https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uoc-cih122220.php
News Release 22-Dec-2020
University of Calgary
•••••
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
COVID-19 isolation hurting women more than men
University of Calgary
In shaky times, focus on past successes, if overly anxious, depressed
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uoc--ist122220.php
News Release 22-Dec-2020
University of California - Berkeley
The more chaotic things get, the harder it is for people with clinical anxiety and/or depression to make sound decisions and to learn from their mistakes. On a positive note, overly anxious and depressed people's judgment can improve if they focus on what they get right, instead of what they get wrong, suggests a new UC Berkeley study.
The findings, published today, Dec. 22, in the journal eLife, are particularly salient in the face of a COVID-19 surge that demands tactical and agile thinking to avoid illness and even death.
•••••
Critical temperature for tropical tree lifespan revealed
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uol-ctf121120.php
News Release 14-Dec-2020
University of Leeds
For the first time scientists have provided clear evidence that tropical tree lifespan decreases above a critical temperature threshold.
Findings, published today (14 December) in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) show that across the tropics, tree lifespans decrease for temperatures above 25 C [77 F].
As temperatures are rising rapidly across large parts of the tropics, tree mortality is likely to accelerate in substantial parts of the tropics, including the Amazon, Pantanal and Atlantic forests with implications for animal habitats, air quality and carbon stocks.
Although tropical rainforests account for only 7% of all land, they are home to about 50% of all animal and plant species, and approximately 50 % of forest carbon stocks on earth. Thus small changes in the functioning of tropical forests can significantly change the atmospheric levels of CO2 - the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
•••••
Currently, average temperatures in tropical rainforests vary between 21 C [70 F] and 30 C [86 F] . According to the latest forecasts, tropical temperatures on land will continue to rise, reaching on average a combined 2.5 C [4.5 F] above pre-industrial levels over the next 10 to 20 years. The study also shows that temperature effects on tree longevity will be further exacerbated by dry conditions.
Climate change will also have an impact on tropical rainforests outside of South America, such as the Congo Forest in west Africa - the second largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon.
Dr Locosselli added: "While tropical rainforests in the Amazon are already close to this temperature threshold temperatures in the Congo are lower. But, with this great increase in temperature, we might begin to see signs of increased tree mortality. From this point of view, the scenario is quite bleak."
•••••
Study connects diabetes, air pollution to interstitial lung disease
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/msu-scd120920.php
News Release 9-Dec-2020
Michigan State University
People with pre-diabetes or diabetes who live in ozone-polluted areas may have an increased risk for an irreversible disease with a high mortality rate. A new study published in the Environmental Health Perspectives connects insulin resistance and repetitive ozone exposure to the development of interstitial lung disease.
•••••
Walmart sued by US over alleged role in fuelling America's opioid crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/22/walmart-sued-us-government-opioid-crisis
Victoria Bekiempis
Tue 22 Dec 2020 16.39 EST
The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Walmart on Tuesday, alleging that the retail giant filled “thousands of invalid prescriptions” for powerful painkillers, helping fuel America’s opioid crisis.
Walmart runs more than 5,000 pharmacies across the country. Until 2018, the chain was a wholesale distributor of controlled substances for its own pharmacies, giving it extensive reach into many communities.
The civil complaint points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.
•••••
Instead, Walmart made it hard for pharmacists to abide by these regulations. Managers pressured pharmacists to fill high volumes of prescriptions as quickly as possible “while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions”, the complaint charged.
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Even though Walmart’s compliance arm had amassed extensive information showing that people were repeatedly trying to get invalid narcotic prescriptions filled, the unit kept that data from pharmacists, authorities also said.
Walmart filled prescriptions from prescribers who its own pharmacists had “repeatedly reported were acting as egregious ‘pill mills’ – even when Walmart was alerted that other pharmacies were not filling prescriptions for those prescribers. In fact, some of those pill-mill prescribers specifically told their patients to fill their prescriptions at Walmart.”
So intense were the pressures on pharmacists that managers told them to “[h]ustle to the customer, hustle from station to station” because completing prescriptions “is a battle of seconds”, federal authorities alleged.
As early as 2013, Walmart adopted a plan that used the number of prescriptions processed by an employee’s store as a factor in determining if the pharmacy staffer “was entitled to monetary incentive awards”.
•••••
'It's hostage-taking.' AOC lashed out after lawmakers got only hours to read and pass the huge 5,593-page bill to secure COVID-19 relief
https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-angry-representatives-2-hours-read-covid-19-stimulus-bill-2020-12
Mia Jankowicz
Dec. 22, 2020
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted furiously about the short time given to lawmakers to review the spending bill passed at speed by Congress on Monday.
