Three MPs have urged their colleagues to keep the pandemic policy in place so women can take tablets at home.
Tory MPs call for home early abortion service to be made permanent
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Category Archives: Body Optimization
Teenage social media use linked to less life-satisfaction for some
Survey suggests teenagers may be more vulnerable to social media at particular ages, with heavy use a risk.
Alzheimer’s: Neil Kinnock supporting wife through disease
The ex-Labour leader says his wife Glenys, who has Alzheimer’s, has been “a continent of rocks”.
Essex mental health services inquiry probes 1,500 deaths
England’s first public inquiry into a mental health service appeals for more people to come forward.
Ukraine: Premature babies struggling for life in bombed cities
Doctors have begun seeing a sharp rise in the number of preterm births in some areas of Ukraine.
Guild Course Update
I finished working out the details for the upcoming Guild course on social alignment, so now I can give you a crisper update on that, including when we’ll get started.
We’ll be opening the doors for people to enroll early next week. I’d say by Tuesday. The course will officially begin one week from today, on Friday, April 1st, and it will run for 30 days straight.
Format-wise it’s a bit of a hybrid that combines the daily live lesson experience of Deep Abundance Integration with the social interactivity of the Amplify group calls. So it will be like an intensive 30-day challenge for anyone who wants to do it live.
Every day for 30 days in a row, from April 1 through April 30, I’ll be hosting a live Zoom call at 9am Pacific time. Each call will go for about 2-3 hours and will have a structured format that includes instruction, breakout rooms for interactive practice, Q&A, open sharing, and more.
The core theme of the course is creating and enjoying an aligned social circle. Each day we’ll chip off a piece of this to work on together, exploring a wide variety of subtopics.
Near the end of each call, we’ll have a co-creative segment to invite and consider suggestions for what to cover on the next day’s call. Then we’ll be able to pre-announce each day’s topic approximately 21 hours in advance. That way people who want to be selective can decide whether the next day’s topic appeals to them enough to attend live, or if they’d prefer to wait for the recording.
All of these calls (but not the breakout room segments) will be recorded, and each recording will be published the same day as the live lesson. Recordings will be streamable in your browser and also downloadable. We won’t be adding text transcripts of the lessons since those just don’t come out well for live calls; we’ve only included those for audio courses.
Every part of this experience is optional. You can choose to have an intense all-in experience by attending every call live. Lots of people did that with DAI and loved sharing the journey day by day – in fact I was impressed by how many people showed up live every day. I even grew a beard for those 30 days as some people may recall.
Alternatively, you can take your time and go through the recordings at whatever pacing you want since you get to keep those indefinitely. Or you can mix and match – do some calls live and enjoy the recordings for the rest.
All the breakout room practice portions are by consent. You can dive in and participate, or you can skip those parts and grab a snack instead. Totally your choice. Every session is an invitation, so nothing is forced, and there won’t be any pressure to do anything you don’t want to explore at this time.
Additionally there will be some extra bonuses to help you with ongoing practice and reinforcement.
The price for the full 30 days will be $497 USD. For Conscious Growth Club members, it’s included as part of their membership. There won’t be a launch discount for this course since the main incentive to sign up by April 1st is if people want to participate in the live experience. The long-term price for the recorded version will be the same.
I’m pricing this as low as I think would be sensible, so we attract people who are really committed to sharing in a major social exploration together. Since this will be a very social course, I want to make sure that we have a good base of very growth-oriented people who truly want to upgrade their social lives. I also don’t want to price it too high since I think it’s better if we have more people for you to engage with on the live calls. That’s better for the co-creative aspect. This price feels more than fair to me, especially for 60-90 hours of live engagement together.
Last year’s 3-day Octo Intensive workshop was also $497, and the Guild experience is going to be around 5-6x as long in terms of our time together. Guild is surely going to be rich in ideas and insights, but I also want to maintain an easy-going pacing that gives us lots of space to share, connect, crack jokes, and explore divergently too.
Like we did last year, I’ll be giving everyone the option to credit the full price of the course towards a CGC membership. CGC opens for new members once per year, always in the last week of April, and our CGC year begins on May 1st. We’ve got about a month to go in Year 5, so that will be the start of Year 6.
This year I expect we’ll open CGC for new members roughly from April 25 through May 1st. Since it started in 2017, CGC has always been $1997 per year, and we’re keeping that the same for 2022. So if you do the Guild course first, you’ll be able to join CGC this year for $1500 more. This type of offer was very popular last year, with dozens of people flowing into CGC from the Amplify course. We attracted some really great and active members, which is the main reason I want to do it again this year. I think such an interactive course is a good way to give people a preview of what the CGC community is like as well, especially since there will be many CGCers on the Guild calls.
I’m excited. This is going be a lot of fun for those who choose to engage with it. 
Here’s some extra info about how I make format choices for our courses, in case you’re curious about that.
With each course topic that we do, I like to stay in divergent space about the exact offer / invitation till the format crystallizes. I always get a signal from reality when it’s time to converge and flow into launch mode, and then everything progresses pretty quickly after that point. Before that point, I’m awash in pondering and synthesizing all the feedback I receive about what people want to work on together.
