren’t the only ones who can eavesdrop on fish sounds. We used a remote sensing technique called passive acoustics to record underwater sounds and learn more about fish and their environment.

Fish sounds have been used to detect invasive species, monitor spawning and identify essential habitats. Fish chewing sounds have even been used in aquaculture to optimize feeding.

There is also a growing body of evidence that human activities through noise pollution, habitat degradation and climate change are hurting the abilities of fish to produce and hear critical sounds for their reproduction and survival. This has potentially detrimental effects to whole populations or communities of fish.

Using our global review of soniferous fishes as a framework, FishSounds makes the data we collected available to other researchers, and anyone else, with an interest in aquatic ecosystems. Users can search by species, recording or study information. We also provide information about our data and links to other relevant websites.

While fish don’t have vocal cords, they do produce sounds to communicate. (Kieran Cox), Author provided

We are also compiling recordings of the many sounds fish produce, with 239 recordings currently available, and many more to come.

Growing resource

We plan to expand our data offerings and functionalities, including regularly updating our database to include new research and recordings, implementing a form submission system that people can use to upload audio files of fish sounds and creating interactive searches that allow users to visualize trends in the data.

FishSounds is also collaborating with other data repositories and efforts, including FishBase, as well as contributing to a global library of underwater biological sounds.

Because more than 95 per cent of fish species lack published research on sound production, we hope to amplify what we know already and support future work on the wonderful world of fish sounds.

Authors

Audrey Looby
PhD candidate, Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, University of Florida

Amalis Riera
Research Scientist

Kieran Cox
Postdoctoral fellow, Marine Ecology, University of Victoria

Sarah Vela
Senior Data Manager, Dalhousie University
Disclosure statement

Amalis Riera works for MERIDIAN - the Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network. This group receives funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Research Nova Scotia, and Dalhousie University.

kcox@uvic.ca receives funding from Liber Ero Fellowship and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Sarah Vela works for MERIDIAN - the Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network. This group receives funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Research Nova Scotia, and Dalhousie University.

Why birth control side effects have eluded science

Birth control users report the drug affects their mental health, but scientists have been unable to find the link

By SAIMA SIDIK

SALON
PUBLISHED MARCH 13, 2022

Young woman holding birth control pills blister pack (Getty Images/Dimitri Otis)

This article originally appeared on Undark.

In August 2021, Emilie Skoog lay on the couch in her parents' living room, thinking that not a single thing in the world sparked joy. For weeks, the 25-year-old MIT graduate student had been unable to muster enough appetite to eat properly. Instead, she'd spend full days lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep between sips of Gatorade.

The depression had set in about two months earlier, Skoog said, just after she'd started taking hormonal birth control pills to ease the debilitating cramps she experienced around the time of her period, which rendered her housebound for a few days each month.

"I'm a very upbeat, happy person," Skoog said. But that first month taking the pills, she recalled, a fog of exhaustion and apathy replaced her usual cheerful mood. When she walked to the lab where she worked, she added, "I didn't even care to look both ways across the street."

Skoog says her doctor diagnosed her with depression and prescribed antidepressants that helped her get off the couch and back to her life. But it wasn't until she followed the advice of a friend, who suggested she try going off the birth control, that the depression truly lifted, she said: "I swear to you, the day I stopped taking it, I literally felt completely normal."
Advertisement:

Oral contraceptives were approved in the 1960s, and since then, studies suggest, the medications have benefitted large segments of society. Still, concerns about possible side effects linger. Researchers have looked for a connection between hormonal birth control and mental health issues like anxiety and depression. But despite the stories like Skoog's that circulate on social media, in sisterly social groups, and in doctors' offices, these studies have not consistently supported a link. For now, while the connection between birth control and mental health may seem obvious to many of the drugs' users, a true link remains elusive to researchers.

Hormone-based birth control works primarily by mimicking key aspects of pregnancy. At the end of each monthly cycle, people who menstruate have natural hormonal lows that tell their bodies they're not pregnant. Birth control keeps hormone levels high, as they are during pregnancy, with one consequence being that eggs stay locked away where they can't be fertilized.

There's ample reason to believe that tinkering with sex hormones might affect a person's mood. Conditions such as anxiety and depression often manifest during puberty and menopause, when hormones are undergoing natural fluctuations. When birth control first came on the market, it didn't take scientists long to begin studying whether these new drugs could also influence their users' psychology. But in 2018, when researchers from Ohio State University looked at 26 studies examining the link between some of the most common types of birth control and depression, they wrote, "the preponderance of evidence does not support an association."

Brett Worly, an OB-GYN based in Columbus, and one of the authors of the meta-analysis, said that performing the study changed how he talks to his patients. Before, he cautioned prospective birth control users that the drugs might cause depression — because some reports indicated this might be the case — but now he tells them that's unlikely. Worly admits, however, that his advice is based only on the best evidence that's available right now. The study he'd like to see has yet to be done.

"It would have to be like hundreds or maybe thousands of women over at least six months to a year," he said. Ideally, the study would be performed by independent researchers unaffiliated with pharmaceutical companies, to avoid any bias. Participants would be randomly assigned to take birth control or placebo pills, and researchers would periodically assess depression, anxiety, and a range of mood changes.