- Lawmakers had only a few hours to read the 5,593-page, $1.4 trillion bill, which was published in the afternoon and passed the same night.
- It was an omnibus measure that included a host of other measures along with the $900 billion in coronavirus relief.
- Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that there was no way lawmakers could have read the whole thing and said the process was serving the American people poorly.
•••••
Former CIA chief says Trump knows Russia helped him so he gives them a pass
I think this has been obvious to anybody who has paid attention.
https://news.yahoo.com/former-cia-chief-says-trump-143851765.html
The Independent
Gino Spocchia
Tue, December 22, 2020, 9:38 AM EST
Donald Trump cannot denounce Russia’s alleged cyber attack on US government agencies because “he realises that Russia has helped him” in the past, a former CIA director has claimed.
John Brennan, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 2013 and 2017, said on Monday that the US president’s comments on Russia were against “reality,” and always have been.
And that, said Mr Brennan, was because the country had helped his one-time election win.
“He refuses to accept reality. I think it’s because he doesn’t see Russia as a threat to him personally,” said Mr Brennan, as he appeared on CNN’s Out Front.
“In fact, I think he realises that Russia has helped him prior to the 2016 election and even afterward, which is why he’s given them a pass”.
•••••
Brazilian woman forced into domestic slavery and marriage freed after 40 years
I remember seeing someone say years ago that laws against slavery should be dropped, because slavery no longer existed. I don't know what alternate reality he was living in.
https://news.yahoo.com/brazilian-woman-forced-domestic-slavery-072007196.html
The Independent
Namita Singh
Tue, December 22, 2020, 2:20 AM EST
A Brazilian woman who was enslaved from the age of eight in a household for 40 years and forced into marriage with an elderly member of the family has finally been rescued after neighbours tipped off the authorities.
“They gave her food when she was hungry, but all other rights were taken from her,” Humberto Camasmie, the inspector in charge of the rescue, told Reuters news agency.
The parents of the victim had given her up to a professor at Patos de Minas University, Unipam, when she was about 8-years-old, the labour inspector said. She was living in a small room of an apartment in Patos de Minas, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais at the time of the rescue.
The woman, now 46, has worked for the family most of her life without any kind of remittance or leave.
The clamping down of domestic slavery is difficult in Brazil because labour inspectors are required to obtain a warrant from a judge to enter a house suspected of enslaving a person. In order to get permission, the officials must produce evidence from the victim that they are being exploited.
•••••
The officials also said that the woman was forced into a marriage with an elderly member of the family so that they continue to receive his pension after his demise.
•••••
Though slavery was abolished about 130 years ago in Brazil, modern slavery has taken various forms in the country, with majority of it found in people working as domestic helps on farms and textile factories. About 53,000 workers have been rescued from slave-like conditions in the country since 1995, according to a media outlet, The Brazilian Report.
Of the 3,513 workers rescued between 2017 and 2019, only 21 were found in domestic servitude, according to Reuters. “It is very rare to receive complaints (about domestic servitude) ... as most (victims) never realise they are being abused,” said labour prosecutor Ana Lucia Stumpf Gonzalez.
•••••
An example of those "law and order" Trump fans.
https://news.yahoo.com/protesters-police-deploy-chemical-agents-235541502.html
Justin Vallejo
Mon, December 21, 2020, 7:14 PM EST
Anti-lockdown protesters that swarmed the Oregon state capitol were pushed out by police as bear spray and pepper balls flew between the two factions, according to reports and footage from the scene.
About 300 members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and other groups arrived at the “Reopen Oregon” rally calling on governor Kate Brown to lift pandemic restrictions as lawmakers met in a special session to discuss stimulus and vaccination distribution measures.
Protestors used bear spray against police while entering the building before they were pushed out by police using pepper spray, according to the Statesman Journal, whose photographer was shoved by protestors while capturing the event.
Salem Police Lieutenant Treven Upkes told the Journal other chemical munitions may have been used by the crowd.
•••••
"There may have been other chemical munitions used by the crowd as well on us that seemed to have acted similar to …a CS gas.”
•••••
Monday, December 21, 2020
Beavers may help amphibians threatened by climate change
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/wsu-bmh120720.php
News Release 8-Dec-2020
Washington State University
VANCOUVER, Wash. - The recovery of beavers may have beneficial consequences for amphibians because beaver dams can create the unique habitats that amphibians need.
