James' World 2

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Ellen Stromdahl was at a garden party in coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Duncan stood up from where he was sitting and abruptly fainted. Duncan is an outdoorsman in his mid-80s — still active and healthy for his age. Stromdahl, an entomologist who works for the United States Army Public Health Center, the Army’s public health arm, rushed to his side. As Duncan came to, she noticed that his tanned skin was tinged with yellow. “This man looks jaundiced,” she thought to herself.

Duncan spent the next several days in and out of the emergency room. His doctors administered countless blood tests and ruled out the usual suspects for an octogenarian — heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Finally, on Stromdahl’s recommendation, Duncan’s wife, Nancy, asked his doctors to test him for babesiosis, a rare malaria-like disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black-legged ticks. The test came back positive not just for babesiosis but also for Lyme disease, another far more common illness caused by the same type of tick.

If Duncan’s doctors had caught the infections sooner, they could have eradicated them with a combination of oral antibiotics and antiparasitic medications. But Duncan, weeks into his illness, needed a procedure called an exchange transfusion. Doctors pumped all of the infected blood out of his body and replaced it with donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, he was well again.

Babesiosis is rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports around 2,000 cases in the United States every year. But what made Duncan’s case even more unusual is that he contracted babesiosis in Virginia, a state that registered just 17 locally acquired cases of the disease between 2016 and 2023.

It got Stromdahl wondering if babesiosis could be becoming more common in Virginia and neighboring states. She spent the following two years working with a team of 21 tick researchers from across the eastern U.S. and South Africa to assess the prevalence of Babesia microti, the parasite that causes babesiosis, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024.

The results of the study, published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology, reveal that the Babesia parasite is rapidly expanding through the mid-Atlantic. This shift, which has coincided with changing weather patterns, could pose a serious threat to people in communities where the disease has long been considered rare.

“Wherever we found positive ticks, there were cases,” Stromdahl said. “They’re small numbers, but that’s why we want to give the early warning before more people get sick.”

One in four cases of babesiosis is asymptomatic. People who do develop symptoms, especially older adults and immunocompromised people, can get quite sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Untreated, the parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to organ failure and death.

Babesiosis is typically found in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. Between 2015 and 2022, case counts in the states that regularly report the disease — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — rose by 9 percent every year, a development researchers attribute in large part to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which afford black-legged ticks more opportunities to bite people in a given year and more habitat to spread into.

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When you’re trying to learn something new — like, say, making that new sales demo really sing — you need to practice. When you’re trying to gain expertise, how much you practice is definitely important.

But even more important is the way you practice.

Most people simply repeat the same moves. Like playing scales on the piano, over and over again. Or going through the same list of vocabulary words, over and over again. Or, well, repeating anything over and over again in the hopes you will master that task.

Not only will your skills not improve as quickly as they could, in some cases, they may actually get worse.

According to research from Johns Hopkins, “What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”

Why? The most likely cause is reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.

Here’s a simple example: trying to get better at shooting free throws in basketball. The conditions are fixed. The rim is always 10 feet above the floor. The free-throw line is always 15 feet from the basket.

In theory, shooting from the same spot, over and over again, will help you ingrain the right motions into your muscle memory so your accuracy and consistency will improve.

And, of course, that does happen — but a better, faster way to improve is to slightly adjust the conditions in subsequent practice sessions.

Maybe one time you’ll stand a few inches closer. Another time you might stand a few inches to one side. Another time, you might use a slightly heavier, or lighter, ball.

In short, each time you practice, you make the conditions a little different. That primes the reconsolidation pump — and helps you learn much more quickly.

But Not Too Different — or Too Soon

But you can’t adjust the conditions more than slightly. Do something too different and you’ll simply create new memories, not reconsolidated ones.

“If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation,” the researchers say. “The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”

And you’ll also need to space out your practice sessions appropriately.

The researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to reconsolidate.

Practice differently too soon, and you haven’t given yourself enough time to “internalize” what you’ve learned. You won’t be able to modify old memories — and therefore improve your skills — because those memories haven’t had the chance to become old memories.

So if you want to dramatically improve how quickly you learn a new skill, try this.

How to Learn a New Skill

The key to improvement is making small, smart changes, evaluating the results, discarding what doesn’t work, and further refining what does work.

