Cav > Books: biology‎ (181)

"Biophilia explains why even today we build houses on the lake, why every child wants a teddy bear, and why Apple names itself after a fruit and its software after noble predators, surfing spots and national parks. The company is brilliant at instilling biophilic longing and affiliation at the very same time it lures us inside."

"This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have known for eons: place matters. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyperproductive presidents of all time, would escape for months to the open country. On some level they all fought a tendency to be “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” as hikerphilosopher John Muir put it in 1901."

"I’ve divided the book into five parts to help make sense of the material, and to make it useful. The first part sets up the two dominant theories that attempt to explain why our brains need nature and that drive much of the research: the first chapter takes us to Japan, where researchers are quantifying nature’s role in lowering stress and boosting mental health using a framework based on the biophilia hypothesis, the idea that we feel most “at home” in nature because we evolved there. The second chapter swerves over to Utah, where American neuroscientists are more interested in how nature helps restore our attention-addled brains to a state of sharper cognition. I’ve organized the rest of the book by nature dose. I explore the immediate effects of quick bursts, or “nearby nature” on our three main senses—smell, sound, sight. Then I look at what happens to our brains and bodies when we hang outside a bit longer to approximate the Finnish recommended nature dose: five hours a month. In Part Four, I take a deeper, longer dive into the wilderness, where really interesting things happen to our brains. This is where, in the words of neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah, “something profound is going on.” Finally, we’ll look at what it all means to the way most of us live, in cities."

"Do you imagine futuristic cityscapes? Do you feel hopeful? Do you picture billowing smokestacks? Do you feel terrified? Does it remind you of school? Does that hold a positive or negative connotation for you?
As to what you envisioned, it may have been any of the above, or something totally different still. But the general consensus of the American public on this matter can be quite easily traced through recent history. In the years following World War II, the American economy was booming. The middle class was gainfully employed, adequately fed and sheltered, and filled with optimism. Because of this, science was viewed as a gleaming obelisk of limitless advancement. It was Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. It was the Jetsons. It was longevity and prosperity."

"Prior to the internet, there were sources of information that were unanimously agreed upon to be trustworthy and reliable. Stories published by newspapers had to be heavily researched by professional journalists. Knowledge from an encyclopedia was not questioned by those who needed to reference a fact, because they were written by top specialists in every discipline, which contributed to their considerable cost. Whether we regard them as good or bad, those times are gone, and they are never coming back. Unlike the encyclopedias of old, the quality of information on the internet is not reliable. It ranges from outstanding to abysmal. For this reason, the internet can serve as a magic mirror, a place where people go to confirm pre-existing bias. Outlets that reflect what we already “know” are correct and trustworthy. Those that do not are ignored, deemed fraudulent, deceitful, paid for by malevolent institutions, or worse. This method of assessment rarely has any respect for the qualifications of those who produce the content we encounter, which has led to what is popularly referred to as the “post-truth era.”

"The word, from the Latin sentire, to feel, is so mercurial that the philosopher Daniel Dennett has, perhaps playfully, suggested, “Since there is no established meaning… we are free to adopt one of our own choosing.” Some use sentience interchangeably with the word consciousness, a phenomenon that in itself is so elusive as to reduce the most stalwart scientific mind to incantations of magic.
Marveling at how brain tissue creates consciousness, how material makes immaterial, Charles Darwin’s staunch defender T. H. Huxley once pronounced it “as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin [sic] when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

"...Red light and near-infrared wavelengths is not harmful because treatments occur in a controlled environment such as a licensed spa or medical center, or even using a high-grade red light device at home. This means the chances of the light wavelengths generated by pure red light burning the skin are very dismal."

"...Red light therapy has been around for decades, since the advent of lasers in the 1960s. Currently, there are dozens of FDA-cleared red and near-infrared light therapy devices on the market, mainly for skin care and aches and pains. Some estimates suggest that the light therapy market, including white light devices for seasonal affective disorder and devices of other colors, will reach $1 billion worldwide by 2025."

"The goal of this book is twofold: to inform and inspire curiosity and action. Because light therapy can seem like magic—how, after all, can a form of energy have healing effects on the human body?—this book lays out in plain language the science of this treatment and its possible results. It does not diagnose or treat, but it does explain which conditions respond best to light therapy and how to seek it out."

