A crowd of turkeys would make the world’s best stand-up comedy audience ever.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrxB8DnUHLs
I’ll forego any comment about the ethics of factory farming and just say that this is one of the strangest flock phenomena I’ve seen. Turkeys: a stand-up comic’s best audience ever.
Via Boing Boing
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“I feel guilty — no one should live like this.”
Matt Fiddes runs a multi-million dollar martial arts franchise in Britain. His family’s weekly budget runs around $2,058. He’d never really looked at a price tag before buying something.
For a social experiment documented by the YouTube channel Only Human, the Fiddes family swapped lives with the Leamons (Andy, Kim, their two kids, and two dogs) who get by on $230 a week. Kim had a life-saving surgery after an accident and now lives with Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome. They lost their savings. Andy works alone to support the family.
On day one of the swap, Matt learned his weekly budget was $230. “That basically fills up the fuel tank of my car,” he said.
What followed was a week of grocery bills he had to think about, a neighborhood with nothing much in it, and night shifts, something he’d never worked in his life. His wife Moniqe cried when she heard about Kim’s condition from the Leamons’ friends.
By the end of the week, Matt had something to say that was harder to shrug off than the budget: “I feel guilty; no one should live like this.”
He also said the week brought his family closer together. The Fiddes left a gift behind for the Leamons when they returned home: a mobility scooter for Kim, so she could get around on her own.
The Leamons, meanwhile, spent the week in the Fiddes’ house taking their kids to a theme park and doing a little shopping experiencing, briefly, what it feels like when money isn’t a constant calculation.
One YouTube commenter put it plainly: “I feel this was a much-needed vacation for the poor family and a grounding experience for the rich family.” That’s about right.
You can watch the full documentary here:
Cleaner indoor air may sharpen aging minds.
Using an in-home HEPA purifier for one month spurs a small but significant improvement in brain function in adults age 40 and older. That’s the result of a new study we co-authored in the journal Scientific Reports.
HEPA purifiers – HEPA stands for high efficiency particulate air – remove particulate matter from the air. Exposure to particulate matter has been connected to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses as well as neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Environmental health researchers increasingly recommend that people use HEPA air purifiers in their homes to lower their exposure to particulate matter, but few studies have examined whether using them boosts mental function.
We analyzed data from a study of 119 people ages 30 to 74 living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Somerville sits along Interstate 93 and Route 28, two major highways, resulting in relatively high levels of traffic-related air pollution. This makes it an especially good location for testing the health effects of air purifiers.
We randomly assigned participants to one of two groups. One used a HEPA air purifier for one month and then a sham air purifier – which looked and acted like the real thing but did not contain the air-cleaning filter – for one month, with a month-long break in between. The second group used the real and sham purifiers in reverse order.
After each month, participants took a test that measured different aspects of their mental capacity. The test probed people’s visual memory and motor speed skills by measuring how quickly they could draw lines between sequential numbers, and it tested executive function and mental flexibility by asking them to draw lines between alternating sequential numbers and letters.
We found that participants 40 years and older – about 42% of our sample – on average completed the section testing for mental flexibility and executive function 12% faster after using the HEPA purifier than after using the sham purifier. That was true even when we accounted for factors like differences in the amount of time participants spent indoors, with either filter, as well as how stressful they found the test.
This improvement may seem small, but it is similar to the cognitive benefits that people experience from increasing their daily exercise. While you may not experience a sudden increase in clarity from a 12% boost, preventing cognitive decline is vital for long-term well-being. Even small decreases in cognitive functioning may be associated with a higher risk of death.
Air pollution can negatively affect mental function after just a few hours of exposure. Studies show that air purifiers are effective at reducing particulates, but it’s unclear whether these reductions can prevent cognitive harm from ongoing pollution sources like traffic. Research has been especially lacking in people living near major sources of air pollution, such as highways.
People living near highways or major roadways are exposed to more air pollution and also experience higher rates of air pollution-related diseases. These risks aren’t encountered by all Americans equally: People of color and low-income people are more likely to live near highways or areas with heavy traffic.
Our study shows that HEPA air purifiers may offer meaningful health benefits under these circumstances.
Research shows that air pollution begins to affect cognitive function especially strongly around age 40. These effects may become increasingly prominent as people age.
HEPA air purifiers may therefore be especially beneficial for older adults. Our study did not explore this possibility, as fewer than 10 of our 119 participants were over the age of 60.
Also, our participants only used a HEPA air purifier for one month. It’s possible that longer durations of air purification may sustain or even increase the improvement in cognitive function we observed in our study.
Finally, it is unclear exactly how air purifiers improve cognition. Some studies suggest that exposure to particulate matter reduces the amount of the brain’s white matter, which helps brain cells conduct electrical signals and maintains connections between brain regions. The brain regions most harmed by air pollution are the ones that control mental flexibility and executive function, the same domains in which we saw improvements in our study.
We plan to study whether reducing particulate matter by using air purifiers is indeed protecting the brain’s white matter, and whether it could reverse some cognitive decline. We will explore that possibility by studying how levels of molecules called metabolites, which cells produce as they do their jobs, change in response to breathing polluted air and air cleaned by a HEPA filter.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
Biodiversity makes planted forests stronger.