But this gold standard approach has a downside for participants: The placebo group would be susceptible to unwanted pregnancies. Participants would need a secondary, non-hormonal form of birth control, but here the options are limited. A copper intrauterine device, or IUD, is the obvious choice for its effectiveness, but insertion is invasive, and heavy, painful periods can be a common side effect. Condoms are an option, but barrier methods are prone to human error and tend to be less effective than hormonal contraceptives. "It's a hard study to do," Worly said. "Hopefully, eventually, that would happen. It hasn't happened yet the way that we need it to."

Even a group with the capability to complete the study would face an additional challenge: Scientists say they lack the tools to accurately assess many of the mental health side effects that birth control users may experience. Worly and his co-authors focused their meta-analysis on depression because it's a specific, widely studied condition that researchers have standard ways of diagnosing. The main symptoms of depression include feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and fatigue, but birth control users have reported that the drugs can make them cry more easily, feel anxious, or feel oddly emotionless — conditions that are assessed by some depression questionnaires, but which don't qualify as depression on their own.

Women's health physician Ellen Wiebe runs an abortion clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she often has conversations with her patients about why birth control failed them. "Over and over again, I had heard that she tried birth control," Wiebe said, "and she went crazy."

She asked her patients what they mean when they say they feel crazy. "They told me that they would get angry more easily, that they would cry more easily, that they would just overreact to stuff," Wiebe said. And so she designed a survey to examine these subtle mood changes. The rate of mental health side effects that she uncovered was far higher than the rates she was used to seeing in physician manuals— of the 978 respondents in the self-reported survey, 51 percent had experienced at least one negative mood-related side effect.

Wiebe said she thinks her research uncovered such a high rate because she designed her survey around the side effects that birth control users reported to her, like disinterest in sex and irritability. And she noted that even comparatively mild mood changes can have a serious impact on well-being: "A combination of being angry and not wanting to have sex is not good for relationships," Wiebe said. "I remember one woman telling me, 'I lost the love of my life.'"

Wiebe's results may not hold for all populations, however. She and her collaborators recruited participants in doctors' offices, "so right there you have some selection bias," Andrew Novick, a reproductive psychiatrist at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email to Undark. Women who feel well on their medications are less likely to visit a doctor than those who are experiencing negative side effects.

Worly says he thinks the survey is a nice contribution to scientists' understanding of mood-related side effects. But he cautions that asking participants to remember how they felt, potentially years earlier, as the study's authors did, could introduce recall bias. And a critical component of his ideal experiment was missing: "There was no 'control group,' to correct for other circumstances that may have affected women, like change in seasons, change in relationship, and more," he wrote.

Lorraine Boissoneault, a journalist from the Chicago area, knows how hard it can be to disentangle mental health side effects from other factors. She struggled with mood swings from the time she started taking birth control until she switched to a non-hormonal IUD, around six years later. "In my head, the thing that had changed, that seems like the obvious change, was birth control," she said. But during that same period, she noted, her personal life improved and she started getting treatment for a thyroid condition that had gone undiagnosed.

Novick says he's treated people who, like Boissoneault, experience mood swings while on birth control, people who experience more subtle changes, and people who actually feel better while taking these drugs. Further complicating the matter, anecdotes suggest that the same person can experience both ends of this emotional spectrum. Elizabeth Hinnant, a writer from Atlanta, found that one form of hormonal birth control left her feeling severely irritated, while another made her feel calmer than usual.

Variability, lack of specificity, and confounding circumstances make mood changes hard to measure, but Wiebe and Novick also pointed to a problem researchers face when studying any serious side effect — people like Boissoneault, Hinnant, and Skoog probably won't participate in studies testing drugs that they believe made their lives miserable, so studies don't capture this segment of the population. "It's something called the survivor effect," Novick said. Most studies are limited to studying women who are willing to take hormonal birth control. "And who are those women?" Novick asks. "Those women are the ones who want to stay on it."

Birth control users say they sometimes contend with stigma and dismissive attitudes as they try to address mood changes. Skoog says she consulted two doctors about whether birth control could be contributing to her depression. Both told her that was unlikely. Boissoneault, meanwhile, never talked to a doctor about her mood swings because, "I was scared of what people might say, or how they might react," she said. "So I kind of just gritted my teeth and tried to get through it."

Compounding the problem, some researchers may hesitate to speak out against drugs that have had undeniably positive impacts for large segments of society. One study found that the introduction of birth control correlated with a three-fold increase in the number of women enrolled in medical and law school. Another found that birth control may have helped narrow the wage gap. And studies consistently show that children are less likely to grow up in poverty when their parents have access to birth control. These gains were hard fought in the U.S. — the battle to keep birth control accessible has reached the Supreme Court multiple times. Novick remembers showing a colleague his first grant proposal to study birth control's mood-related side effects. "He was like, 'You got to tread carefully here,'" Novick said. "Because OB-GYNs are gonna get very defensive."

Some scientists think outdated views about physiology have also stymied research. Nafissa Ismail, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Ottawa, said, "We've been studying the brain as its own entity for the longest time in the field of neuroscience and forgetting that it belongs to a body." It's only recently that a push to reconsider the body has prompted questions about how drugs targeting the uterus can translate to the brain, she added.

