Tag Archives: environment

Human Behavior

VCs Share Thoughts, Advice On State Of The Market During COVID Restrictions – Crunchbase News

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended life as we know it, and the world of venture capital and startups is in the process of trying to figure out its new normal.

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Between how sudden everything changed and the uncertainty of when it will all end, there have been a lot of questions about whats going on in the market, best practices for companies and if deals are still happening.

I chatted with a few VCs to learn more about the state of the market and what theyre advising their portfolio companiesespecially the more mature oneswhat they predict will happen in the near future, and what theyre seeing and hearing about how deals are being made.

Companies looking to go public will just have to wait it out. The effects of COVID-19 on the IPO market is already showingthere were just two IPOs in the past two weeks, both pharmaceutical companies (Keros Therapeutics and Zentalis Pharmaceuticals).

Malcolm Thorne, a partner at 4490 Ventures, said he expects the IPO market to slow down, and if a company wants to go public, its going to be very difficult.

I think if its an IPO, I think people need to be patient, Thorne said I think there are still going to be strategic transactions that make sense during these times. The challenge is that valuations drop during these times.

So, that doesnt mean all exit opportunities are at a standstill. There are still other exits that make sense in certain markets and certain applications, Thorne said.

I do think that everything is sort of being exposed in this COVID crisis, Thorne said.Because of this consumer behavior shift thats been exposed, I think a lot of firms are going to (make a strategic bet). They dont want to be left behind in these markets, not having a strategy, not having a solution.

While the prospect of an IPO in the near future may not be likely, Andy Lerner of IA Capital agrees with Thorne, saying mergers and acquisitions are expected to continue.

I think theres money for exits, currently, its not as robust as it was a month or two ago. Especially financial sponsors, [private equity] firms will continue to be buying companies in this environment, Lerner said. I wouldnt rule out exits in particular. In some ways exit might be an option for a company that doesnt want to raise new capital at a lower valuation.

Lerner said he thinks private equity buyers will be more nimble than corporate buyers, and there will continue to be activity on the M&A side, but not the IPO side.

The shift in human behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (think an increase in use of telehealth services, distance learning and video communication), will translate into more M&A activity for companies in those sectors, Thorne said.

I think were going to see increased adoption of many of the things were utilizing in this crisis and I think thats going to lead to increased M&A, he said.

The general consensus for companies of all stages looking for new funding was to turn to existing investors rather than seeking out new ones. The people who know you and are (literally) more invested in you will be more likely to help you out.

For late-stage companies, the good news of the situation is that theres a huge amount of capital allocated to the asset class, Next Coast Ventures co-founder Mike Smerklo said. But the bad news is that its hard to make assessments of the future of a company, which makes coming up with a valuation much tougher.

The good news is theres a lot of dry powder, the bad news is its hard to determine valuation, he said.

Its a sellers market, not a buyers market right now, so for companies who need capital, they cant be picky about where it comes from.

If youre in a situation where youre going to run out of capital, take what you can get and live to see another day, Smerklo said, adding that if a company can wait, it should.

One of the biggest questions up in the air is if there will be a funding slowdown because of the lack of in-person interaction during the pandemic. Investing in a company usually requires meeting in-person and getting to know the company and the people behind it.

I think people will continue working on investments theyve engaged with prior to the ciris, but its just outside of peoples comfort zone to make an investment on a company they have not met in person, Lerner said, noting that the possible exception to this would be for companies in the telehealth, insurance tech and fintech spaces.

Investors are moving forward on deals they already had in the pipeline and done site visits for, met the team and done due diligence, he said, though there are adjustments being made on pricing and valuations.

Lerner expects that over the next couple of months new deals will slow down. But, theres a chance that if the pandemic continues for several months, people will start making deals over Zoom.

Smerklo said he expects a funding slowdown in the second and third quarter, but that specific areas (like video communications) will be robust.

I think in the short term, [the slowdown] will be pronounced but I think as the year progresses Im optimistic, I think activity will pick back up, he said.

Theres two ends of the spectrum, with some VC firms actively looking for new opportunities and others heavily focused on helping their portfolio companies navigate the COVID-19 situation, according to Thorne.

We are continuing to meet with people, obviously we dont know when this ends, Thorne said. Ultimately we hope we meet with these people face-to-face but were not stopping taking new meetings just because it has to be done remotely at this point.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias

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VCs Share Thoughts, Advice On State Of The Market During COVID Restrictions - Crunchbase News

Cell Biology

Bruker : partners with ANPC to support major new frontline response to combat the COVID-19 threat – Marketscreener.com

04/11/2020 | 07:43am EDT

Bruker partners with ANPC to support major new frontline response to combat the COVID-19 threat

Bruker is proud to partner with Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC) at Murdoch University to support the work of their researchers into the COVID-19 pandemic threat.

The ANPC team, led by world-renowned phenomics pioneer and academician Professor Jeremy Nicholson, and working with the South Metropolitan Health Service COVID-19 Response Team and the broader Western Australian (WA) healthcare community, has launched a major research and diagnostics project to better understand and predict variation in COVID-19 severity and determine the complex genetic, environmental and lifestyle interactions that influence its pathogenicity in individuals. Later they will engage with clinical trials of novel antiviral agents and when available vaccines in order to predict responder/non-responder outcomes.

Accelerating time to diagnosis

The goal is to deliver diagnostic and prognostic solutions in an accelerated time-frame. Most importantly, the risk of severity of infected patients needs to be assessed rapidly to help guide and optimize the clinical patient pathway. Researchers at the ANPC will use a range of state-of-the-art Avance IVDr nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and timsTOF Pro Impact II and Solarix MR mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation from Bruker, as well as data modeling approaches, to perform broad and deep metabolic analysis of the molecular, physical and biochemical characteristics of blood plasma and urine samples to create informative translational models. These models will predict variation in the severity of the disease and help understand differential responses to therapeutic interventions.

Professor Nicholson said: 'At the ANPC, we are dedicating 100% of our resources to the COVID-19 fight for at least a year. This is the greatest emergent healthcare challenge on the planet and there is no better equipped metabolic lab in Australia, or possibly anywhere in the world, to undertake this type of investigative work in an excellent clinical and hospital framework.

'Linked to our genomics team, led by Professor Simon Mallal and Associate Professor Mark Watson, we're setting out to identify specific biomarkers of the disease to figure out who has it, how we can detect it and stratify patients by severity risk, and assess the real time patient responses to treatments.':

Scientific partnership to drive clinical research

Frank H. Laukien, Ph.D, President and CEO of Bruker Corporation, commented: 'We are strongly committed to supporting Professor Nicholson and his team scientifically and technically. The comprehensive COVID-19 clinical research plan at Murdoch University into metabolic biomarker patterns of diseases, prognosis, and treatment response is exceptional.

'In particular, I hope that the team can find evidence-based clinical protocols very soon to reduce mortality in 'phase 2' of COVID-19 with its life-threatening lower respiratory tract infections. Medical science needs to determine urgently whether broad spectrum antibiotics and/or immunosuppressants improve survival statistics in 'phase 2', when viral pneumonia, potential bacterial pneumonia or ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), as well as lung inflammation due to our own immune systems' cytokine storms, appear to create a very dangerous set of co-morbidities.'

Unique bio sample collection capability

The project will see the ANPC working hand-in-hand with Professor Merrilee Needham of Murdoch University and Notre Dame University, and Professor Toby Richards of the University of Western Australia, who are bringing together the top doctors and researchers from WA through the Western Australian Health Translation Network (WAHTN) led by Professor Gary Geelhood for the COVID-19 Response Team.

It is anticipated that all new COVID-19 patients will be consented for testing on admission and later for clinical trials, with the ANPC running the samples from those trials and tests, including longitudinal urine and plasma metabolic monitoring.

Commenting on the unique position of the WA-based research team, Professor Richards said: 'We are in the second wave and have the opportunity to be prepared for COVID-19. We have built a unique platform in WA to collect patient data and bio samples to enable a thorough understanding of the disease and response to treatment.'

Mitigating current and future threats

Understanding the pathways to infection and the biological consequences will enable the development of effective treatments and vaccines to mitigate the current threat to thousands of people across the world. This pioneering work will also prepare us for the threat of viral pandemics in the future.

