Australian and US researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the structure of a key genetic molecule, called RNA, and revealing for the first time how these changes impact RNA's function.

Publishing in the journal Nature, the research team developed a bioinformatics technique to resolve separate structures of RNA rather than viewing them as a 'blur' that averaged multiple structures. This underpinned their discovery that the structure of RNA can influence how cells function.

RNA is a DNA-like molecule that encodes genetic information. Certain viruses - including HIV and SARS-CoV2 - use RNA as their genetic material. The team were able to apply the techniques they developed to reveal how the structure of HIV's RNA genome influences which proteins the virus produces.

The international collaborative team was led by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researcher Dr Vincent Corbin together with Mr Phil Tomezsko and Professor Silvi Rouskin at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Boston (US). The research team also included the Institute's Computational Biology Theme Leader Professor Tony Papenfuss and mathematician and PhD student Mr Lachlan McIntosh.

At a glance

RNA is a molecule found in all living things that carries genetic information. RNA is an important regulator of how cells function, directly controlling which proteins are produced in cells, and can also switch genes on and off.

RNA molecules have a two-dimensional structure which influences how the genetic information contained within them can be accessed, said Dr Corbin, who led the project's bioinformatics research.

"The big question in RNA biology has been whether RNA molecules have a single, constant structure, or whether they can shift between different structures - and what this means for the function of a particular RNA molecule," he said.

"Our collaborators, led by Professor Silvi Rouskin, developed a technique for deciphering the structure of RNA molecules. We wanted to understand whether what we were detecting was a single structure of RNA, or an 'average' structure that blurs multiple different structures together.

"It's a bit like seeing red and yellow stripes, or blurring them together and thinking you can see orange," he said.

By developing a computational algorithm, the team were able to detect and measure the amount of different RNA structures.

We could detect these both in a test tube and in living cells, so we next looked at whether these structures influenced how RNA functioned."

Dr Vincent Corbin, Project Leader, Bioinformatics Research, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

When RNA is produced in cells, it starts in a longer form that is 'spliced' or trimmed to remove unwanted parts.

"RNA splicing can influence how it encodes proteins," Dr Corbin said. "There are many examples of how altered RNA splicing influences how a cell functions - and in some cases, changes in RNA splicing have been associated with cancer or neurodegenerative diseases."

Certain viruses use RNA for their genome, including HIV and SARS-CoV2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19). In the case of HIV, RNA splicing influences which protein the virus produces - which changes at different stages of the virus's lifecycle.

"Using the HIV genome as a model system, we looked at whether RNA structure influences how HIV's RNA is spliced. We discovered that RNA structure was a critical determinant of RNA splicing in HIV, and influenced which viral proteins were produced," Dr Corbin said.

"This is the first clear evidence of how RNA structure can control RNA function. The techniques we have developed have opened up a new field of research into the role of RNA structure in regulating the function of cells."

Professor Papenfuss said the research showed how finely tuned biological systems are. "This study how very subtle changes in one tiny molecule can have big implications for the function of a virus. By using computational biology to unravel these changes, we've made a significant discovery about how viruses - and potentially human cells - function, which may underpin future discoveries about health and disease."

Source:

Journal reference:

Tomezsko, P. J., et al. (2020) Determination of RNA structural diversity and its role in HIV-1 RNA splicing. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2253-5.

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Researchers shed new light on the structure of RNA - News-Medical.Net

Genetics

Researchers around the world are using DNA to see if genetics play a role in coronavirus – KOMO News

May 7, 2020 medical

Researchers around the world are using DNA to see if genetics play a role in coronavirus KOMO News

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Researchers around the world are using DNA to see if genetics play a role in coronavirus - KOMO News

Genetics

University of Iowa molecular genetics researcher studying COVID-19 testing methods to alleviate test shortages – UI The Daily Iowan

May 7, 2020 medical

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Val Sheffield is pivoting his research focus to find a way to test patients without using high demand cotton swabs.

University of Iowa Molecular Genetics Chair in the Carver College of Medicine Val Sheffield has made research breakthroughs in linking gene research and was recently named to a prestigious American research institutes class of 2020.

But amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Sheffield is pivoting his work to research an alternate way to test patients for novel coronavirus to alleviate a nationwide shortage of the parts in a COVID-19 test.

Sheffield and his team submitted a document April 1 to the FDA requesting emergency-use authorization to utilize a patient-sample collection method for COVID-19 testing.

My laboratory decided early on that we have the capability to help with [COVID-19] testing, Sheffield said. Testing is really important, but its behind where it should be because there arent enough official, FDA-approved swabs to collect samples from patients For the last month weve been trying to get FDA approval for our testing method where patients snort through the nose and spit into a tube, and the saliva sample is tested for the virus.

When the method is approved by the FDA, Sheffield said researchers can use it to test anyone. The most common coronavirus tests involve inserting a long cotton swab into a patients nostril. Sheffield anticipates beginning testing soon, with a limited number of patients in a study that will be the final step in getting FDA approval.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds launched Test Iowa, a partnership between the state and private technology companies Domo, Qualtrics, and NomiHealth. But, the Test Iowa equipment was pending certification by the State Hygienic Lab to run tests as of Friday.

In Iowa, tests are being prioritized for those over the age of 60, with chronic health conditions, are in the hospital, or live in congregate living facilities such as a nursing home.

Iowa has tested more than 63,000 people and reported more than 10,000 cases as of Wednesday. Reynolds is using widespread testing as a signal that the state can begin the steps of reopening, seemingly going against the advice of University of Iowa researchers, who concluded that a second wave of COVID-19 cases could emerge without precautions in place.

In late April, amid his shifting work, Sheffield was elected to the 2020 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sheffield began as a faculty member at the UI 30 years ago and contributes to campus clinical work and research. He started as an assistant professor and has since branched out to administrative work, instruction, and research. He served as the UI Division Director of Medical Genetics for 22 years and stepped down in January to spend more time on research.

RELATED: National registrar association awards Sarah Harris with honorary membership after 30 years at UI

Sheffield has co-authored 330 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and said he has found supportive and outstanding collaborators who have been pivotal to his researchs success in his time at the UI.

My research focuses on hereditary blindness, he said. Ive worked on identifying genes that play a role in hereditary blindness. More recently, my team and I have been focusing on figuring out mechanisms by which mutations cause disease and developing treatments.

Sheffield said that his election has reinforced his obligation to serve and help others with his science. This will continue to fuel his desire to work hard and continue to further his research, Sheffield said.

David Ginsburg, James V. Neel Distinguished university professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He first met Sheffield at the Howard Hughes Medical Institution.

Ginsburg said Sheffields research has been crucial to developing human genetic maps. Only a few academic scientists are elected to the U.S. organization a year, and Ginsburg said Sheffields election was well deserved.

Val is a fantastic physician scientist, Ginsburg said. Hes done landmark work figuring out what gene is defective for a whole variety of different, rare genetic diseases. He was one of the real pioneers tracking down these genes. He identified where the corresponding disease gene is located in our chromosomes for about 35 diseases When I was in medical school, we only knew the responsible gene for one human disease Today, we know the gene for about 6,000 human diseases, and Val was one of the early leaders in this work.

Ginsburg said he has seen how much members of the organization can grow once theyre inducted. Sheffield will be able to continue expanding his horizons in academia when he is inducted next spring, he added.

A big part of what drives what we do in academic medicine is interaction with colleagues and the new ideas that you get when meeting, talking, and interacting with colleagues in diverse fields, he said. Thats one of the greatest things the American Academy has to offer. I know it will give Val an opportunity to expand his research and intellectual contributions to the academic enterprise.

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences website, the 240-year-old American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded by John Adams and John Hancock and aims to recognize scholars and leaders in various disciplines. Sheffield joins 11 other Hawkeyes already in the organization, including UI Cardiovascular Research Chair and Professor Francois Abboud.

