BEAUTY: Photography--Linda Westin

Stockholm-based photographer Linda Westin took a detour into science and obtained a PhD in neuroscience, specializing in super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, a technique that allows scientists to illuminate the structures inside cells by making them glow under specific wavelengths. She now uses this same idea to photograph trees and plants in dense natural settings. Her work is startling and enigmatic, and her images play as though they are illustrations from fairytale stories about magical forests full of night time intrigue and possible dangers ... Where The Wild Things Might Be ...

https://www.instagram.com/_cometalktome_/

"Engaging With Art May Slow Biological Aging"

This is a fascinating, wonderful article form Designboom about the positive health effects of engaging with the arts. I have suspected this for a long while now...

Scientists now link museums, concerts, and creative hobbies to slower aging
Designboom
May 15,2026

What if visiting museums, attending concerts, singing in a choir, or regularly engaging with creative hobbies did more than improve mood or reduce stress? A new scientific study led by Daisy Fancourt suggests that arts and cultural engagement may also influence the biological pace at which we age.

Published in Innovation in Aging, the new research builds on years of work connecting the arts with physical and mental health outcomes. But while previous studies largely focused on wellbeing, depression, loneliness, or longevity, this latest paper moves into far more microscopic territory: epigenetic ageing, the molecular processes that shape how quickly the body biologically ages over time.

Drawing on data from more than 3,500 adults in the UK Household Longitudinal Study, the researchers found that people who engaged more frequently and more diversely with arts and cultural activities showed signs of slower biological aging across several advanced epigenetic aging clocks. Remarkably, the associations were found to be comparable in magnitude to those linked with physical activity.

from emotional wellbeing to molecular ageing

Over the last decade, Daisy Fancourt’s research has helped establish the growing field of arts and health, demonstrating how cultural participation can affect stress regulation, immune function, mental health, cognitive resilience, and even mortality risk. Her 2026 book Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health argued that the arts should be considered a foundational pillar of wellbeing alongside sleep, diet, exercise, and nature.

This new study by Fancourt together with Lehané Masebo, Saoirse Finn, Hei Wan Mak, and Feifei Bu pushes that argument further. The research investigates whether cultural engagement may be linked to measurable biological aging processes inside the body itself. The study focuses on epigenetic aging, a field of molecular biology that examines how environmental and behavioral factors influence patterns of DNA methylation over time.

Scientists increasingly use so-called epigenetic clocks to estimate biological age, which may differ from chronological age. While someone may be 50 years old chronologically, their biological aging markers could suggest a body aging faster or slower depending on lifestyle, stress exposure, and health behaviors.

The researchers analyzed seven different epigenetic clocks, ranging from earlier models based primarily on chronological age to newer generations designed to measure physiological decline and pace of aging. The strongest associations appeared in newer second- and third-generation clocks, including PhenoAge and DunedinPACE, which are considered more sensitive to health-related behavioral factors.

museums, concerts, choirs, and creative hobbies

The study defines arts and cultural engagement broadly, including visiting museums, galleries, and heritage sites; attending concerts, theater performances, and exhibitions; singing, dancing, painting, photography, and crafts; and participating in libraries, archives, and community cultural spaces.

Researchers evaluated both the frequency and diversity of engagement. Participants who engaged monthly or weekly with cultural activities generally showed slower biological ageing markers than those who participated only once or twice a year.

One of the most striking findings of the paper is that diversity mattered almost as much as frequency. People participating across many different kinds of cultural activities appeared to show stronger associations with slower aging than those engaging in only one or two forms.

The authors suggest this may be because different forms of arts engagement activate multiple systems simultaneously, including cognitive stimulation, emotional processing, sensory immersion, social interaction, creativity, identity formation, and stress reduction.

the comparison with exercise

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of the research is its direct comparison between arts engagement and physical activity. Alongside cultural participation, the study also analyzed exercise habits, including activities such as running, swimming, yoga, cycling, and walking. Both arts engagement and physical activity were associated with slower epigenetic aging, and the effect sizes were found to be broadly comparable across several measures.

The findings do not suggest that museums replace exercise or that attending a concert functions identically to physical training. But they do position arts and cultural participation as a potentially meaningful health behavior in its own right, rather than merely a form of leisure or entertainment.

For decades, exercise, diet, smoking cessation, and sleep have dominated discussions around healthy aging and longevity. The study proposes that cultural participation may deserve consideration within that same framework.