Medical imaging suggests that there may be significant translation from body to mind. Using brain scanning techniques like magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have observed that birth control may alter the number of cells — and the number of connections between them — in certain regions of the brain. These alterations may underly behavioral changes observed by Ismail and others, like differences between how birth control users and non-users respond to stress.

Ismail says that resources for this type of work are becoming more available — she cites the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health as funding agencies that have expressed interest in research on birth control and mood. But after so many years of languishing in obscurity, these fields lack the number of researchers necessary to make rapid progress.

Meanwhile, Skoog said she's off hormonal birth control for good, and considering acupuncture to control her cramps. She's also helping friends track their own moods, just in case birth control skews their feelings into dangerous territory. "I imagine that there are many, many, many women out there who are going through this," she said.

When you eat matters: How your eating rhythms impact your mental health



When the main circadian clock in the brain is out of sync with eating rhythms, it impacts the brain’s ability to function fully. (Shutterstock)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 13, 2022 8.28am EDT


Eating is an essential part of human life and it turns out that not only what we eat but when we eat can impact our brains. Irregular eating times have been shown to contribute to poor mental health, including depression and anxiety, as well as to cardio-metabolic diseases and weight gain.

Fortunately, it is possible to leverage our eating rhythms to limit negative mood and increase mental health. As a doctoral student in the field of neuropsychiatry and a psychiatrist studying nutrition and mood disorders, our research focuses on investigating how eating rhythms impact the brain.

Here’s how it all works: The circadian clock system is responsible for aligning our internal processes at optimal times of day based on cues from the environment such as light or food. Humans have evolved this wiring to meet energy needs that change a lot throughout the day and night, creating a rhythmic pattern to our eating habits that follows the schedule of the sun.

Although the main clock manages metabolic function over the day-night cycle, our eating rhythms also impact the main clock. Digestive tissues have their own clocks and show regular oscillations in functioning over the 24-hour cycle. For example, the small intestine and liver vary throughout the day and night in terms of digestive, absorptive and metabolic capacity.

When the main circadian clock in the brain is out of sync with eating rhythms, it impacts the brain’s ability to function fully. Even though the brain is only two per cent of our total body mass, it consumes up to 25 per cent of our energy and is particularly affected by changes in calorie intake. This means that abnormal meal times are bound to have negative health outcomes.
Food and mood

Although the underlying mechanisms are still unknown, there is overlap between neural circuits governing eating and mood. Also, digestive hormones exert effects on dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a large role in mood, energy and pleasure. Individuals with depression and bipolar disorder have abnormal dopamine levels. Altered eating rhythms are thought to contribute to the poor maintenance of mood.

There is overlap between the neural circuits governing eating and mood. (Shutterstock)

Irregular eating may even play a role in the complex underlying causes of mood disorders. For example, individuals with depression or bipolar disorder exhibit disturbed internal rhythms and irregular meal times, which significantly worsen mood symptoms. In addition, shift workers — who tend to have irregular eating schedules — demonstrate increased rates of depression and anxiety when compared to the general population. Despite this evidence, assessing eating rhythms is not currently part of standard clinical care in most psychiatric settings.
Optimizing eating rhythms

So, what can be done to optimize our eating rhythms? One promising method we have encountered in our research is time-restricted eating (TRE), also known as intermittent fasting.

TRE involves restricting the eating window to a certain amount of time during the day, typically four to 12 hours. For example, choosing to eat all meals and snacks in a 10-hour window from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. reflects an overnight fasting period. Evidence suggests that this method optimizes brain function, energy metabolism and the healthy signalling of metabolic hormones.

TRE has already been shown to prevent depressive and anxiety symptoms in animal studies designed to model shift work. The antidepressant effects of TRE have also been shown in humans. Eating on a regular schedule is also beneficial to reduce the risk of health issues such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Circadian rhythms in a 24-hour world

We live in a 24-hour world filled with artificial light and round-the-clock access to food. That makes the effects of disturbed eating rhythms on mental health an important topic for modern life. As more research provides data assessing eating rhythms in individuals with mood disorders, incorporating eating rhythm treatment into clinical care could significantly improve patient quality of life.

For the general population, it is important to increase public knowledge on accessible and affordable ways to maintain healthy eating. This includes paying attention not only to the content of meals but also to eating rhythms. Aligning eating rhythms with the schedule of the sun will have lasting benefits for general well-being and may have a protective effect against mental illness.

Authors

Elena Koning
PhD Student, Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Ontario

Elisa Brietzke
Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Queen's University, Ontario
Disclosure statement
Elisa Brietzke receives funding from Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Psychiatry and Centre for Neuroscience Studies (CNS), Queen's University.

Cool to be kind: being nice is good for us – so why don’t we all do it?

As science proves that acts of kindness benefit both giver and receiver, we ask why some people are so much better at putting others first

Guinea-Bissau's Braima Suncar Dabo helps Aruba's Jonathan Busby to the finish line during the men's 5,000m heats at the 2019 IAAF World Athletics Championships in Doha. 

Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images



Donna Ferguson
Sun 13 Mar 2022 10.00 GMT

It was freezing cold the day Neil Laybourn saw a man in a T-shirt sitting on a high ledge on Waterloo Bridge and made a split-second decision that would change both their lives for ever. “It’s hard to pin down what it was that made me stop… but it would have played on my mind if I hadn’t,” he said. “That’s not how you live your life is it? You don’t just walk past when you see someone in need.”