Abboud said Sheffield, who he has known since 1990, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of human molecular genetics and genomics as well as someone he admires.

[Sheffield] is more than a great scientist, Abboud said. Ive always been impressed by his true commitment to his patients. What drives his scientific research is his extraordinary commitment to the patients. Science is his true passion. He is a brilliant scientist and an even more remarkable person.

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University of Iowa molecular genetics researcher studying COVID-19 testing methods to alleviate test shortages - UI The Daily Iowan

Human Behavior

10 New Books We Recommend This Week – The New York Times

May 7, 2020 medical

The great American Zen poet and eco-warrior Gary Snyder turns 90 on Friday. Ive been thinking a lot about Snyder lately, along with other nature-minded writers like Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, as Ive grown more restless during lockdown and started spending time in the deep woods where I live. (OK, theyre not that deep. But neither was Walden Thoreau brought laundry to his mothers house! and they at least give the illusion of solitude.) Snyders no hermit. One thing I admire about his work is its sense of fellowship: how alert it is to the links between land and politics and culture. He writes about nature, sure, but also about human nature. In honor of his birthday, maybe spend a few minutes reading Axe Handles or Above Pate Valley.

Theres not much nature on this weeks list of recommended titles, but theres plenty of politics and culture. You could read Lawrence Wrights prescient new pandemic thriller, The End of October, if you dare. You say you prefer your world affairs without viruses? In that case we might suggest Dalia Sofers novel Man of My Time, about an Iranian mans path from revolutionary to government interrogator, or Gotz Alys history Europe Against the Jews, about the 19th-century political spasms that led to the Holocaust. Theres In Deep, in which David Rohde investigates the alleged existence of a bureaucratic deep state, or The Inevitability of Tragedy, in which Barry Gewen (a longtime editor at the Book Review) traces the roots of Henry Kissingers political philosophy. Or theres Nobodys Child, Susan Nordin Vinocours incisive look at the problems and promise of the insanity defense as its used in American jurisprudence.

We also recommend a Gothic novel set in the Italian Alps, a story collection about refugees and immigrants in North America, a memoiristic biography of the woman who founded Weight Watchers, and an immersion in the ways of French cooking courtesy of Bill Bufords Dirt which, come to think of it, has a lot to do with nature after all.

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, BooksTwitter: @GregoryCowles

THE END OF OCTOBER, by Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) The sweeping, authoritative and genuinely intelligent thriller the sort of novel in which the author employs a bulldozer and a scalpel at the same time is a rare specimen, our critic Dwight Garner writes, and The End of October is one of those rarities. The fact that its about the world in shock and ruin because of a virus similar to Covid-19 makes it read as if its been shot out of a cannon.

MAN OF MY TIME, by Dalia Sofer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Sofers second novel traces a mans path from baffled revolutionary in Iran to complicit actor in a ruthless regime sure he can undermine the system from inside. It is a master class in layering together a character who is essentially unforgivable but no less captivating. With Sofers considerable talents, the betrayals (of both self and others) that leave Hamid a brittle shell of a man are fully worthy of our intense gaze, Rebecca Makkai writes in her review.

THE ANCESTOR, by Danielle Trussoni. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99.) When a genetic testing site reveals ordinary Bert Monte to be Countess Alberta Montebianco, heiress to a grand old estate in the Italian Alps, she decides to claim her birthright. Trussonis Gothic novel explores what happens next. The central contradictions in The Ancestor reside in the questions of who we are and where we belong of what divides us and what unites us, Carol Goodman writes in her review. Those are the mysteries were invited to discover in this chilling and inventive novel.

NOBODYS CHILD: A Tragedy, a Trial and a History of the Insanity Defense, by Susan Nordin Vinocour. (Norton, $28.95.) The insanity defense, deployed in fewer than 1 percent of criminal cases and successful only about a quarter of the time, nevertheless looms large in debates about crime and punishment. Vinocour shows the injustices of this sliver of our legal system meant to bring together psychiatric research and criminal law. She makes her case delicately, every page offering an incriminating new piece of evidence, scientific fact or court case that demonstrates just how unjust our legal system is to anyone suffering the misfortune of mental illness, our reviewer, Rachel Louise Snyder, writes.

THE INEVITABILITY OF TRAGEDY: Henry Kissinger and His World, by Barry Gewen. (Norton, $30.) In this magisterial account, Gewen, a longtime editor at the Book Review, traces the historical and philosophical roots of Kissingers famous realism, situating him in the context of Hannah Arendt and a cohort of other Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany. The book is a timely and acute defense of the great realists actions, values and beliefs, according to John A. Farrells review. Gewens book is a thoughtful rumination on human behavior, philosophy and international relations,

IN DEEP: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About Americas Deep State, by David Rohde. (Norton, $30.) Rohde examines Donald Trumps contention that there is a deep state trying to undermine his presidency, offering a history of the conspiracy theory and concluding that, despite the presence of an institutional government made up of career civil servants, there is no such thing. Some of the books most fascinating passages trace the rise of William Barr, Trumps attorney general, from his time as a C.I.A. intern, Fred Kaplan writes in his review. Rohde highlights Barrs activism, along with a small group of other conservative lawyers, in the Federalist Society and the Catholic Information Center, which now exercise enormous influence. The tale of these groups is worth an entire book.

HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE: Stories, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. (Little, Brown, $26.) Most of the characters in this spare and rigorous debut collection by Thammavongsa, a Canadian writer and poet, are immigrants in unnamed North American cities, struggling with loneliness and the challenges of mastering the English language. Thammavongsas spare, rigorous stories are preoccupied with themes of alienation and dislocation, her characters burdened by the sense of existing unseen, Sarah Resnick writes in her review. Thammavongsas gift for the gently absurd means the stories never feel dour or predictable, even when their outcomes are by some measure bleak.

THIS IS BIG: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World and Me, by Marisa Meltzer. (Little, Brown, $28.) This is a story of kinship between two women who never met: Meltzer, a journalist, and Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers. The two have more in common than their struggles with the scale, as Meltzer frankly details. By toggling between Nidetchs story and her own, Meltzer positions herself and the weight-loss icon as battle buddies of a sort, separated by time and space, yet bound by efforts to lose weight and to thrive within the boundaries imposed on women of their respective generations, our reviewer, Lily Burana, writes. Meltzer has created a singular companionate text for those who know the agony of frustration surrounding weight as an issue, both personal and political.

EUROPE AGAINST THE JEWS: 1880-1945, by Gotz Aly. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.99.) The origins of the Holocaust, Aly argues, are to be found in the rise of nationalism and the persecution of minorities that began in the late 19th century and solidified in the welter of new nation-states after World War I. Alys reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europes interwar years feels all the more valuable today, Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his review. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then once the province of the ill-informed deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far weve stumbled into an age of troubled sleep.

DIRT: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking, by Bill Buford. (Knopf, $28.95.) Buford, whose last book was about Italian food, here delivers a delightful exploration of his immersion in French cuisine and its soul. This book may well be an even greater pleasure than its predecessor, Lisa Abend writes, reviewing it alongside two other culinary memoirs. He tangles with the btes noires of every Anglophone in France the language, the bureaucracy, the arrogance and embarks, to the great nationalistic dismay of all around him, on a quixotic investigation to prove an Italian origin theory for pot au feu and other French classics.

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10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times

Human Behavior

Meet the ‘psychobiome’: the gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act – Science Magazine

May 7, 2020 medical

Newly isolated bacteria grown on agar plates or their products could act as psychobiotics.

By Elizabeth PennisiMay. 7, 2020 , 9:00 AM

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTSKatya Gavrish is searching for new brain drugs in a seemingly unlikely place: human stool samples. An earnest and focused microbiologist who trained in Russia and loves classical music, shes standing in front of a large anaerobic chamber in a lab at Holobiome, a small startup company here. She reaches into the glass-fronted chamber through Michelin Manlike sleeves to begin to dilute the sample inside. Thats the first step toward isolating and culturing bacteria that Gavrish and her Holobiome colleagues hope will produce new treatments for depression and other disorders of the brain and nervous system.