Importantly, the strongest findings appeared among adults over the age of 40, a period increasingly understood as a key threshold in the acceleration of biological aging processes.

a new role for cultural spaces

Beyond the biological findings themselves, the research also carries broader implications for how cities and societies value cultural infrastructure. If museums, libraries, performance venues, choirs, and community arts programs contribute to healthier aging trajectories, cultural access begins to look like part of a preventative health ecosystem. This perspective aligns with a growing movement around social prescribing, where healthcare systems refer patients to community and cultural activities alongside medical treatment. Architecture, urban planning, exhibition design, acoustics, accessibility, and public cultural funding all become intertwined with questions of health and longevity.

The paper remains cautious in its conclusions. The researchers highlight that epigenetic aging science is still evolving and that associations do not prove direct causation. Biological aging clocks themselves remain an emerging and sometimes debated area of research.

Still, the study marks one of the clearest attempts yet to connect arts engagement with measurable molecular aging processes, suggesting that cultural participation may become increasingly important to how societies think about ageing itself. Daisy Fancourt’s research points toward a larger cultural shift, proposing that the arts also help shape the biological conditions through which people age, recover, and remain resilient over time.

project info:

name: Does leisure activity matter for epigenetic ageing? Analyses of arts engagement and physical activity in the UK Household Longitudinal Study

authors: Daisy Fancourt, Lehané Masebo, Saoirse Finn, Hei Wan Mak, and Feifei Bu

journal: Innovation in Aging

publisher: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America

institution: University College London

Original article on Designboom:
https://www.designboom.com/art/scientists-museums-concerts-creative-hobbies-slower-aging-daisy-fancourt/

NASA Climate Spiral 1880-Present

Released Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Last updated Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 4:39 PM EDT
Visualizations by: Mark SubbaRao

The visualization presents monthly global temperature anomalies. This visualization is updated roughly two weeks after the end of each month.

Temperature anomalies are deviations from a long term global average. In this case the period 1951-1980 is used to define the baseline for the anomaly. These temperatures are based on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4), an estimate of global surface temperature change. The data file used to create this visualization is publicly accessible here.

The term 'climate spiral' describes an animated radial plot of global temperatures. Climate scientist Ed Hawkins from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading popularized this style of visualization in 2016.

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

Link to NASA page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/

Artemis II Wisdom

I was quite moved by NASA's recent Artemis II mission. Here are some great quotes from the crew of the lunar fly-by:

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover show a photo of Earth taken just moments
after the Orion spacecraft ignited its thrusters for a final burn for 8 seconds, producing a change
in velocity of 4.2 feet-per-second and pushing Artemis II toward Earth. | Photo: NASA

"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."

“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”

"To all of you on Earth, and around the Earth ... we love you, from the moon."

"You can see the surface of the Moon ... we just went sci fi."

"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."

"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."

“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”

"I said that we do not leave Earth, but we choose it. And that is true."

"Christina has been sleeping head down in the middle of the vehicle, kind of like a bat"

"It's really fun to be floatin' around, it just makes me feel like a little kid."

"Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful."

"'Homo Sapiens' is all of us, no matter where you're from or what you look like. We're all one people."

"I'm proud to call myself the Space Plumber."

"I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me but there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth: You are a crew."

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

"The myth that women are more naturally empathetic than men" from BBC Future

I found this article fascinating--and hopeful, showing that empathy is innate and available to all.


"The myth that women are more naturally empathetic than men"
by Melissa Hogenboom* | BBC Future
February 15, 2026

Scientific research is up-ending age-old gender stereotypes about empathy – and revealing new ways of thinking about masculinity.

When women achieve great things, it was erroneously supposed that "they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!", the philosopher Mary Astell wrote in 1705. Even Queen Elizabeth I once famously said that she'd rule the country like a king, despite having the body of a "feeble woman" – as if ruling had to be a masculine path.

While these anecdotes are from the past, subtle gendered biases of what it means to be a successful, powerful individual still permeate.

Notably, we still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.

One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.

But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?

Gender stereotypes like these have clear consequences on how we raise our children, workplace culture and leadership. But what's less visible is how early these biases start, and the fact that stereotypes reinforce our expectations – imposing significant constraints on how we expect others to behave.

The hormones behind empathy

Empathy involves both the ability to understand others' thoughts and feelings, allowing us to respond appropriately. It can also be thought of in terms of cognitive empathy – our ability to recognise emotions and take other perspectives – and affective or emotional empathy, where we have an emotional response to someone's thoughts and feelings.

Scientists use a variety of methods to empirically measure empathy, including questionnaires and experiential tasks.

And it's long been found that, on average, women tend to consistently score higher than men.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical psychologist at Cambridge University, argues that it is because the female brain is "predominantly hard-wired for empathy", which makes women especially suited for caring roles, while the male brain is "predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems".

