🔴The best way to apologize

Over the years, people have come up with some truly awful apologies. From classic non-apologies to evasive excuses, and flimsy corporate promises, it’s all too easy to give a bad apology. But researchers have found that good apologies generally share certain elements and thoughtfully considering these factors can help you make amends in a wide variety of situations.
Since public apologies have their own unique complications, we’re going to focus on some person-to-person examples. So, picture this: your new office has free ice cream sandwiches in the communal fridge— or at least that’s what you thought. But on Friday, when you’re helping your co-worker Terence set up another colleague's birthday party, he finds that half the ice cream he bought for the celebration is gone. While this is obviously an embarrassing accident, coming forward and apologizing is still the right thing to do. Understanding and accepting responsibility for your actions is what some researchers call the “centerpiece of an apology.” But it’s okay if this feels difficult and vulnerable— it’s supposed to be! The costly nature of apologies is part of what makes them meaningful. So while you might be tempted to defend your actions as accidental, it’s important to remember that a good apology isn’t about making you feel better. It’s about seeking to understand the perspective of the wronged party and repair the damage to your relationship. This means that while clarifying your intentions non-defensively can be helpful, your mistake being an accident shouldn’t absolve you from offering a sincere apology.
But what if your mistake wasn’t an accident? Consider this: you promised your friend Marie that you’ll attend her championship football match. But another friend just called to offer you an extra ticket for your favorite musician's farewell tour. You know this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and you can’t pass it up. Plus, you figure Marie wouldn’t mind if you miss the game— she always has plenty of fans supporting her. But the next day, Marie tells you she was really hurt when she didn’t see you in the crowd.
You feel terrible for upsetting her and genuinely want to apologize. But while you regret hurting Marie, you’re not actually sure if you made the wrong choice. So how can you reach beyond that terrible non-apology, “I’m sorry YOU feel this way”? In situations like this, it can be easy to focus on rationalizing your actions when you should be working to understand the other person’s perspective. Consider asking Marie how you made them feel to better understand your offense. In this case, Marie might explain that she was disappointed you broke your promise, and she was really counting on your support. This kind of clarity can help you recognize your wrongdoing and honestly accept how your actions caused harm. Then you can frame your apology around addressing her concerns, perhaps by admitting that it was wrong of you to break your promise, and you're sorry you weren't there for her.
Clearly acknowledging wrongdoing indicates that you know exactly how you messed up, and it can give Marie faith that you’ll behave differently moving forward. But it’s always helpful to indicate exactly how you’ll change and what you’ll do to repair the damage caused by your offense. Researchers call this the “offer of repair,” and it's often rated as one of the most critical parts of an apology. In some cases, these gestures are straightforward, like offering to replace the ice cream you eat. However, with less tangible transgressions, this might need to be more symbolic, like expressing your love and respect for someone you wronged. One common offer of repair is a verbal commitment not to make the same mistake again, but promising to do better only works if you actually do better.

Taking the victim’s perspective, accepting responsibility, and making concrete offers of repair are just a few of the elements of a good apology. But remember, apologies aren’t about getting forgiveness and moving on; they’re about expressing remorse and accepting accountability. And the best apologies are just the first step on the road to reconciliation.

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🔴How puberty changes your brain?

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🔴How puberty changes your brain?

