The Daily Drift

Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally

'Nuff Said!

Today is January 31, 2023

Today is: Inspire You Heart With Art Day

On This Day In History

In 1949CE: 1st daytime soap on TV "These Are My Children" (NBC in Chicago)

Ain't That The Truth

Oh, and while you're at it - check out our sister blog Come What May for off the cuff and off the wall seriousness. Heck, who are we kidding, it's just fun and hilarity.

Editorial Comment

Long hours working and turning around and doing it all over again, when are those better days supposed to start, again?

Days like the past few make 'adulting' seem impossible.

We do want to give a shout out to our readers in South Africa and United Kingdom and say thanks for stopping by to read Carolina Naturally.

Remember to have fun and enjoy life.

Editorial Staff

Wingnut County Chair Arrested For Child Porn

Three counts of possession of child pornography. It's always projection with wingnuts.

I'm sure the Q-nuts will be all over this after a former chairman of the Jones County wingnut cabal in South Dakota was arrested for possessing child porn. The child in the 16-second video appeared to be 9 to 12 years old with an adult male. The accused, Rocky Hayes, was listed as the chairman of the Jones County wingnut cabal as of 2020.
Former Wingnut County Chair Arrested For Child Porn

Flowers

Favorite Pizza Topping In Every State

Americans across the country just love to cram pizza into their gaping maws. The Onion examines the most popular pizza topping in each state.
Favorite Pizza Topping In Every State

When the Sears Catalog Sold Everything

It's been 30 years now since the last Sears catalog was printed. By then, the company had spent more than 100 years as the king of mail order. Does anyone else remember when you could order a gun through the Sears catalog? Sears would mail some items that would be unthinkable today, like heroin, back when it was offered as a non-addicting alternative to morphine. Sears offered a whole line of drugs, many that would be categorized as "snake oil" today.
You could order an entire house delivered from Sears, although it would come in many separate packages that you put together yourself. Plans were included that gave you step-by-step directions for buildings your own house from a kit. For an additional charge, you could even get one designed to include a bathroom.
Smithsonian gives us the origin story of the company founded by 22-year-old Richard W. Sears in 1886, including the short appearance of Alvah C. Roebuck. And we get a taste of some of the weirder things that were once sold by mail order through the Sears catalog. 

Good One

Why does cannabis keep some people skinny?

Smoking weed to lose weight? The idea may sound a little half-baked, but many people are convinced cannabis can help with shedding pounds or maintaining a healthy weight. Some even swear it helps with diabetes. It's a little counterintuitive given that marijuana, which is any extract from the Cannabis sativa plant, is typically associated with laziness and the munchies, which triggers a craving for junk food.

Why does cannabis keep some people skinny? Experts explain how weed and metabolism are connected

Maitland

People Believe What They Want

The MAGA world continues to try to vilify means of voting that helped its own fortunes.

Five of History's Greatest Con Women

Who was the real life, Carmen Sandiego? History has so many male thieves, con artists, and scammers that the women who pulled these capers often fly under the radar. But they are there, making themselves wealthy by convincing people they are someone besides who they really are. Con women may present themselves as someone worthy of expensive gifts or talk their way into money that is never seen again, or marry into wealth by false pretenses, or engage in plain old thievery. Some are better at it than others.
The picture is of May Dugas, an educated prostitute from Michigan who blackmailed her wealthy clients. When her scams were uncovered, she took her show on the road, to Shanghai, Tokyo, London, the Netherlands, and back to the US, where she returned to her hometown as a fabulously wealthy woman. But Dugas continued her crimes even then. Other con women from history include a jewel thief, a royal fraud, and one woman who faked her own death. Read about five of them at Messy Nessy Chic.