About the Australian National Phenome Centre

The Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC), led by Murdoch University, will transform how long and how well people live, not just in Australia, but around the world. The work of the ANPC supports almost every area of bioscience. It reaches across traditional research silos and fosters a new, more collaborative approach to science. Long-term, the ANPC hopes to build 'global atlases' of human disease, providing insights into future health risks which everyone on the planet can benefit from. The only facility of its kind in the southern hemisphere, the ANPC brings together all five Western Australian universities and leading health and medical research institutes. It is linked to the International Phenome Centre Network and also has wide applications in agriculture and environmental science. The ANPC positions Perth and WA as a global leader in precision medicine, and enables quantum leaps in predicting, diagnosing and treating disease. It is part of the Health Futures Institute at Murdoch University.

Technology and partners

The ANPC is equipped with multiple state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) instruments from ANPC strategic alliance partners Bruker BioSpin and Bruker Daltonics. Bruker is a manufacturer of scientific instruments for molecular and materials research, as well as for industrial and applied analysis.

Phenomes

A person's phenome is a dynamic fingerprint of their unique biology resulting from the complex interactions between environmental and genetic factors. Phenomics is the study of how the environment and a person's lifestyle interacts with their genes to influence their health and risk of disease. Metabolic phenotyping is the analysis of biological tissue and fluid to uncover the specific interactions of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors at a molecular level.

The team

Professor Jeremy Nicholson

An internationally renowned pioneer in metabolic phenotyping and systems medicine, Professor Nicholson leads the ANPC. He currently holds the appointment of Pro Vice Chancellor for the Health Futures Institute at Murdoch University. Professor Nicholson is a Highly Cited Scholar who has published more than 800 peer-reviewed papers on molecular aspects of body systems medicine. A Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Nicholson comes to WA from Imperial College London where he was the founding director of the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre and previously Head of Surgery and Cancer. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London.

Professor Elaine Holmes

Another systems medicine pioneer, Professor Holmes is a Highly Cited Scholar and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. Professor Holmes also comes to WA from Imperial College London where she was previously Head of the Division of Computational and Systems. She is Professor of Computational Medicine and a Premiers' Fellow, Australian National Phenome Centre, Murdoch University She also holds a current appointment at Imperial College London as Professor of Chemical Biology.

Dr Ruey-Leng Loo

Premier's Intermediate Fellow, Senior Lecturer, ANPC, Murdoch University.

Professor Toby Richards

Michael Lawrence Brown Chair of Surgery UWA, Honorary Professor Institute of Clinical Trial Methodology University College London, Director COVID Research Response.

Professor Merrilee Needham

Senior Consultant, Director of Research, Fiona Stanley Hospital, Murdoch University & University of Notre Dame Australia.

About Bruker Corporation

Bruker is enabling scientists to make breakthrough discoveries and develop new applications that improve the quality of human life. Bruker's high-performance scientific instruments and high-value analytical and diagnostic solutions enable scientists to explore life and materials at molecular, cellular and microscopic levels. In close cooperation with our customers, Bruker is enabling innovation, improved productivity and customer success in life science molecular research, in applied and pharma applications, in microscopy and nanoanalysis, and in industrial applications, as well as in cell biology, preclinical imaging, clinical phenomics and proteomics research and clinical microbiology.

Disclaimer

Bruker Corporation published this content on 11 April 2020 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 11 April 2020 11:42:05 UTC

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Neuroscience

How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing The Brain Power Of Narrative – OPB News

When you listen to a story, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller. And reading a narrative activates brain regions involved in deciphering or imagining a person's motives and perspective, research has found.

aywan88, Getty Images

When you listen to a story, whatever your age, youre transported mentally to another time and place and who couldnt use that rightnow?

We all know this delicious feeling of being swept into a story world, says Liz Neeley, who directs The Story Collider, a nonprofit production company that, in nonpandemic times, stages live events filled with personal stories about science. You forget about your surroundings, she says, and youre entirelyimmersed.

Depending on the story youre reading, watching or listening to, your palms may start to sweat, scientists find. Youll blink faster, and your heart might flutter or skip. Your facial expressions shift, and the muscles above your eyebrows will react to the words another sign that youreengaged.

A growing body of brain science offers even more insight into whats behind theseexperiences.

On functional MRI scans, many different areas of the brain light up when someone is listening to a narrative, Neeley says not only the networks involved in language processing, but other neural circuits, too. One study of listeners found that the brain networks that process emotions arising from sounds along with areas involved in movement were activated, especially during the emotional parts of thestory.

As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller, says Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. When he and his research team recorded the brain activity in two people as one person told a story and the other listened, they found that the greater the listeners comprehension, the more closely the brain wave patterns mirrored those of thestoryteller.

Brain regions that do complex information processing seem to be engaged, Hasson explains: Its as though, Im trying to make your brain similar to mine in areas that really capture the meaning, the situation, the schema the context of theworld.

Other scientists turned up interesting activity in the parts of the brain engaged in making predictions. When we read, brain networks involved in deciphering or imagining another persons motives, and the areas involved in guessing what will happen next are activated, Neeley says. Imagining what drives other people which feeds into our predictions helps us see a situation from different perspectives. It can even shift our core beliefs, Neeley says, when we come back out of the story world into regularlife.

Listeners, in turn, may keep thinking about the story and talk to others about it, she says, which reinforces the memory and, over time, can drive a broader change inattitudes.

Different formats of information lists of facts, say, or charts may be better suited to different situations, researchers say, but stories wield a particularly strong influence over our attitudes andbehavior.

In health care contexts, for example, people are more likely to change their lifestyles when they see a character they identify with making the same change, notes Melanie Green, a communication professor at the University at Buffalo who studies the power of narrative, including in doctor-patient communication. Anecdotes can make health advice personally important to a patient, she finds. When you hear or read about someone you identify with who has taken up meditation, for example, you might be more likely to stick with ityourself.

Stories can alter broader attitudes as well, Green says like our views on relationships, politics or the environment. Messages that feel like commands even good advice coming from a friend arent always received well. If you feel like youre being pushed into a corner, youre more likely to push back. But if someone tells you a story about the time they, too, had to end a painful relationship, for example, the information will likely come across less like a lecture and more like a personaltruth.

Neeley has been taking advantage of these effects to shift perceptions about science and scientists in her work with Story Collider. We try and take everybody all different people and perspectives put them onstage, and hear what a life in science is really like, shesays.

Solid information in any form is good, Green says. But thats not necessarily enough. A vivid, emotional story can give that extra push to make it feel more real or more important. If you look at the times somebodys beliefs have been changed, she says, its often because of a story that hits them in the heart.

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Physiology

Rutgers Researcher Partners with NYU in Creating Sleep Apnea Machine Alternative to Ventilators and a Virus-Trapping Hood – Newswise

Newswise A Rutgers researcher is testing modified sleep apnea machines intended to help relieve the shortage of mechanical ventilators for COVID-19 patients.

After testing for safety and efficacy, the design will be available free to medical professionals and can be created quickly using readily available components. It was created by a team led by Vikram Kapila, a professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.

Patients using the modified breathing supports called the NYU Tandon AirMOD wear a non-vented mask with filters that trap the virus when they exhale and keep it from entering the environment. The machines also can be used as breathing support for critical care patients being eased off ventilators, thereby freeing those ventilators for other patients. Unlike other methods being used to convert these CPAP and BiPAP sleep apnea machines for COVID-19 use, these design modifications assemble in minutes and use FDA-approved off-the-shelf components in stock at most hospitals.

Rutgers is also testing a prototype for a second system called the NYU Tandon AirVENT. It is a portable, personal, negative pressure hood that sucks virus particles exhaled by the wearer into a filter and traps them. The hood was designed to allow health care workers easy access to the patient. It can be placed over possible COVID-19 patients in waiting rooms and be used in ICUs, while physicians intubate patients or during patient transfers.

Jorge Serrador, associate professor of pharmacology, physiology and neuroscience at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, is testing both systems for safety and efficacy. A normal CPAP or BiPAP machine would spread the virus widely because not only is the mask vented, but pressurized air from the system would amplify the dispersion of the virus. The AirMOD design cuts off that avenue of exhaust and uses a system that filters out the virus before it enters the environment, he said.

To test the designs, Serrador measured how much carbon dioxide, which is expelled through breathing, is present outside the devices while they are being used. When we turn on the fan inside the hood, we see the level of carbon dioxide outside the hood decrease to the level seen in normal room air, which indicates that expired air and thus the virus is not escaping, he said. Negative pressure rooms are already used safely for infectious disease patients. We have just created a personal negative pressure area around the patients head. (See test results here.)