The eight-person company plans to capitalize on growing evidence from epidemiological and animal studies that link gut bacteria to conditions as diverse as autism, anxiety, and Alzheimers disease. Since its founding a mere 5 years ago, Holobiome has created one of the worlds largest collections of human gut microbes. The companys CEO, Phil Strandwitz, cannot yet say exactly what form the new treatments will take. But the targeted ailments include depression and insomnia, as well as constipation, and visceral pain like that typical of irritable bowel syndromeconditions that may have neurological as well as intestinal components. Strandwitz, a mild-mannered Midwesterner with a Ph.D. in microbiology, isnt prone to visionary statements, but neither is he short on ambition: He predicts the first human trial will start within 1 year.

The allure is simple: Drug development for neuropsychiatric disorders has lagged for decades, and many existing drugs dont work for all patients and cause unwanted side effects. A growing number of researchers see a promising alternative in microbe-based treatments, or psychobiotics, a term coined by neuropharmacologist John Cryan and psychiatrist Ted Dinan, both at University College Cork. This is a really young and really exciting field with a huge amount of potential, says Natalia Palacios, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who is looking into connections between gut microbes and Parkinsons disease.

Some researchers prefer a less hurried approach focused on understanding the underlying biology. But Holobiome and a few other companies are eager to cash in on the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar market that has already sprung up for other microbial therapies, which aim to treat conditions including intestinal disorders allergies, and obesity. Those companies are pushing ahead despite many unresolved questions about how psychobiotic therapies might actually work and the potential dangers of moving too fast. Theres a gold rush mentality, says Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California (UC), San Diego.

Over the past 20 years, the recognition that the microbes living inside us outnumber our bodys own cells has turned our view of ourselves inside out. The gut microbiome, as its known, weighs about 2 kilogramsmore than the 1.4-kilogram human brainand may have just as much influence over our bodies. Thousands of species of microbes (not only bacteria but also viruses, fungi, and archaea) reside in the gut. And with as many as 20 million genes among them, those microbes pack a genomic punch that our measly 20,000 genes cant match. Gut bacteria can make and use nutrients and other molecules in ways the human body canta tantalizing source of new therapies.

The brain is the newest frontier, but its one with an old connection to the gut. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed mental disorders arose when the digestive tract produced too much black bile. And long before microbes were discovered, some philosophers and physicians argued that the brain and gut were partners in shaping human behavior. What probably happens is that our brain and our gut are in constant communication, says Cryan, who over the past decade has helped drive efforts to decode those communications.

Bacterial residents of the intestines may influence neurons and the brain through several routes.

V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE

Epidemiological researchers have turned up intriguing connections between gut and brain disorders. For example, many people with irritable bowel syndrome are also depressed, people on the autism spectrum tend to have digestive problems, and people with Parkinsons are prone to constipation.

Researchers have also noticed an increase in depression in people taking antibioticsbut not antiviral or antifungal medications that leave gut bacteria unharmed. Last year, Jeroen Raes, a microbiologist at the Catholic University of Leuven, and colleagues analyzed the health records of two groupsone Belgian, one Dutchof more then 1000 people participating in surveys of their types of gut bacteria. People with depression had deficits of the same two bacterial species, the authors reported in April 2019 inNature Microbiology.

Researchers see ways in which gut microbes could influence the brain. Some may secrete messenger molecules that travel though the blood to the brain. Other bacteria may stimulate the vagus nerve, which runs from the base of the brain to the organs in the abdomen. Bacterial molecules might relay signals to the vagus through recently discovered neuropod cells that sit in the lining of the gut, sensing its biochemical milieu, including microbial compounds. Each cell has a long foot that extends outward to form a synapselike connection with nearby nerve cells, including those of the vagus.

Indirect links may also exist. Increasingly, researchers see inflammation as a key factor in disorders such as depression and autism. Gut bacteria are key to proper immune system development and maintenance, and studies show that having the wrong mix of microbes can derail that process and promote inflammation. And microbial products may influence what are known as enteroendocrine cells, which reside in the lining of the gut and release hormones and other peptides. Some of those cells help regulate digestion and control insulin production, but they also release the neurotransmitter serotonin, which escapes the gut and travels throughout the body.

Finding the perfect psychobiotic requires culturing, identifying, and testing new gut microbes, work that keeps the Holobiome team busy.

Although the mechanisms remain elusive, animal studies by Cryan and others have bolstered the idea that gut microbes can influence the brain. Rats and mice given fecal transplants from people with Parkinsons, schizophrenia, autism, or depression often develop the rodent equivalents of those problems. Conversely, giving those animals fecal transplants from healthy people sometimes relieves their symptoms. The presence or absence of certain microbes in young mice affects how the mice respond to stress as adults, and other mouse studies have pointed to a role for microbes in the development of the nervous system.

At their lab, Cryan, Dinan, and their colleague Gerard Clarke think the amino acid tryptophan, which some gut bacteria produce, could be a causal link. Microbes or the bodys own cells can convert tryptophan into serotonin, a neurotransmitter implicated in depression and other psychiatric disorders. Cells also turn tryptophan into a substance called kynurenine, which reacts further to form products that can be toxic to neurons. Changes in the microbiome might tip the production of those various substances in a way that impairs mental health, Cryan says. Research has shown, for example, that people with depression convert tryptophan into kynurenine more readily than into serotonin.

Cryans group has amassed scores of papers and reviews that have helped solidify the case for microbial effects on several psychological and neurological disorders. But teasing effective fixes out of those links will be difficult, Clarke says: It is one thing to know that a particular aspect of host physiology is influenced by our gut microbes and quite another to bend this influence to our will.

Clarkes group collaborates and consults with many companies and has tested some potential psychobiotics for stress management in healthy volunteers. But he sees a long road to treatments. It will be important to understand better and more precisely the mechanisms at play.

Holobiome isnt as patient. Strandwitz founded the company in 2015 while still a graduate student in Kim Lewiss microbiology lab at Northeastern University. He very politely told me that he would join the lab only if I helped him start a company once he graduated, recalls Lewis, who is famous for discovering and working to commercialize new antibiotics from soil microbes. Lewis agreed, but he figured it would be 10 years or more before Strandwitz would have his own company. Lewis was wrong: It only took 4 years.

At Northeastern, Strandwitz learned what he calls the art of cultivation from Gavrish, who was working with Lewis on isolating soil microbes. At the time, only about 25% of gut bacteria could be grown in the lab. Gavrish, who specializes in isolating and describing new microbial species, taught Strandwitz to manipulate nutrients and use antibiotics to give slow-growing, picky bacteria a chance to survive in culture instead of being outcompeted by more aggressive species. He began to track down growth factors to keep recalcitrant species going. Now, Strandwitz says, We have in culture about 70% of the known human gut microbes. If true, its a figure few other labs can match.

One growth factor Strandwitz identified turned out to be the key to launching his entrepreneurial dreams. He and colleagues isolated a bacterium that couldnt survive on typical culture media and required an amino acid called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) to thrive. GABA is a neurotransmitter that inhibits neural activity in the brain, and its misregulation has been linked to depression and other mental health problems.

The researchers reasoned that if this gut microbe had to have GABA, some other microbe must be making it. Such GABA producers might be a psychobiotic gold mine. Strandwitz and colleagues began to add gut microbes one at a time to petri dishes containing the GABA eater. If the GABA eater thrived, the scientists would know theyd found a GABA producer. They discovered such producers among three groups of bacteria, includingBactereroides. They quickly filed a patent for packaging those bacteriaor their productsto treat people with depression or other mental disorders.