"More than 4,000 PBM lab studies have been conducted, as well as about 700 clinical trials. In total, more than 6,000 papers have been published on the subject—nearly 500 in 2018 alone, signaling a rising interest in the treatment.
Looking back over the last decade or so, we can point to a few particularly important papers. A major report was published in the journal Nature in 2006, highlighting the ability of near-infrared light to flush nitric oxide from cytochrome c oxidase, helping stressed cells return to their normal, healthy function.4 The report noted that “any solution to excessive [nitric oxide] binding might lower the risk of both cancer and degenerative diseases,” since it would encourage sick cells to die off and rejuvenate healthy cells. The following year, the Journal of Rheumatology published a review of research on treatment for chronic neck pain and found that low-level laser therapy effectively reduced pain and improved function in the intermediate term for acute and chronic conditions"

"PBM is also effective at treating wounds and illnesses in animals, which seems relevant to the conversation since there’s no such thing as a placebo effect in animals. As Dr. Praveen Arany, a PBM researcher at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine, explained to me, “Animals do not have placebo. They do not pretend to get better because you’re shining light on them.” Take that, PBM skeptics."

"The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health. These energy efficient artificial lights produce different spectra than older incandescent technology, or the natural light of the Sun that life on Earth evolved with over billions of years. LED lighting is brighter, bluer, and more widely used than incandescent lighting.
Glen Jeffery, a professor of neuroscience from University College London, said that as a result, we may be paying the price with our health due to being oversaturated with blue light and starved of red and infrared light..."

"...Hundreds of millions of people would be told to start taking it by their doctors every day. And doctors all over the world would call it a “miracle drug.”
Here’s the crazy part: That drug exists.
But it’s not a pill. It’s red and near-infrared light.
Red and near-infrared light therapy are one of the biggest breakthrough discoveries in health in the last half century. Scientists have quietly accumulated thousands of studies on the power of red and near-infrared light to enhance human health for the last several decades. And yet, most people have never even heard of it..."

"In this book, you’ll discover the incredible power of red and near-infrared light therapy and how it can help:
* Increase your energy
* Combat aging and make your skin healthier, reduce wrinkles, and help get rid of cellulite
* Speed up fat loss
* Improve muscle recovery and athletic performance
* Improve mood and cognitive function
* Speed healing from injury
* Improve metabolism and hormonal health
Sound too good to be true? Think again! Red and near-infrared light have already been proven in over 3,000 scientific studies to do all that and more!"

"There have now been literally thousands of studies conducted upon both animals and humans. Overall, red light has been repeatedly shown to have positive effects on cell function in animal and human studies and aid in improving a wide range of conditions, improving health in numerous ways. Red and near-infrared (NIR) light therapy devices have been FDA-approved for several purposes so far, including anti-aging, hair-loss reversal, acne treatment, pain relief, slow to heal wounds, fat loss, among other purposes. (This is worth noting as it proves the abundance of research showing benefits—the therapy has to be proven safe and effective in numerous trials to gain FDA approval.)"

"...The moment after birth, when the baby’s first handed to his mother, maternal instincts magically kick in, right along with the hormones. As a mother, you will know what to do, and you will continue to know for the next eighteen years. This fountain of knowledge is supposed to come as part of a matched set of ovaries and a desire to wear expensive high heels."

"'Nurture shock,' as the term is generally used, refers to the panic— common among new parents—that the mythical fountain of knowledge is not magically kicking in at all.
This book will deliver a similar shock—it will use the fascinating new science of children to reveal just how many of our bedrock assumptions about kids can no longer be counted on.
The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring—because key twists in the science have been overlooked."

"The topics covered in this book are wide-ranging, devoted to equal parts brain fiber and moral fiber. They relate to children of every age from tots to teens. It could not be further from a paint-by-numbers approach.
Specifically, we have chapters devoted to confidence, sleep, lying, racial attitudes, intelligence, sibling conflict, teen rebellion, self-control, aggression, gratitude, and the acquisition of language. The prose throughout is our mutual collaboration.
Along the way, we will push you to rethink many sacred cows—too many to fully list here, but some highlights include the following: self-esteem, Noam Chomsky, Driver’s Ed, the idea that children are naturally blind to racial constructs, emotional intelligence, warning kids not to tattle, educational cartoons, the early identification of the gifted, the notion that television is making kids fat, and the presumption that it’s necessarily a good sign if a child can say “no” to peer pressure."

"Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.
It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.)
At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”
Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction. He recently published an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

"In this book we tell the story of the new science of children’s minds. This story should be important to everyone who is interested in the mind and the brain. It’s a central part of the new discipline called cognitive science. Cognitive science has united psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience. New scientific insights often come from unexpected and even humble places, and some of the most important insights in cognitive science have come from the crib and the nursery. Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way."

"...What is it like to be a baby? A two-year-old offers a hungry-looking stranger a half-chewed lollipop. Could a child this young already feel empathy and be altruistic? A three-year-old announces that she will come to dinner only if a place is laid for the Babies, the tiny purple-haired twins who live in her pocket and eat flowers for breakfast. How could she believe so profoundly in something that is just a figment of her own imagination? And how could she dream up such remarkable creatures? A five-year-old discovers, with the help of a goldfish, that death is irreversible. How could a child who can’t yet read or add uncover deep, hard truths about mortality? The one month- old turns into the two-year-old and then the three-year-old and the five-year-old and eventually, miraculously, turns into a mother with children of her own. How could all these utterly different creatures be the same person? All of us once were children and most of us will become parents— we have all asked these sorts of questions."