While we often talk about puberty’s effect on the body, what gets overlooked are the fascinating changes that happen in the brain.
I’ve been sent here to talk to you about puberty. Any questions?
During puberty, your reproductive organs grow and mature. Any questions?
This ripening allows you to become a sexually mature adult.
There are so many other changes to your body that puberty can seem almost magical.
I think I'll take it from here.
Puberty, in fact, begins in the brain. At some point, usually between the ages of 9 and 14, puberty is triggered when a region known as the hypothalamus releases waves of a specialized hormone.
As convenient as it would be to go to sleep a child and wake up an adult, this maturation is slow, and puberty lasts as long as 4 to 5 years. And during this extended process, the brain undergoes its own transformation, thanks to two of puberty’s key players— estrogen and testosterone.
Produced in the developing testes and ovaries, these hormones hitch a ride to the brain via the bloodstream. Once there, they interact with receptors on neurons, changing the way the individual cells work and function by making them more or less excitable, altering their growth, or reshaping their connections. Cumulatively, this can change how you feel, think, and behave.
For example, hormones remodel and develop the limbic system, a collection of brain regions responsible for emotional behavior. Research in animal models suggests that the amygdala undergoes changes in size and connectivity during puberty. The amygdala’s function is wide-ranging, from detecting threats in your environment, to helping you recognize emotions in your friend’s faces. Its development allows you to better connect with your peers, while priming your brain for learning and discovery.
Likewise, puberty organizes and restructures the nucleus accumbens involved in reward and sensation-seeking. Activity in this dopamine hub is thought to drive the pleasurable sensations we feel when doing rewarding activities, like spending time with friends or having new experiences. Several studies have found that as hormone levels increase through puberty, so does the response of the nucleus accumbens. As a result, exploration and social engagement may feel that much more important during adolescence.
As these emotion and reward centers rapidly develop, their connections with higher cortical brain regions tend to do so on an extended timeline. These cortical regions, which help impose emotional regulation and impulse control, continue to grow well past puberty, into your 20s. While teens are often unfairly stereotyped as rash or impulsive, research reveals a more complex story. Teens are just as capable as adults of making thoughtful decisions when given the time and space. It’s only during high stress or in the heat of the moment that teens may find it more difficult to manage emotions. Further, this lengthy cortical development allows adolescent brains to remain adaptable as they learn and grow in new situations, form their identities, and build the skill sets needed for adulthood.
For all we know about the effects of puberty on the brain, there remain many unanswered questions. What sets off the initial puberty signal in the brain? Why is the average onset of puberty shifting earlier? And, while hormones may seem powerful, they may not be the full story. Experiences you have during adolescence may be just as influential as hormones in shaping and maturing the developing brain. So while all these physical and mental changes can make you feel as if puberty is in control, you have more power than you think. The everyday choices you make, from learning new skills, to being a good friend, to setting boundaries, ultimately steer the path of who you are and will become. Any questions?

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🔴3 ways to end a virus

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🔴3 ways to end a virus

It’s spring 2021. The Alpha variant of the coronavirus has spread rapidly, becoming the dominant variant worldwide. But another, more transmissible variant is about to appear— Delta. What happens when two variants clash?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose that the variants reach a hypothetical isolated city of 1 million people who are completely susceptible to both viruses on the same day. When a person here is infected with Alpha, they transmit it to, on average, 5 close contacts, then begin to feel sick and immediately isolate themselves for the rest of the simulation. The same thing happens with Delta, except that an infected person transmits it to, on average, 7.5 close contacts.
What would you guess happens next?
After six days, Alpha will have infected 15,625 people. Delta will have infected more than 10 times as many. Just 20 hours later, Delta will have infected the rest of the population— all before Alpha could infect 6% of it. With no one left to infect, Alpha dies out.
This model is drastically simplified, but it accurately reflects one thing that did happen in real life: when both variants competed, Delta drove Alpha towards extinction in a matter of weeks.
Viruses are wildly successful organisms. There are about 100 million times as many virus particles on Earth as there are stars in the observable universe. Even so, viruses can and do go extinct.
There are three main ways that can happen.
First, a virus could run out of hosts.
This might have happened in early 2020 to a flu lineage known as B/Yamagata. When much of the world shut down, social distanced, and wore masks to slow the spread of COVID 19, that dramatically reduced the number of hosts available for B/Yamagata to infect. It’ll take a few more flu seasons to know for sure if it’s truly extinct or just hiding out in an animal reservoir.
Many viruses, as part of their life cycle, cause diseases severe enough to kill their hosts. This can be a problem because if a virus kills all its hosts, it could— in theory— run out of hosts to infect and go extinct.
This almost happened back in 1950s Australia.
At the time, Australia was overrun by the European rabbit— an invasive species— so, in an attempt to control the population, scientists released a virus called myxoma, which had been previously shown to be almost 100% lethal to European rabbits. During the initial outbreak, as planned, tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of European rabbits died. But as the virus spread, it evolved a series of mutations that happened to make it less deadly, killing rabbits more slowly and killing fewer rabbits overall. With more infected hosts hopping around, this strain of the virus was more likely to spread than its deadlier cousin. And of course, rabbits evolved too, to mount better immune responses.
Overall, instead of killing every single rabbit, the virus evolved, the rabbit population bounced back, and both survived.
The second way a virus could go extinct is if humans fight back with an effective vaccine— and win.
Vaccination campaigns have driven two viruses essentially to extinction since vaccines were invented in the 1800s: smallpox and rinderpest, which kills cattle. More on vaccination later.
The third way a virus can go extinct is if it’s outcompeted by another virus or strain, like we saw earlier with Delta and Alpha.
By the way, viruses don't always compete with each other. A viral species can carve out its own distinct niche— for example, influenza infects your respiratory tract, and norovirus infects cells in your intestine, so both of these viruses can co-exist.
A virus’ ecological niche can be tiny: hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses can infect the same cell— hep B occupies the nucleus, and hep C occupies the cytoplasm. In fact, epidemiologists estimate that 2 to 10% of people with hep C are also infected with hep B.
So, will SARS-CoV-2— the species of virus that causes COVID 19— ever go extinct?