When you constantly modify and refine something you already do well, you can do it even better.

Say you want to improve a skill; to make things simple, we’ll pretend you want to master a new presentation.

1. Rehearse the basic skill. Run through your presentation a couple of times under the same conditions you’ll eventually face when you do it live. Naturally, the second time through will be better than the first; that’s how practice works. But then, instead of going through it a third time …

2. Wait. Give yourself at least six hours so your memory can consolidate. (Which probably means waiting until tomorrow before you practice again, which is just fine.)

3. Practice again, but this time …

• Go a little faster. Speak a little — just a little — faster than you normally do. Run through your slides slightly faster. Increasing your speed means you’ll make more mistakes, but that’s OK — in the process, you’ll modify old knowledge with new knowledge, and lay the groundwork for improvement. Or …

• Go a little slower. The same thing will happen. (Plus, you can experiment with new techniques — including the use of silence for effect — that aren’t apparent when you present at your normal speed.) Or …

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Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today, those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then-approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now, meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.

Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”

The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry

For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.

The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one-third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.

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After a delicious feast, the last thing many people want to do is exercise. Food is sloshing inside a bloated belly, and sleepiness is setting in. A nap seems like the right move. But while it might feel good at the time, there is another activity you should probably be doing instead: walking.

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, there are many opportunities for feasting on seasonal foods. Family gatherings may feature that one aunt who sighs after cleaning her plate before saying, “Who’s up for a nice, brisk walk?” Everyone is entitled to their own responses to this ambitious, well-meaning aunt, but there’s something to getting some movement after eating.

A Turkey Trot 5K isn’t the first thing most want to do after a few plates of festive carbs. Nobody needs to do a 5K, though, or even what’s conventionally considered exercise. Just a little light movement is enough.

Science in action — In February 2022, a meta-analysis published in the journal Sports Medicine examined seven studies on how walking after a meal impacted glucose levels. Of those seven, the researchers also looked at four for insulin levels and three for blood pressure. The studies looked at how post-meal glucose metabolism varied based on whether one spent time sitting, standing, or walking in a lab setting.

These researchers gleaned that across these studies, both standing and walking improved one’s glucose metabolism after eating compared to sitting for a while. The novel finding — they write in the paper — is that even standing has benefits. However, a gentle walk assuaged glucose levels far more than standing did. In fact, the difference between sitting and standing’s impact on blood glucose levels was slight.

Overall, they found that even walking for even two minutes after a meal tempers blood sugar.

Why it’s a hack — A few things happen in the body after a meal. Blood diverts to the organs that aid in digestion and nutrient absorption. With more blood coursing through the digestive system, less oxygen circulates through the rest of the body. Going for a walk improves circulation because all your muscles require blood.

“Now you’re telling the body, ‘Wait a minute, we need the blood in the muscles deliver oxygen to help you ambulate,” Steven Malin, an endocrinology and metabolic health professor at Rutgers University, tells Inverse. Going for a walk doesn’t detract from the digestive process but helps create balance in the body, Malin says. He adds that walking after a big meal reduces gastrointestinal issues because movement makes the body absorb food’s nutrients more quickly.

On this note, the meta-analysis posits that the greater benefits on glucose and insulin levels from walking than standing come from the intensity and frequency of muscular activity. In other words, exercising our muscles is part of the biological pathway that mediates glucose and insulin levels.

Our bodies also produce a flurry of hormones. Especially after a large mea

l, feel-good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine will float around, but with that good feeling comes drowsiness. In contrast, cortisol, glucagon, and norepinephrine are the counter-regulatory hormones that energize us. These hormones send the body opposing signals, but seizing those hormones that offer a surge of energy can help head off sluggishness.

The body also more efficiently breaks down food when it doesn’t have a ton on its proverbial plate. Taking a walk right after Thanksgiving dinner offsets the total amount of calories the body must process later. Think of it like doing homework during a free period in high school, so you wouldn’t have as much to do at home that night.

How it affects longevity — Malin’s mantra is, “Any movement is good movement.” You don’t have to race a triathlon to reap the benefits of exercise. Everyone’s aunt might be suggesting a nice family walk, but other options include giving piggyback rides to any children present, wrestling with the cousins, or even doing some arm stretches with or without weights. Walking isn’t the only way to get the blood flowing.

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