The AirMOD design is less expensive than ventilators and has other benefits to health care workers, such as being portable and requiring minimal set-up. There are also benefits to patients, Serrador said. It gives people the assistance they need in their natural breathing to maintain their oxygen levels while allowing their bodies to deal with the virus. Since they are not intubated, they do not need to be sedated and can talk, clear their throats and cough, which helps prevent pneumonia.

The AirMOD modifications were also reviewed by pulmonologists and physicians at NYU Langone and other centers. The designs can be downloaded here.

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Rutgers Researcher Partners with NYU in Creating Sleep Apnea Machine Alternative to Ventilators and a Virus-Trapping Hood - Newswise

Anatomy

The Anatomy Of A Corporate Event That Won’t Bore Delegates To Tears – BBN Times

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As a business owner in charge of a team, you can feel an element of responsibility to ensure that the working environment is a positive place to be.

Not only for yourself, but also for the productivity levels of your workforce. However, there are certain aspects of the working environment that can be forgotten. Whether you have a small or large business indoor or outdoor, here are some of the biggest improvements that you can make to your working environment in order to improve the mindset of your employees and increase productivity.

Image source - pixabay - CC0 License

Many businesses work from an office environment, which often means that you will have staff working at various different levels under one roof. As a manager of the operation, or the business owner, you have a duty of care to ensure that you make the right improvements to ensure that staff can do their job, while maintaining a positive environment. Here are some of the things to think about.

One of the first things to think about would be to ensure that the office has the right technology for you to do the job. It can often be the small things such as a working computer, decent internet connection, which are all functional things for your business. You might want to think about having the right sort of systems in place to ensure that your staff and employees can perform their job roles effectively.

A small change that you could make to your business and working environment when you work indoors is to create a quiet room or a breakout area that staff and employees, including yourself, can go to relax and gather your thoughts. This is going to be free from the distractions of work and even their personal lives. Helping them to improve their mindset and have a positive attitude for their work and job role.

You might also want to implement things such as flexible working options for your staff members. That might be working from home or condensing their hours into longer days. An improved working life can help your employees work life to thrive because of a simple change that you made.

Image source - Pixabay - CC0 License

There are some businesses out there that only require you to stay at your desk, on your phone or attached to your laptop. Working away through the digital spectrum or speaking to customers, to then sell a product and service and have it shipped out. Job done. But some businesses are a little more physical than that. They require building work or manufacturing. Here are some of the things to think about.

One of the first things that you need to consider as a manager is to make sure that you take into account health and safety. Not just for you, but for anyone working with you on site. The working environment may be a bustling yard. Perhaps the business you are in is one of selling houses, for example, or buildings in city centres. Health and safety is going to be of the utmost importance, as not only do you have less control of the surroundings, but you also need to make sure that people are safe. This is because the environment outside of the office might be more dangerous. Such as using different equipment or machinery, for example. Having a decent policy in place can help you ensure that this is covered.

Of course, whether your project is a big one, or something on a smaller scale, you will need to ensure that you have the right level of equipment there ready and waiting. So you need to ensure that you have the right equipment for the job. Whether that is the right sort of crane, fork lift trucks or excavators, ensure that the people you have employed to do a job can do it to the best of their ability because you have supplied the right level of equipment for the job.

As a manager, you need to ensure that there is some form of plan in place to follow. This could be building plans, blueprints that are seen as guides, or even things like meetings so that people know what is expected of them. As a manager, you need to be able to lead. So you may want to ensure that your leadership skills are on point. It could be that you need to be more assertive with things, or ensure that your presence on site is seen and adhered to. Small changes could make a big difference.

It is so important to be prepared for every eventuality when off site and not in the office surroundings. You have less control over outside factors such as the weather. So things like the right level of footwear and clothing should be worn, to ensure safety. It could be things such as foreseeable problems, being discussed and then actions and plans put in place to help overcome them. Be prepared for every eventuality, so that you are never second guessing your next move.

Image source - Pixabay - CC0 License

No matter what your business is, be it outside, in an office, out on the road, specialist or working from home, the workwear you have and the tools that you use are two vital elements to making improvements for staff and employees. Or even your own work ethic. Often the small focuses such as uniform, workwear requirements and having the right tools for the job can be the only elements that give a staff member, including yourself, the confidence to get the job done. Depending on the type of business you have, here are some of the improvements you can make in this area.

Working outside could appear to be the dream job during a heatwave in the Summer, but how about when its winter like now, and the temperatures are plummeting? Working outside often means that you dont get an escape from the elements, and so you need to be dressed appropriately to protect your body and also keep warm. If you can, you may also want to think about a wooly hat and a scarf and glove set to keep your head, neck and hands warm. Your fingers can often feel the cold the most, and if you need to be hands on in your job, it could be a saving grace to have them covered.

Working outdoors can often mean that workers will be using specific tools to take on jobs and tasks. So ensuring that a health and safety check takes place and you supply what that person needs to complete the job is important. You also need to think of the general well being on the staff members that are working. So small things such as an onsite toilet could help to create a decent working environment outside. Thankfully, you can find construction site toilet hire online and you may also want to consider hiring wellness areas and breakout rooms where workers can enjoy a warm drink and rest out of the elements of the weather. This could be especially helpful in winter.

An office environment can often mean that your appearance needs to be smart and presentable. Whether you are customer facing or not, many employers prefer to have this sort of dress code as they feel it better aids productivity. There is some truth to that as mentally you feel dressed for the occasion of work, instead of in some clothes that are comfortable and relaxing to you. Most commonly people who work in an office or customer facing environment would wear a suit and smart attire.

Finally, working from home means you get to decide the dress code. You could work in your pyjamas and nobody would be aware of it. But you have to think about your productivity levels and your mindset when working from home. So it is a good idea to treat the day as if you were heading out to work, that means dressing appropriately. Of course, you dont need to be wearing a shirt and tie, but dressing smarter could help your work rate increase.

You might also want to think about joining up with applications like Skype and Zoom so that video conferencing and communication can be made easier for anyone that is working from home, including yourself. Email access, text messaging services and even taking advantage of cloud based software systems can help people who work from home to be fully able to complete tasks and perform their jobs.

We hope these tips will help you when it comes to making improvements in your working environment.

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The Anatomy Of A Corporate Event That Won't Bore Delegates To Tears - BBN Times

Human Behavior

Psychology: An introduction to the science of human behavior

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: January 13, 2020.

Why do we do the things we do? Why do some people like hot chocolate while others prefer coffee? Why do some live to surf while others would rather stay home and read a book? How can some of us puta name to every single person we've ever met while others struggleeven to remember our own telephone number? Why do some peoplealways seem happy and successful while others see no choice but toend their painful lives in suicide? These are the sorts of questionswe can try to answer through psychology: the science of humanbehavior. In this short article, we'll briefly explore the differentbranches of psychology and get a quick overview of the kinds ofthings psychologists do.

Photo: Everything you do, think, and feel involves your brain, shownhere as a 3D-printed model. Understanding how the brain works, how it gives rise to the mind, and why it makes us do the things we do is the prime goal of psychology. Photo courtesy of Nevit Dilmen, NIH 3D Print Exchange, National Institutes of Health, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

We can divide psychology into two big areas called experimental psychology and social psychology.

Of course, we can study social psychology in a lab using rigorousexperiments, just as we can carry out meticulous experiments in the real world; the division I've drawn between experimental and socialpsychology is arbitrary and artificial, but it reflects the waypsychology is often taught in schools and colleges, and how it'swritten up in textbooks and scientific papers. The reason for that islargely historical: in the late 19th-century, when psychology wasstill a very new field, psychologists were keen to be taken seriouslyas scientists, so they tried to adopt scientific methods to cloak thethings they studied in respectability. To this day, there's a certainstigma attached to social psychology and sociology (the study of howindividuals and groups behave in society); whether fairly or not,some people see them as soft sciences lacking academic rigor. AtCambridge University in England, for example, the psychologydepartment still calls itself the "Department of ExperimentalPsychology" and its curriculum includes relatively little socialpsychology.