"New scientific research and philosophical thinking have both illuminated and deepened the mystery. In the last thirty years, there’s been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies and young children. We used to think that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric, and amoral. Their thinking and experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. In fact, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered that babies not only learn more, but imagine more, care more, and experience more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are..."

"...Clouds spared one city, while one couple’s vacation decades earlier saved another. The story of Kyoto and Kokura poses an immediate challenge to our convenient, simplified assumptions of cause and effect following a rational, ordered progression. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We want a rational explanation to make sense of the chaos of life. The world isn’t supposed to be a place where hundreds of thousands of people live or die from decades-old nostalgia for one couple’s pleasant vacation, or because clouds flitted across the sky at just the right moment."

"...Whenever we revisit the dog-eared pages within our personal histories, we’ve all experienced Kokura’s luck (though, hopefully, on a less consequential scale).
When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world. To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been.
If hundreds of thousands of people could live or die based on one couple’s vacation choice decades earlier, which seemingly trivial choices or accidents could end up drastically changing the course of your life, even far into the future? Could being late to a meeting or missing an exit off the highway not just change your life, but alter the course of history? And if that happened, would you even realize it? Or would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?"

"I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.
But I also began to flirt with an alluring thought: that we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality, by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes, spit out by a universe that can’t be tamed..."

We will tackle six big questions:
1. Does everything happen for a reason, or does stuff… just happen?
2. Why do tiny changes sometimes produce huge impacts?
3. Why do we cling to a storybook version of reality even if it’s not true?
4. Can’t we just tame flukes with better data and more sophisticated probability models?
5. Where do flukes come from—and why do they blindside us?
6. Can we live better, happier lives if we embrace the chaos of our world?

"Who has been the most influential person of the twenty-firstbcentury so far? Some might say Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or Donald Trump. I disagree. My nomination would be an unnamed person. The COVID- 19 pandemic likely started with a single person, in a single event, in Wuhan, China.VIII The lives of literally billions of people were drastically changed, for years, by one virus infecting one individual. Never in human history have the daily lives of so many people been so drastically affected, for so long, by one small, contingent event. Welcome to the swarm..."

"...The chemicals in these products of nature are not a sideshow—they are the main event, and we’ve unwittingly stolen them from a war raging all around us. We use these toxic chemicals to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from our surgeries (morphine), cure our infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (cannabinol), spice up our food and drink (myristicin), and enhance our social lives (ethanol)."

"This book explores the fascinating and sometimes surprising ways that toxins from nature arose, have been used by us humans and other animals, and have consequently changed the world. We will follow several interrelated threads, or approaches, as we examine how these chemicals have influenced evolution and how they have penetrated each human life, for better and for worse."

"...The Moon’s influence goes back to the sulfurous origins of this planet and everything that crawls, flaps, swims, or strains skyward on its surface. The Moon guides all of us from its vaulted position above us. But it’s not apart from us, not least because it is actually a part of Earth. It was sheared from Earth when the planet was still freshly baked. And its elliptical orbit does not technically circle Earth, at least not in the way you might think. Instead, Earth and the Moon orbit each other, pivoting around a combined center of gravity that guides them both and that shapes their shared history.
Today, the Moon directs migrations, reproductions, the movements of the leaves of plants, and possibly the very blood in your veins. The Moon conducts the symphony of life on Earth, from the people who wage war on one another to the coral polyps that built the reefs of Tarawa. It has guided evolution since the moment of life’s first stirrings, which occurred either inside deep ocean vents or in warm little pools at the water’s edge, both of which derive nutrients through the Moon’s tide.
The Moon makes Earth unique, certainly in our solar system and possibly in the broader cosmos. It made us who we are, in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand, from our physiology to our psychology. It taught us how to tell time, which we used to impose order on the world. The Moon inspired the human projects of religion, philosophy, science, and discovery."

"This book is the story of our journey with the Moon in three parts: how the Moon was made, how the Moon made us, and how we made the Moon in our image. This is not solely an astronomy book, and it is not an Apollo book, though astronomy and the Apollo missions are both inseparable from humanity’s journey with the Moon. This is a book about time, life on Earth, human civilization, our place in the universe, and how the Moon has made all of it possible. I hope this book changes your understanding of all these things. And I hope it changes the way you see the Moon, this partner world that has always been with you, and which I hope you notice anew the next time you go outside at night."