Lady In Red

100-Year-Old Masterpiece Reveals Astounding Secret Hidden In Plain Sight

Step into the time machine as we take you on a journey to the past through art. Imagine wandering through an art museum, minding your own business, and stumbling upon a masterpiece from 1904. But not just any masterpiece, one that holds a hidden secret, a discovery so unexpected that it shook the art world to its core. That's exactly what happened to one man in an Australian art museum. Keep reading to find out the incredible discovery that this man made.
100-Year-Old Masterpiece Reveals Astounding Secret Hidden In Plain Sight

52-foot-long Book of the Dead papyrus from ancient Egypt discovered at Saqqara

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 52-foot-long (16 meters) papyrus containing sections from the Book of the Dead. The more than 2,000-year-old document was found within a coffin in a tomb south of the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. 

52-foot-long Book of the Dead papyrus from ancient Egypt discovered at Saqqara

Ground-Breaking DNA Sequencing Study Shows Vikings Weren’t Who We Believed Them to Be

We have all grown up watching several interpretations of Vikings in various forms of media, but there is one common thread that binds them – their ferocity. People saw them as bloodthirsty warriors whose main occupation was to pillage and plunder. 
They were mainly heavy-set, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed, with long blonde tresses billowing in the air. Our ears still ring with their battle cries and metals clanging for their fights ahead; they were intense, and we’ve pictured them that way for ages. Turns out, we were all, mostly wrong. In 2020, a DNA sequencing study debunked those theories. 
Ground-Breaking DNA Sequencing Study Shows Vikings Weren’t Who We Believed Them to Be

Yellow on Black

Climate tipping points in Amazon, Tibet 'linked'

Climate extremes in the Amazon rainforest are directly affecting those in the Tibetan Plateau, scientists said Thursday, warning that the Himalayan region crucial for the water security of millions was close to a potentially disastrous "tipping point".
Planet-heating pollution from human activities is raising global temperatures and scientists have said this is pushing crucial ecosystems and whole regions towards often irreversible changes.
Vulnerable areas include melting polar ice sheets that could cause metres of sea-level rise, as well as the Amazon basin, where tropical forests are at risk of turning into savannah.
But can one tipping point have a domino effect on another region? Recent research suggests this is already happening.
Climate tipping points in Amazon, Tibet 'linked': scientists.

It’s Cold in Space

But not as cold as it could be ...
The temperature of space is approximately -456 degrees Celsius. This translates to roughly 2.7 Kelvin. For perspective, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -138.5 degrees Celsius, or 178.45 Kelvin, in Antarctica. Absolute zero is reached at 0 Kelvin, and is thought to be impossible to reach in the physical world on its own.
This temperature of absolute zero is what fascinates Anita Sengupta, M.S. ’00 and Ph.D. ’05 in aerospace engineering and a USC Viterbi adjunct research associate professor of astronautical engineering.
For the five years leading up to 2018, she led NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). In 2018, the project launched a cabinet-sized laboratory into the International Space Station (ISS) with the goal of cooling atoms of various elements, such as potassium and rubidium, down to absolute zero and studying how they interact in the microgravity of space.
The team hopes the results will have important applications for navigation; their lab will be producing an ordered state called the Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) that only occurs when particles are cooled to absolute zero. In addition, the technology the team created to create a BEC could be harnessed by future quantum sensors that are inherently hypersensitive to slight changes in gravitational, magnetic, and electric fields, which will help improve navigational precision during deep space travel and measurements of celestial bodies throughout the solar system. This hypersensitivity will be tested as the space station orbits around Earth, as the gravitational, magnetic, and electrical fields will change in relation to the station’s position over Earth’s surface.
Temperature is a matter of speed: the faster something moves, the warmer it is; so cooling particles down to absolute zero essentially means completely stopping their movement. To accomplish this, the laboratory will use concentrated lasers to slow atoms down and stop their movement completely. They will then observe how the particles interact.
“This is the first time an experiment like this will be conducted in Earth Orbit on the space station,” Sengupta said.
As this is a pioneering project, researchers have faced several difficulties. According to Sengupta, the biggest challenge was determining how to condense a laboratory that would normally occupy the size of a room down to the size of an ice chest.
Though terrestrial labs exist that can reach these cold temperatures, the experiments will be conducted in space to allow for a longer period of observation. The microgravity in space means that the ordered state, once reached, has a longer duration period– approximately five seconds– whereas on earth, the particles quickly fall out of suspension after less than a second due to Earth’s gravitational pull. The longer the window of time to study these particles, the more information the team can glean from their experiments.
Ultimately, the CAL project is about trying to understand the nature of matter. Though scientists currently understand how photons, electrons, and other small particles behave when part of a large system, it is not completely clear how single particles join together to create complex systems, essential to better understand how matter, and indeed the universe itself, came to exist.
The project currently has a three-year operational life, though there is a possibility of an extension. The instrument was designed to be upgradeable, so the crew on the ISS can go into it and do repairs and updates as need arises.
“CAL will be a pathfinder for many future space-based cold atom and laser cooling experiments and technology. It could open the door to a new quantum world,” Sengupta said.
And Sengupta is nothing if not ambitious. Her next journey has already begun revolutionizing high-speed transportation as we know it. Sengupta recently joined Hyperloop One as a Senior Vice President leading the tech company’s systems engineering, regulatory certification, and product planning divisions.
“My NASA engineering and leadership roles on CAL and missions to Mars and deep space have given me the foundation to bring space-age technology down to Earth to make green transportation a reality,” Sengupta said. 