That finding was reported by four WSU Vancouver scientists in a paper published in the journal Freshwater Biology. The research took place in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest of the Cascade Range, where the researchers identified 49 study sites either with or without beaver dams. The researchers found the beaver-dammed sites were 2.7 times higher in amphibian species richness than the undammed sites.
Certain types of amphibians, particularly those that develop more slowly, such as red-legged frogs and northwestern salamanders, were detected almost exclusively in dammed sites.
"Beaver-dammed wetlands support more of the amphibian species that need a long time to develop in water as larvae before they are able to live on land as adults," said Jonah Piovia-Scott, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and one of the authors of the article.
•••••
Difference in blood pressure between arms linked to greater death risk
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uoe-dib121720.php
News Release 21-Dec-2020
University of Exeter
Robust evidence from a large international study confirms that a difference in blood pressure readings between arms is linked to greater risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
Led by the University of Exeter, the global INTERPRESS-IPD Collaboration conducted a meta-analysis of all the available research, then merged data from 24 global studies to create a database of nearly 54,000 people. The data spanned adults from Europe, the US, Africa and Asia for whom blood pressure readings for both arms were available.
Funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and published today in Hypertension, the study is the first to conclude that the greater the inter-arm blood pressure difference, the greater the patient's additional health risk.
•••••
Inflammatory compounds found in cooked meat linked to childhood wheeze
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/b-icf121720.php
News Release 21-Dec-2020
BMJ
Inflammatory compounds found in cooked meat are linked to a heightened risk of childhood wheeze, finds research published online in the journal Thorax.
The compounds, known as advanced glycation end products, or AGEs for short, are by-products of high temperature cooking, such as grilling, frying, or roasting, with cooked meat a major dietary source.
AGEs lock on to particular 'danger signal' cells in the body, which are particularly abundant in the lungs, triggering an inflammatory immune system response.
•••••
Exposure to metals can impact pregnancy
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/ru-etm121720.php
News Release 21-Dec-2020
Rutgers University
Exposure to metals such as nickel, arsenic, cobalt and lead may disrupt a woman's hormones during pregnancy, according to a Rutgers study.
The study appears in the journal Environment International.
Exposure to metals has been associated with problems at birth such as preterm birth and low birth weight in babies, and preeclampsia in women. However, little is known about how metals exposure can lead to such problems.
This new research shows that some metals may disrupt the endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating our body's hormones. These disruptions may contribute to children's later health and disease risk.
•••••
Prenatal exposure to metals can have enormous consequences even beyond health at birth. Alterations in sex-steroid hormones during pregnancy have been associated with inadequate fetal growth, which leads to low birthweight. Birth size is strongly associated with a child's growth and risk of chronic diseases, including obesity and breast cancer.
•••••
Water limitations in the tropics offset carbon uptake from arctic greening
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/nsfc-wli121820.php
News Release 18-Dec-2020
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
More plants and longer growing seasons in the northern latitudes have converted parts of Alaska, Canada and Siberia to deeper shades of green. Some studies translate this Arctic greening to a greater global carbon uptake. But new research shows that as Earth's climate is changing, increased carbon absorption by plants in the Arctic is being offset by a corresponding decline in the tropics.
•••••
Plant productivity in the frigid Arctic landscape is limited by the lengthy periods of cold. As temperatures warm, the plants in these regions have been able to grow more densely and extend their growing season, leading to an overall increase in photosynthetic activity, and subsequently greater carbon absorption in the region over the 35-year time span.
However, buildup of atmospheric carbon concentrations has had several other rippling effects. Notably, as carbon has increased, global temperatures have risen, and the atmosphere in the tropics (where plant productivity is limited by the availability of water) has become drier. Recent increases in drought and tree mortality in the Amazon rainforest are one example of this, and productivity and carbon absorption over land near the equator have gone down over the same time period as Arctic greening has occurred, canceling out any net effect on global productivity.
•••••
Climate change: threshold for dangerous warming will likely be crossed between 2027-2042
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/mu-cct122120.php
News Release 21-Dec-2020
McGill University
The threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042 - a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics, researchers from McGill University introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature. Based on historical data, it considerably reduces uncertainties compared to previous approaches.
•••••
"Our new approach to projecting the Earth's temperature is based on historical climate data, rather than the theoretical relationships that are imperfectly captured by the GCMs. Our approach allows climate sensitivity and its uncertainty to be estimated from direct observations with few assumptions," says co-author Raphael Hebert, a former graduate researcher at McGill University, now working at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Potsdam, Germany.