Humans are the most complex of all the animals, which explains whypsychology is such a vast subject. Within the psychology departmentof a typical university, you'll find people working in a huge rangeof different areas. There are people who study perception (such ashow our eyes and ears work), learning (how we develop as children andhow we make sense of the world as adults), memory (why we rememberand how we forget), language, thinking, and reasoning. While somepsychologists study "normal" human behavior, others specialize in"abnormal" psychology, which includes how people behave whentheir brains are damaged or degenerate over time and what causespsychiatric disorders. Social psychologists study everything from thebest way to design a computer mouse to whether we can really trustthe evidence we get from people who witness crimes. Let's look at thevarious branches of psychology in turn, in a bit more detail.

You can think of people as living machines who receive information fromthe world, process it in various ways, and then act on it. In themid-20 century, it was fashionable to talk about animals (includingpeople) receiving a stimulus through their senses (maybe seeing achocolate-chip cookie appearing in front of you), which then led tosome kind of response (salivating and reaching out); according to aschool of thought known as behaviorism, human behavior was allabout the way a certain stimulus produced an appropriate response(and exactly what went on inside the brain to make the connectionwasn't thought to be especially important: behaviorism was literally"mindless"). Since the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists have tendedto view the human brain as a kind of computer, taking in informationas "input," processing and storing it in various ways, and thenproducing "output" (some kind of visible behavior); this approachis known as cognitive psychology and we'll consider it again alittle later. However you react to the world, your behavior usuallystarts with sensory perception: the way your five main senses(vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste), plus other, lesser-knownsensory abilities such as proprioception (your sense of where yourlimbs are and how your body is moving), feed information into yourbrain.

Photo: A huge part of your brain is devoted to processing information gathered by your eyes.

For most people, vision is easily the most important sense, closelyfollowed by hearing; that also explains why perceptual psychologistshave traditionally devoted most effort to studying vision, closelyfollowed by hearing (comparatively speaking, the other senses havebarely been explored at all). Most of us assume that we see with oureyes, but it's far more accurate to say that we see with our eyes andour brains. While we can't see without our eyes, it's also true thatour brains carry out a huge amount of processing on the sensoryimpressions they receiveand in all kinds of interesting ways. Onevery obvious example is that we see things in three dimensions usingseparate, two-dimensional images that our brain fuses together fromour two eyes. But we also see things based on what we expect to see,which is what causes most of the things we call optical illusions;for example, we see faces in clouds because our brains try to makesense of the world very quickly based on the things we've seen in thepast (an awful lot of faces), the things we expect to see in thefuture (an awful lot more faces), and the things that matter most tous (the faces of people we love, work with, and have to interactwith). We can get some idea of just how complex the human visualsystem is by considering how little progress computer scientists androbot engineers have made designing machines that can "see" inanything like the same way. Why are our own brains so good at seeing?It's estimated that something like 30 percent of the cortex (the outer and,in evolutionary terms, "newest" part of the human brain) is devoted to vision. That's a veryimpressive illustration of the sheer complexity of making sense ofthe world entirely by studying light rays that enter two big holes inyour head.

One of the things that marks out humans from "lesser" creatures is ourability to make sense of our environment and learn from it. It'sobviously untrue to suggest that humans are the only creatures thatlearn things: you can teach a chimpanzee to use a symbolic language,you can train a dog not to defecate on your carpet, a rat willquickly learn to run through a maze to reach a food reward, and evena simple sea-slug can learna couple of basic tricks.

Learning goes hand-in-hand with survival, but it's a surprisingly large andcomplex subject. At one end of the spectrum, psychologists study theprocess of conditioning, which is how animals come toassociate a particular stimulus with a certain response. One ofthe first people to look into this was Russian scientistIvan Pavlov(18491936), who famously rang a bell when he delivered food to his dogs; eventually,he found the dogs would salivate simply when he rang the bell, evenwhen there was no food around, because they'd been conditionedto associate salivating with the sound of the bell. When behaviorismwas fashionable, some psychologists thought all kinds of complexhuman behavior might be broken down into patterns of stimulusand response. That's why, for example, you often see attempts toblame violence on TV and in the movies for wider violence in society.Now we know complex human behavior is much more than a simpleknee-jerk reflex from stimulus to response.

One of the great things about psychology, which differentiates it from oldersciences such as physics and chemistry, is that its relevance toeveryday life is often more immediate and apparent. One branch of thepsychology of learning is called developmental psychology andit concerns how babies develop into children and adults: for example,how they learn language, how they turn specific, concrete examples ofthings they see around them into much more general, abstractprinciples (the rules by which we have to live to survive), and therelative importance of "nature" (genetic factorsthings we'reborn with) and "nurture" (environmental factorsthings we'retaught and learn). Developmental psychology has played a huge role inpedagogy and the scientific, theoretical approach to education; it's also afascinating subject to study if you're a parent.

Photo: Mirror neurons? Sometimes we mimic one another's behavioral unconsciously, such as when two friends stand next to one another and, quite unawares, adopt exactly the same posture. Psychologists think our brains contain "mirror neurons," which are activated both when we do things and when we see other people doing those things. That encourages us to copy other people's behavior, and possibly explains how we feel empathy with others. Photo by Kasey Close courtesy of US Navy.

Thousands of years ago, before humans started to create fixed settlements anddeveloped agriculture, we lived much like other animals andday-to-day survival was our only preoccupation. How different thingsare now. Although the world's poorest people still experience life asa horrible daily battle to survive, most of us, thankfully, get tolead lives that alternate between (reasonably tolerable) work and(extremely tolerable) pleasure. Both of these things involve usingour brains as much as or more than our bodies; both see us functioningas living computers"human information processors"that take ininformation, process or store it in our brains, and then outputresults. The way we process and store information is what cognitivepsychologists study. How do we understand a simple sentence whisperedinto our ears? How can we remember everything from how to ride abicycle to the names, in order, of all the American presidents? And isthere any fundamental difference between these two types of memory(knowing how to do something, which is called procedural memory, andknowing facts about the world, which is declarative memory)?

Where behaviorists liked to pretend that "internal mental processes"didn't matter, didn't exist, or probably both, cognitive psychologists spendtheir time teasing out the precise nature of those processes,typically coming up with flowchart models that break such things asmemory and language processing (a field of its known, often known aspsycholinguistics) into sequences of discrete components.Applying this to the study of memory, for example, has given usmodels of mind that suggest memory breaks into separate long-term andshort-term stores, with the short-term or "working" memory itselfdivided into distinct areas that process visual impressions, snippetsof spoken language, and so on.

Artwork: Ulric Neisser's famous caricature of cognitive psychology from his 1976 book Cognition andReality.

Cognitive psychology is not limited to how we process the structure ofinformation, but also what information means. The word cognition is asynonym for thinking and reasoning, two areas that cognitivepsychologists have also studied using computational models. How do wemake informed judgements about things, such as whether one car is abetter buy than another? Why do we live in absolute fear of thingslike terrorist attacks but happily cross roads, drive cars, ridebicycles, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes (all of which pose fargreater risk to our safety and health)? Why do we play lotteries whenthe chances of winning are so much less than the odds of being struckby lightning? These are the sorts of questions cognitivepsychologists consider under the broad umbrella of thinking and reasoning.

Photo: The psychology of typography: Thanks to things you've read and seen previously, you read words printed in different fonts (typefaces) with a slightly different meaning and emotion: elegant, relaxed, friendly, imperative, hostile, or whatever it might be. You can emphasize a message you want to get across by choosing the most appropriate font. That's one of the key principles of graphic designand it happens in your mind, not on the page.

Though related to cognition, intelligence, which we might define as ageneral ability to solve problems, is a separate area of study, andit's much less fashionable than it used to be several decades ago.There are several reasons for this. FromSir Cyril Burt (a prominentBritish psychologist who allegedly faked research data about hisstudies of intelligence) toWilliam Shockley (the co-inventor of thetransistor who, predictably, became embroiled in controversy when hedared to suggest that there was a link betweenrace and intelligencethat made white people intellectually superior to blacks), the studyof intelligence has often proved intensely controversial. Thecontroversies, though important, distract from a much more fundamentaldifficulty: how should we define intelligence and is it even a meaningfulconcept? Some cynics have defined intelligence as the mere ability topass intelligence tests, but although psychometric testing isas popular as ever in recruitment for jobs, intelligence tests arenot, and never have been, a predictor of people's ability to livehappy, worthwhile, successful lives.