While social factors clearly influence empathy, says Baron-Cohen, his work suggests that hormone exposure in the womb plays a role in social development.

His 2006 study of over 200 children aged 6-9 found that testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid during pregnancy – which are higher in males than in females – are directly correlated with how the children performed on cognitive tests on systemising, defined as the ability to analyse rules or patterns. Indeed, testosterone exposure in the womb was a stronger predictor of a child's test scores than their sex alone.

A similar 2007 study also showed that foetal exposure to testosterone was inversely correlated with empathy test scores.

"What's clear is that something like empathy or systemising are a complex mix of biology and social factors," says Baron-Cohen.

Is empathy in the genes?

Many other researchers, such as neuroscientist Gina Rippon, find this hormonal theory problematic. "The idea that all women are naturally more empathic is part of the persistence of the so-called 'female brain myth'," she says. We also must remember, says Rippon, that young children's brains are "hugely responsive to outside influences".

In one seminal study that found gender differences in empathy tasks, the differences were not large: women were more empathetic in 36 of the 57 countries studied, but in 21 countries the scores were very similar, and the authors stated that they "cannot determine causation".

And though women do score slightly higher than average on empathy studies, the range of variation within genders is much greater than between them. "If you look at the spread of the empathy scores within the male and female populations, it's huge," says Rippon.

Girls and women are often said to be more attuned to the faces of others, an important skillset needed for empathy, but results are mixed, and recent research suggests this preference is not something they are born with. A meta-analysis published in 2025 examined 31 studies featuring 40 separate experiments on how one-month-old girls and boys observed others' faces, if they cried when others cried and how alert they were to those surrounding them. In all these measures, no matter the sex, the infants did not differ in their social awareness and keenness in understanding others' emotions.

Indeed, a 2018 large-scale genetic study of empathy involving over 46,000 participants who completed a questionnaire and submitted DNA samples, suggested that genes do play a role in how empathetic a person is. But none of these genes are associated with a person's sex.

Varun Warrier, an assistant professor of neurodevelopmental research at Cambridge University and author of the study, explained at the time that "since only a tenth of the variation in the degree of empathy between individuals is down to genetics, it is equally important to understand the non-genetic factors". This means that the environment in which someone grows up and lives must be playing a role.

The socialisation of empathy

Women tend to display empathetic traits more, not because they are innate, many scientists argue, but because girls and women are socialised to act on their emotions and to prioritise the needs of others from an extremely young age. Girls are also often presented with toys that emphasise softer, more nurturing skills, while boys are encouraged to play with toy tools and cars.

"Little girls are told to be nice and not to be unkind and rough, so it gradually becomes part of who they are," says Rippon.

Many studies have similarly shown that power distorts our empathy and inhibits people from feeling it. In my book Breadwinners, I outline the argument that, as men have historically had more power than women – and continue to do so in business and politics – they are therefore more likely to experience less empathy.


One study found that individuals who perceived themselves as having "lower subjective rank, lower income and belonging to cultural groups associated with the lower class" were better at reading the emotions of others, for instance. That women score higher on empathy could therefore stem from a need to be highly perceptive to those in power, coupled with their own relative lack of power.

Empathy is a malleable trait

Crucially, empathy can be learned, according to Nathan Spreng, a neurologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. "Once we understand this idea of a range of emotional experience, we can focus on it and learn what other people's emotions are, and improve our empathy," Spreng said on the BBC's The Documentary Podcast. "It's not static, it's a dynamic thing across the lifespan."

A 2023 neurological study clearly shows that both women's and men's brain waves respond in much the same way when shown images of painful or neutral facial expressions. But in the part of the experiment where participants completed empathy questionnaires rating how empathetic they felt, men scored lower than women did on average. That is, unless they were told beforehand that they'd score well.

In the group of men who were primed with information suggesting that men are also naturally "good at sharing and caring for the feelings of others", the gender differences in how empathetic they felt disappeared.

Not only do these findings suggest that self-reported empathy experiments are hard to untangle from a slew of personal and social biases, but they also further support the hypothesis that a person's expectations and motivations play a major role in their empathy.

Women "tend to come out as more empathic when they know their empathy levels are being assessed", says Rippon, of experiments like these. "It's a socially acceptable trait, so they want to score highly."

One study found that women only outperformed men on a task asking them to accurately infer someone else's feelings when they were first asked to reflect on how they felt. If they weren't nudged in this way, there was no observed gender gap. And when researchers offered participants money to infer others' feelings accurately, empathic accuracy improved for both genders. Participants easily learned to be empathetic because there was a reward for doing so.