At Holobiome, Stephen Skolnick tests whether bacterial cells can make GABA, an important neurotransmitter.

Before publishing those findings, the group teamed up with researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine who were doing a brain scan study of 23 people diagnosed with depression. They found that people with fewerBacteroidesbacteria had a stronger pattern of hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex, which some researchers have associated with severe depression. The collaboration reported its findings on 10 December 2018 inNature Microbiology, along with the discovery of GABA-producing bacteria.

Holobiome further discovered that the bacteria produce GABA in the rat digestive tract, which may increase GABA levels in the brain. And it found that GABA eaters reduced learned helplessnessa symptom of depressionin those animals. One of Strandwitzs co-authors, microbial ecologist Jack Gilbert at UC San Diego, is also testing the therapeutic potential of GABA-producing bacteria in rats. His group and Holobiome have both observed that treated rats are more likely to stay longer on an uncomfortably warm surfacea test of visceral pain toleranceperhaps because elevated GABA calms them. The findings are unpublished, but theyve persuaded Gilbert to investigate whether those bacteria can also reduce anxiety in rats. Its clear they do have a neuromodulatory effect, he says.

GABA is too big to reach the brain by slipping across the blood-brain barrier, a cellular defense wall that limits the size and types of molecules that can get into the brain from blood vessels. Instead, the molecule may act through the vagus nerve or the enteroendocrine cells. Some researchers might question why bacteria would be any more beneficial than GABA-boosting drugs. But Strandwitz says the bacteria may do more than simply boost GABA. He notes that they produce molecules that may have other effects on the brain and body, thereby addressing other symptoms of depression.

He and Gilbert are unfazed by those uncertainties. If we can show an influence, without any side effects, I dont see any reason for not going forward with clinical trials, Gilbert says.

At Holobiome, Strandwitz and colleagues have identified and ranked 30 promising GABA-producing bacteria, including the ones Gilbert is testing. Now, the company is enlisting an outside manufacturer to figure out which GABA-producing bacteria are best suited to produce in large enough quantities to test in people. The researchers hope to complete regulatory and ethical reviews in time to start human trials by early 2021. Weve been able to progress at this rate because we know our microbiology, Strandwitz says. The initial target conditions are insomnia and irritable bowel syndrome with constipation.

Ultimately, Holobiome does not know whether its best products will be a single bacterial species, a group of species, or a compound made by bacteria. For now, live bugs work the best, Strandwitz says. He suggests a consortium of bacteria that includes a wider range of species than typical probiotics will be more versatile and able to treat multiple aspects of, say, depression.

Holobiome is already lookingbeyond GABA producers. Thousands of newly isolated microbes wait in frozen vials at the companys headquarters for their psychobiotic potential to be explored. Whenever we see someone publishes a new paper on the microbiome, we can check if we have those bacteria and replicate the experiments, says Holobiomes Stephen Skolnick, who recently joined the company.

A key tool for those experiments is a gut simulator, a series of flasks connected by tubing, with several portals for adding microbes and for monitoring whats happening inside. By allowing a mock microbiome to develop from different combinations of bacteria, sometimes with mammalian cells in the mix, the researchers can investigate newly isolated microbes and their products. If the scientists see promise, they can quickly pivot to thinking about additional products to develop.

Holobiomes Mariaelena Caboni examines mammalian cells used to assess how microbes affect nerve cell signaling in their hosts.

Skolnick took the lead on obtaining a patent for Holobiomes use of queuinea vitaminlike molecule only produced by certain gut microbesto improve mental well-being. The body converts queuine into building blocks for neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and melatonin. Whether adding queuine producers or the molecule itself to the gut might help people with mental illness isnt clear, but Strandwitz says hes excited about the idea.

Its been amazing to witness the tremendous growth in the microbiome gut-brain field, says UC Los Angeles biologist Elaine Hsiao. Like Strandwitz, she is an enthusiast, having helped start two companies to develop microbial therapies for several disorders, including epilepsy and autism.

Other researchers fear entrepreneurship is outracing science. Knight says venture capitalists are funding startups developing almost any microbiome-based therapies. Some concepts are very promising and are supported by a lot of evidence, he says, but others arent, and theyre still getting money. Knight says investors see an opportunity in eager patients. (Raes says he gets almost daily emails from depressed people seeking help.)

Microbial therapies wont necessarily meet the same standards of efficacy as regular drugs. To be marketed as a pharmaceutical, a treatment has to pass muster with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or its equivalent in other countries, through clinical trials that prove its effectiveness against specific diseases. Most microbiome treatments so far are marketed as probiotics, for which regulatory thresholds are lower, at least in the United Statesas are limits on the health claims that a manufacturer can make. Holobiome is developing both types of products.

The field still faces considerable scientific questions, too. Besides the correlative nature of much of the research and the usual questions of whether animal studies will translate to humans, theres also the sheer complexity of the human microbiome, says Beatriz Pealver Bernab, a systems reproductive biologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I dont think that it will be one thing fits all. We will need to look for specific strains and dosages for different people. And, she adds, new theories and models are needed to predict how those strains will affect the individuals particular microbiome community.

Despite the obstacles, Gavrish remains confident that some strains shes growing in the anaerobic chamber will lead to treatments. After all, she says, the connection between gut microbes and the human brain has deep evolutionary roots. I truly believe you can harness the power of a million years of signaling by gut bacteria to help people.

See the article here:
Meet the 'psychobiome': the gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act - Science Magazine

Human Behavior

The Reading Quilt: ‘Does My Head Look Big in This?’ | The notebook – Philadelphia Public School Notebook

May 7, 2020 medical

As adults may remember, the teen years are when you strive to be more like others and nothing like yourself. Individuality is social suicide. Instead, teens spend hours flooding social media with selfies that prove that they are following the adolescent social order: cloning for acceptance. Every once in a while, we hear of a teenager who bucks the system and goes rogue, risking alienation.

The yearning to be accepted and loved as an individual in spite of the magnetic pull to think like the crowd is difficult for boys, but it is especially hard for girls, who are bombarded with images depicting female perfection. Alicia Keys, the singer and songwriter, details her distress with female perfection in her new book,More Myself: A Journey. In her life, Keys wins the struggle to define herself in a world that rarely encourages a true and unique identity.

Randa Abdel-Fattahs first novel,Does My Head Look Big in This?,mirrors the concept.

Each month The Reading Quilt provides a short review of a book or play that a teacher may use to spark conversations about culture and race, along with a learning activity that may help students understand human behavior. Using the acronym QUILT, we offer readers informationabout the Quality of writing, Universal theme, and Imaginative plot, as well as a mini Lesson plan, and Talking points that stem from the books premise.

This months selection is Does My Head Look Big in This?by Randa Abdel-Fattah (2005).

Randa Abdel-Fattahwas born to Palestinian and Egyptian parents in 1979 in Sydney, Australia. She began her writing career in her late teens. While studying at the University of Melbourne, Abdel-Fattah found opportunities to write for various newspapers. Using that platform,Abdel-Fattah found the courage to hold the media responsible for their representation of Muslims. After completing her undergraduate degree, Randa continued her education, earning a Ph.D. for her studies of Islamophobia. That work laid the foundation for her writing award-winning books. Randa, who is outspoken about various issues, including womens rights, is a popular public speaker.

Quality of writing: Abdel-Fattahs book tells the story of Amal Mohamed Nasrullah Abdel-Hakim, a 16-year-old Australian Palestinian-Muslim girl who could have easily melted into the social pot without raising any eyebrows. Instead, she decides to honor her religion by wearing the hijab, a scarf that covers the head and chest and is worn by some Muslim women. Afraid that the students at McCleans Preparatory School may reject her, Amals parents arent thrilled with the idea. Despite their fears, she wears the hijab, which represents modesty, to school. Abdel-Fattahs use of natural dialogue brings to life realistic characters who spit in the face of Amals religious bravery.