"What about the human Umwelt? What experiential worlds do we live in as a species, and how do these worlds differ across individuals? The ecological nature of this question has been mostly overlooked in contemporary psychology, in part because we naively assume that we all know what it’s like to be human. But unfortunately we are poor judges of our own experience, and it’s common sense to believe that we experience the world as it objectively is. This is what social scientists and philosophers call naive realism: taking what we see, smell, hear, and feel at face value."

"...That’s what every form of exercise boils down to. The stress could be lifting weights or pedaling a bicycle, and the adaptation is bigger muscle fibers, a stronger heart, and hundreds of other microscopic changes. The key is balancing the size of the stress: too small (lifting a half-pound weight, say), and your body won’t see any need to adapt; too large, and it won’t have a chance to adapt due to injury or exhaustion. Much of the research described in this book aims to help you find this delicate balance."

"...So let me begin with a full disclosure: this book does not contain any secret workouts or magic pills that will produce instant fitness.
Instead, what follows is an up-to-date guide to what scientists know about exercise, health, and performance—and, just as importantly, what they don’t know. It’s an “evidence-based” guide: the answers it offers to common fitness questions aren’t based on conventional wisdom or gut feelings.
Instead, they’re drawn from the more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles listed in the reference section at the back, along with over 100 interviews with researchers around the world.
That means that if scientists don’t yet have a definitive answer to a question, I haven’t just made one up. For example, the last few years have seen a surge of interest in running barefoot or in “minimalist” shoes, a practice that some people believe reduces the risk of injury compared with conventional running shoes. A few studies examining how running barefoot affects your joints have now been published, but the results so far have been ambiguous—so, in chapter 2, you can read about some of these studies and make up your own mind about whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks (and the funny looks). For someone who has been repeatedly injured trying to run in conventional shoes, the answer might be yes; for someone trying running for the first time, probably not."

"From a public health perspective, the top priority is getting those inactive people to start moving, even a little bit. Going from zero to slightly active offers the biggest possible health boost, according to a recent National Institutes of Health study that followed 250,000 men and women between the ages of 50 and 71. Those who were just slightly active but didn’t manage to meet the exercise guidelines were 30 percent less likely to die than those who were totally inactive. Stepping it up to moderate exercise reduced risk by only eight more percent, and adding in some vigorous exercise subtracted an additional 12 percent. When you combine that data, you find that getting half an hour of moderate to vigorous exercise five times a week cuts your risk of dying from all causes in half."

"Obese people who are physically fit are half as likely to die as thin, sedentary people. Aerobic fitness may be a better measure of health than body-mass index."

"...While some of those microbes might be harming or even killing us, what about the rest? Could they be helping us heal and grow, or even think and feel? Could our microbes be in conversation with our immune system – and explain why diseases related to it are increasingly common? Or why we get cancer, what the appendix does, or even why some drugs work and others don’t? For the best part of two decades I have sampled the microbiomes of generous patients undergoing surgery in theatre number three, in my quest to find answers to these questions. I’ve also followed the work of colleagues across the world and we’ve shared our findings and ideas. The answers have been surprising, beyond what we could have imagined.
Today, I am driven by the idea that the rise in the collection of disabling chronic diseases has been caused, over just eight decades, by the radical disruption to the colonies of microorganisms that live in and around us. And that, in our quest to cure the world of infectious diseases, we’ve inadvertently created a new pandemic of non-infectious ones. This book is my way of sharing my own journey to these conclusions, and my hope is that this will start a conversation about how we can provide a different type of medicine. The true promise of microbiome science is in disease prevention."

"The microscopic life forms that preside over our health and wellness are increasingly frustrated with the mistreatment inflicted upon them by hyperglobalization – and they have a formidable molecular arsenal with which they are demonstrating their displeasure. The result is that although we are living longer than ever before in history, we are not living happier.
Medicine doesn’t have all the answers for this paradox. In response, some of my patients are now returning to ancient strategies for the treatment of their modern maladies…"

"Transgender people also face a disproportionate risk of death – double that of cisgender people – in large part because of a lack of access to adequate healthcare and high rates of violence and discrimination."

"For example, in the developed world, women who are female at birth typically live longer than their biological male equivalents and are less likely than men to experience a heart attack, cancer (excluding those found in sex organs), alcoholism, cirrhosis, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, Autism Spectrum Disorders (even when accounting for diagnostic bias)23, 24 or substance abuse.
Because of socioeconomic and gender-based social inequalities that exacerbate any underlying genetic variance that exists between the sexes, women also experience higher rates of obesity, stroke, gallstones, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and eating disorders. For girls aged fifteen to nineteen, self-harm is the second leading cause of death, globally, after pregnancy.25 In the developing world, millions of women still don’t have access to basic health services and modern contraceptives. As a result, the burden of communicable diseases and perinatal and nutritional disorders remains unequally distributed between the sexes."