Sara Hodges, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and co-author of this study, proposes that women may show improved empathic accuracy not due to an innate ability, but because they are more motivated to do so by societal expectations.

Rather than viewing empathy as a fixed trait we should see it as a process that draws upon multiple sources of information, including body language, speech, stereotypes, personal experiences and past interactions, according to Hodges. "When people are more motivated to know what someone is thinking or feeling, they recruit more sources for constructing that," says Hodges.

The dire consequences of the empathy bias

What is less talked about, says Hodges, is that empathy isn't just a soft skill used for good – it can also be used to manipulate others or exploit people. "For example, in negotiation, if you know the other person's bottom line, you're a better negotiator," says Hodges.

But ultimately, the consequences of expectations surrounding empathy and the like can contribute to inequality in society and have dire consequences for both women and men.

Women are judged as less likely to have leadership potential than men because we tend to see leaders as needing to be dominant and assertive, traits typically associated with masculinity.

But when it comes to loneliness, women are more likely to seek support from their social network than men. Social isolation, instead, is a known risk factor for attempting suicide, the rate of which is much higher among men.

Fortunately, the narrative about the importance of emotional skills among men and women is slowly changing, including the importance of empathy towards others and caring responsibilities, according to Niall Hanlon, a sociologist from Technological University Dublin, in Ireland.

"Broadly speaking, men and boys are socialised to not see care in the way that women and girls do, that it's not part of the trajectory of being a man," says Hanlon. "They do imagine themselves to be fathers, but they don't expect that they will be in a primary caring position."

But society is already shifting to pave the way for more men to embrace caring responsibilities and be more outwardly empathetic. Men are spending more time with children than in the past, and they state they want to spend more time with their family (though women still do the bulk of flexible working and childcare).

The work being done to reframe men as more caring and empathetic will open the door to a new type of masculinity that could help prevent loneliness, says Hanlon – one that emphasises interdependence and empathy rather than autonomous, power-focused individuals.

"There's a lot of research that shows this is much better," says Hanlon. "For men, women and children."

* Melissa Hogenboom is a BBC health correspondent and author of the Breadwinners (2025) and The Motherhood Complex.

Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260213-are-women-naturally-more-empathetic-than-men

Margaret Mead's Sign of Civilization from Sustainable Human

A student once asked the renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered the first sign of civilization in a culture.

The student expected an answer about tools—fishhooks, clay pots, grinding stones. But Mead didn’t mention artifacts. She mentioned a bone.

The first sign of civilization, she said, is a healed femur.

In the wild, if an animal breaks its leg, it dies. It can’t run from predators, can’t search for food or water. A broken leg is a death sentence. No animal survives long enough for the bone to mend.

But a healed femur tells a different story.

It tells us that someone stopped. Someone noticed. Someone stayed with the injured. Someone bound up the wound, carried the person to safety, brought them food and water, and protected them through the long, painful process of healing.

A healed bone is more than biology. It’s evidence of care. Of compassion. Of community.

It’s easy to measure progress in tools, technologies, and towers. But true civilization begins when we choose to care for someone who can offer us nothing in return.

In that quiet act of empathy—of tending to the wounded, of staying by someone’s side through pain—we find the roots of humanity.

Civilization didn’t begin with invention. It began with compassion.
It began when someone said, “Your pain is my concern too.”

So maybe the question isn’t how advanced we are.
Maybe the real question is: How well do we care for each other when it matters most?

Stories from the marvelous organization Sustainable Human:
https://sustainablehuman.org/

"11 mind-boggling facts about time" from BBC Future

11 mind-boggling facts about time
By BBC Future Staff
11th November 2023

This week, we're launching a special series called "Time: The Ultimate Guide". To kick things off, here are some of the most fascinating facts we've learnt to date…

To mark the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we'll be spending the next week tackling the big questions about time, including the science of time travel, how clocks have shaped humanity, and even the mind-bending temporal consequences of flying into a black hole.

We're starting our ultimate guide with 11 mind-bending facts about the physics, psychology and history of time, plucked from the BBC Future archive. Read on to learn why there's more to time than meets the eye.

1. YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECTS YOUR PERCEPTION OF TIME
Think of time as a line. Which direction does it flow? Is it horizontal or vertical? Or perhaps it is not a line at all for you. The answers to these questions may very well depend on what language you speak.