Which came first: complex life or high atmospheric oxygen?

We and all other animals wouldn’t be here today if our planet didn’t have a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere and oceans. But how crucial were high oxygen levels to the transition from simple, single-celled life forms to the complexity we see today?
A study by UC Berkeley geochemists presents new evidence that high levels of oxygen were not critical to the origin of animals.
The researchers found that the transition to a world with an oxygenated deep ocean occurred between 540 and 420 million years ago. They attribute this to an increase in atmospheric O2 to levels comparable to the 21 percent oxygen in the atmosphere today.
This inferred rise comes hundreds of millions of years after the origination of animals, which occurred between 700 and 800 million years ago.
“The oxygenation of the deep ocean and our interpretation of this as the result of a rise in atmospheric O2 was a pretty late event in the context of Earth history,” said Daniel Stolper, an assistant professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley. “This is significant because it provides new evidence that the origination of early animals, which required O2 for their metabolisms, may have gone on in a world with an atmosphere that had relatively low oxygen levels compared to today.”
He and postdoctoral fellow Brenhin Keller will report their findings in a paper posted online Jan. 3 in advance of publication in the journal Nature. Keller is also affiliated with the Berkeley Geochronology Center.
The history of Earth’s oxygen
Oxygen has played a key role in the history of Earth, not only because of its importance for organisms that breathe oxygen, but because of its tendency to react, often violently, with other compounds to, for example, make iron rust, plants burn and natural gas explode.
Tracking the concentration of oxygen in the ocean and atmosphere over Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, however, isn’t easy. For the first 2 billion years, most scientists believe very little oxygen was present in the atmosphere or ocean. But about 2.5-2.3 billion years ago, atmospheric oxygen levels first increased. The geologic effects of this are evident: rocks on land exposed to the atmosphere suddenly began turning red as the iron in them reacted with oxygen to form iron oxides similar to how iron metal rusts.
Earth scientists have calculated that around this time, atmospheric oxygen levels first exceeded about a hundred thousandth of today’s level (0.001 percent), but remained too low to oxygenate the deep ocean, which stayed largely anoxic.
By 400 million years ago, fossil charcoal deposits first appear, an indication that atmospheric O2 levels were high enough to support wildfires, which require about 50 to 70 percent of modern oxygen levels, and oxygenate the deep ocean. How atmospheric oxygen levels varied between 2,500 and 400 million years ago is less certain and remains a subject of debate.
“Filling in the history of atmospheric oxygen levels from about 2.5 billion to 400 million years ago has been of great interest given O2’s central role in numerous geochemical and biological processes. For example, one explanation for why animals show up when they do is because that is about when oxygen levels first approached the high atmospheric concentrations seen today,” Stolper said. “This explanation requires that the two are causally linked such that the change to near-modern atmospheric O2 levels was an environmental driver for the evolution of our oxygen-requiring predecessors.”
In contrast, some researchers think the two events are largely unrelated. Critical to helping to resolve this debate is pinpointing when atmospheric oxygen levels rose to near modern levels. But past estimates of when this oxygenation occurred range from 800 to 400 million years ago, straddling the period during which animals originated.
When did oxygen levels change for a second time?
Stolper and Keller hoped to pinpoint a key milestone in Earth’s history: when oxygen levels became high enough – about 10 to 50 percent of today’s level – to oxygenate the deep ocean. Their approach is based on looking at the oxidation state of iron in igneous rocks formed undersea (referred to as “submarine”) volcanic eruptions, which produce “pillows” and massive flows of basalt as the molten rock extrudes from ocean ridges. Critically, after eruption, seawater circulates through the rocks. Today, these circulating fluids contain oxygen and oxidize the iron in basalts. But in a world with deep-oceans devoid of O2, they expected little change in the oxidation state of iron in the basalts after eruption.
“Our idea was to study the history of the oxidation state of iron in these basalts and see if we could pinpoint when the iron began to show signs of oxidation and thus when the deep ocean first started to contain appreciable amounts of dissolved O2,” Stolper said.
To do this, they compiled more than 1,000 published measurements of the oxidation state of iron from ancient submarine basalts. They found that the basaltic iron only becomes significantly oxidized relative to magmatic values between about 540 and 420 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years after the origination of animals. They attribute this change to the rise in atmospheric O2 levels to near modern levels. This finding is consistent with some but not all histories of atmospheric and oceanic O2 concentrations.
“This work indicates that an increase in atmospheric O2 to levels sufficient to oxygenate the deep ocean and create a world similar to that seen today was not necessary for the emergence of animals,” Stolper said. “Additionally, the submarine basalt record provides a new, quantitative window into the geochemical state of the deep ocean hundreds of millions to billions of years ago.”