In a study for Climate Dynamics, the researchers introduced the new Scaling Climate Response Function (SCRF) model to project the Earth's temperature to 2100. Grounded on historical data, it reduces prediction uncertainties by about half, compared to the approach currently used by the IPCC. In analyzing the results, the researchers found that the threshold for dangerous warming (+1.5C) will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042. This is a much narrower window than GCMs estimates of between now and 2052. On average, the researchers also found that expected warming was a little lower, by about 10 to 15 percent. They also found, however, that the "very likely warming ranges" of the SCRF were within those of the GCMs, giving the latter support.
•••••
Inmate died of leukemia after pleading for help, federal lawsuit claims
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inmate-died-leukemia-after-pleading-help-federal-lawsuit-claims-n1251830
A 20-year-old in a St. Louis County jail last year died of survivable leukemia after pleading for help from staffers who failed to let him see a doctor, a federal lawsuit claims.
The civil rights suit against the county and several jail staffers was filed by the Tashonda Troupe, the mother of the deceased Lamar Catchings.
•••••
The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court's Eastern District of Missouri claims that after Catchings was jailed on April 17, 2018, his health deteriorated, and he died Feb. 28, 2019. The filing did not say what Catchings was accused of doing.
An autopsy determined he died from a form of leukemia that has a survival rate of about 90 percent, the lawsuit states.
The filing cites Yale University oncologist Steven Gore on the mortality of acute promyelocytic leukemia, believed to have killed Catchings, who said death from the disease was "unconscionable" and "should never happen," the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported.
Catchings' death came after two other high-profile deaths in 2019 at St. Louis County’s Buzz Westfall Justice Center. There were two more before the year was up, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit claims the county's jail health care system is in disarray and without proper medical supervision by registered nurses and doctors.
•••••
In February 2019, Catchings was seen by nurses three times for several minutes after asking for help, vomiting and losing his ability to walk, the lawsuit claims, alleging that two days before his death, one nurse said, "There is nothing wrong with him. He is a [expletive] faker."
Another jail staffer allegedly told Catchings as his health deteriorated to "grow up."
The lawsuit claims staffers at the Buzz Westfall Justice Center acknowledged he was ill because they gave him Tylenol, took food to him and and carried him or wheeled him around in a wheelchair.
His body, with rigormortis developing, was discovered the day after he died, the lawsuit said.
"Mr. Catchings ultimately died alone in his cell and from a condition that the St. Louis County Medical Examiner would later report to have been completely diagnosable through a routine blood panel administered by the jail," it said.
Pennsylvania student said she suffered heart failure at age 20 after mild case of Covid
Dec. 21, 2020, 1:11 PM EST
By Tim Fitzsimons
A Temple University student says she experienced a life-threatening heart condition weeks after recovering from a mild case of Covid-19.
•••••
Neville said her doctors told her she had myocarditis, a swelling of the heart muscle that has been linked to Covid-19.
Recently, doctors have raised the question of whether athletes should be required to undergo additional screenings before returning to gameplay following recovery from the disease because of the risk of myocarditis.
"They were throwing around this term called 'multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children,'" Neville said.
The CDC has recently written that the Covid-linked syndrome has recently been observed in adults.
•••••
When she first shared her story on Facebook in early December, Neville wrote that she hoped that her story might serve as a "reality check" for some of her peers who "take their health for granted."
"I know that I did," Neville wrote. "I believed that my youth and health would allow me to make it through any run in I had with the virus relatively unscathed."
"However, as someone who has been on the ass end of it, I wish I had chosen inconvenience over jeopardizing my health. I wish I had been more careful in my social interactions prior to contracting COVID, to save myself, my family, and my friends the pain of uncertainty regarding whether or not this illness would kill me."
•••••
What's in the U.S. COVID-19 bill? Unemployment, $600 checks, 'three martini lunch' deduction
See the article for details.
https://news.yahoo.com/factbox-whats-u-covid-19-001746937.html
Sun, December 20, 2020, 7:17 PM EST
(Reporting by David Shepardson, David Brunnstrom and Andy Sullivan; Editing by Heather Timmons, Richard Pullin)
U.S. congressional leaders said on Sunday they had reached agreement
on a $900 billion package to provide the first new aid in months to an
economy hammered by the novel coronavirus pandemic, with votes likely on
Monday.