On that January morning in London’s rush hour, hundreds of other people were doing exactly that. But Laybourn didn’t and – it turned out the man, Jonny Benjamin, was contemplating suicide. Six years later he would launch a campaign to find and thank Laybourn for persuading him down off that ledge. The two of them now give talks on mental health issues and suicide prevention together.

Looking back now on that day, Laybourn says: “It’s made me much more aware of how important it is to put the amount of kindness you have in you, out into the world.”

But what is it, exactly, that makes us kind? Why are some of us kinder than others – and what stops us from being kinder?

The Kindness Test, a major new study involving more than 60,000 people from 144 different countries, has been looking into these and other questions. Launched on BBC Radio 4 and devised by the University of Sussex, it is believed to be the largest public study of kindness ever carried out in the world.

The results, which are currently the subject of a three-part Radio 4 documentary The Anatomy of Kindness, suggest that people who receive, give or even just notice more acts of kindness tend to experience higher levels of wellbeing and life satisfaction.

Other encouraging findings are that as many as two-thirds of people think the pandemic has made people kinder and nearly 60% of participants in the study claimed to have received an act of kindness in the previous 24 hours.

“It is a big part of human nature, to be kind – because it’s such a big part of how we connect with people and how we have relationships,” says Claudia Hammond, visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex and presenter of the documentary. “It’s a win-win situation, because we like receiving kindness, but we also like being kind.”

South Africans spend 67 minutes on July 18, Nelson Mandela’s birthday, on acts of kindness in their communities, to mark the 67 years he fought for social justice and equality. 

Photograph: Louise Gubb/Corbis/Getty Images

Our desire to be kind is actually quite selfish, on one level, she explains. Because we have evolved to have empathy, we have all sorts of “ulterior motives” for being kind – the chief one being that it makes us feel good. “We know from brain research, there is a warm fuzzy feeling that people feel straight away. But also, it gives you the sense that you are a kind person who cares about other people. And we want to be good, we want to feel good about ourselves and what we are like.”

Your religious beliefs and your values system also help to determine how kind you are, the study shows. “We found those who believed benevolence was important were more likely to give than those who believed power and achievement were more important.”

People who have been told they should be kind are naturally more likely to notice opportunities to be kind: “They have expectations, which might be the expectations of their religious teachings or it might be the expectations of those around them,” Hammond says.

This may be one of the reasons why women who filled in the study’s online questionnaire were more likely to report being kind, receiving kindness and seeing kindness. Women may feel that they ought to report performing acts of kindness, because caring for people and comforting them is traditionally seen as a more “feminine” activity, she says.

For this reason, Hammond is concerned about the use of the hashtag #BeKind on social media. “It’s sometimes used to shut women down from talking, to suggest they can’t hold an opinion, because they’ve got to ‘be kind’. And obviously we want social media to be a kinder place. But if kindness then gets weaponised and used to stop people talking, then I think that’s a worry.”

While boys wear slogans like ‘born to win’, messages like ‘be kind’ and ‘kindness always wins’ litter young girls’ clothing . Hammond questions how much girls are stereotypically being taught, at a young age, to be caring – and whether that puts an unequal amount of pressure on girls to be kind as they grow up. “What I would hope is that boys are being taught to be nurturing too.”

Paul Dadge helps Davinia Turrell stagger from Edgware Road Tube station after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. 

Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA

Overall, the study suggests the greatest predictor of how kind you are to others – and how kind they are to you – is not your gender, but your personality. People who scored high on extraversion, openness to new experiences and agreeableness self-reported giving and receiving more kindness, as did people who talk to strangers.

The reason for this may simply be that these people have more confidence to be kind, Hammond says. The most common barrier to kindness reported by British people in the study was a fear that their behaviour would be misinterpreted. “You need confidence to be able to offer kindness and to face the possibility that your offer of kindness may be rejected. And people may be happier to do that, and talk to strangers, if they are extroverted.”

To get over this fear of misinterpretation, Hammond recommends you remind yourself how amazing it can feel to receive an act of kindness. “When we asked people how they felt, they said warm and happy and grateful and loved and pleased.”

Luke Cameron, dubbed the “nicest man in Britain”, once spent a year doing a good deed every day to raise money for 45 different charities. It taught him that sometimes offering some help, reassurance or a kind word can make a huge difference to strangers. “It’s made me more aware of things that happen in front of me. If someone falls over in the street, there’s always going to be people who go and help and others who stand back. It’s made me one of those people who go and help. Consciously, I now just do it.”

He became that person, he says, after a “mindset shift” where he realised: “Actually, if it was me, I’d want somebody to help me. That makes you think differently about how you are with people.”

Like Laybourn and Hammond, Cameron says that you have a choice when you interact with people – and the more you try to find opportunities to be kind, the easier it gets. “It was actually the small things that I found were the most impactful,” he says.

For example, he once bought coffee for a woman who looked sad in a Costa Coffee shop and invited her to sit with him. She thanked him, saying no one had been kind to her like that in a while, and then poured her heart out to him about her friend, who was really struggling with cancer.

