James' World 2

Contributor: Mohur Hemp

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I was reading Matthew Henery’s commentary on Isaiah chapter 29 Verses 17-24 Section 5. shown below, and it seemed extremely apropos of what is happening in the USA currently. I wonder if what the prophet Isaiah predicted then will repeat itself. I read that history repeats itself.

5. The persecutors, that were vexatious, shall be quieted, and so those they were troublesome to shall be quiet from the fear of them. To complete the repose of God’s people, not only the terrible one from abroad shall be brought to nought, but the scorners at home too shall be consumed and cut off by Hezekiah’s reformation.

Those are a happy people, and likely to be so, who, when God gives them victory and success against their terrible enemies abroad, take care to suppress vice, and profaneness, and the spirit of persecution, those more dangerous enemies at home. Or, They shall be consumed and cut off by the judgments of God, shall be singled out to be made examples of. Or, They shall insensibly waste away, being put to confusion by the fulfilling of those predictions which they had made a jest of. Observe what had been the wickedness of these scorners, for which they should be cut off. They had been persecutors of God’s people and prophets, probably of the prophet Isaiah particularly, and therefore he complains thus feelingly of them and of their subtle malice. Some as informers and persecutors, others as judges, did all they could to take away his life, or at least his liberty. And this is very applicable to the chief priests and Pharisees, who persecuted Christ and his apostles, and for that sin they and their nation of scorners were cut off and consumed. (1.) They ridiculed the prophets and the serious professors of religion; they despised them, and did their utmost to bring them into contempt; they were scorners, and sat in the seat of the scornful. (2.) They lay in wait for an occasion against them. By their spies they watch for iniquity, to see if they can lay hold of any thing that is said or done that may be called an iniquity. Or they themselves watch for an opportunity to do mischief, as Judas did to betray our Lord Jesus. (3.) They took advantage against them for the least slip of the tongue; and, if a thing were ever so little said amiss, it served them to ground an indictment upon. They made a man, though he were ever so wise and good a man, though he were a man of God, an offender for a word, a word mischosen or misplaced, when they could not but know that it was well meant, Isa. 29:21. They cavilled at every word that the prophets spoke to them by way of admonition, though ever so innocently spoken, and without any design to affront them. They put the worst construction upon what was said, and made it criminal by strained innuendoes. Those who consider how apt we all are to speak unadvisedly, and to mistake what we hear, will think it very unjust and unfair to make a man an offender for a word. (4.) They did all they could to bring those into trouble that dealt faithfully with them and told them of their faults. Those that reprove in the gates, reprovers by office, that were bound by the duty of their place, as prophets, as judges, and magistrates, to show people their transgressions, they hated these, and laid snares for them, as the Pharisees’ emissaries, who were sent to watch our Saviour that they might entangle him in his talk (Matt. 22:15), that they might have something to lay to his charge which might render him odious to the people or obnoxious to the government. So persecuted they the prophets; and it is next to impossible for the most cautious to place their words so warily as to escape such snares. See how base wicked people are, who bear ill-will to those who, out of good-will to them, seek to save their souls from death; and see what need reprovers have both of courage to do their duty and of prudence to avoid the snare. (5.) They pervert judgment, and will never let an honest man carry an honest cause: They turn aside the just for a thing of nought; they condemn him, or give the cause against him, upon no evidence, no colour or pretence whatsoever. They run a man down, and misrepresent him, by all the little arts and tricks they can devise, as they did our Saviour. We must not think it strange if we see the best of men thus treated; the disciple is not greater than his Master. But wait awhile, and God will not only bring forth their righteousness, but cut off and consume these scorners.

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[Photo: Zacharylim/Wikimedia Commons]

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The once-unfathomable octopus has revealed some of its most intimate details to science—its brain, its genome, its secret cities. But scientists are still in the dark about a supremely foundational aspect of this animal’s existence: its sex. What causes an octopus to be female or male?

No one knows.

Octopuses, for starters, seem to be missing sex chromosomes in any form as we know them. In humans and many other animals, two X chromosomes make an egg-producing female, while one X and one Y make a sperm-producing male. (Biologists use the word “female” to describe organs or organisms that produce eggs, and “male” for those that produce sperm; animals do not have socially constructed genders.) Octopuses possess no such familiar, tidy determinants.