Here's what is in the package, according to a summary released by House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and interviews with several congressional aides who provided additional details:
•••••
What’s not in the bill: Liability protection for companies whose employees get coronavirus, which Republicans have backed for months, was not including in the final negotiations or bill; Democrats laid aside sizable funds for state and local governments in return.
[A major reason it took so long to pass Covid relief was that republicans were insisting on the Liability protection, and Democrats would not allow it.]
A last-minute attempt by the Republican Party to limit the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending power to small businesses and local governments was also left out.
[appears that republicans were trying to limit the amount of economic stimulus to try to make Biden look bad, the way they did to Obama.]
See also
https://news.yahoo.com/900-billion-relief-package-extends-042300190.html
Sunday, December 20, 2020
You 2.0: Empathy Gym
The link contains the podcast and transcript of the show.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/907943965
•••••
Jamil Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford University. He's the author of the book "The War For Kindness: Building Empathy In A Fractured World."
•••••
VEDANTAM: Talk a little bit about the benefits of empathy. There's been a lot of work that looks at what happens when people receive empathy from their partners, for example, or from their doctors.
ZAKI: Oh, yeah. I mean, in many cases, empathy benefits all parties involved. So for instance, patients of empathic doctors are more satisfied with their care but are also more likely to follow doctors' recommendations, which is important for things like preventative care. And spouses of empathic partners are happier in their marriages.
But one thing that I think people don't realize as much is that people who experience empathy for others also benefit. It's not just receiving it, but giving it helps us, too. So people who are relatively high in empathy, for instance, are less likely to become depressed. Feeling empathy for others reduces our stress. And adolescents who are able to pick out other people's emotions accurately are better adjusted during middle school.
•••••
VEDANTAM: So at the same time that parents and books and motivational speakers and faith traditions cite the value of empathy, there is also some evidence that empathy might be changing over time, and not necessarily in a good way. You cite research that compares the average level of empathy in 2009 to the average in 1979.
ZAKI: Yeah. So this is work by Sara Konrath and her colleagues using the most sort of famous and well-known scale to measure empathy, which is just a questionnaire. In this questionnaire, people see a number of statements, and they're asked how much they agree with that statement from one, not at all, to five, extremely. So a sample statement might be, I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than myself, or, I try to look at everyone's side of a disagreement before I make a decision.
So a series of questions like that give you a sort of empathy score, again, from one to five. People have taken this questionnaire over several decades. And if you compare their scores over time, they've been dwindling or eroding. And what's more troubling is that a lot of this decline happened pretty recently, sort of since the turn of the 21st century.
VEDANTAM: Let's talk about some of the reasons this might be happening.
•••••
There's a great study by Juliana Schroeder and her colleagues where they had people describe their political opinions sort of in an audio recording. They then had a separate group of people listen to those audio recordings or read a transcript of them. And what they found was that people were more likely to dehumanize the person whose opinion they were reading about if they were only reading it, whereas if they were hearing the person's voice, they were less likely to dehumanize that individual, right? So it's almost as though we're leaving behind, when we go online, some of the cues that allow us to detect each other's real humanity.
•••••
VEDANTAM: So it's really interesting. What you're really pointing out is that empathy, in some ways, has this double-edged sword quality to it, which is, on the one hand, it's prompting us to be outward-looking, but it's also driven in some ways by factors about who's in our in-group and who's not in our in-group. The psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote the book "Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion," he argues that empathy tends to be parochial, and it tends to be biased. And that's why when we ask people to be empathic, we're really inviting them to be prejudiced. Is that true?
ZAKI: I think that Paul is right in certain ways. Absolutely, empathy sort of begins parochially. Our instinctive empathy might be more driven towards people in our tribe than outside of it. I often think of oxytocin, you know, this chemical that sort of causes us to bond to other people, right? We often think of oxytocin as the love drug or the cuddle hormone, but it turns out that if you give people oxytocin intranasally, for instance, they become more caring about people in their group but less caring about people outside their group. In essence, sort of turning up people's empathy, in that case, means turning up their parochialism.
I think a big place where Paul and I differ is on what we do with this information. So Paul, I think, believes that, OK, empathy tends to be parochial and biased towards insiders versus outsiders, so we should give up on it altogether. I think differently. I think that that's a problem with how empathy tends to operate, but I try to focus us on the fact that we can control how we empathize and make choices about the way that we deploy our caring. And if we recognize that, hey, I'm empathizing in a parochial way, in a tribal way, we can try to make a different choice and broaden our empathy even towards people who are different from ourselves.