Variants within the species will continue to arise. Those variants might drive prior ones to extinction, or not. Regardless of how the variants compete (or don’t), the species itself— to which all the variants belong— is pretty firmly established among humans.
If we managed to vaccinate enough people, could we drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction? Our vaccination campaign against smallpox worked because the vaccine was highly protective against infection and smallpox had no close animal reservoir in which it could hide. But SARS-CoV-2 can hide out in animals, and our current vaccines— while they provide excellent protection against severe illness and death— don't prevent all infections.
So, conceivably there are two ways that SARS-CoV-2— the entire species— could go extinct:
a cataclysmic disaster could kill us all.
We could invent a universal vaccine that prevents all SARS-CoV-2 infections— those caused by all the variants that currently exist and those that don’t.
Let's work toward that second option.

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📙4000 essential english words 6

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📙4000 essential english words 6

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🔴The kingdom hidden in Brazil

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🔴The kingdom hidden in Brazil

During the 1600s, an expansive autonomous settlement called Palmares reached its height in northeastern Brazil. It was founded and led by people escaping from slavery, also called maroons. In fact, it was one of the world’s largest maroon communities, its population reaching beyond 10,000. And its citizens were at constant war with colonial forces. The records we have about Palmares mainly come from biased Dutch and Portuguese sources, but historians have managed to piece much of its story together.
During the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the 1500s, nearly half of all enslaved African people were sent to Portugal’s American colony: Brazil. Some escaped and sought shelter in Brazil’s interior regions, where they formed settlements called mocambos or quilombos. Fugitives from slavery probably arrived in the northeast in the late 1500s. By the 1660s, their camps had consolidated into a powerful confederation known today as the Quilombo of Palmares.
It consisted of a central capital linking dozens of villages, which specialized in particular agricultural goods or served as military training grounds. Citizens of Palmares, or Palmaristas, were governed by a king and defended by an organized military. African people and Brazilian-born Black and Indigenous people all came seeking refuge. They collectively fished, hunted, raised livestock, planted orchards, and grew crops like cassava, corn, and sugarcane. They also made use of the abundant palm trees for which Palmares was named, turning palm products into butter, wine, and light. Palmaristas crafted palm husks into pipes and leaves into mats and baskets. They traded some of these goods with Portuguese settlers for products like gunpowder and salt. In turn, settlers avoided Palmares’ raids during which they’d seize weapons and take captives.
The Portuguese were concerned with other invading imperialists, but regarded Indigenous uprisings and Palmares as their internal threats. Palmares endangered the very institution of slavery— the foundation of Brazil's economy. During the 1670s, the Portuguese escalated their attacks.
By this time, Ganga-Zumba was Palmares’ leader. He ruled from the Macaco, which functioned as the capital. His allies and family members governed the other villages— with women playing crucial roles in operation and defense. As they fought the Portuguese, Palmaristas used the landscape to their advantage. Camouflaged and built in high places, their mocambos offered superior lookouts. They constructed hidden ditches lined with sharp stakes that swallowed unsuspecting soldiers and false roads that led to ambushes. They launched counterattacks under the cover of night and were constantly abandoning and building settlements to elude the Portuguese.
In 1678, after years of failed attacks, the Portuguese offered to negotiate a peace treaty with Ganga-Zumba. The terms they agreed upon recognized Palmares’ independence and the freedom of anyone born there. However, the treaty demanded that Palmares pledge loyalty to the crown and return all past and future fugitives from slavery. Many Palmaristas dissented, among them Zumbi— Ganga-Zumba’s nephew— a rising leader himself.
Before long, Ganga-Zumba was killed, likely by a group affiliated with his nephew. As Palmares’ new leader, Zumbi rejected the treaty and resumed resistance for another 15 years. But in February of 1694, the Portuguese captured the capital after a devastating siege. Zumbi escaped, but they eventually found and ambushed him. And on November 20th, 1695, Portuguese forces killed Zumbi.
His death was not the end of Palmares, but it was a crushing blow. After years of warfare, there were far fewer rebels in the area. Those who remained rallied around new leaders and maintained a presence, however small, through the 1760s.