Much of the way we perceive the time is influenced by the language we use. For example, English speakers describe time as being in front or behind them, or as a horizontal line moving left to right. Mandarin speakers envision time as a vertical line where down represents the future, while Greek people tend to view time as a three dimensional entity that is "big" or "much" rather than "long". In Pormpuraww, a remote Indigenous Australian community, time is arranged according to east and west.

2. WHEN THE UNIVERSE EVENTUALLY DIES THERE WILL BE NO MORE FUTURE AND NO PAST
Much like us, the way time passes changes will change as the Universe ages. The "arrow of time", which points from the past towards the future, is thought to have its origins in the Big Bang. The infant Universe is thought to have had very low entropy – a measure of disorder or randomness. Since then, entropy has been increasing – this change is what gives the arrow of time its directionality. It's the same reason it's easy to crack a fresh egg, but extremely hard to take a mess of shards and yolk and create a whole fresh egg.

No one knows what will happen at the end of the Universe, but a strong contender is "heat death", where entropy will have reached a maximum and the arrow of time will lose its direction. Think of it as all the eggs in the Universe being already smashed, and after that nothing interesting ever happens again.

3. IT MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE TO HAVE CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE WITHOUT TIME
We count, therefore we are. The ticking of time is the invisible heartbeat of our lives, and affects every moment of our consciousness. Time and self are in perpetual handshake – even a human trapped in a completely dark cave would still be governed by the circadian rhythms of our internal clocks.

Holly Andersen, who studies the philosophy of science and metaphysics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, warns about what losing our sense of time could do to our sense of self. She believes it's not possible to have conscious experience without time and the passage of time. Think about how your personal identity is built over time, filed away as memories.

"These memories constitute you over time," says Andersen. "If you lose a bunch of time you are now a different person."

4. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A CLOCK WITH 100% ACCURACY
Metrologists work very hard to keep time, using ever-finer technology to measure the passing of minutes, seconds and hours. However, while their atomic clocks are incredibly accurate, they're not perfect. In fact, there is no clock on Earth that is entirely "correct".

The actual process of defining what time it is – right now – is based on lots of clocks, all keeping time around the world. National laboratories all send their time-keeping to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, which then creates a weighted average. The time, therefore, is a human construct.

5. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME IS ACTIVELY CREATED BY OUR MINDS
Various factors are crucial to our construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow located in space. Our time perception roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.

The upside is that this gives us some measure of control over how we experience it. For example, if you want to feel like your life is not rushing past you, the key is novelty: research shows that a life of repetitive and routine activities will feel, as you reflect on it, that time is moving faster.

6. THERE ARE CITIZENS OF THE 22ND CENTURY ALREADY AMONG US – BUT THEY'RE NOT TIME TRAVELLERS
The next century can often feel very far away: a distant land, where hypothetical unborn generations live. However, there are millions of people on Earth right now who will be there when the fireworks go off on New Year's Eve 2099. A child born in 2023 will be their 70s. We're far more connected across long spans of time than we might realise. Through our family ties, we're all just a hop, skip and a jump away from past and future centuries.

7. WE CAN ALL EXPERIENCE A TIME WARP
Time does not always flow at the same rate for everyone. Is time all in the mind?

A car skids for what feels like an age, spraying gravel into the air where it hangs motionless. Time slows almost to a standstill and, in that moment, you react and dive for safety. In situations like this, stress can prompt the brain to speed up its internal processing – to help you handle a life-or-death situation.

Brain disorders such as epilepsy or stroke, too, can cause temporal tricks of the mind – speeding time up or stopping it dead. Some people, like athletes, can even train their brain to create a time warp on demand; a surfer catching a wave at the perfect moment, an unstoppable footballer.

Time, it seems, is a fragile illusion. In a moment we could find ourselves in an altered reality.

8. WHEN THE CLOCKS CHANGE FOR DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, WE HAVE ONE BUILDER TO THANK (OR BLAME)
Changing the clocks for summer – to make the most of long daylight hours at higher latitudes – is not universally embraced by everyone. But love it or hate it, there's a stubborn British campaigner you can thank. Without a builder called William Willett, a quarter of the world – including the US – might never have adopted daylight saving time.

After Willett managed to persuade political leaders, Britain made the change during World War One. The move came about because of a coal shortage – and longer daylight hours meant less need for coal-powered electricity to keep the lights on. It was such an effective idea that in World War Two, Britain took it a step further and temporarily ran on Double Summer Time, a full two hours ahead of GMT, to save on industrial costs.

9. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT
As you read these words, it's easy to assume that it's "now". However, it's not.

Take the simple act of looking at a person speaking to you across a table. The confirmation of them moving their lips reaches our eyes before the sound of their voice (because light travels faster than sound) but our brain syncs them up to make them match.