As she left, he realised she was wearing a wig and her eyebrows had been drawn on. “It dawned on me, she was the one going through cancer and she needed somebody to talk to about what she was going through. So she spoke to a complete stranger.” He will never forget their conversation and its impact on him. “That will always stay with me.”

Talking to strangers makes us feel more connected with each other, says Hammond: “People often think that conversations with strangers are quick and shallow and saying hello to someone in a shop doesn’t really matter. But actually it does. All of these things are received kindly by other people because they connect us. And connection is everything.”

Thawing Permafrost Could Leach Microbes, Chemicals Into Environment

Thawing permafrost can result in the loss of terrain, as seen in this image where part of the coastal bluff along Drew Point, Alaska, has collapsed into the ocean. 

Credit: Benjamin Jones, USGS

In Brief:

Scientists are turning to a combination of data collected from the air, land, and space to get a more complete picture of how climate change is affecting the planet’s frozen regions.

Trapped within Earth’s permafrost – ground that remains frozen for a minimum of two years – are untold quantities of greenhouse gases, microbes, and chemicals, including the now-banned pesticide DDT. As the planet warms, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate, and scientists face a host of uncertainties when trying to determine the potential effects of the thaw.

A paper published earlier this year in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment looked at the current state of permafrost research. Along with highlighting conclusions about permafrost thaw, the paper focuses on how researchers are seeking to address the questions surrounding it.

Infrastructure is already affected: Thawing permafrost has led to giant sinkholes, slumping telephone poles, damaged roads and runways, and toppled trees. More difficult to see is what has been trapped in permafrost’s mix of soil, ice, and dead organic matter. Research has looked at how chemicals like DDT and microbes – some of which have been frozen for thousands, if not millions, of years – could be released from thawing permafrost.

Then there is thawing permafrost’s effect on the planet’s carbon: Arctic permafrost alone holds an estimated 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon, including methane and carbon dioxide. That’s roughly 51 times the amount of carbon the world released as fossil fuel emissions in 2019. Plant matter frozen in permafrost doesn’t decay, but when permafrost thaws, microbes within the dead plant material start to break the matter down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

“Current models predict that we’ll see a pulse of carbon released from the permafrost to the atmosphere within the next hundred years, potentially sooner,” said Kimberley Miner, a climate researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of the paper. But key details – such as the quantity, specific source, and duration of the carbon release – remain unclear.

The worst-case scenario is if all the carbon dioxide and methane were released within a very short time, like a couple of years. Another scenario involves the gradual release of carbon. With more information, scientists hope to better understand the likelihood of either scenario.

While the review paper found that Earth’s polar regions are warming the fastest, it was less conclusive on how increased carbon emissions could drive drier or wetter conditions in the Arctic. What is more certain is that changes in the Arctic and Antarctic will cascade to lower latitudes. Earth’s polar regions help stabilize the planet’s climate. They help drive the transfer of heat from the equator toward higher latitudes, resulting in atmospheric circulation that powers the jet stream and other currents. A warmer, permafrost-free Arctic could have untold consequences for Earth’s weather and climate.
An Integrated Approach

To understand the effects of the thaw scientists are increasingly turning to integrated Earth observations from the ground, the air, and space – techniques outlined in the paper. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

Ground measurements, for example, provide precise monitoring of changes in a localized area, while airborne and space-based measurements can cover vast areas. Ground and airborne measurements focus on the specific time they were collected, whereas satellites constantly monitor Earth – although they can be limited by things such as cloud cover, the time of day, or the eventual end of a satellite mission.

The hope is that using measurements from a combination of platforms will help scientists create a fuller picture of changes at the poles, where permafrost is thawing the fastest.

Miner is working with colleagues on the ground to characterize the microbes frozen in permafrost, while others are using airborne instruments to measure emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane. In addition, airborne and satellite missions can help to pinpoint emissions hotspots in permafrost regions.

There are also satellite missions in the pipeline that will provide carbon emissions data with greater resolution. The ESA (European Space Agency) Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission will map changes in land cover and help monitor soil properties and water quality. NASA’s Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission will also use satellite-based imaging spectroscopy to collect data on research areas including plants and their health; changes to the land related to events like landslides and volcanic eruptions; and snow and ice accumulation, melt, and brightness (which is related to how much heat is reflected back into space).

SBG is the focus area of one of several future Earth science missions that make up NASA’s Earth System Observatory. Together, these satellites will provide a 3D, holistic view of Earth, from its surface through the atmosphere. They will provide information on subjects including climate change, natural hazards, extreme storms, water availability, and agriculture.

“Everyone is racing as fast as they can to understand what’s going on at the poles,” said Miner. “The more we understand, the better prepared we will be for the future.”

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE

Saudi Arabia carries out mass execution of 81 inmates, biggest in modern history

By Euronews with AP • Updated: 12/03/2022 

A US Honor Guard member is covered by the flag of Saudi Arabia as Defence Secretary Jim Mattis welcomes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Pentagon in 2019. - Copyright AP Photo/Cliff Owen


Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant and terrorist groups -- the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history.

The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam's holiest pilgrimage site.

It was unclear why the kingdom chose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world's attention remained focused on Russia's war on Ukraine.