Is this simply another example of octopuses being oddballs? Not at all. Across the animal kingdom, chromosomes are only one of more than a dozen ways that sex is determined, and scientists are continuing to find more, expanding the notion of how—and why and when—animals produce one sort of sex cell over the other.

The effort to understand these dynamics goes beyond mere curiosity. Unraveling these unexpectedly complex patterns is helping scientists sharpen their understanding of evolution itself, by illustrating how conflicts between genes or between parasites and hosts can lead to new traits.

This research also helps scientists peer into the future. It’s no exaggeration to say that animal life on Earth depends on eggs and sperm. (A few fascinating species can reproduce with eggs alone, but everyone else, from earthworms to elephants, requires both types of sex cell to build the next generation.) Climate change and pollution can seriously impact the sex ratios of many animals. Thus, understanding how and why sex determination happens could also help us safeguard the future of many species on this rapidly changing planet.

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Parasites, weather, and luck can play a role in determining whether some animals are male or female.

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Dinosaurs have always seemed larger than life. They lived during a time when almost everything seemed bigger—titanic herbivores stretching more than 80 feet long were not uncommon, and nine-ton carnivores had to feast on hundreds of pounds of flesh each day to survive. This popular view of the Age of Dinosaurs overlooks the innumerable small species that lived alongside Stegosaurus and Triceratops, just as we’re surrounded by insects, birds, rodents, and other small animals today. It also falsely frames the end of this era as an end to the heyday of gigantism—but that’s only an illusion.

Life didn’t shrink after the end of the Cretaceous. Long past the Age of Dinosaurs, Earth saw the evolution of impressive birds, snakes, crocodiles, rhinos, and more, including the largest animals of all time. While the broader story of life on Earth may best be told through the diminutive and meek creatures that are often overlooked, here are ten animals that underscore the fact that remarkable body size was not just the domain of the dinosaurs.

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Many giant animals roamed the Earth after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / Dmitry Bogdanov via Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0 / Dmitry Bogdanov via Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0 / Pagodroma721 via Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0 / Sergiodlarosa via Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0 / public domain

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Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains something rather than nothing.

Given the stakes, a small community of physicists has been doggedly hunting for any asymmetry in the shape of the electron for the past few decades. The experiments are now so sensitive that if an electron were the size of Earth, they could detect a bump on the North Pole the height of a single sugar molecule.

The latest results are in The electron is rounder than that.

The updated measurement disappoints anyone hoping for signs of new physics. But it still helps theorists to constrain their models for what unknown particles and forces may be missing from the current picture.

“I’m sure it’s hard to be the experimentalist measuring zero all the time, [but] even a null result in this experiment is really valuable and really teaches us something,” said Peter Graham, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. The new study is “a technological tour de force and also very important for new physics.”

Poaching Elephants

The Standard Model of Particle Physics is our best roster of all the particles that exist in the universe’s zoo. The theory has held up exceptionally well in experimental tests over the past few decades, but it leaves some serious “elephants in the room,” said Dmitry Budker, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

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If the electron’s charge wasn’t perfectly round, it could reveal the existence of hidden particles. A new measurement approaches perfection.

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Jean-Marie Robine is not impressed by your centenarian grandma. Sure, she’s sprightly for her age, but how unusual is making it to 100, really? Robine is a demographer and longevity researcher, and in his home country of France alone there are 30,000 centenarians; 30 times more than there were half a century ago. Add up all the centenarians worldwide and you get to 570,000—an entire Baltimore’s worth of extremely long-lived humans. Having a birthday cake with 100 candles is nice, but nowadays it’s nothing special.

To really pique Robine’s interest we need to up the longevity stakes a little. He is an expert in supercentenarians: people who live to 110 or even longer. In the 1990s Robine helped validate the age of the oldest person who ever lived. Born in 1875, Jeanne Calment lived through 20 French presidents before dying in 1997 at the age of 122, five months, and 15 days. Since then Robine has become a collector of the super long-lived, helping run one of the largest and most detailed databases of extremely old people.

For Robine, each supercentenarian is a crucial data point in the quest to answer a big question: Is there an upper limit to the human lifespan? “There are still many things we don’t know. And we hate that,” says Robine. But there is an even more fundamental question that undercuts the whole field of longevity research. What if—in our quest to push the limits of human lifespan—we’re looking for answers in all the wrong places?