10. OUR DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER DUE TO THE MOON'S GRAVITY
It might surprise you to know that the Moon – our planet's constant orbital companion in the astro-ballet we perform around the Sun – is inching away from us. Every year the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases by 1.5in (3.8cm). And as it does so, it is making our days ever so slightly longer in the process.

This is down to the tug of the Moon's gravity on our planet. The gravitational pull of the Moon creates tides, which are a "bulge" of water that extends in an elliptical shape both towards and away from the gravity of the Moon. But the Earth spins on its axis much faster than the Moon orbits above, meaning friction from the ocean basins drag the water along with them. This causes the bulge to move slightly ahead of the Moon in its orbit, which in turn attempts to pull it backwards. This gradually saps our planet's rotational energy, slowing its spin while the Moon gains energy, causing it to move into a higher orbit and away from the Earth.

The incremental braking of our planet's spin has caused the length of an average Earth day to increase by about 1.09 milliseconds per century since the late 1600s. Other estimates put the figure a little higher, at 1.78ms per century by drawing on more ancient observations of eclipses. While none of this sounds like much, over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, it adds up.

11. MANY PEOPLE LIVE OUTSIDE CONVENTIONAL TIME – FOR THEM, IT'S NOT 2023
For many Nepalis, this article was not published in 2023. In the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar, it's actually the year 2080. At least four calendars are used among different ethnic groups there, and Nepal is even 15 minutes out of sync with standard time zones.

It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years simultaneously. In Myanmar, it's also 1384, in Thailand it's 2566, and in Ethiopia it's 2016, where the year lasts 13 months. The Islamic calendar, meanwhile, marked the arrival of the year 1445 in July.

Link to original article with additional information and video about each item:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231110-11-mind-boggling-facts-about-time

"To Scale: TIME"

The "To Scale" series created by Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet presents a scale model of the history of the universe and our place in it. This is startling, humbling, inspiring, moving. Worth watching.

We have one life. How do you want to spend it?

https://www.toscaleseries.com/

"The weird way language affects our sense of time and space"

I've been meaning to post this amazing article from BBC Future for many weeks now, and finally, here it is, full of incredible, mind boggling insights about language and communication and psychology and how differently we perceive our movement through time, and thus the structure of the universe altogether.

The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren*
3rd November 2022

The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.

If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?

These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.

In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.

The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.

It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.

Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.

There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.

We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.

But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.

In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.

Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".

And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".

The same is also true in Spanish.

"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."

Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.

Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.

These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.

Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)

"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.

Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".

But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.

It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.

They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.

But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.

But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).

And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."

In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".

Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.

In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."

Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.

Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".

Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.

As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".

But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.

* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?

Link to original article on BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space

"Why does time go forwards, not backwards?" by Martha Henriques for BBC Future

I've been meaning to share this fascinating article from BBC Future for a little while now. I am a bit of armchair physicist so this is really interesting to me. And as we have seen, modern physics also incorporates philosophy and spirituality to varying degrees, areas that I am also interested in.

Why does time go forwards, not backwards?

By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022

The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?

When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.

The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.

"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."

The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.

"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."

How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"

Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.

But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.

GATHERING STEAM

In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.

In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."

As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.

To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."

So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.

Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.

This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.

"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.

"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.

While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.

"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?

"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."

The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."

Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."

Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."

Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."

Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.

"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.

There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.

"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."

This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.

It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."

The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.

HUMAN TIME

The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".

"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."

This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."

There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".

The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.

"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."

These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.

"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."

That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.

To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.

"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.

"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.

"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"

Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards

Life may actually flash before your eyes on death by Holly Honderich

I don't know if you caught this recent little news item (it probably got buried because of the start of WW III)...it has fascinating implications.

Life may actually flash before your eyes on death - new study
By Holly Honderich
BBC News, Washington

New data from a scientific "accident" has suggested that life may actually flash before our eyes as we die.

A team of scientists set out to measure the brainwaves of an 87-year-old patient who had developed epilepsy. But during the neurological recording, he suffered a fatal heart attack - offering an unexpected recording of a dying brain.

It revealed that in the 30 seconds before and after, the man's brainwaves followed the same patterns as dreaming or recalling memories.

Brain activity of this sort could suggest that a final "recall of life" may occur in a person's last moments, the team wrote in their study, published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on Tuesday.

Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a co-author of the study, said that what the team, then based in Vancouver, Canada, accidentally got, was the first-ever recording of a dying brain.

He told the BBC: "This was actually totally by chance, we did not plan to do this experiment or record these signals."