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally

'Nuff Said!

Today is January 28, 2023

Today is: Rubber Ducky Day

On This Day In History

In 1807CE: London's Pall Mall is 1st street lit by gaslight.

Ain't That The Truth

Oh, and while you're at it - check out our sister blog Come What May for off the cuff and off the wall seriousness. Heck, who are we kidding, it's just fun and hilarity.

Editorial Comment

Got the sunshine but someone ordered the air-conditioning to be turned on to full 'arctic' ... that was not very nice of you.

Have you ever tried to prepare a garden and your hands are freezing - of course you have every year during garden prep season! Still is not pleasant though.

We do want to give a shout out to our readers in Brazil and Bulgaria and say thanks for stopping by to read Carolina Naturally.

Remember to have fun and enjoy life.

Editorial Staff

How Race, Politics, and Family Affect Support for LGBTQ+ Issues

Olivia Adams tells us:
The Pew Research Center recently published data covering Americans’ views on gender identity and issues affecting transgender people, with special attention to differences based on age, political affiliation, and other metrics. Generally speaking, attitudes are trending toward increased acceptance of transgender people, and this trend is largely driven by younger folks and Democrats. For example, compared to older adults and Republicans, these groups are more likely to believe that society has not done enough in accepting transgender people. 
A January 2023 report taking a deeper dive into these findings reveals important nuances in these attitudes, particularly among Democrats.
How Attitudes Toward LGBTQ Issues Vary Across Race
When examining Democrats’ responses by race, Pew researchers found that Black Democrats tended to report more conservative views regarding gender and issues affecting transgender people when compared to Democrats of other racial and ethnic identities. 
For example, while the majority of White, Hispanic/Latinx, and Asian Democrats agreed that gender can be different than a person’s sex assigned at birth, only 33% of Black Democrats held this view. Black Democrats were more aligned with Americans as a whole, however, as 60% of Americans endorse the view that a person’s gender is determined by their assigned sex at birth. 
Perceptions of how far society has gone to accept transgender people also differed by race: 41% of Black Democrats believed that society has “not gone far enough” in accepting trans people, a lower percentage compared to Democrats of all other races (but still significantly higher than the 10% of Republicans who agreed with this statement). Black Democrats also appeared to have the most varied opinions on this item, with a more equal split between the three response options (i.e., “gone too far,” “not gone far enough,” “been about right”) when compared to other groups.
Researchers suggest that these more conservative views from Black Democrats may be due to religiosity: Black Democrats tended to be more religious in general and reported religion as having a greater influence on their attitudes towards gender-related topics compared to other Democrats. This probably isn’t the entire story, though.
A 2019 Pew Research Center article on American attitudes towards masculinity – especially “traditional” masculinity – offers another view. Researchers found that while less than 10% of American men overall believe that being seen as very masculine (i.e., emotional strength, interest in sports, willing to fight if provoked, among other things) was very important to them, 23% of Black men endorsed this view compared to 7% of White men and 8% of Hispanic/Latinx men. This is important, because research also suggests that people who endorse more “traditional” or “hyper-masculine” beliefs (especially beliefs like hostile sexism) also tend to endorse transphobic and homophobic attitudes. Researchers believe this has something to do with masculinity threat, or social factors (either external or internal) that challenge certain beliefs about normative masculinity. In this way, gender identities and expressions that challenge binary gender norms also challenge masculinity norms. 
These are important findings, but what do they mean beyond the context of a nationally representative survey? In other words, where might these findings crop up in folks’ everyday lives? To begin to answer this question, I reviewed recent research reports on the experiences of LGBTQ people and their support networks. 