The number of death penalty cases being carried out in Saudi Arabia had dropped during the coronavirus pandemic. However, the kingdom continued to behead convicts under King Salman and his assertive son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The state-run Saudi Press Agency announced Saturday's executions, saying they included those "convicted of various crimes, including the murdering of innocent men, women and children".

The kingdom also said some of those executed were members of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and also backers of Yemen's Houthi rebels.

A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Iran-backed Houthis since 2015 in neighbouring Yemen.

Dozens killed and injured in Saudi-led airstrikes in northwestern Yemen

Yemen faces a famine as deadly as Ethiopia's during the 1980s, says refugee council head

Those executed included 73 Saudis, seven Yemenis and one Syrian. The report did not say where the executions took place.

"The accused were provided with the right to an attorney and were guaranteed their full rights under Saudi law during the judicial process, which found them guilty of committing multiple heinous crimes," the Saudi Press Agency said.

"The kingdom will continue to take a strict and unwavering stance against terrorism and extremist ideologies that threaten the stability of the entire world," the report added.

It did not say how the prisoners were executed, though death-row inmates typically are beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

An announcement by Saudi state television described those executed as having "followed the footsteps of Satan" in carrying out their crimes.

Activists fear execution reprisal against Shiite minority

The executions drew immediate international criticism.

"The world should know by now that when Mohammed bin Salman promises reform, bloodshed is bound to follow," said Soraya Bauwens, the deputy director of Reprieve, a London-based advocacy group.

Ali Adubusi, the director of the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, alleged that some of those executed had been tortured and faced trials "carried out in secret".

"These executions are the opposite of justice," he said.

The kingdom's last mass execution came in January 2016, when the kingdom executed 47 people, including a prominent opposition Shiite cleric who had rallied demonstrations in the domain.

In 2019, the kingdom beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, predominantly minority Shiites, in a mass execution across the country for alleged terrorism-related crimes.


It also publicly nailed the severed body and head of a convicted extremist to a pole as a warning to others. Such crucifixions after execution, while rare, do occur in the kingdom.

Jamal Khashoggi: Saudi Arabia rejects US intelligence report into journalist's death

How a glitch on a Saudi woman's iPhone revealed widespread spyware hacking around the world




Activists, including Ali al-Ahmed of the US-based Institute for Gulf Affairs and the group Democracy for the Arab World Now said they believe that over three dozen of those executed Saturday were Shiites.

However, the Saudi statement did not identify the faiths of those killed.

Shiites, who live primarily in the kingdom's oil-rich east, have long complained of being second-class citizens. Executions of Shiites in the past have stirred regional unrest.

Saudi Arabia meanwhile remains engaged in diplomatic talks with its Shiite regional rival Iran to try to ease yearslong tensions.

The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque remains a crucial moment in the history of the oil-rich kingdom.

A band of ultraconservative Saudi Sunni militants took the Grand Mosque, home to the cube-shaped Kaaba that Muslims pray toward five times a day, demanding the Al Saud royal family abdicate.

A two-week siege that followed ended with an official death toll of 229 killed. The kingdom's rulers soon further embraced Wahhabism, an ultraconservative Islamic doctrine.
'No power' to get rid of death penalty, crown prince claims

Since taking power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has increasingly liberalised life in the kingdom, opening movie theatres, allowing women to drive and defanging the country's once-feared religious police.

Saudi Arabia releases women's driving activist after three years in jail

Saudi Arabia accused of using golf tournament to 'sportswash' its human rights record

However, US intelligence agencies believe the crown prince also ordered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi's slaying and dismemberment and overseeing airstrikes in Yemen that killed hundreds of civilians.

In excerpts from an interview with The Atlantic magazine, the crown prince discussed the death penalty, saying a "high percentage" of executions had been halted by paying so-called "blood money" settlements to aggrieved families.

"We got rid of [the death penalty] except for one category, and this one is written in the Quran -- and we cannot do anything about it, even if we wished to do something -- because it is clear teaching in the Quran," the prince said.

"If someone killed someone, another person, the family of that person has the right -- after going to the court -- to apply capital punishment unless they forgive him. Or if someone threatens the life of many people, that means he has to be punished by the death penalty."

"Regardless if I like it or not, I don't have the power to change it," bin Salman said.

America’s rush to normalcy has robbed us of the time to grieve our Covid dead


Americans who’ve lost loved ones to Covid-19 say they feel like ‘everyone wants you to get over it’

‘It is harder to have a sense of shared grief, because we are not all sharing it evenly.’ Illustration: Ulises Mendicutty/The Guardian


Iffah Kitchlew
Sun 13 Mar 2022

We have lost a great deal within the last two years. The worldwide Covid death toll has surpassed 6 million lives. In the US, nearly a million people have succumbed to the virus – more than the number of people who died during the civil war. In fact, more lives were lost to Covid in the US last week alone than in the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.


The Covid cloud is starting to lift – but two years on, its legacy of grief lingers

And now, at the pandemic’s second anniversary in the US, we are watching a terrifying war unfold abroad. The immense cumulative toll on the public’s psyche has felt impossible for many to escape.

“It’s like losing someone in a car accident and being surrounded by car accidents, 24/7,” said Sabila Khan, a 42-year-old from Jersey City, New Jersey, whose father died of Covid-19 in April 2020.