Universal theme: Despite parental dismay and Islamophobia, Amal prevails in achieving self-expression and religious freedom, bringing to mind strong-willed women such as Linda Sarsour, who co-chaired the 2017 Womens March and was named one of Time magazines 100 Most Influential People that year.

Imaginative plot: Abdel-Fattah hoped to give her readers a story that debunked the common misconceptions about Muslims, which allowed readers to enter the world of the average Muslim teenage girl and see past the headlines and stereotypes, shesaid.

Lesson plan: Islamophobia, an exaggerated and illogical fear of Muslims that may incite a person to show aggression toward them, is on the rise in the United States. Students can learn why this fear has increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (also referred to as 9/11).

Talking Points:

What are some of the most significant instances of Islamophobic attacks that have occurred in the United States?

If a person said all terrorists are Muslims in your presence, how would you respond?

Do you think Muslims condemn terrorism?

Dr. Rachel Slaughter earned her doctoral degree in Cognitive Studies in Reading at Widener University. Her dissertation explores multicultural literature in private schools through the lens of Critical Pedagogy. Her new book titled Turning the Page: The Ultimate Guide for Teachers to Multicultural Literature will be published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2020. To contact her, email literacyuniversity@gmail.com. For other multicultural literary suggestions, visit literacyuniversity.org.

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The Reading Quilt: 'Does My Head Look Big in This?' | The notebook - Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Human Behavior

The psychology of the COVID-19 coup: The elite, their victims and those who resist – NationofChange

May 7, 2020 medical

As the elite coup against humanity continues to gather pace see The Elites COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully it is invaluable to observe the way in which the dysfunctional and violent psychology of the global elite, including those of its members who have a significant public profile such as Bill Gates, is revealed more starkly.

At the same time, it is interesting to observe the vast number of fearfully submissive people who are willing to accept, or even ask for, greater constraints on our rights, freedom and economic security, ostensibly to protect them from a virus. Sadly, too, the fear of these people plays a critical collaborative role in both advancing the elite coup and condemning millions of others to death as the economic consequences of the destruction of the global economy inflicts its devastating impacts on those least able to cope with it.

Clearly complicated by a number of factors, including the locust plagues that have been devastating several countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia during early 2020 see 360 Billion Locusts And Growing A Plague Of Biblical Proportions Is Destroying Crops Across The Middle East And Africa but now particularly because of official responses to COVID-19, as World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director, David Beasley, has recently warned:

If we dont prepare and act now to secure access, to avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade, we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period. See WFP chief warns of hunger pandemic as Global Food Crises Report launched.

That is 27,000,000 people, if arithmetic is not your strong point, that will die of starvation, not COVID-19. And this figure, of course, is quite separate from the phenomenal hardship that millions are already experiencing as a result of the economic dislocation which has created s staggering number of newly unemployed people around the world.

In this article I will do three things. I will briefly explain the dysfunctional psychology of the global elite, using Bill Gates as an example, which explains why they seek vastly greater control over our lives at staggering expense to our rights, freedom and economic security. I will briefly explain why so many people are fearfully submissive victims of this coup, unable to perceive the deeper strands of what is taking place. And I will briefly reiterate what those people in a third category, ranging from those skeptical of the fear-mongering in relation to COVID-19 to those already resisting the lockdowns, curfews, martial law and other serious impositions on our lives, can do to ensure that their resistance has strategic impact.

The Violently Dysfunctional Psychology of the Global Elite

While the world is in turmoil, partly in response to the fear-mongering by WHO, governments, the medical industry and the corporate media that has profoundly inflated peoples fear of COVID-19 but also because of the adverse cascading impacts of the long list of ill-advised decisions, particularly those that impact national economies made to supposedly deal with COVID-19, the primary concern of Bill Gates is that we all submit to vaccination and acquire a digital certificate to prove that we have done so. For explanations of Gates unsavory motives in promoting and conducting extensive vaccination, see Gates Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination and Bill Gates and the Depopulation Agenda. Robert F. Kennedy Junior Calls for an Investigation.

While this has led to substantial resistance on social media, including that Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity see Arrest Bill Gates Says every Instagrammer on Gates Account it is, in fact, only the most public initiative by a member of the global elite even though it constitutes a key element of how the global elite intends to capture complete control of our lives to create what Whitney Webb describes as a techno tyranny.

Citing a range of evidence obtained from official but largely ignored organizations, decisions and documents in recent years, Webb thoughtfully describes a frightening view of the techno tyranny that is almost upon us and for which the latest moves are being rapidly implemented under the guise of combating COVID-19. Involving an unsavory alliance of the intelligence community, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, COVID-19 is being used as cover to remove economic and social obstacles (including so-called legacy systems with which we are all familiar) to implementing the so-called fourth industrial revolution a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing to achieve everything from a cashless society and AI-driven technologies (particularly for mass surveillance and law enforcement) to driverless cars and telemedicine.

For a sample of the documentation, see Competing With China on Technology and Innovation, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the Chinese Tech Landscape Overview, US Attorney General William Barrs Implementation of National Disruption and Early Engagement Programs to Counter the Threat of Mass Shootings, the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Year One Annual Report of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the recent advice by the White House that President Donald J. Trump Announces Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups. Whitney Webb has written two recent articles Meet The Companies Poised To Build The Kushner-Backed Coronavirus Surveillance System and Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision and been interviewed see Security State using coronavirus to implement Orwellian nightmare that thoughtfully describe what is taking place.

In short, it will leave those of us who are still alive and who havent been replaced by robots as little more than digital entities, devoid of rights and freedoms, who are monitored and controlled to serve elite ends. You might still be able to choose what you buy, provided you do it online.

But while you can consider this evidence at your leisure, my own concern in this article is to explain why members of the global elite are so willing to inflict their violence on us, and to exploit us so mercilessly, without even caring. Why does their vision for the world and their effort to create it resemble the works of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, rather than something that many more of us would consider desirable? Is profit really all that matters? What about people?

In short, the explanation for their behavior is that they are completely insane. But like some other versions of insanity that are also defined as normal essentially because they are so widespread (like over-consumption in industrialized countries) that few think to question whether or not the behavior is actually functional it is fairly straightforward to explain both the origin and outcomes of their insanity.

At birth, every human child has enormous unique potential. However, to fully realize that potential, the child must be nurtured physically, emotionally, intellectually and in other ways so that their unique potential unfolds. This includes caring for them in their unique physical environment while allowing their natural inclination to learn, an evolutionary gift, to guide the manner and nature of their inquiry.

Unfortunately, however, adult humans do not appreciate and value the innate learning capacities of their children so we teach them, in the ways of our choosing (particularly by funneling them all through the one-size-fits-all institution we call school), what we want them to know instead. Because the child naturally resists this, the child is subjected to an extraordinary range of visible and invisible violence to force them to conform to societal norms.

Then, using what I have labeled utterly invisible violence, we ensure that the feelings of fear, sadness, anger and pain (among many others) that this causes are suppressed so that we do not have to deal with the emotional and behavioral consequences of the violence we inflict on the child. This leaves the child with an unconscious legacy of fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that will manifest, depending on the context, throughout the childs life. For a thorough explanation of this, see Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

One outcome of being terrorized into submissive obedience throughout childhood is that the human individual enters adulthood with no sense of their unique identity but fully comfortable with the social constructed delusional identity they gradually took on during childhood. Having been terrorized into obedient submission to parents, teachers and religious figures, virtually all people readily take on the role of submissive worker/soldier and citizen fulfilling some fairly meaningless role in a society largely devoid of meaning. Understanding no other way and in a last resort to feel some sense of control over their life, they also then terrorize their own children into being submissively obedient.

And people like Bill Gates are not all that different except that the opportunities provided by their wealth and the privilege that goes with it, enable them to inflict their dysfunctional and violent behaviors on a vastly greater number of people in a fruitless endeavor to feel in control. And they can do so without attracting the sanctions, legal and otherwise, that might constrain the behaviors of the rest of us.