How Many LGBTQ Youth Have Family Support?
The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the mental health of LGBTQ youth, released data late last year (Protectiveness of Family Sexual Orientation Support) that may help address this question. Three in four “out” youth reported having at least one family member who supported them. Most often, this was a sibling. While this report did not examine differences in the political orientation of respondents, it did speak to differences across racial and ethnic categories.
Youth who identified as AAPI, Black, or Middle Eastern/North African reported the lowest rates of family support, with AAPI youth reporting the lowest support and Black youth reporting the highest support within this grouping. However, at least 60% of youth across every individual racial and/or ethnic category reported having one or more supportive family members. Support was also particularly high for certain racial groups. Specifically, for Native/Indigenous youth as well as for youth of more than one race or ethnicity, 78% reported having at least one supportive family member.   
According to the Trevor Project report, the most common supportive family member across all groups were siblings. Support was also higher for LGBTQ youth aged 18-24 compared to younger participants. Trevor Project researchers argue that while sibling relationships are important, they may be an “often-overlooked source of support.” What, then, does the research say about adult sibling relationships when one sibling is LGBTQ-identifying?  
Siblings Play an Important but Complex Role in LGBTQ Support
A 2021 article from the Journal of Marriage and Family addresses this question through a series of in-depth interviews with 67 LGBTQ adults with siblings. The researchers hypothesized that LGBTQ adult sibling relationships may be uniquely positioned to provide strong support due to general resilience and strength of sibling bonds compared to other familial networks, but may also be vulnerable to changes in the sibling relationship as people age, leading to conflict, ambivalence, or decreased contact. 
Even though siblings appear to be an important source of support for LGBTQ youth, tangential ties in which sibling bonds were under- or never developed were the most commonly reported characterizations of sibling relationships in this study. Participants generally described these relationships as having a lack of closeness, in some cases stemming from emotional or physical distance. Participants also noted that siblings with spouses and children of their own often prioritized their “own” families above their siblings or other immediate family members. 
Conflict in sibling relationships was also commonly reported. These relationships included a variety of factors contributing to conflict, including siblings being estranged from the family due to struggles with substance use, having problematic or clashing personalities, familial favoritism, as well as explicit anti-LGBTQ attitudes. 
About one third of participants reported a “solidary” sibling tie, meaning their bonds were strong and characterized through solidarity in emotional, instrumental, financial, and LGBTQ-affirming support. For example, Participants of various gender identities and racial or ethnic identities claimed this kind of strong relationship, including one Black-identified transgender participant who noted that her sister continued to support her when their mother had a negative reaction to her identity.
About 10% of participants noted that their sibling was also LGBTQ, a commonality that strengthened their bond. And while participants predominantly discussed their siblings related by birth or marriage, the small number of participants who discussed their “chosen siblings” were more likely to describe bonds driven by solidarity. 
Taken together, these three research reports paint a complex picture of the role of political affiliation, race/ethnicity, and siblings when it comes to LGBTQ acceptance and support. Do these factors play an important role in relationships you have with your siblings, or in your own views on gender- and LGBTQ-related issues?
Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here to listen to the podcast.