When you study psychology, it's remarkably easy to forget that most of thecool and fascinating things you discover happen inside the brainanapparently unremarkable organ often compared to "two fistfuls ofporridge." Neuropsychology is all about figuring out how the brainis structured and how different parts of it have different functions.One extreme, early example of neuropsychology, known as phrenology,famously involved quack doctors claiming they could tell interestingthings about someone's personality by feeling their skull for bumps.Although the idea seems risible today, the central idea ofphrenologythat the brain is modular, with discrete regions havingspecialized functionsis now known to be essentially correct.However, it's an unhelpful oversimplification to suggest, forexample, that the right half of the brain is dreamily creative whilethe left half is clinically rational; for most of the things we do,many different parts of the brain are involved, either working inparallel or in complex serial circuits.

Photo: Brain scanners have revolutionized psychology. By showing up the activity inside ourbrains when we think certain thoughts or do certain things, they can help to reveal which areas of the brain do what. Photo by courtesy ofWarren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center (CC) and USNational Institutes of Health (NIH) Image Gallery.

If cognitive psychology can break things like memory or language intoseparate areas or processes, is it possible to locate parts of thebrain where those things happen? That's the basic thinking behind ahugely successful field called cognitive neuropsychology,which involves trying to map abstract processes and functionsdiscovered through cognitive psychology onto very concrete areas ofthe brain that neuropsychologists have discovered (and vice-versa).Some psychologistsmodern-day mentalMercatorsget carried away in a frenzy to map the brain,forgetting that the ultimate goal is not to draw a tourist's guide to the insideof your head but to produce a scientific explanation of the mind: who we are andwhy we do the things we do.

While neuropsychologists do study healthy, functioning brains, they alsodevote a lot of their time to researching people whose brains havebecome damaged through such things as head injuries, strokes, ordegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. We can discover much abouthow things like memory and language processing work by studying whatpeople can no longer do when specific areas of their brain aredamaged or destroyed. In the most spectacular cases, it's possible tofind people with very localized brain damage who can no longer dovery specific things (for example, recognizing faces or readingwords); we can infer from this that the damaged brain areas play akey role in whatever function has been lostand that helps us buildup a map of which parts of the brain do what.

People are hugely diverse and differentthat's one of the things that makeslife interesting. While it's difficult to define "normal"behavior, it's somewhat easier to point to examples of abnormalbehavior, which is harmful to people and those around them.Neuropsychological problems following brain injuries are one example,but behavior can also become abnormal for a wide variety of otherreasons, which we might broadly divide into behavioral, cognitive,and neurochemical/biological. Eating disorders such as anorexia andbulimia are believed to be largely behavioral and cognitive, forexample: you might develop an eating disorder if you convinceyourself you're fat, after becoming obsessed with skinny catwalkmodels. Illnesses such as Parkinson's disease are more to do withneurochemistry and biology: Parkinson's is believed to occur when nerve cells in the brainstop producing dopamine, an essential chemical neurotransmitter that sends messages around the brain.

Psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia are hugely complex andstill imperfectly understood. Depression can occur for many differentreasons, which might be behavioral (you feel nothing you do makes anydifference and become miserable through "learned helplessness"),cognitive (you analyze the world around you in a way thatpersistently makes you unhappy), neurochemical/biological (for onereason or another, the chemicals or the basic structure of your brainare geared to unhappiness), or some combination of these things. Thestudy of schizophrenia has a fascinating history, with attempts toexplain it shifting from anatomical/biological causes, through cognitive and behavioral ones, and back again. Originallydescribed as a kind of premature dementia ("dementia praecox"),by the 1960s it was being painted (by such figures as R.D.Laing) as akind of sane reaction to an insane world, and now it's much more likely tobe considered a consequence of a person's particular brain chemistry.

You'd think understanding the cause of a psychiatric problem would be thefirst step toward treating it but, remarkably, psychiatry has oftenworked in willful ignorance of what was happening in the mind, partlythrough the influence of behaviorism, partly through the challenge of anti-psychiatristswho refused to believe in what they called the"myth of mental illness," and also because the underlyingcauses of psychiatric problems were genuinely not known. Treatmentsfor psychiatric disorders were largely doled out on the basis of whatseemed to work and what didn't; if clinical trials found that drugscured more depressive patients than, say, group therapy (talkingabout your problems with other patients), drugs became the treatmentof choice. It didn't necessarily matter why they worked or how,providing the patients showed an improvement. That's how hugelycontroversial psychiatric treatments such aslobotomy (surgicalremoval or destruction of parts of the brain, also called leukotomy) andelectroconvulsive therapy(electrical shocks to the brain) became popular in the mid-20thcentury. Just as psychology tried to cloak itself in experimental andscientific rigor, so 20th-century psychiatry latched onto therespectability of medicine, often masking a substantial ignorance ofhow and why disorders actually occurred. Today, thanks to advances inneurology, neuropsychology, and neurobiology, we have a much clearerunderstanding of how the brain works and why it can malfunctionbutmany questions remain.

Photo: Psychologists are helping computer scientists to develop emotional robots like this one, pictured at Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England.

In the 150 years or so since psychology became a science, hugeamounts have been discovered about why people behave as they do andhow we can relate different aspects of human behavior to what goes oninside our heads. Even so, teasing out the many, remaining mysteriesof the brain remains one of the last great challenges of science.Apart from being hugely interesting in its own right, anotherimportant prospect is the discovery of effective treatments forterrible degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Afurther interesting direction is the development of artificialintelligence, including computers and robots that can "think" andact in more humanlike ways. Will probing the mysteries of the mindhelp us perfect electro-mechanical rivals who make us obsolete? Orwill the act of developing intelligent machines sharpen our sense ofwhat it means to be human, making us happier and more fulfilled?Psychologists, you can be sure, will find the answer!

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Psychology: An introduction to the science of human behavior

Human Behavior

The Pandemic Is Giving Animals a Temporary New World – Slate

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There are now so many lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and quarantines in effect around the world that half of global humanity is essentially indoors (minus walks). Its all very weird for us, but the natural world is entering uncharted territory too. No, swans havent returned to the canals of Venice (they were always there), and no, elephants arent taking advantage of temporary human absence to get drunk and pass out on vacated farmland. Those, among other online reports of chaos in the animal kingdom, have largely turned out to be fabricated or oversimplified. Still, a significant shift is about to take place. If we really do live in the Anthropocenean epoch of natural history defined by the effects of human beings on the planetthen a drastic curtailing of our activity (reduced air and car travel; our disappearance from streets, parks, and beaches; changes in hunting, fishing, and wildlife management practices) will have effects that are felt throughout nature. What are animals, and other wild things, going to get up to in our absence?

Its easy to imagine Jumanji-esque chaos ensuinga mass exodus of scavengers out of beaches, parks, and shadows and into city streets. Fire escapes overrun by bands of raccoons, rats pouring out of subway stations. Desperate gulls and pigeons circling the skies, trying to steal food from garbage trucks and grocery shoppers. Maybe even hawks dragging small dogs to tree limbs and consuming them, leash and all, as shocked parkgoers gaze up in horror. In mythology and literature, visions of social collapse, crisis, and apocalypse have always featured breakdowns in the natural order. Locust plagues, swarms of rats, and ominous bird signs regularly accompany narratives of human calamity. Its unlikely that all of these things will happen, but still, it seems safe to assume that well see animals behaving strangely in the coming weeks.

The first thing I started to think about is people who live adjacent to restaurants or above restaurants, where there are rats that have a daily habit of eating the trash thats putout. Matthew Combs

Its hard to predict what the effects are going to be, explained Kaitlyn Parkins, senior conservation biologist for New York City Audubon, because we dont know how long this will last. Parkins is in a unique position to imagine what the changes might actually look like; her work is heavily focused on the areas where people and animals exist in close proximity. Throughout the year, she facilitates wildlife surveys and other wildlife conservation and research projects around New York City.

Some days, Parkins works at the Javits Centers Green Roof, a 6.75-acre human-built habitat that rests above the convention hall that has recently filled up with men and women in uniform as the Army transforms it into a makeshift hospital. The Green Roof is the second-largest facility of its kind in the country. Thirty bird species and five bat species use it as habitat in some form or another. Herring gulls nest there in the summer, and the fledglings spend their first months flying to the river to eat everything from fish stunned by boat propellers to sandwich scraps left behind in Hudson River Park. A lot of the human-animal interaction in the city revolves around food, Parkins said.