The world is trying to move on: mask mandates are relaxing and quarantine periods are shortening. But this rush to reinstate a sense of normalcy may have inadvertently robbed us of the time we need to process many layers of trauma. It’s important to ask ourselves: have we been given the space to grieve the scale of what we have lost?

“That exposure to so much death on a massive scale is so unsettling to a person’s mental health. It made people realize just how precarious their lives are,” said Holly Prigerson, director of the Cornell Center for Research on End-of-Life Care. “It’s a recipe for a perfect psychological storm.”

If anything lies in the eye of this “psychological storm”, it is grief. This might explain the response to the most recent surge in the pandemic. The flu-ization of the Omicron variant – meaning the push to treat the virus as an endemic illness similar to the flu – has changed the narrative on Covid. Workers are returning to their offices, restaurants are no longer requiring vaccinations, festivals as big as Coachella are heading to get rid of vaccine and Covid testing requirements.

The apparent lack of severity of Omicron’s symptoms and the advent of the Covid vaccine has given people a “false sense of security”, according to Amna Zaki, a psychiatric nurse at St Francis medical center in Trenton, New Jersey. “By fall of last year people’s attitude was ‘We’re done, it’s over,’” she said.

But for those who have seen the worst that it can do, the pandemic is far from over.

“We’re still trying to heal our grief and our heartbreak,” said Jeneffer Haynes, 38, who lost her younger brother to Covid last year. Haynes remembers sitting on a plastic chair, by herself, in a cold, palely lit hallway at Holy Cross hospital’s Covid ward in Germantown, Maryland, watching as he struggled to breathe. After eight days in a small grey hospital room, Haynes’ brother died. He was 30 at the time.

Haynes says she still has not wrapped her head around the events of her brother’s death. And as the world reverts to business as usual, she says people who have experienced a Covid loss like her feel as if their grief is being ignored.

“I feel like an outcast,” said Manisha Patel, a 43-year-old from Pennsylvania whose 76-year-old father died of Covid at the beginning of the pandemic.

Coping with this kind of grief can be particularly challenging because of the circumstances of a Covid-related loss, said Debra Kaysen, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.

“This is a place where normal mourning is interrupted. Where it is hard to finish or to move forward with the grieving process,” she added.

The interruption of mourning traditions can worsen mental health issues for the bereaved. A study on the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone found that the disruption to community mourning practices increased the severity of distress among those who had lost someone to Ebola, making it more difficult for them to cope with their grief.

The feeling that everybody else is moving on from the pandemic, then, can complicate this grief.

“As the world is shifting, people may feel like they are being left behind. For them, it’s not back to normal. And it really can’t be,” said Kaysen.

But not everyone has lost loved ones over the last two years. About 9 million people are grieving a Covid loss, an average of nine close relatives have been left bereaved for every Covid death in the US. This also means that there are 291 million people who are not grieving.

“It is harder to have a sense of shared grief, because we are not all sharing it evenly,” said Kaysen. The uneven distribution of Covid losses has created some “tension” between those who want to get back to their lives and those who do not have that luxury, she added.

That disconnect has, in a way, stolen the time and space needed by those who have lost someone during the pandemic to grieve properly. Patel lost her father two years ago; her teenage daughter, the “favourite grandchild”, still has not cried.

For Khan, whose father was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease when he was diagnosed with Covid, his death feels like an “inconvenient statistic” that ruins people’s “rosy-colored picture” of the pandemic’s regression. “Everyone wants you to get over it,” she said.

We cannot assume that people will “just move on and be over it, because that’s not going to happen”, said Prigerson.

In this situation, memorializing those lost to Covid, in a way that the Aids Quilt has done for Aids-related losses, might be a much-needed way to heal from these deaths, said Kaysen. We could create a sense of “shared mourning”, she added.

This is especially important because people are still losing their loved ones to the virus. According to the WHO, half a million people worldwide have died of Covid between the time Omicron was first declared a variant and the beginning of February. About a third of all Covid-caused children’s deaths in the US have happened during the Omicron surge.

“If people could just hear us, from the people who have lost a loved one, to see the severity of this,” said Patel.

However, there might be a silver lining for what people can do for each other in this trying time.

In search of a space that would understand her grief, Khan created a Facebook group based in the US for those who have lost someone to Covid. The group is working to provide access to affordable mental health services for its members as well. Haynes has dedicated much of her time to equitable vaccine distribution in Maryland, where she lives, among disadvantaged and minority communities.

We have lost a great deal to two years of a pandemic, but we have not lost everything. There is hope for our communities to come together, to become more empathetic, according to Kaysen.

“Folks have learned ways to be more interconnected, even when we are not seeing each other in person. And that has the potential to help us build a sense of community even during times when we can’t be together.”

 ANALYSIS

How Deng Xiaoping set China on a path to rule the world

The Conversation

 / By Tony Walker

Posted Fri 9 Jul 2021 at 4:45pmFriday 9 Jul 2021 at 4:45pm

Deng, a man of diminutive size — he was barely 1.5 metres tall — has had an outsize impact on world economic history.(Wikimedia Commons)

Deng Xiaoping could lay claim to being the most significant political leader of the latter part of the 20th century, and one whose legacy continues to expand.

His record is remarkable.