Michigan man accused of sexually assaulting au pair after luring her from Italy with fake job

A Michigan man allegedly lured a prospective au pair to his home before handcuffing and sexually assaulting her in a horrific caught-on-camera attack, according to federal authorities.
The 18-year-old woman traveled from Italy to take the nanny job only to quickly realize the suspect had other demented motives for her, a federal indictment filed this week outlined. She was told through an au pair’s website she would take care of the man’s niece, who apparently didn’t exist and help clean the house, the federal complaint states.
The terrifying encounter in October began soon after the alleged victim arrived at the East Lansing home that had newspapers covering the windows and cameras throughout the home, the FBI said. Suspect Arisknight Arkin-Everett Winfree allegedly insisted she go to his bedroom in just her bathrobe just as she was about to take a shower following a day of chores, and began allegedly touching her legs, which she rejected.  
The 31-year-old man then grabbed the young woman and handcuffed her behind her back, the alleged victim wrote to authorities through an online complaint.
Michigan man accused of sexually assaulting au pair after luring her from Italy with fake job

Transgender rapist will not serve time in women’s jail

A transgender woman who raped two women before beginning to transition will not be sent to Scotland’s only all-female prison, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Thursday

Isla Bryson, 31, previously known as Adam Graham, was convicted at the High Court in Glasgow on Tuesday of raping one woman in 2016 and another in 2019.
Bryson, who claimed during the trial to have decided to transition gender aged 29, was reportedly due to be held at Cornton Vale women’s prison ahead of sentencing next month, stirring widespread public anger.
The case comes with transgender issues in the spotlight in Scotland after Sturgeon’s devolved government passed legislation last month to make it easier for people to self-identify their gender.
The United Kingdom’s government has subsequently blocked the law from obtaining royal assent, citing the potential negative impact on UK-wide equalities legislation, and setting up a legal showdown between the two governments.
“Given the understandable public and parliamentary concern in this case, I can confirm to parliament that this prisoner will not be incarcerated at Cornton Vale women’s prison,” Sturgeon told Scotland’s devolved parliament.
“I hope that provides assurance to the public, not least the victims in this particular case.”
Some Scottish media said Sturgeon had been forced into a “humiliating U-turn”.
During court proceedings, Bryson claimed to have wanted to change gender since the age of four and to be currently taking hormones and seeking surgery to complete gender reassignment.
But Bryson’s estranged wife, Shonna Graham, 31, has questioned her former partner’s motives for the decision in newspaper interviews.
According to her, Bryson “never once” mentioned feeling “in the wrong body or anything”, she told the Daily Mail, adding it was a “sham for attention”.
The UK’s shadow interior minister, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, told BBC Radio on Thursday that “this dangerous rapist should not be in a women’s prison”.
She added: “That is straightforward, and I think most people would agree with that.”
However, Fiona Cruickshanks, head of operations and protection at the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), earlier said that “any transgender person who is admitted into custody is admitted into the establishment that matches their identified gender.
“If an individual inmate poses a particular risk, they can be removed and separated from other prisoners,” she said.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally

'Nuff Said!

Today is January 27, 2023

Today is: Thomas Crapper Day

On This Day In History

In 1888CE: The National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C. for "the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge."

Ain't That The Truth

Oh, and while you're at it - check out our sister blog Come What May for off the cuff and off the wall seriousness. Heck, who are we kidding, it's just fun and hilarity.