•••••
ZAKI: Yeah. This was a fascinating study where Pancer placed a table sort of asking for charitable donations in the middle of a busy sort of college student union. And the table had, you know, a request for donations to charity. And sometimes, it had a picture of a sort of happy child on it. And other times, it had a picture of a suffering child on it. Sometimes, the table had no one manning it, and sometimes the table had a person there who was in a wheelchair.
And so the sad child and the person in the wheelchair were what Pancer thought of as empathic triggers, things that when people saw them, they might feel sad. Maybe they'd feel obligated to donate as well. And what he found is that when he put those empathic triggers on the table, people actually walked further away. They sort of went out of their way to avoid the table more. It was almost as though they were trying to keep physical distance between them and something that would make them feel empathy, either because it would feel bad or because it would force them to do something like donate that maybe they didn't really want to do.
I think a lot of us have this experience when we see, for instance, a homeless individual on the sidewalk ahead of us. I've heard of people who cross the street to avoid that encounter maybe because they don't want to sort of see that person's suffering close up because it will make them feel sad or guilty or both.
•••••
VEDANTAM: So what happens at the level of individuals also, at some level, manifests itself at the level of groups and even the level of nations. White Americans asked to read about the suffering of Native Americans become more likely to say that Native Americans are unable to feel complex emotions such as hope and shame. So in other words, empathy not only can produce pain, pain can not only produce disengagement, but we can actually almost dehumanize other people because we're so, in some ways, reluctant to accept the pain that comes with actually empathizing with them.
ZAKI: Yeah, absolutely, especially if you or a group that you belong to is responsible for that pain because then, empathy can twist into a sense of guilt or even self-loathing. There are a lot of studies like this. In one classic set of studies from the 1950s, psychologists asked people to repeatedly shock - electrically shock - another person. And what they found was that when people had to shock someone else, they ended up saying that they liked that person less, almost as though they were defensively, again, turning down their empathy for that individual.
•••••
there's also some experimental evidence now coming out that even small doses of fiction produce small but reliable improvements in people's empathy. And I think this is especially important because fiction is one of the most powerful ways to connect with people who are different from us who maybe we might not have a chance to meet otherwise, right?
•••••
The Nature Conservancy of Canada suggests leaving your old Christmas tree in your backyard
https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/where-we-work/quebec/news/christmas-tree-1.html?fbclid=IwAR28La8Bei474vCigNwyrNP-M-htXkAcsTQFX3dBTtrHMHia5tuE-3wRVTQ
•••••
If you’d like to prolong the holiday spirit and share the gift of giving with wildlife, then the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) has a suggestion. This year, instead of bringing your old Christmas tree to the curb, the not-for-profit, private land conservation group suggests putting it in your own backyard.
Dan Kraus, NCC’s senior conservation biologist, says leaving it in your backyard over the winter can provide many benefits for backyard wildlife. Your tree can provide important habitat for bird populations during the winter months, especially on cold nights and during storms.
The first step in letting nature help you recycle your Christmas tree is to put it anywhere in the backyard. Prop it up near another tree, against a fence or lay it in your garden. You can even get the family involved by redecorating it with pine cones filled with peanut butter, strings of peanuts and suet for birds to enjoy. These delicious decorations will provide food for birds while they find shelter in the tree.
"Evergreens offer a safe place for birds to rest while they visit your feeder," says Kraus. "Another benefit is that if you leave the tree in your garden over the summer, it will continue to provide habitat for wildlife and improve yoursoil as it decomposes."
By spring, the tree will have lost most of its needles, resembling a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Simply cut the tree branches, lay them where spring flowers are starting to emerge in your garden and place the trunk on soil, but not on top of the flowers.
Kraus says the tree branches and trunk can provide habitat, shelter wildflowers, hold moisture and help build the soil, mimicking what happens with dead trees and branches in a forest. Toads will seek shelter under the log, and insects, including pollinators such as carpenter bees, will burrow into the wood.
"By fall, the branches and trunk will begin to decompose and turn into soil," says Kraus. "Many of our Christmas trees, particularly spruce and balsam fir, have very low rot resistance and break down quickly when exposed to the elements. The more contact the cut branches and trunk have with the ground, the quicker it will decompose. Drilling holes in the tree trunk will speed up that process.
Our backyards are ecosystems of their own and provide an opportunity to learn about forest ecology. By leaving our Christmas tree in our backyard, we can understand its life cycle and observe its impact on backyard biodiversity.
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