So will we get a glimpse back at time with loved ones and other happy memories? Dr Zemmar said it was impossible to tell.

"If I were to jump to the philosophical realm, I would speculate that if the brain did a flashback, it would probably like to remind you of good things, rather than the bad things," he said.

"But what's memorable would be different for every person."

Dr Zemmar, now a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, said in the 30 seconds before the patient's heart stopped supplying blood to the brain, his brainwaves followed the same patterns as when we carry out high-cognitive demanding tasks, like concentrating, dreaming or recalling memories.

It continued 30 seconds after the patient's heart stopped beating - the point at which a patient is typically declared dead.

"This could possibly be a last recall of memories that we've experienced in life, and they replay through our brain in the last seconds before we die."

The study also raises questions about when, exactly, life ends - when the heart stops beating, or the brain stops functioning.

Dr Zemmar and his team have cautioned that broad conclusions can't be drawn from a study of one. The fact that the patient was epileptic, with a bleeding and swollen brain, complicates things further.

"I never felt comfortable to report one case," Dr Zemmar said. And for years after the initial recording in 2016, he looked for similar cases to help strengthen the analysis but was unsuccessful.

But a 2013 study - carried out on healthy rats - may offer a clue.

In that analysis, US researchers reported high levels of brainwaves at the point of the death until 30 seconds after the rats' hearts stopped beating - just like the findings found in Dr Zemmar's epileptic patient.

The similarities between studies are "astonishing", Dr Zemmar said.

They now hope the publication of this one human case may open the door to other studies on the final moments of life.

"I think there's something mystical and spiritual about this whole near-death experience," Dr Zemmar said. "And findings like this - it's a moment that scientists lives for."

Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60495730

Climate Catastrophe Change In A Chart

UK climate data scientist has charted the monthly/yearly change in global temperature from 1851 to 2020. We have always known it is not good news and here is the chart...

https://twitter.com/neilrkaye

The True Size

UK climate data scientist Neil Kaye has animated a map of the world that shows the distorted sizes of countries due to the Mercator Projection, and then their true sizes. For example: in reality, Greenland is not larger than Africa...

https://twitter.com/neilrkaye/status/1464874387698552832

HOW TO SAVE LIVES

Vaccine mandates are controversial. They’re also an effective way to save lives.

By David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick | The New York Times
July 23, 2021

How to save lives
Vaccine mandates are controversial. They’re also effective.

• Before Houston Methodist became one of the first hospital systems in the U.S. to mandate Covid-19 vaccines, about 85 percent of its employees were vaccinated. After the mandate, the share rose to about 98 percent, with the remaining 2 percent receiving exemptions for medical or religious reasons, Bloomberg’s Carey Goldberg reported. Only about 0.6 percent of employees quit or were fired.


• Schools — including Indiana University and many private colleges — that require students and workers to get vaccinated have reported extremely high uptake.


• A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey of Americans who had been opposed to getting vaccinated and later changed their minds found that mandates — or restrictions on the unvaccinated — were one common reason. One 51-year-old man told Kaiser that he began to feel as if he had “limited options without it.”


• The French government will soon require that people show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test to eat at a restaurant, attend a movie or participate in many other activities. After President Emmanuel Macron announced the policy last week, the number of vaccine appointments surged. Italy announced a similar policy yesterday, The Times’s Marc Santora explains.

It’s true that these mandates often generate intense criticism. In France, more than 100,000 people marched to protest Macron’s policy. In the U.S., critics sued, unsuccessfully so far, to stop Indiana University’s mandate. Some Republican politicians have also tried to stop mandates, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio.

The mandates are also not 100 percent effective. Some people will receive exemptions, as was the case at Houston Methodist. A small number may forge vaccine records. And some vaccinated people will still contract mild versions of Covid, through so-called breakthrough infections.

But even with the opposition and the exceptions, mandates can play a major role in reducing the spread of Covid and saving lives. That’s especially true now that the Delta variant is fueling a rise in cases. “The takeaway message remains, if you’re vaccinated, you are protected,” Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist, told our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli. “You are not going to end up with severe disease, hospitalization or death.”

A ‘staggering’ success

Covid is a new disease, and the debates over Covid policy can seem new, as well. But they’re often not wholly new. They instead echo longstanding debates. Vaccine mandates fall into this category.

Throughout history, societies have struggled with when and how to require vaccines. Opponents of mandates have argued that individuals should be allowed to make their own health decisions — and bear the consequences: What, they ask, is more personal than deciding whether to inject a medicine into one’s body? Supporters of mandates have replied that society has a duty to protect its citizens, including those who cannot be inoculated (like young children and some immunocompromised people, in the case of Covid) and are therefore put at risk by people who voluntarily refuse vaccines.