So, as documented in the articles about Bill Gates cited above, his vaccination programs have wreaked havoc on adults and children throughout the global south, killing or incapacitating substantial numbers of people. This is unsurprising given the historical role of vaccination in precipitating a great many disorders and deaths, by introducing into the body contaminants such as aluminium and glyphosate. See Sayer Jis 326 page bibliography with a vast number of references to the literature explaining the exceptional range of shocking dangers from vaccination see Vaccination or, if you wish to just read straightforward accounts of the history of vaccine damage and the ongoing dangers, see these articles by Gary G. Kohls MD: A Comprehensive List of Vaccine-Associated Toxic Reactions and Identifying the Vaccinology-Illiterate among Us.

But does Bill Gates care about the staggering harm these vaccinations are causing? Does he care that future vaccinations are intended to be used to grotesquely infringe our rights and freedoms with the insertion of biometric data? See COVID-19: Perfect Cover for Mandatory Biometric ID. What of his love? Compassion? Empathy? Sympathy? Does he have a conscience to call him to account, even if no legal system does? Does he respect people? Does he believe everyone should be given an individual and informed choice about whether or not they are vaccinated?

Tragically, Bill Gates is so psychologically damaged that he is simply devoid of qualities such as these. They were never given the chance to develop by parents who showed him the same lack of love, sympathy, care, respect and consideration. Moreover, because of his fear of being out of control, as he was when endlessly suffering the incredible violence of his parents throughout childhood, he now endlessly seeks control in the highly dysfunctional ways that his unconscious fear projects. That is, by seeking to control us all.

If you want to read more about the psychological dysfunctionality of Bill Gates and other members of the global elite, as well as their agents, and how this always manifests to our detriment, you can do so in articles such as The Global Elite is Insane Revisited, Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War and Understanding Self-Hatred in World Affairs.

Sadly, however, it is not just members of the global elite who are psychologically dysfunctional. There is a substantial portion of the human population who have suffered a similar fate, even if it manifests very differently. However, while this dysfunctionality might manifest in an extraordinarily wide variety of ways, it almost invariably includes fearful submission to those considered to be in authority.

Because each human being is unique, the individual is born with a powerful evolutionary gift: Self-will. This means that the individual has an incredible range of tools, including the capacity to apply sensory perception (sight, sound, touch) to observe what is happening, the emotional capacity to feel what this means (is it satisfying, enjoyable, frightening, infuriating), to think for themself about the significance of it, to compare and contrast it with relevant memories, to gauge it against ones conscience and so on until an integrated sense of how to behave in response is formulated and then acted on.

If a person is doing this then we might describe them as Self-aware. And they are, truly, an individual.

However, because of the experience of childhood terrorization, briefly touched on above, most children are compelled to surrender the essence of these various capacities, and hence their Self-will, by a very young age. In these circumstances, the child becomes a fairly malleable instrument, easily transformed into a victim who is now devoid of the capacity to look deep within themselves to make sound judgments about what is taking place and to behave powerfully in response.

Instead, they simply obey the will of another: parent, teacher, religious figure, employer, political leader. and act more out of habit than consideration. Given the endless violence (usually labeled punishment) that is inflicted to ensure that children are obedient to others, rather than allowed to follow their own self-will, it takes an extraordinary child to survive with even a semblance of the potential with which they were born. As a result, most human behavior lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

For elaboration of this explanation, see The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth and The Psychology of Victimhood: Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, Clinton, Kissinger.

A primary outcome of this childhood terrorization experience in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themself. By doing this, the child rapidly loses their emerging self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents whose Self-awareness is non-existent). For a fuller explanation, see Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War.

In essence, a victim is utterly terrified and powerless. These feelings are unconscious to the victim, which is why they are incapable of intelligently seeking out and personally assessing evidence (such as that in relation to COVID-19 and how it is being used) and they simply submit without protest once told to obey.

An equally important outcome for the victim, is that they have little, if any, capacity to see beyond themselves or their immediate concerns (which might include an activist preoccupation). They are incapable of perceiving and considering the wider ramifications of what is taking place the big picture such as for those millions of starving people referred to by WFP Executive Director David Beasley above. Any sense of a wider self, of human solidarity beyond the most superficial kind, is incomprehensible to them.

So this is why a third group in relation to this elite coup is so important: Those individuals who are already resisting the coup or those who will soon choose to do so. Clearly, these people have sufficient sense of Self, the intelligence and emotional capacity (including courage) to consider the evidence in relation to COVID-19 and what lies beneath it, and to draw conclusions at variance with those presented by the elite through its international organizations (such as the World Health Organization), governments and corporate media.

And it is to these people that this final section is particularly addressed.

I have previously explained a nonviolent strategy to resist this elite coup against humanity. See The Elites COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully.

This included identifying its political purpose obviously To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite and setting out a basic list of 26 strategic goals for achieving this purpose. You can read the Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity by scrolling down the page at Strategic Aims.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression.

While many of the tactics identified are designed to make it very easy for individuals to be involved, an increasing number of people are already participating in nonviolent actions based on public gatherings to End the Lockdown using social media messaging with that or similar labels. See, for example, Protesting the Lockdowns is Getting Going #endthelockdown.

Therefore, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it continues to gather pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to End the Lockdown in your country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place.

Because the actions taken can be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression.

Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction see Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

Moreover, given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try Putting Feelings First.

In addition, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See My Promise to Children and Do We Want School or Education?

Finally, as touched on above, apart from the ongoing elite coup the Earth is under siege from our assaults on a vast range of fronts. See Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth. So if we are serious about tackling this crisis too, we must be willing to consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)

2. I will not travel by plane

3. I will not travel by car

4. I will not eat meat and fish

5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food

6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices

7. I will not buy rainforest timber

8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws

9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons

10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere

11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter)

12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant

13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that any serious investigation of the circumstances underlying the so-called COVID-19 pandemic reveals that the entire global episode has been contrived to further an unsavory elite end, at staggering cost to humans everywhere, it is imperative that those who are capable of perceiving this reality also take action to bring this ongoing coup to an early end.

The longer it takes to muster a full response to defeat this coup, the more damage to our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment will have been inflicted, making the struggle to restore them vastly more difficult.

More importantly, if human solidarity means anything to you, the lives of millions of people (in the global south) are at stake and the economic security (through lost employment) of millions more.

And these lives, if lost or marginalized, while suiting some elite depopulation agenda, will be a stark but ugly reminder that COVID-19 was never about a virus but about our fear.

FALL FUNDRAISER

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The psychology of the COVID-19 coup: The elite, their victims and those who resist - NationofChange

Human Behavior

Growth Teams Have the Tools to Be Coronavirus Anti-Growth Teams – WIRED

May 7, 2020 medical

While platforms like Facebook offer 21st-century advertising tools that harness advanced computation to target ads and change behavior, they are only using 20th-century PSAs against coronavirus.

Given the exponential challenge were up against, passive links to information and videos from the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization are woefully insufficient to keep the curve flattened. Too many people are still uninformed, not fully appraising, or unmotivated to action by the threat we faceand it will result in millions of lives being lost around the world, their last days without breath and in isolation from loved ones. As summer nears and social distancing extends, our collective will may wane. Technology has the power to change that.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Aza Raskin (@aza) is a cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Consider that on April 9, nearly a month into the pandemic, 25 percent of the US population misunderstood whether they were subject to a shelter-in-place order. And in some states, more than 50 percent didnt know or incorrectly answered the question Do you live in an area that is currently under a stay-at-home order due to the pandemic? On May 4, the city of Miami Beach had to close a park where over 7,300 people showed up without masks. Its been over a month since the CDC officially adopted mask use as necessary to halt the spread of the disease. Similarly, only 60 percent of Americans knew that you cant actually kill the coronavirus by drinking water to flush it into your stomach acid; only 44 percent had worn a mask in public. One report found that 100 pieces of false Covid-19 content were shared on Facebook 1.7 million times and had 117 million views.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 was doubling infections every few days. In New York City, a steady flow of refrigerator trucks docked at hospitals to carry away the dead bodies. The number of Americans killed is now more than 25 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Seventy thousand Americans are dead, 20 percent more than were killed in the Vietnam war. That horror will soon overwhelm the limited health care systems in Lagos and Mexico City and New Delhi, where millions more reside.