The animals that are most likely to undergo rapid, dramatic shifts in behavior when human beings go inside are also some of the most visible. In New York City, squirrels, pigeons, rats, raccoons, and a few gull species will have to adapt right away. In places where bears and coyotes are more common, those populations will also have to quickly recalibrate. Any animal that depends on human scraps for a significant portion of its diet will have to either find alternative local food sources or fan out to new places. Its interesting, Parkins noted, because a lot of the wildlife that tends to thrive in cities are generalists. They take advantage of any resource they can get, and have a lot of behavioral plasticity. That sets them up to be able to adapt to short-term changes in the environment quickly and easily.

In New York, that could mean moving to new places. The mass closure of restaurants and dramatic declines in subway ridership could force rat populations that inhabit those places to fan out and look elsewhere for meals. If parks close or empty out significantly, raccoons and squirrels will no longer be able to depend on the steady supply of food offered by public garbage cans. If public beaches abbreviate their seasons, the herring gulls and laughing gulls that spend the warmer months chasing down potato chips and other food left unattended by beachgoers will have to seek out a new food supply.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

Its pretty clear where all those animals will need to go if they want to keep eating scraps. Although human garbage will disappear from some public spaces, people are still eating the same amount they were before. I thought about all of the cooking Id been doing recently, and the pictures of home-cooked meals that my friends and co-workers had been sending me. If theres an influx of trash in residential neighborhoods, Parkins said, thats a smorgasbord for rats.

Parkins fianc, Matthew Combs, is a research scientist at Columbia. He got his Ph.D. at Fordham University studying New York Citys rat population. The two of them had been discussing the possible outcomes for animals, particularly in urban areas. Rats have among the closest relationships with humans, Combs explained. The first thing I started to think about is people who live adjacent to restaurants or above restaurants, where there are rats that have a daily habit of eating the trash thats put out on the sidewalk every night. Rats like to stick to a routine, if its working outexploring involves risks. But if those food sources dry up, theyll likely start looking elsewhere. The properties that are adjacent will maybe experience rats coming to look for food.

The pandemics effect on the natural world could go further than rats coming out of the subways, though. Natural systems, when you look at them closely, are deeply interconnected. A year that produces a high yield of pine cones, for example, even in just a single area, can have ripples that lead to population spikes, changes in migration patterns, and habitat realignment for multiple species across vast areas for more than one season. We can make predictions based on what we know about wildlife, Parkins said, but the urban system is more complex than we realize. Animals have learned to adapt to and make use of human behavior in countless ways, from the birds that follow fishing boats out to sea, to the peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks that nest on bridges and skyscrapers, to the eels that writhe through our sewers.

One of the most significant human-made impositions on wildlife, our highways and streets that hum constantly with traffic, is about to empty out as travel declines dramatically. Roadways, cars, and traffic have the ability to contain wildlife in particular places, Parkins said. An animal might have to be really brave to cross to the next habitat. As those barriers come down, animals will suddenly find their movements less inhibited, as footage from Wales showing Kashmiri goats romping through the empty streets of a small town called Llandudno demonstrated. Ranges will expand, and some animals that were suffering from constricted habitat might find themselves in a more secure situation. It sounds delightful, but its a dramatic change that will come on quickly. Imagine all the animals in a zoo waking up one day to find that the walls and bars had disappeared overnight. Theres a kind of pastoral beauty to imagining herds of deer roaming freely across the highway system to graze in backyards and public parks, sure. Just remember that roaming deer mean coyotes and bears could also be less inhibited.

Indeed, every animal exists in the wider food web. In urban settings, rats, squirrels, and pigeons are prey for larger animals like feral cats and raptors, which might have to adjust their behavior as their food sources fan out. A change in behavior even in a single species could set off a chain reaction that affects animal behavior in countless unpredictable ways. There are a dizzying number of moving parts, all of them connected in a giant chain of causes and effects that are nearly impossible to predict. A large population of white-tailed deer, for example, can devastate a forests understory by grazing on low-lying plants and saplings. Even a modest population bump from a reduction in automobile collisions could set back woodlands for years to come.

It would be idiotic to indulge in the fantasy that human beings going inside for a few months will somehow allow the natural systems weve damaged over centuries toheal.

There are other species that might stand to benefit, at least in the short term. If public beaches dont fill up this summer, shorebirds that nest there will likely have a better breeding season than they would otherwise, with thousands of miles of new habitat suddenly available to them when they arrive. Birds and mammals that are highly sensitive to noises or susceptible to being killed by car traffic will probably fare slightly better too. There are hints that things are already starting to change. A credible-seeming news report from New Orleans described an emboldened rat population leaving the shadows to scavenge out on Bourbon Street. A video shot in Thailand showed dozens of monkeys in a near-empty tourist square brawling over a single container of yogurt. The oldest national park in AfricaVirunga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congoclosed its doors to tourists out of fear that the virus, like other similar viruses, could make a leap to the dwindling populations of great apes that survive there. Its hard not to feel like these are tremors of things to comea realignment in the way animals interact with the world that will match, in some ways, the extraordinary intensity and insanity of whats unfolding in the human world every day.

Still, it would be idiotic to indulge in the fantasy that human beings going inside for a few months will somehow allow the natural systems weve damaged over centuries to heal. The wear and tear of human behavior on wildlife has been long-term and extensive. Many of the ways humans affect wildlife are more permanent than us scaring them into staying put or accidentally feeding them with our trash. When I first met Parkins two years ago, she was leading a training for volunteers with Project Safe Flight, NYC Audubons initiative to research and document bird collisions with windows in the city. Birds, she explained at the time, perceive the world differently than human beings do. Reality comes at them all at once, a constantly moving set of spatial reference points. Building glass, which can confuse them by reflecting images of clear sky or nearby trees, kills somewhere between 90,000 and 230,000 birds in New York City each year. Theres no reason to suspect that those collisions will decline just because humans are inside. A day after we spoke, in fact, Parkins sent along a photo of a dead golden-crowned kinglet that shed watched collide with a window near Central Park.

A picture of a dead bird would have made me upset a month ago, but now a window strike seemed like a reassuring sign. All around the world, animals are still participating in their normal habits, which right now means migrating up toward breeding habitat. Seals that haul out in Staten Island and the Bronx in the winter are swimming north with dolphins, porpoises, and whales, as they do each year. Striped bass and Atlantic sturgeon are surging up the Hudson River to spawn. New York Citys terrestrial spaces are about to be inundated with what might be the most remarkable natural phenomenon in this part of the world: the rapid arrival and departure of millions of birds in a two-month period.

Our disappearance from the world is happening at a time of massive flux for creatures. This might have its own set of influences. Our abrupt retreat inside was preemptive, a reaction to information from scientists and journalists about an event we knew was coming. Animals dont have newspapers or epidemiologists to tell them how to prepare; theyre still just out there, migrating, hunting, trying to survive. Its one of the reasons their reactions are so difficult to anticipate. Just like us, wildlife is at the beginning of this crisisthey just dont know it yet. While we get guidance from political figures and doctors, animals will respond with reflex and instinct. And even as they adapt to us being gone, they cant realize that, eventually, well come back. Which means that despite modest benefits that might reach specific populations due to our absence, theres no reason to believe that the factors that initially put stress on those animals wont come roaring back whenever people head outside again.

My best guess is that there will be dramatic developments in the coming weeksreports of animals spreading out into new areas to explore habitat options or look for food. Some will become aggressive or behave in other strange ways. Human beings and bears will come into closer contact than either species is accustomed to. It might be a systemic unraveling, or a modest shift, or a series of isolated, temporary incidents. Combs and Parkins were cautious with their predictionscareful to mention that they can envision scenarios where little changes. I cant help but imagine the extremes: the Boschian nightmares where primates stop traffic to tip over trucks full of food and gulls invade homes and grocery stores, Hitchcock-style. Natural systems are incredibly intricate, and its almost impossible to predict exactly how theyll respond.

