James' World 2

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But Mr. Ali, who lives with his wife and two children in a rented room, says he has no choice but to endure the discomfort.

“I need to work because we are poor,” he said.

Mr Ali works eight-hour shifts every day in Gulshan, an affluent district in Dhaka which houses fancy apartments, sprawling corporate offices and several foreign embassies. To be even allowed into the area, he has to wear a jacket over his shirt – a uniform of sorts – which makes the heat even more uncomfortable.

The grueling heat in the country has been made worse by fuel shortages- a consequence of the Ukraine war – which has led to frequent power cuts.

Millions of people across the world, including in North America and Europe, have experienced blistering heat this year.

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Mohammad Shukkur Ali, 50, a Bangladeshi rickshaw puller, says the heat this year has been extreme

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We share the planet with some 7.7 million species of animals. And every day, they confound us. Take the orcas (i.e., killer whales), for example, that have taken to ramming human vessels. Despite the tens of thousands of academic papers that have been written about them, the best any researcher can do to explain why they have been bludgeoning ships is shrug, and make some guesses.

Animals tease us by sharing the world with us, but by also withholding many of their secrets. “We don’t know what it’s like to conceive of the world as a killer whale or as a cat, or a nonhuman primate, or any individual that doesn’t have language really,” Jennifer Vonk, a cognitive scientist who studies animals at Oakland University, tells Vox’s, Byrd Pinkerton.

On Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown — we routinely return to stories about animals. The people who study them have enviable jobs: involving playing with puppies, or diving deep into the dark parts of the sea, or thinking through what the roar of a long-dead dinosaur might have sounded like.

And their works in turn provoke deep, fascinating questions. Questions about the interior lives of animals, but also about how humans are changing the world, about how wildlife is responding to those changes, and about how many forms of life depend on one another.

We might not be able to understand why animals do what they do. But we can at least understand how important these creatures are.

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Shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, Ernesto Chavez retired from his job at a Los Angeles food warehouse. Sara, his wife of forty-five years, told me that he meticulously took his medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, hoping to enjoy his time with his grandchildren. But one morning in January 2021, Ernesto burned with fever, his chest heaving as though he were once again lifting heavy boxes. At the hospital, he tested positive for COVID-19. His oxygen levels plummeted, and he was quickly intubated. Ten days later, his lungs were failing, his face was bloated from liters of intravenous fluid, and his hands and feet had begun to cool. As his chances of survival waned, I arranged to speak with his family about a subject inseparable from death itself: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

For decades, physicians have debated whether CPR should be offered to people who suffer from the final blows of incurable illness, be it heart failure, advanced cancer, or dementia. Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly eighty-five percent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos. The pandemic only deepened the risks: every chest compression spewed contagious particles into the air, and intubation, which often follows compressions, exposed doctors to virus-laden saliva. Hospitals in Michigan and Georgia reported that no COVID patient survived the procedure. An old question acquired new urgency: Why was CPR a default treatment, even for people as sick as Ernesto?

As a palliative-care physician, I help people with serious, often terminal, illness consider a path forward. During the pandemic, this involved weekly Zoom meetings with each family whose loved one was in the I.C.U. with COVID. We discussed how the virus could damage the lungs irreversibly, how we gauged a patient’s condition, and what we would do if, despite being on life support, that patient died.

On a gray afternoon, I logged on to Zoom to speak with Ernesto’s family. I would be joined by Sara, her daughter Nancy, and Neal, an internal-medicine resident covering the I.C.U. Before the meeting, I asked Neal whether he’d been taught how to have these conversations. “Nope,” he said. I asked him what he might say to Ernesto’s family. “Unfortunately, he still needs the ventilator for his lungs, and he’s not showing signs of improvement. We want you to know that he is very sick,” he said, his expression solemn. “Because he is so sick, his heart could stop. If that happened, would you want us to do CPR to revive him?” He used his hands to simulate chest compressions on a phantom body.

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Photograph by Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Chicago Sun-Times / AP

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If you were told to do more exercise to lower your blood pressure, you might think you’d need break out you running gear or hit the weights. But one of us (Jamie) recently published research that found exercises that you hold in a static position, such as planks and wall sits, are actually the best way to reduce blood pressure.

This kind of “isometric” exercise involves contracting a specific muscle or muscle group and holding it, so the length of the muscle doesn’t change throughout the exercise.

But lower blood pressure is only one of the benefits of doing this type of exercise.

1. They improve heart health

Jamie’s recent work looked at 270 randomized controlled trials involving a total of over 15,000 participants. It found that the best way to lower blood pressure was to perform an average of three isometric sessions per week.

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He was mentioned in an episode of Mash!

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Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces’ lives during the war. As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950.

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Charles Richard Drew, Born June 3, 1904, in Washington, D.C., U.S.

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Movement can change lives. I see it every day.

When I was young, I didn’t understand pain. Each morning, I hit the ground running, moving easily through life. But at age 25, I injured my spine while dancing. My perspective on my body and my relationship with it changed overnight.

I learned to adapt and apply my fitness knowledge to my daily life and, later, to the lives of my clients; as a Pilates instructor for decades, I understand when clients ask, “What can I do to lessen my pain? How can I feel better?”Pain robs us of the joy in life—but stretching gives us a return to life, freedom, and joyful experiences. It can help ease aches and prevent new pains. Daily stretching increases blood flow, which delivers more oxygen and nutrients to joints and muscles, and this helps improve flexibility, range of motion, and strength—all things that add up to less stiffness and pain. In short, stretching helps your body function at its best.

I don’t break down stretches into individual body parts, but rather into broader movements. The body is a network: Our muscles, bones, tendons, and fascia are all connected. Pain in one area can affect another body part, but this also means you get more bang for your buck when you stretch mindfully.

I also think it’s crucial to connect stretching with functional activities—how to properly reach for an item on a high shelf, for example. If a stretch doesn’t help you move with less pain in the real world, what good is it?

I don’t break down stretches into individual body parts, but rather into broader movements. The body is a network: Our muscles, bones, tendons, and fascia are all connected. Pain in one area can affect another body part, but this also means you get more bang for your buck when you stretch mindfully.

I also think it’s crucial to connect stretching with functional activities—how to properly reach for an item on a high shelf, for example. If a stretch doesn’t help you move with less pain in the real world, what good is it?

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Philip Friedman

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New research sheds light on a tricky idea of consciousness: There’s a difference between what the brain takes in and what we’re consciously aware of taking in.

Scientists now think they’ve pinpointed the brain region where that conscious awareness is managed.

The team, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in the US, found sustained brain activity in the occipitotemporal area of the visual cortex in the back of the brain.

While this activity dropped to around 10–20 percent of its level about 300 milliseconds after an original visual stimulus, the pattern of activity remained while the stimulus was viewed.

That was in contrast to other brain areas, where information disappeared entirely within half a second (500 milliseconds).

“This stable representation suggests a neural basis for stable perception over time, despite the changing level of activity,” says psychologist Leon Deouell from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In other words, this neural region is where we not just notice something but also notice that we’re noticing it. As the visual stimulus changed – a series of images – so did the brain activity recorded by the researchers. Machine learning algorithms then filtered out the noise and spot patterns.

Researchers enlisted 10 epilepsy patients for the study who were already scheduled to have electrodes fitted inside their skulls. These electrodes allow for a more complete measure of brain activity over time, with less guesswork, compared with other brain scanning methods that work externally.

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(Johan Swanepoel/Shutterstock)

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