For these reasons, vaccine mandates cause intense disputes. But when supporters win the argument, public health has often benefited. Guy Nicolette, an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out to The Washington Post that colleges have long required other vaccines, like the one for measles. “It’s staggering how well a mandate works on a college campus,” he said.

Dr. Aaron Carroll, Indiana University’s chief health officer, has noted that the country’s victories over many diseases — including smallpox, polio, mumps, rubella and diphtheria — have depended on vaccine mandates by states or local governments. “That’s how the country achieves real herd immunity,” Carroll wrote in The Times. (In the U.S., a national mandate may be unconstitutional.)

When states and school districts have opted not to require vaccines, a disease can often spread needlessly, Carroll explained. That has been the case with human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease known as HPV that can cause cancer. It’s also been the case with influenza, which kills about 35,000 Americans in a typical flu season.

Covid now seems certain to join influenza and HPV as diseases that American society chooses to accept. But it is a choice. Companies, schools and communities that decide to enact vaccine mandates will almost certainly save American lives by doing so.

Mark Barnes, a former health official in New York City, told Bloomberg that he expected the number of these mandates to grow in coming months. “We’re going to see more vaccine mandates by large organizations of all kinds,” he predicted.

Link to original article:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/23/world/covid-variant-vaccine-updates#vaccine-mandates-are-controversial-theyre-also-effective

Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines: What a vaccine's "efficacy rate" actually means

Nicely and clearly explained: why all the vaccines will work...if people will just take them!

https://www.vox.com/

Reasons To Be Optimistic About The Vaccine

We explain why the vaccine news is better than you may think.

by David Leonhardt
January 18, 2021 for New York Times

‘We’re underselling the vaccine’
Early in the pandemic, many health experts — in the U.S. and around the world — decided that the public could not be trusted to hear the truth about masks. Instead, the experts spread a misleading message, discouraging the use of masks.

Their motivation was mostly good. It sprung from a concern that people would rush to buy high-grade medical masks, leaving too few for doctors and nurses. The experts were also unsure how much ordinary masks would help.

But the message was still a mistake.

It confused people. (If masks weren’t effective, why did doctors and nurses need them?) It delayed the widespread use of masks (even though there was good reason to believe they could help). And it damaged the credibility of public health experts.

“When people feel as though they may not be getting the full truth from the authorities, snake-oil sellers and price gougers have an easier time,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote early last year.

Now a version of the mask story is repeating itself — this time involving the vaccines. Once again, the experts don’t seem to trust the public to hear the full truth.

This issue is important and complex enough that I’m going to make today’s newsletter a bit longer than usual. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to email me at themorning@nytimes.com.

‘Ridiculously encouraging’ 

Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.

These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect. But the sum total of the warnings is misleading, as I heard from multiple doctors and epidemiologists last week.

“It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told me.

“We’re underselling the vaccine,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

The details

Here’s my best attempt at summarizing what we know:

*The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn’t even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.

*If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.

*Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”

*The risks for vaccinated people are still not zero, because almost nothing in the real world is zero risk. A tiny percentage of people may have allergic reactions. And I’ll be eager to see what the studies on post-vaccination spread eventually show. But the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure.

Offit told me we should be greeting them with the same enthusiasm that greeted the polio vaccine: “It should be this rallying cry.”

The costs of negativity

Why are many experts conveying a more negative message?

Again, their motivations are mostly good. As academic researchers, they are instinctively cautious, prone to emphasizing any uncertainty. Many may also be nervous that vaccinated people will stop wearing masks and social distancing, which in turn could cause unvaccinated people to stop as well. If that happens, deaths would soar even higher.

But the best way to persuade people to behave safely usually involves telling them the truth. “Not being completely open because you want to achieve some sort of behavioral public health goal — people will see through that eventually,” Richterman said. The current approach also feeds anti-vaccine skepticism and conspiracy theories.

After asking Richterman and others what a better public message might sound like, I was left thinking about something like this:

We should immediately be more aggressive about mask-wearing and social distancing because of the new virus variants. We should vaccinate people as rapidly as possible — which will require approving other Covid vaccines when the data justifies it.

People who have received both of their vaccine shots, and have waited until they take effect, will be able to do things that unvaccinated people cannot — like having meals together and hugging their grandchildren. But until the pandemic is defeated, all Americans should wear masks in public, help unvaccinated people stay safe and contribute to a shared national project of saving every possible life.

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/briefing/donald-trump-pardon-phil-spector-coronavirus-deaths.html