Recently, with all this in mind, I picked up my binoculars and went out for a long walk through Manhattan and along the Hudson River. House sparrows were beginning to form nests inside the metal fixtures that hold up traffic lights. I saw a red-throated loon bobbing in the wind shadow of a hulking dinner boat at Pier 60a locally rare bird that made me wonder if the reduction in boat traffic had already made Manhattans shoreline a more inviting place for solitary animals. None of this was scientific, of course. I was projecting the human crisis onto the natural details around me. Still, I couldnt help but feel that something was going onthat I was witnessing the early moments of what might turn out to be sea change. There was a cache of emptied acorn lids on the sidewalk, dug up and devoured, and I imagined the squirrels of Hudson River Park panicking at the sight of empty garbage cans and gnawing through their savings all at once. As I was getting ready to leave, a red-tailed hawk caught me off guard. It was staring from the top of a chain-link fence a few feet away, ignoring the rain the wind. It was well within the 6-foot bubble that Id been keeping between myself and other peoplecloser, in fact, than any hawk had ever let me get. We looked at each other for a long minute before a car horn from the Westside Highway scared it out over the river.

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The Pandemic Is Giving Animals a Temporary New World - Slate

Human Behavior

Renewable energy must be the future, if we are to have one – Los Angeles Times

The world still relies far too much on burning fossil fuels for energy, but an annual accounting of new energy sources carries some heartening news: Nearly 75% of new electricity generation capacity last year involved renewable energy an all-time record.

Yes, the world still relies too much on burning fossil fuel to create energy. But the 2019 annual report from the International Renewable Energy Agency shows that the world continues to move in the right direction, at least in some areas, as it has for the past decade.

Carbon Brief, a British-based nonprofit covering climate science, notes that too many countries are still building too many coal-fired power plants, particularly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Over the last 20 years, the world driven by China and India has doubled its coal-fired capacity to about 2,045 gigawatts, Carbon Brief reports, adding that another 200 gigawatts in coal-fired capacity are under construction, with 300 gigawatts more on planning boards. That growth contrasts with significant net reductions in coal-fired capacity through the retirement of plants in the U.S. and Europe, and a slowdown of new construction.

Notably, much of that coal power is being replaced by natural-gas-fueled plants, which produce far less greenhouse gas emissions than coal plants but nonetheless contribute to global warming.

So the faster the world can minimize reliance on burning fossil fuels, the better chance we have at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, the limit scientists (yes there are such people walking among us) say we need to observe if we are to avoid the worst effects of our profligate carbon emissions.

According to Carbon Brief, observing that 1.5-degree Celsius limit will require us to reduce global coal use by 80% this decade.

The current coronavirus pandemic has, at least temporarily, made a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. But that reflects a stalled economy rather than smart energy consumption choices. The pandemic is a naturally occurring threat to humans, as were SARS and MERS before it. Global warming, by contrast, is being driven by human behavior; it is a self-inflicted crisis.

We can best address the climate crisis by changing practices, by converting our global economy from fossil fuels to renewable sources, by using the force of our collective will to change our collective behavior and reduce the damage our actions inflict on the environment, which we rely on for our very survival.

The stats that show we are moving in the right direction, albeit it too slowly, are a positive sign during these trying days.

But they are also a further spur to action. We can see where decisions, policies and actions lead to positive effects, but also where continued self-destructive actions beginning with burning coal imperil us all.

And that threat lies far beyond the reach of a vaccine.

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Renewable energy must be the future, if we are to have one - Los Angeles Times

Human Behavior

We have no one to blame for the coronavirus but ourselves | TheHill – The Hill

Its inevitable that people are looking to assign blame for COVID-19.

Were living in a surreal time, experiencing personal and institutional disruptions that just one month ago would have seemed impossible and unimaginable.

Today, millions of people are isolated in their homes and practicing social distancing. The stock market has lost trillions, businesses are closing and basic life support systems are scrambling.

But rather than casting blame, we need to own it. This pandemic was born of destructive human behavior.

Our lives are deeply intertwined with other lives on Earth. We share biological material, including viruses, with other organisms. In fact, most of the cells in each of our bodies are not human, but made up of foreign DNA, including bacteria, viruses and fungi, which are concentrated in the microbiome of our digestive system.

Our health and wellbeing depends on mutually beneficial relationships with these microbes, as well as on mutually beneficial interactions with other animals and the earth. We suffer when these relationships are extractive and parasitic instead of symbiotic.

As tragic as this pandemic is, perhaps it will serve as a wake-up call.

Humans have exploited and obliterated natural ecosystems all over the world, replacing biodiversity and balance with extractive industries like factory farming and the live animal trade. Animals caught up in the destruction of these systems are forced from their natural habitats and with them comes the unleashing of viruses potentially deadly to humans.

By upsetting natures balance we are contributing to zoonotic spillover, which is the transmission of a pathogen from a vertebrate animal to a human (and a term that everyone should get familiar with, fast). This devastating transfer of viruses between species is the genesis of COVID-19. By some accounts there are tens of thousands of viruses that could potentially crossover, representing a global health threat that is poorly understood. These new unknown genetic strains are very difficult to combat and their impacts could be lethal. With the destruction of natural habitats for animal agriculture, these emerging pathogens that were once found deep in nature are more readily able to jump the species barrier between wild animals and humans.

A 2018 biomass survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that 96 percent of the mammals are either human or domesticated, while only 4 percent live in the wild.

Scientists say we are now living in the Anthropocene era, a geological epoch marked by human dominance that will be reflected in the fossil record by the prominence of plastic, as well as chicken bones the remains of tortured creatures who have been genetically engineered to grow twice as large in half the time and which are mass-produced in factory farm warehouses.

Diverse and interwoven habitats have been lost, cleared to graze and grow feed for farm animals, and this has caused native species to disappear. Huge swaths of rainforest have been burned, adding to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere, while also weakening our planets capacity for absorbing CO2. This exacerbates the climate crisis, which poses an existential threat. We are now witnessing more turbulent weather with fires and flooding around the world.

We are despoiling the earth and squandering precious natural resources, and industrial agriculture is largely to blame. Groundwater is being drained from aquifers, and iconic rivers, like the Colorado, no longer reach the coast. Tulare Lake in California, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes and the namesake of Americas top dairy producing county, is gone. Monocrop fields and petrochemical inputs have replaced sustainable farming and healthy soils. Biocides are killing insects and microorganisms and disrupting natural cycles, while cows, pigs, chickens and other animals who have been genetically engineered are crowded into factory farms. These confined animals are so sick and stressed that they are routinely fed antibiotics, which leads to the development of potentially fatal antibiotic resistant bacteria. At the same time, oceans are being overfished and filling up with garbage, such that scientists predict that they will contain more plastic than fish by 2050.

Our actions have consequences, and when we abuse the environment and other animals, we undermine our own wellbeing. We have acted recklessly and rationalized gross misconduct, despite warnings from experts concerned about planetary health. We need to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, and then make adjustments.

Right now, we need to focus on immediate threats from COVID-19. We must respond by following social distancing measures and washing hands, while also doing what we can to protect those most vulnerable, health care workers and others on the front lines.

Ultimately, however, personal and planetary health and resilience can be best served by learning to live more kindly. Three out of every four new infectious diseases that sicken people come from animals, and these commonly emerge when we abuse other animals. We need to reshape our relationships to be more respectful and empathetic.

Chinas ban on the countrys wet markets, including those in Wuhan thought to be the source of the current COVID-19 outbreak is a positive step, but it remains to be seen how stringently the ban will be enforced and whether or not it will be lifted once the virus is contained, as was the case after the SARS outbreak in 2003.

The wet markets of China arent the only breeding ground for disease, however. We also need to curtail factory farming, whose practice of cramming together tens of thousands of animals in unsanitary conditions is credited with causing the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009. It killed hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, including over ten thousand in the U.S.

Agriculture needs a major overhaul. We can feed more people with less land and fewer resources by replacing animal farming with a plant-based food system. This would allow millions of acres to rest and recover, since animal production currently occupies ten times more land than plant-based agriculture in the U.S.

Shifting to plant based agriculture would significantly lighten our ecological footprint and allow diverse natural habitats to recover. Eating plants instead of animals also improves our health and reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic problems, which also increase our likelihood of dying if were infected with the coronavirus.

Our fate is inextricably linked to the health and resilience of the earth and our fellow earthlings, and when these are harmed and made to suffer, so are we. The good news is that just as the disease of cruelty can be contagious and spread, so too can compassion.

Gene Baur is the president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, a national farm animal rescue and advocacy organization.