Around the world, people plan to plant more than 1 trillion trees this decade in an ambitious effort to slow climate change and reduce biodiversity loss. But if the past is prologue, many of those planted trees won’t survive. And if they do, they could end up as biological deserts that lack the richness and resilience of healthy forests.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to encourage efforts to repair degraded ecosystems. Tree planting has become a centerpiece of that effort, championed by initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge and the Trillion Trees Campaign.
However, many tree-planting commitments have a critical flaw: They rely too heavily on monoculture plantations – vast areas planted with just a single tree species.
Monoculture plantations are generally one-way tickets to producing wood. But these high-yield plantations are high risk and can be surprisingly fragile. When drought, pests, or forest fires strike, entire monoculture plantations can fail at once. In one example, nearly 90% of 11 million saplings planted in Turkey died within three months due to drought and lack of maintenance.
Forests are more than just timber factories. They regulate water, store carbon, provide habitat for wildlife, cool the landscapes around them and even provide human health benefits.
Rather than gambling on a single species and hoping for the best, science now points to a smarter path that captures both ecological and economic benefits while minimizing risk: mixed-species plantings that mirror the biodiversity of a natural forest, ultimately creating forests that grow faster and are more resilient in the face of constant threats.
We are community and landscape ecologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Since 2013, we and our colleagues have been rigorously testing this idea in a large, ecosystem-scale experiment called BiodiversiTREE. The verdict is striking: Trees in mixed forests don’t just survive – they outgrow their monoculture counterparts and support dramatically more biodiversity.
Thirteen years ago, we teamed up with volunteers to plant nearly 18,000 tree seedlings on 60 acres of fallow fields on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center campus near the Chesapeake Bay.
We didn’t plant just a single species. We planted 16 different native species from all walks of tree-life. Some species were fast-growing timber species, some were mid-story species, and some were slow-growing species that might not reach full size for a century or more.
Some plots we planted with just a single species – homogenous rows of the same species over and over again. But others were planted with random allotments of four and 12 species, reflecting the middle and upper ends of tree diversity in similar-sized areas of our local forests.
We asked a simple question: What would happen if we tried to mirror nature and plant a mixture of species instead of a monoculture?
The differences over a decade later are striking.
The monoculture plots – those that survived – resemble traditional plantation forestry that historically has dominated rural lands in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest in the U.S. They contain rows of tall, narrow trees with sparse canopies and little life below.
The mixed-species plots, by contrast, are layered, complex and dynamic, with foliage filling the canopy and a diversity of plants and animals thriving underneath.
These visual contrasts reflect real ecological gains. Trees grown in mixtures, including important timber species like poplar and red oak, are up to 80% larger than the same species when grown alone. Mixed plots supported fewer leaf pathogens, more abundant caterpillar communities that provide food for birds, and increased phytochemical diversity in their leaves. We hypothesize that these leaf chemicals, some of which deter animals from eating them, reduced browsing damage from hungry deer, ultimately leading to higher tree growth in the mixed plots.
Plots with several tree species also had much fuller, denser leaf canopies, leading to cooler, shadier conditions that help understory plants flourish and support up to 50% more insects, spiders and birds.
This pattern isn’t unique to our site. The BiodiversiTREE project is part of TreeDivNet, a global network of large-scale experiments spanning more than 1.2 million trees and hundreds of species. Across continents and climates, the results are consistent: Forests with a mix of species tend to grow larger, store more carbon and better withstand stress from drought, pests and disease.
Despite decades of evidence, mixed-species plantings remain relatively rare in practice. Most commercial forestry operations still rely on monocultures, and these plantations are counted toward international planting campaigns aimed at slowing climate change and reversing biodiversity loss.
The reasons are generally practical: Mixed plantings can be more complex to design, more expensive to establish and harder to manage. Crucially, until recently, there has been limited evidence that they can match or exceed the economic returns of conventional plantations.
A new experiment at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center called “Functional Forests” aims to bridge some of the gaps between science and practice. We’re developing intentionally designed combinations of trees to test whether specific mixtures of species can contribute ecological benefits while also providing timber and other services that humans need to support a thriving, sustainable economy.
Each of the 20 tree species in the Functional Forests project was chosen to provide one or more benefits, including timber, wildlife habitat, food for people, resistance to deer and climate resilience. But no single species provides all of these benefits.
Some of the nearly 200 plots will contain a single species, while others include carefully selected combinations of five species assembled based on the functions they provide. Some plots are protected from deer browsing, while others are left exposed.
By comparing these approaches, we can test how different planting strategies perform across a range of goals, from timber production to food production and from biodiversity to climate resilience.
Landowners and communities have different priorities, whether that’s producing wood, supporting wildlife or creating forests that can withstand a changing climate. The idea behind Functional Forests is to design plantings that can deliver these multiple benefits all at once, rather than optimizing for just one, essentially leveraging the positive effects of biodiversity to achieve real-world goals.
The stakes are high. Restoration has become a major global investment, with hundreds of billions of dollars already being spent annually. Getting it wrong means wasted resources and missed opportunities to address some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.
If the world is going to plant a trillion trees, we believe it needs to do more than just put seedlings in the ground. It needs to rethink what a forest should be.
The goal isn’t just to grow trees. It’s to grow forests that last.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
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