Editorial Comment

Sunshine all day and we've been stuck inside at work. 

Rain all day yesterday and we were stuck inside at home.

This is not fun people.

We do want to give a shout out to our readers in India and Russia and say thanks for stopping by to read Carolina Naturally.

Remember to have fun and enjoy life.

Editorial Staff

Redleaf

Clothing from 1600s shipwreck shows how the 1 percent lived

Years of research have raised more questions than answers regarding the spectacular contents of a 17th-century shipwreck in the Netherlands, which includes some of the most important clothing discoveries ever made in Europe.
The shipwreck was discovered in 2009 by a local diving club in Texel, an island in the Wadden Sea approximately 60 miles north of Amsterdam, and excavated between 2014 and 2017. Since then, some 1500 artifacts from the wreck— commonly called the “Palmwood Wreck” for its pricey hardwood cargo—have been undergoing study and conservation by an international team of researchers.
What has awed archaeologists is the discovery of luxurious—and unusually well-preserved—clothing on the ship, including an elegant dress embroidered with silver loveknots, an elaborate damask gown, a lady's toilet set and mirror, and a velvet, Ottoman-style tunic dyed with cochineal, a ruby-hued pigment obtained from insects only found in the Americas.
In addition, a collection of 32 leather-bound books dating to the 16th- and 17th centuries were discovered onboard. While the pages dissolved long ago, the embossed covers reveal volumes from several countries including France, Poland, and one bearing the crest of Britain’s Royal House of Stuart.
"These would be hugely expensive objects in the 17th century, and someone took the effort to bring them all together and transport them from A to B. But why?" asks Alec Ewing, curator at the Museum Kaap Skil, a maritime museum in nearby Oudeschild. 
Based on the style of the clothing and information from the books, researchers first suspected the wreck may have been part of a convoy carrying Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, from England to the Netherlands. A letter describes how a baggage ship from the queen consort’s retinue, which contained the wardrobes of her two ladies-in-waiting and their maids, sunk in March 1642.
Clothing from 1600s shipwreck shows how the 1 percent lived

Golden secret found in mouth of "controversial" socialite who died in 1619

Scientists have discovered the long-buried secret of a 17th-century French aristocrat 400 years after her death: she was using gold wire to keep her teeth from falling out.

The body of Anne d'Alegre, who died in 1619, was discovered during an archaeological excavation at the Chateau de Laval in northwestern France in 1988.

Embalmed in a lead coffin, her skeleton — and teeth — were remarkably well-preserved.

Golden secret found in mouth of "controversial" socialite who died in 1619

Aged

When Chronic Stress Activates These Neurons, Behavioral Problems Like Loss Of Pleasure, Depression Result