🔴Why you should shop at your local farmers market?

#Farming #Agriculture #Food #Future #Environment #Business #Sustainability

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🔴Why you should shop at your local farmers market?

It's been about a decade since the last financial crisis, yet this industry has never been bigger. Legislation that was meant to better regulate its largest players has hurt its smaller ones, resulting in most of the industry's assets to be controlled by the top one percent. They've become too big to fail. I'm not referring to big banks, but the world of Big Agriculture.
As a public health practitioner who has worked with small-scale farmers in Rwanda and now as a small food business owner who sits at the intersection between our consumers and producers, I've been exposed to one of the most ecologically and economically intensive industries in the world, and throughout my work, I've witnessed a chilling irony. Our farmers, who feed our communities, cannot afford the very foods they grow. Today, a handful of corporations continue to consolidate the entire food supply chain, from the intellectual property of seeds to produce and livestock all the way to the financial institutions who lend to these farmers. And the recent results have been rising bankruptcies for family farms and little control for those who are just trying to survive in the industry. Left unchecked, we will head into another economic collapse, one very similar to the farm crisis of the 1980s, when commodity market prices crashed, interest rates doubled, and many farmers lost everything.
Fortunately, there's a very simple, three-part solution you can be part of right now to help us transform our food industry from the bottom up.
Step one: shop at your local farmers markets.
Buying from your local market and subscribing to a community-supported agricultural produce box, better known as a CSA, may be the single greatest purchasing decision you can make as a consumer today. Last year, American farmers made the least they have in almost three decades, because they now own fewer parts of the supply chain than ever before. Under exclusive contracts with Big Ag and big box stores, farmers are not offered a fair price for their goods. In fact, the average farmer in America makes less than 15 cents of every dollar on a product that you purchase at a store. On the other hand, farmers who sell their goods at a farmers market take home closer to 90 cents of every dollar. But beyond taking home a larger share, farmers use markets as an opportunity to cultivate the next generation of agriculturalists who shepherd our farmlands and our pastures. In our fight against climate change, we need them now more than ever to promote and preserve diverse land use.
When multigenerational farms are lost to Big Ag consolidation, our communities suffer in countless ways. Rural America has now jumped above the national average in violent crime. Three out four farmworkers surveyed have been directly impacted by our opioid epidemic. Now oftentimes disguised as accidents, farmer suicide is now on the rise.
Step two: shop at your local farmers markets.
Produce from a large retail store is harvested before it's ripe to travel more than a thousand miles before it ultimately sits on your shelf roughly two weeks later. Alternatively, because most farmers markets have proximity and production requirements, farmers travel less than 50 miles to offer you local produce with minimal packaging waste. With the advent of online grocers and trending meal kits, consumers are increasingly disconnected with their farmers and the economics of food production. Since the rise of the smartphone revolution, direct-to-consumer goods have stagnated.

While local and sustainable foods have been trending for almost a decade, terms like "healthy" and "natural" have no legal framework in the United States. Your best bet for fresh, nutrient-rich foods without the marketing jargon? Go to your farmers market. Buying local is not a new idea, but turning it into a habit in today's world still is. If we want to avoid the high costs of cheap food, protect our environment, rebuild our communities and save our farmers -- literally -- we're going to need to vote with our food purchases. The success of our food systems is directly attached to us. If we want to break up Big Ag's hold on our food supply chain, then we're going to need to connect with our farmers. We're going to need to rebuild relationships with the hands that feed us three times a day. Plus, two more for snacks. Come on.
With a government online database of more than 8,600 farmers markets across the country, you can easily find the nearest one to you. Just think of yourself as an investor in food, where your purchasing power helps create a more equitable society for everyone. Oh!
Almost forgot step three, which may surprise you: shop at your local farmers markets.
Thank you.

#Farming #Agriculture #Food #Future #Environment #Business #Sustainability

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