We technologists have a responsibility. Our products are uniquely capable of leaping past the exponential curve to reach 3 billion peopleeveryone on the social platformsbefore the virus can.

Inside every major social media platform there are groups known as growth teams, whose sole purpose is to virally grow user numbers. Theyve pioneered the features and techniques that have fueled the exponential growth of Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and every other social platform. They understand and play to fundamental human psychology that works across language, country, and culture.

What if every growth team became a Covid-19 anti-growth team?

Using these kinds of techniques pose all sorts of ethical considerations. Crises pit dearly held values against other dearly held values. That ethical complexity, however, is no different than the ethics of previous design choices and automated ranking algorithms for news feeds. In addition, they require no new mass surveillance.

To change behavior at scale goes a step beyond mere information.

Recently, WhatsApp launched a WHO chatbot to its 2 billion users. While thats great, to get it to work, a user has to save the number +41 79 893 1892 to their phone contacts, then text "Hi" in a WhatsApp message. Few will use it if they must text hi to an obscure number to initiate the bot.

Moreover, waiting for users to send a message to a bot on their own simply wont save millions of lives. Poor design has real-world consequences.

Instead, WhatsApp should proactively send a message to users in the highest-risk and most dense urban areas and cities to reach them before the virus does. This is especially important for reaching the 2 billion people in the Global South, whose fragile health care systems are more vulnerable to surges, and whom WhatsApp is uniquely positioned to reach.

Originally posted here:
Growth Teams Have the Tools to Be Coronavirus Anti-Growth Teams - WIRED

Human Behavior

Where Psychologists Should Fear to Tread on Covid-19, They Don’t – Undark Magazine

May 7, 2020 medical

Consider the following brain teaser: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? A researcher devised the question 15 years ago as a measure of our ability to move past intuitive responses to deeper, reflective thinking a concept Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics, would go on to explore in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Its been popularized to the point you may already know the answer. (Hint: Its not 10 cents, the response that springs to mind for most people. If you ponder a bit youre more likely to arrive at the correct answer, which Ill get to later.)

So, what does the answer to the bat-and-ball question have to do with how you size up the threat posed by Covid-19? According to psychologist Mark Travers, intuitive thinkers the 10 centers may be (in his view) irrationally concerned about the virus. In an April 5 article for Forbes, he uses that concept to explain survey results showing that men are more cavalier than women about Covid-19 risks. Based on a study finding that men outscored women on the bat-and-ball question and two similar brainteasers, he posits that males are more rational. The difference could be due to genetics or the environment, he writes, but to Travers, it ultimately suggests that men might be better equipped to size up the Covid-19 risk for what it is: a threat that, in most cases, is still exceptionally remote.

Travers is one of a slew of psychological and behavioral experts weighing in to tell us how we should think, feel, and act in the face of Covid-19 and some of it can be useful. Its a stressful time, after all. Anxieties are running high, and there are, to date, very few firm answers regarding how long the pandemic might last.

But while psychologists can be essential to helping the public deal with the mental health fallout of Covid-19, not everyone thinks analyses like Travers are improving matters. Indeed, according to Stuart Ritchie, a psychology lecturer at Kings College London who wrote a recent analysis of the issue for the British website UnHerd, some behavioral researchers are disgracing themselves by using psychological research to downplay the severity of the pandemic. We shouldnt be trying to draw conclusions from our research, especially small-scale lab studies, he told me, for something as serious, unprecedented, and rare as this.

The stakes are too high to get it wrong. In March, for example, psychologist David Halpern, head of the Behavioral Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) that consulted on the U.K.s response to the pandemic, offered advice that now seems dangerously misguided: He spoke of achieving herd immunity by cocooning older people and otherwise deliberately allowing the virus to spread. He also recommended delaying social distancing, arguing that people would quickly tire of it and not comply.

While Halperns influence on official decision making is unclear, the U.K. did not act swiftly, and it is now among the hardest-hit countries in Europe.

The social sciences have spent the last decade coming to grips with the realization that some widely touted results could not be reproduced in independent experiments. For example, researchers failed to replicate results from one-third of experimental studies in the social sciences published in Science and Nature between 2010 and 2015, according to a 2018 report in Nature and findings they could reproduce were often weaker than those reported in the original papers. But in a recent review (in preprint and not yet peer-reviewed), Tal Yarkoni, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that the focus on the so-called replication crisis has distracted researchers from a more pressing and consequential problem: generalizability.

Yarkoni explains the concept using a thought experiment. Lets say a scientific paper publishes a surprising finding: Pizza is disgusting! The evidence appears to be sound researchers concluded people dont like pizza after averaging responses from a large sample of people who rated different foods. But it turns out the study tested an unappetizing broccoli pizza. The results are reproducible, but its not valid to generalize them to claim that people dislike all pizza.

Of course, the narrower claim this particular broccoli pizza is disgusting is uninteresting and would be impossible to get published, said Yarkoni. Social and behavioral scientists have a habit of wanting to make a broad, lively statement, he said. They make an unjustified leap from what happens in a narrow, controlled context to how people think and act in the real world.

According to Ritchie, risk perception is one such area that is too-often vulnerable to over-generalization. Yes, he says, risk perception research is highly replicable but its inappropriate to generalize it to the wholly new context of the pandemic. All that risk perception stuff works in the context of the sorts of threats they were talking about in the lab, he said, but when a real genuinely massive threat comes along, it falls to pieces.

They make an unjustified leap from what happens in a narrow, controlled context to how people think and act in the real world.

One of the psychologists Ritchie calls out in his analysis is Northeastern University professor David DeSteno. In a February 11 op-ed for The New York Times, DeSteno started with the assumption that the seasonal flu presents a much greater threat than does the coronavirus. He then drew on psychological experiments, including his own, to explain why he thought people were overreacting by buying face masks, avoiding crowds, and being suspicious of Asians. Such findings show that our emotions can bias our decisions in ways that dont accurately reflect the dangers around us, he wrote.

In his article, Ritchie characterized opinion pieces by DeSteno and others as dreadful misfires for minimizing the threat of Covid-19 not long before governments began imploring their citizens to stay home. He told me that the social scientists themselves are guilty of another replicable behavioral quirk: confirmation bias, the tendency to favor information consistent with your own point of view. You could just as easily compose a just so story using psychological principles to explain why people like the men in Travers article underestimated the threat.

Its completely speculative, said Ritchie. People rarely consider these biases in concert with each other. They just focus on one and say this must be the explanation for all our behavior.

DeSteno told me that Ritchie completely mischaracterized his views by not accounting for what was going on at the time. When DeStenos op-ed was first published, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported only 13 cases of Covid-19 in the U.S., and many American officials were still ignoring or downplaying the likely impact of the virus. At the same time, by early February it was clear that Covid-19 was spreading globally and quickly. Public health experts were warning that something very bad was coming and, in fact, was likely already here, although we were not yet widely testing for it.

Should DeSteno have known better, based on this? Its a fair question but he was far from alone in issuing ostensibly research-based psychological and behavioral nostrums and prognostications early on. In a February 28 piece in Bloomberg Opinion, for example, Cass Sunstein, a behavioral economist at Harvard University, expressed concern that people would take unnecessary precautions such as canceling trips, refusing to fly, or avoiding certain countries due to the virus. (A month later he wrote that expensive precautions were justified.) And in a March 12 opinion piece for Project Syndicate, the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer looked to the psychological research and responses to past viral epidemics to predict that people will react to Covid-19 based on fear rather than evidence.