It’s clear that chronic stress can impact our behavior, leading to problems like depression, reduced interest in things that previously brought us pleasure, even PTSD.
Now scientists have evidence that a group of neurons in a bow-shaped portion of the brain become hyperactive after chronic exposure to stress. When these POMC neurons become super active, these sort of behavioral problems result and when scientists reduce their activity, it reduces the behaviors, they report in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University looked in the hypothalamus, key to functions like releasing hormones and regulating hunger, thirst, mood, sex drive and sleep, at a population of neurons called the proopiomelanocortin, or POMC, neurons, in response to 10 days of chronic, unpredictable stress. Chronic unpredictable stress is widely used to study the impact of stress exposure in animal models, and in this case that included things like restraint, prolonged wet bedding in a tilted cage and social isolation.
They found the stressors increased spontaneous firing of these POMC neurons in male and female mice, says corresponding author Xin-Yun Lu, MD, PhD, chair of the MCG Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Translational Neuroscience.
When they directly activated the neurons, rather than letting stress increase their firing, it also resulted in the apparent inability to feel pleasure, called anhedonia, and behavioral despair, which is essentially depression. In humans, indicators of anhedonia might include no longer interacting with good friends and a loss of libido. In mice, their usual love for sugar water wains, and male mice, who normally like to sniff the urine of females when they are in heat, lose some of their interest as well.
Conversely when the MCG scientists inhibited the neurons’ firing, it reduced these types of stress-induced behavioral changes in both sexes.
The results indicate POMC neurons are “both necessary and sufficient” to increase susceptibility to stress, and their increased firing is a driver of resulting behavioral changes like depression. In fact, stress overtly decreased inhibitory inputs onto POMC neurons, Lu says.
The POMC neurons are in the arcuate nucleus, or ARC, of the hypothalamus, a bow-shaped brain region already thought to be important to how chronic stress affects behavior.
Occupying the same region is another population of neurons, called AgRP neurons, which are important for resilience to chronic stress and depression, Lu and her team reported in Molecular Psychiatry in early 2021.  
In the face of chronic stress, Lu’s lab reported that AgRP activation goes down as behavioral changes like anhedonia occur, and that when they stimulated those neurons the behaviors diminished. Her team also wanted to know what chronic stress does to the POMC neurons.
AgRP neurons, better known for their role in us seeking food when we are hungry, are known to have a yin-yang relationship with POMC neurons: When AgRP activation goes up, for example, POMC activation goes down.
“If you stimulate AgRP neurons it can trigger immediate, robust feeding,” Lu says. Food deprivation also increases the firing of these neurons. It’s also known that when excited by hunger signals, AgRP neurons send direct messages to the POMC neurons to release the brake on feeding.
Their studies found that chronic stress disrupts the yin-yang balance between these two neuronal populations. Although AgRP’s projection to POMC neurons is clearly important for their firing activity, the intrinsic mechanism is probably the major mechanism underlying hyperactivity of POMC neurons by chronic stress, Lu says.
The intrinsic mechanism may include potassium channels in POMC neurons that are known to respond to a range of different signals, and when open, lead to potassium flowing out of the cell, which dampens neuronal excitation. While the potential role of these potassium channels in POMC neurons in response to stress needs study, the scientists suspect stress also affects the potassium channels and that opening those channels might be a possible targeted treatment to restrain the wildly firing POMC neurons.
Excessive activity of neurons is also known to produce seizures and there are anticonvulsants given to open potassium channels and decrease that excessive firing. There is even some early clinical evidence that these drugs might also be helpful in treating depression and anhedonia, and what the Lu lab is finding may help explain why.
Lu hasn’t looked yet, but she wants to further explore the role of these channels to better understand how stress affects them in POMC neurons and how best to target the channels if their findings continue to indicate they play a key role in exciting POMC neurons.
Chronic stress affects all body systems, according to the American Psychological Association. Even muscles tense to keep our guard up against injury and pain. Stress can cause shortness of breath, particularly in those with preexisting respiratory problems like asthma. Longer term, it can increase the risk for hypertension, heart attack and stroke, even alter the good bacteria in our gut that helps us digest food.
Read the full study.

How economic dislocation and the plague of social isolation ruptured our communities

There is very little to recommend my old gym, other than the low monthly fee, where I worked out nearly every day from 2007 until the pandemic shut it down. The locker rooms were grimy with moldering carpets. There were brown rings around the basins and a thin blackish layer of slime, composed, I suspect, of dead skin, urine, hair, dust, dirt and assorted bacteria on the floor of the shower stalls. To step into the slime without flip flops was to take home athlete’s foot and toenail fungus, at the very least. The sauna in the locker room was reportedly listed on a gay pick-up app and attracted pairs of men looking for anonymous sexual encounters in clouds of steam. The gym management first tried to combat these liaisons by posting a sign on the door that read: “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO HAVE SEX IN THE SAUNA.” When this failed to slow the traffic in and out of the sauna, the door was removed and the sauna shut down. Robberies occurred in the early afternoon when the gym was nearly empty. One man would stand by the entrance of the locker room as a lookout while another quickly pried the hinges off the flimsy lockers and pocketed the wallets. The management was unsympathetic. They had posted signs not to leave valuables in the lockers. Theft was our problem.
Chris Hedges: How economic dislocation and the plague of social isolation ruptured our communities