If you’ve ever read an interview with a supercentenarian, there is one question that will inevitably come up: What’s the secret? Well, take your pick. The secret is kindness. Not having children. Connecting with nature. Avoiding men. Or, being married. Smoking 30 cigarettes a day. Not smoking 30 cigarettes a day. Drinking whisky. Abstaining from alcohol altogether. We mine the lives of the super-old for hints on how we should live our own.

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Photograph: adventtr/Getty Images

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Hope feels elusive in America right now. Suicides and fatal drug overdoses—so-called deaths of despair resulting from a seeming lack of hope—are at unprecedented levels. Mental-health problems are on the rise: A recent CDC study of teenagers found a significant increase in sadness and vulnerability to suicide over the past decade, particularly among teen girls—a trend that began well before the coronavirus pandemic. In a recent Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Americans said they believe the country is going in the right direction.

What can our society do to encourage hope and combat despair? We might typically think of hope as a touchy-feely emotion that, almost by definition, is divorced from real-life experience. In fact, as more research is beginning to show, hope is an important scientific concept—something we can define, measure, analyze, and ultimately cultivate. Emotions are crucial to a range of human behaviors that have broader economic, social, and political consequences. And hope might just be the most important emotion in that equation, offering a new (if also ancient) way to think about issues such as health, poverty, inequality, education, and despair-related deaths.

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Illustration By Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

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In modern times, clocks underpin everything people do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible structure that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the foundation of the high-speed computers that conduct financial trading and even the GPS system that pinpoints locations on Earth’s surface with unprecedented accuracy.

But humans have likely lived by some version of the clock for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, says Rita Gautschy, an archeoastronomer at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

“It’s really difficult to get a grip on when people started with timekeeping,” Gautschy says. Simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky, a person can construct a primitive calendar. These early human efforts at understanding the flow of time left no trace at all, she says.

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An ancient Chinese sundial is located at the Beijing Ancient Observatory in China. Credit: Penn Song/Getty Images

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By the time they enter kindergarten, most American children believe that being “thin” makes them more valuable to society, writes journalist Virginia Sole-Smith. By middle school, Sole-Smith says, more than a quarter of kids in the U.S. will have been put on a diet.

Sole-Smith produces the newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. In her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, she argues that efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages.

“The chronic experience of weight stigma … is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,” Sole-Smith says. “This raises your stress level. This has you in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and stress hormones are elevated. That takes a toll on our bodies for sure.”

Sole-Smith says parents can combat American diet culture by reclaiming — and normalizing — the word “fat.” Instead of shushing a child in the grocery store who asks why a stranger is so fat, she advises parents to explain that bodies come in lots of shapes and sizes, some fat, some thin.

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My first child, Penelope, was born at 6 a.m. As a result, our insurance covered two nights in the hospital. On our second night—when my husband had gone home to rest and prepare the house for our return—the nurses took Penelope for some tests and returned her at 2 a.m. I was sleeping. The nurse switched on the light and rolled the bassinet in; in addition to Penelope, the bassinet had a little sign: Breastfeeding Only.

“We weighed her,” the nurse said, “and she’s lost 11 percent of her body weight. Our limit is 10 percent, so you’ll have to start supplementing with formula. If you don’t, you probably won’t get to take her home tomorrow.” I felt rising panic—not take her home?—and also some confusion. 10 percent versus 11 percent? These seemed pretty similar—was that one percent really enough to prevent an otherwise healthy baby from coming home?

Obviously, you want your baby to thrive, and weight is an important metric. But many new parents are not expecting the tremendous focus doctors and hospital staff place on infant weight gain or loss. If you have happily given birth to a healthy baby after a relatively uneventful delivery, the vast majority of your hospital conversations will now revolve around the baby’s feeding and weight. That might sound like a fine idea, but remember this is not a moment you are at your most laissez-faire. When you’re just postpartum and trying to breastfeed for the first time, it can be incredibly tense. It can feel like you are failing—you did such a great job growing this baby inside you, and now that it’s out, you are a failure. (You’re not!! That’s just how it feels.)

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Illustration by Doris Liou.

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