It is at least arguable, if not certain, that had it not been for Deng's force of personality and his willingness to take political risks, China would not have embarked in 1978 on an accelerated process of economic development.

If the Chinese economy had not achieved staggering rates of economic growth of 10 per cent annually on average in the decades following Deng's political re-emergence in 1977, the world would be a very different place.

In other words, one man of diminutive size — he was barely 1.5 metres tall — has had an outsize impact on world economic history.

Deng's rise, fall and rise again

Born to a landowning family in Sichuan province in 1904, Deng gradually progressed through the Chinese Communist hierarchy as a committed Marxist-Leninist and a tough field commander and political commissar.

Mao Zedong may have prevailed in a bloody revolutionary war against the Nationalists, but it was his one-time protégé who propelled a country containing one-quarter of the world's population into a new era.

History will be a lot kinder to Deng than it will be to Mao, who brought enormous grief to his country in highly destructive political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76.

Deng himself was a victim of these campaigns. He was banished from the Chinese leadership early in the Cultural Revolution until he was rehabilitated in 1973 by his patron, then-Premier Zhou Enlai. He was purged a second time after Zhou died in 1976.

Mao's death not long after Zhou's and the arrest of the Maoist acolytes known as the "Gang of Four" enabled Deng to assert himself in a series of stunning political manoeuvres that ruled a line under years of revolutionary upheaval.

China's chairman Mao Zedong (left) conferring with Deng Xiaopiong (right) in Shandong province in March 1959.(Reuters)

To get rich is glorious

Deng was, without question, an authoritarian figure who believed in the absolute power of the Chinese Communist Party. His legacy will be forever stained by his authorisation of force against the pro-democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which hundreds are believed to have died, and many more were incarcerated.

Without excusing the excesses of the Tiananmen crackdown, however, the totality of Deng's contribution to his country's transition from economic laggard to modern superpower cannot be overstated.

Deng's extraordinary achievements are too many to list here, but three dates stand out in his efforts to set his country on a path, as he put it, of "reform and opening".

The fact he used both words — reform and opening — summed up his approach to wrenching his country from its revolutionary past to chart another course.

These dates are:

1978: Deng's authority manifested itself at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

In modern Chinese history, this event is seen as the starting point for the massive shifts that would loosen up China's economy and dismantle what was known as the "bamboo curtain" that had shielded it from the outside world.

1980: In a speech whose importance is sometimes lost in historical accounts, Deng laid down the "Great Tasks" facing China in the last two decades of the 20th century and beyond.

Among those tasks was the quadrupling of gross national product by 2000, an aspiration that was initially scoffed at. Under the Deng-initiated reforms, which included the de-collectivisation of agriculture and the unleashing of an entrepreneurial business class, China achieved that goal in a canter.

Deng Xiaoping was responsible for opening up China's economy to the world.

1992: Deng, then 90 and in bad health, embarked on what was described as a nanxun, or southern inspection tour, in which he re-energised the reform process after it had fallen into the doldrums following Tiananmen.

The fallout from the massacre included the purging of reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, who was general secretary of the Communist Party and a former premier. A ruthless Deng elected not to protect his protégé.

Historians may well come to regard Deng's nanxun as not simply his last hurrah, but his most enduring contribution to China's surging power and influence.

In all of this, it is important to remember that in 1978, China's economy was about the same size as Italy's. In 2021, China's economy on a nominal GDP basis is the world's second largest behind the United States, and should surpass the US in the next few years. At the same time, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Never before in human history have we seen anything quite like this.

Of course, Deng did not achieve all of this by himself, but he was prepared to embrace what Mao had sought to suppress in a single-minded desire to maintain control over party and country. This was the extraordinary energy and enterprise of the Chinese people.

Deng's various slogans, such as "to get rich is glorious" captured the moment, and indeed helped to unleash the full potential of the Chinese people.

Biding its time no more

None of this is to suggest Deng's legacy will be untroubled, or that China's surging power and influence will continue to build without impediments.

The country's continuing economic transformation resembles a high-wire act as China's leadership seeks to maintain its footing in a world in flux as American power recedes. China's economy is far from having reached a plateau in which consumer demand provides a buffer against ups and downs in its export markets. These are challenging times for the post-Deng leadership in Beijing.

DDeng's various slogans, such as "to get rich is glorious" helped to unleash the full potential of the Chinese people.(Reuters: Reinhard Krause, File)

Deng himself may well have looked askance on the emergence of a personality cult around paramount leader Xi Jinping. In his "Great Tasks" speech of 1980, Deng had warned against this very development.

This was born of his own experiences at the hands of a tyrannical Mao. In that speech, Deng had emphasised collective leadership in the knowledge that untrammelled power corrupts.

What has certainly been left astern is Deng's advice that China should "keep a low profile" or "bide its time" — tao guang yang hui — as its power and influence grows. The use of this phrase has been variously interpreted over the years as either a warning from Deng that China should avoid throwing its weight around or a ruse in which Beijing stealthily accumulates power without making it too obvious.

Under Xi's brand of Chinese nationalism, the approach has been discarded. This may have been inevitable as China becomes more powerful, but it is at least debatable whether a shrewd Deng Xiaoping would have countenanced an approach that risked antagonising much of the rest of the world.

Tony Walker is a Vice-chancellor's fellow at La Trobe University. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.