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We have no one to blame for the coronavirus but ourselves | TheHill - The Hill

Physiology

Is there a best time to train? A sports scientist investigates – Cycling Weekly

Lets face it, no matter what we tell our friends, cycling comes quite far down the priority list when drawing up the days to-do list. We ride when we can fit it in, rather than at the best possible time for making fitness gains.

As amateur riders, our family, friends, work and sleep you choose the order of priority put the squeeze on our windows of opportunity for getting in quality saddle-time. The question is, does it matter what time you train?

The evidence suggests that, yes, it does. For various reasons, our bodies may have a preference that affects the training response. This feature will investigate the physical and mental effects of riding at different times of day. Should you schedule different types of session at particular times? And are there certain times of day you should actively avoid?

Often, we have to resort to training at the only time available to us. Mercifully, now that were emerging from the dark, wet winter, well soon have a few extra hours of daylight to play with at each end of the day. What does the science tell us about the best time to choose? Chronobiology is the study of lifes rhythms: heart rate, body temperature, and a variety of hormonal responses that follow the daily (or circadian) pattern. These rhythms are programmed genetically as well as being influenced by our environment and activity. Exercise performance can be dramatically affected up to 15 per cent by variations in these rhythms.

Dr Brendan Gabriel, from the University of Edinburgh, studies circadian biology in clinical conditions and sport.

Rhythmic changes in core/muscle temperature and hormonal signalling particularly adrenaline can affect exercise performance, including oxygen uptake and mechanical power, explains Gabriel. The hypothalamus, our brains regulatory control centre, is very reactive to daylight and receives this signal mainly from the eyes the reason why light is such an important trigger.

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This reactivity to light is why humans are diurnal active during the day, asleep at night. But we are not all the same. There are differences between individuals sleep/wake behaviours and our preferred pattern is known as our chronotype. Owls prefer to rise late and retire late (e.g. get up at 10am and go to bed at midnight), while at the other extreme, larks favour an early start and early bedtime (e.g. awake by 7am, asleep by 9pm). Most of us fit somewhere in between, with our physiological rhythms set accordingly.

You probably know straight away which side of the chronotype fence you sit on, but if you want to make sure, check out a Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. Depending on where you fit on this spectrum, there are implications for which times of the day best suit you for training, bearing in mind that circadian rhythms can be affected by activities including exercise and meal times.

Regardless of your chronotype, riding before work probably feels harder than at mid-morning, owing to sleep inertia the drowsiness that gradually dissipates after waking. However, if early morning is your only option, there are some useful tips for shifting or resetting your rhythm so as to get through the first few kilometres and out of the circadian trough.

The simplest solution is often the best: get up earlier. Dragging yourself out of bed kick-starts the myriad physiological processes, which during the early hours of the morning were at their lowest point. Consistently rising a little earlier could have a lasting effect on your circadian rhythms with an important footnote: make sure you balance this with a suitably earlier bedtime, and stick to it. Relapsing over a weekend off or a holiday will set you back to square one.

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Once youre awake and moving around, continued exposure to light is a major stimulus. If drawing back the curtains reveals only more darkness, artificial light is an effective substitute, and there is some evidence that daylight bulbs are effective. Eating also has a pronounced effect on your daily highs and lows, so have breakfast in good time, at least an hour before heading out. This not only provides you with the energy you need, but helps to wake you up too. Even so, you are unlikely to snatch a KOM or PB first thing in the morning.

Illustration: David Lyttleton

The answer here is to adjust your expectations to suit the time of day. When riding at a time that is not optimal for your physiology, pay less attention to the external outputs such as speed and power, and rely instead on internal parameters such as heart rate and perceived exertion. If you must squeeze in a Zone 2 training ride before breakfast, ride at the speed that elicits a Zone 2 physiological response rather than the wattage or speed that would usually equate to Zone 2 later in the day.

Keep records and have morning and evening ranges these will allow you to monitor shifts in your chronotype, should they occur. The evidence suggests that diurnal fluctuations have a greater effect on strength and power events than on endurance exercise, so short intense efforts may feel harder in the morning than in the evening. If this is true for you, avoid high-intensity interval sessions or strength training early in the day.

Human physiological systems appear to become more efficient as the day progresses. Annoyingly, we are probably best ready to ride during the middle part of the day, when most of us are at work. Does this mean that riding after work is seriously disadvantaged? Thankfully not. There is evidence to suggest that the psychological effects of work add another dimension to our ability to apply effort later in the day.

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Professor Samuele Marcora, of the University of Bologna, has published several papers investigating the effects of mentally fatiguing tasks on sports performance. This research has established that mental fatigue can have a debilitating effect on exercise performance. When the mentally fatiguing stimulus is removed, athletes perceive subsequent exercise as being easier and thus perform better. A day at work may have a similar effect on your training session. Have you felt a lack of motivation while training after a stressful day? Pushing through might make you stronger.

A further disadvantage when training late in the day is its effect on subsequent sleep. As we have learnt, training can disrupt our circadian rhythm, meaning we may not be ready for bed until later than normal (particularly if youve taken a caffeine supplement). Eating later adds to the potential for sleep trouble. If you cant drop off, avoid lying awake for hours getting frustrated; instead, read or get up and do something different (avoiding screens) until you feel weary.

Marcora advises that the best time to train, from a psycho-biological perspective, is late morning or lunchtime.

Mentally, we are fresher, and the perception of effort is lower enabling us to push harder. Most people are understandably mentally fatigued in the evening after a day at work, so if this is your only option, taking caffeine prior to your workout will help reduce the perceived effort.

As we have seen, there are pros and cons to riding at either end of the day. This poses an intriguing question: is there an edge to be gained by facing down the fatigue and training at a time when you are less primed or motivated? Marcora believes there may be. If the aim of a session is to develop brain endurance that is, mental resilience for long or intense exercise the professor postulates that training in the evening might increase the perceived effort of a session and subsequently lead to improved endurance performance.

Physiologically, there appears to be little evidence to suggest that training early (or late) improves subsequent performance during optimal hours.

But it may help to train at the time of day you intend to race. According to Dr Gabriel, you should regularly train at the time you intend to race as part of your preparation so as to get your physiological rhythms primed and adapted. For example, if your long sportive has an early morning start time, make sure you head out early on some of your training rides in the weeks before.

With cycling holidays becoming ever more popular, another situation where managing your circadian variation becomes crucial is around travel. When flying abroad, you should aim to adjust to the new time zone (no matter how small) as quickly as possible by getting into your new normal daily routine. This has long been a concern for elite athletes who travel the world to train and compete. The primary cause of jet lag is disruptions to the sleep-wake cycle. To overcome this problem, Team GB athletes travelling to the Tokyo Olympics in August will be advised to allow one day per time zone crossed to fully adjust in time to compete.

For shorter trips, when the time difference is only an hour or two, you could tweak your routine in the few days before you leave to match the destination time zone just make sure to turn up to the airport on time!While your daily biological rhythms are largely pre-programmed, it is worth being strategic about the time of day you train. Sometimes training while mentally tired may elicit an extra adaptation, provided you dont overdo it and risk falling into a state of burn-out.

Whenever possible, train at the time of day when you feel most energised. If youre forced to train early or late in the day, remember that extending your waking hours will take its toll if you do not make adjustments to compensate for the reduction in sleep. Training counts for nothing unless you allow your body to recover, repair and adapt. The benefits of sleep, particularly in athletes, are well reported and far greater than any potential gains induced through a tweak in circadian rhythms, so whatever you do, dont go burning the candle at both ends.

Being ready to compete is key to good performance. Early start times can be commonplace in amateur cyclo-cross or time trial competitions, so what can you do to maximise your mental and physical alertness in preparation?

Wake time

The earlier you rise before your start time, the better within reason. T-minus two hours is a good starting point, but experiment and find out what works for you, especially when travelling is involved.

Light

If you need to be up before the sun rises, a useful compromise can be a light therapy product such as a Lumie light (lumie.com), which simulates natural light more effective than simply putting the big light on.

Warm up

Gentle exercise before you eat is a smart move, particularly combined with some fresh air. A walk or spin on the rollers helps kick-start your systems.

Breakfast

Eat a high-carbohydrate breakfast, and make sure it is plain and palatable, as your digestive system is not firing on all cylinders early in the day. Porridge is a safe, reliable choice for most people. And, of course, make sure you are well hydrated (this applies to the night before too).

Written by Dr Mark Homer

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced 3.25.

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Is there a best time to train? A sports scientist investigates - Cycling Weekly