For my part, by the end of February, I was rethinking spring travel, talking contingencies with two of my children who were in other countries, and considering steps to protect my mother.

However, it is true that fear can compel people to act in irrational and harmful ways. Both Gigerenzer and DeSteno decried discrimination against Asians after the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, for example. The idea is not to justify panic or bad behavior, its to question the premise at the center of these pieces that Covid-19 posed less of a threat than everyday dangers we take in stride such as car accidents or other illnesses.

To Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, such predictions were wildly premature. I would be very cautious to say people are overreacting and I know this because I understand the human mind, she said. Even if we did, youd still need the other half of the equation, which is What would be the appropriate reaction?

Yarkoni chalks up most of the opinions to harmless psychological storytelling. The stories could potentially be true, but we usually have no idea, and very little basis for determining that, he said.

But Ritchie disagrees. A bunch of articles by experts floating around in prominent places could easily influence people and governments, he said. Thats what people hope for when they write articles.

Instead, Vazire suggests that behavioral scientists should leave risk assessment to the virologists and epidemiologists. I can sympathize a lot with why they believe these things, she said of experts publishing their speculations in the press. But I feel very little sympathy for why they went and printed it in a very high-circulation newspaper with their credentials attached to it, because I knew better than to do that.

For his part, DeSteno stands by his New York Times piece. While fear may have been rational for health experts who understood what might be coming and needed to prepare, it wasnt yet for everyday citizens who were not at risk at the time, he told me. Most people dont have the knowledge to think like a virologist or an epidemiologist. And, so, fear fills in the blanks in ways that are problematic. In our conversation, he cited more extreme versions of the examples of irrational behavior in his op-ed attacking Asians and causing face-mask shortages by hoarding.

And while behavioral scientists may not the best source of information on how a pandemic will unfold, their insights can be valuable for understanding our connections to each other and to the larger world. A lot of the problems were facing right now and even in resilience to disasters in general arent only a function of the physical and life sciences, said DeSteno. A lot of what matters are decision sciences what matters is resilience and how people behave.

DeSteno points to research showing that after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, areas where neighbors cooperated and trusted each other were up and running faster than other neighborhoods with similar damage. Human decisions, human behavior is as related to surviving epidemics as is trying to figure out the medical science and everything else, he said. Its all interweaved.

He also pointed out that as with information on the medications used to treat Covid-19, advice in any scientific field will change as the situation evolves. In both his op-ed and in our conversation, he recommended heeding the latest advice of public health authorities as did everyone I talked to for that matter. Never anywhere did I say that Covid-19 wouldnt become a big concern for us, he told me.

For what its worth, I correctly answered the bat-and-ball question. (The ball costs 5 cents.) Research shows that people like me, with a background in math, are more apt to get the question right, regardless of gender. Or maybe as a journalist, Im just skeptical of first impressions and the easy answer.

And while Im not panicked, Im also skeptical of advice telling me to calm down. With all due respect to Travers who declined to comment for this story a degree of fear seems justified. My dad is 79 and I spend loads of time worrying about him, said Ritchie. The worries multiply when you think about the risk to yourself, friends, family, and others in your community he said. I think it becomes quite rational to be quite scared.

My city of Austin, Texas is not a hotspot at the moment, but nonetheless I have friends recovering from severe cases of Covid-19. My nephew is a respiratory therapist assigned to an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients. My stepmother is hospitalized with a broken hip confused and alone because visitors could carry the virus. Im not sure when Ill get to give her or my own mother, whos also isolated a hug again. What does the cost of a ball have to do with how I feel about that? Not a damn thing.

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Where Psychologists Should Fear to Tread on Covid-19, They Don't - Undark Magazine

Human Behavior

Responding to the Spike in Domestic Violence Across Oceania – The Diplomat

May 7, 2020 medical

Oceania|Society|Oceania

Societies need to move beyond reacting to the consequences of violence to changing norms of behavior that allow violence to occur.

One of the innumerable awful side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a rise around the world in reported cases of domestic violence. Across the Oceania region there have been reports that violence against women and children has spiked, from Australia and New Zealand to Fiji and Samoa. While governments have a long list of competing interests they will have to prioritize due to the pandemic, it is of critical importance that domestic violence is not ignored. It is an issue of basic human security, with immeasurable negative consequences.

It has long been acknowledged that women are most likely to be victims of violence from within their own home, either by a partner or another family member. It is also incredibly difficult to measure the true scale of violence against women, as most incidences of both domestic violence and sexual assault remain unreported either due to a fear of repercussions or a distrust of justice systems.

Yet even with just the reported cases of violence against women the statistics are brutal. The Australian governments Institute of Health and Welfare states that in Australia one woman is killed every nine days by a partner, and that one in six women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former cohabiting partner. Globally the rate of violence rises to 35 percent of women, according to the United Nations.

Reasonable people read these statistics and nod along, recognizing their blunt reality, but it is important to take a step back and ask ourselves a fundamental question: If relationships and families are meant to be bonds of mutual love and care, then how does this violence exist within them?

The fact of violence is so normalized that I dont think we quite comprehend just how extraordinary it actually is that the core purpose of a relationship has been inverted in an astonishing number of cases. It is not something we should be comfortable with.

Part of this normalization stems from our societal approach to this issue. In early April, the Australian government announced that it was providing an additional $20.8 million to the states and territories to immediately reinforce frontline services that seek to assist victims of domestic violence. This was a welcome acknowledgment that the pandemic is creating an increase in instances of domestic violence, yet it remains a reactive measure: The provision of services after the fact.

At the core of this kind of response is a collective, whole of society, expectation that men will continue to commit violence against women, and the best we can do is to try to clean up afterward. We remain at a complete loss about how to reform masculinity away from this instinctive use of violence as an instrument of human interaction. Yet if we continue to expect this kind of behavior from men we will maintain its insidious and destructive presence in our societies. Social values that tolerate these abuses and justice systems that downplay them perpetuate the violence.

There are obviously limited actions that governments can take toward getting in front of this issue, but it remains a matter that they should take incredibly seriously. If providing basic human security is the primary function of states, then millions of female citizens are currently existing in insecure conditions, demonstrating a failure of the states duty. These millions of individual cases of insecurity also have the ability to compound into wider security dilemmas, as is the case with the related issue of cross-border human trafficking. In this way, states should consider the continued prevalence of domestic violence as an internal security threat.

The financial burden that countries carry from these abuses should also be a considerable concern for governments. It is estimated that domestic violence costs Australia $14 billion a year, alongside the far greater costs in the destruction of peoples lives. In regards to the new environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic it should also be acknowledged that many women may now have their personal financial resources diminished, affecting their ability to leave abusive relationships. Governments can provide resources to assist these women as Canberra did in early April but often the realities of peoples lives make accessing such resources difficult.

It is important that we recognize that the current insecurities created by the COVID-19 pandemic are not just related to personal health and finances. For many women, their personal safety has also been negatively affected. Women already live with violence either directly or the threat of it as an everyday facet of their existence; it should be unacceptable that this current global crisis has accentuated that reality.

If COVID-19 is prompting us to question our assumptions about how states should be organized, then the increase in domestic violence due to the virus should also prompt us to question persistent harmful norms of human behavior. Collectively, we need to question whether we will continue to accept violence against women as an issue that we can only respond to after the fact, or whether we have the will to wholeheartedly reject such violence, and seek to find ways to evolve masculinity away from these destructive traits.

If you are in need of help in Australia a list of resources is available here; resources for those in New Zealand are available here.

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Responding to the Spike in Domestic Violence Across Oceania - The Diplomat