One thing I’ve noticed again and again is that I can’t effectively force reality to converge before it’s ready. I could try to converge at the personal level by my own volition, but it never feels right to do so until I receive that timing ping from reality. The greater floodgates of support from reality won’t be forthcoming unless we get synched up, and when that synching happens isn’t really up to me. I feel like it has more to do with some collective timing coordination that happens in the background, and I have to wait for reality to let me know when it’s ready. It’s like catching a wave on a surfboard. When I feel that rising wave of energy, I know it’s time to advance from private development mode to public invitation mode. And that wave showed up this week.
I don’t entirely feel that the format choices are made by me. It’s more like I bounce ideas off reality and wait for a very clear YES in response. I’ve explored different formats and creative forms over the years, so I’m very flexible format-wise. I like to just tune in to and listen for what kind of format wants to come through, especially as I get clearer about the themes and changes people want to explore.
Whenever I ponder different formats for a course, I get a feel for whether they’re truly right or not. I sometimes run through several different partial match ideas till I feel that the format really does fit the purpose. I’m basically asking, Is this a match for the collective intentional energy?
This 30-day format may seem intense to some. It does to me too – in a good and appealing way. But it really feels like it fits the collective intentional energy too. It makes sense to me that the transformations that people asked for would match up well with a socially immersive approach this time. Some people shared that they have some major social misalignments in their lives, so I think an immersive approach will serve them well. We may need to generate a lot of energy and mutual support to help people get unstuck.
I do feel there are other ways we could do this course, but they wouldn’t match up as well with that collective intentional energy. I did give serious consideration to doing this as another audio course, perhaps with a smaller number of live calls, but that just doesn’t fit the needs and desires that people expressed. I think we’ll be better served by diving into this experience together.
The COVID situation has apparently reduced many people’s social bandwidth and capacity. I just read an article about that this morning – how people who used to socialize a lot but contracted their social lives due the pandemic are trying to open up more this year, but they’re feeling really drained when they try. It’s like they have to start over to build up their social stamina again. It’s much like not exercising for a couple of years and then trying to get back into it. It may take several weeks to train back up again. So here’s the invitation to train up with a 30-day intensive. Consider this a timely invitation to get back into the social game.
There are a lot of people in my audience, outside of CGC, who have zero growth-oriented friends. They have contacts and colleagues, but those relationships lack depth and intimacy. Some are dealing with significant social trust wounds. A lot of people are experiencing some kind of social withdrawal, yet deep down they really want to change that. It just seems like it takes an extraordinary amount of energy to make these shifts alone. So don’t do it alone. Join us and let’s do this together. There’s power in aligning with likeminded people to do transformational work together.
With these kinds of transformations, there’s some strong inertia to overcome for many people. It’s going to take a lot of intention and energy and collective will to help people (who want to) to shift gears and experience what life could be like with more aligned social flow. There are a lot of thorny issues to collectively untangle.
I think this will be the most co-creative course we’ve ever done because, like with DAI, we’re going to come up with the subtopics day by day, always with the intention of helping people get what they want and need from the experience. It’s definitely not going to be a dogmatic course but rather an exploratory and experiential one. There will be lots of sharing and testing of ideas as people discover what works and what doesn’t work for them as social beings. Part of the big picture intention here is to create a psychologically safe space where people can test and explore and stretch themselves in ways that society never gave them the space or permission to do.
I also know that this format won’t be perfectly practical for some people. The timing, intensity, frequency, or duration may not be a fit for their lifestyles. I’m doing what I can to make it as adaptable as possible. This includes recording all the sessions and posting them the same day, like we did with DAI. If people are pressed for time, they can watch the recordings at 2X speed. Since the breakout rooms aren’t recorded, that shaves time off the recorded versions too.
We’ll also be publishing 1-page lesson summaries in an evolving Guild Summary Guild, also on the same days the live lessons occur. So if people just want to skim the key points on busy days, they can do that.
There’s the option for people to approach this as a 30-day challenge by attending every call live, and some 30-day challenges require significant but temporary lifestyle adjustments and possibly some family discussions. It’s up to each person to decide how much they want to prioritize the live session experience relative to potentially competing priorities. There’s no right or wrong choice there – just what’s right for you and the people you care about, right now.
I’m fully committed to facilitating this experience for those who would appreciate it. I’ll bring my best self to this physically, mentally, and emotionally. It feels like a beautiful time to explore this with you.
I’ll put up the official invitation page early next week, but for now I wanted to give you a heads up with the key details, so you can start thinking about whether you want to do this. The Guild course journey will begin at 9am sharp (Pacific time) on April 1, 2022. It’s going to be a fun ride.
Advances in street lighting are reducing the efficacy of coastal species’ camouflage
Species that rely on darkness to forage and feed are losing the gift of camouflage thanks to advances in the lighting used to illuminate the world’s cities and coastlines, a study has shown.
The worldwide proliferation of energy efficient broad spectrum lighting has the potential to disrupt an array of visually guided ecological processes.
New research has demonstrated that these new lighting technologies can significantly improve a predator’s ability to discriminate prey species against a natural background.
The magnitude of this effect varies depending on an organism’s colour, meaning certain colour variations may be at greater risk.
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, was conducted by researchers at the University of Plymouth and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML).
It is one of the first to examine the potential for artificial light at night (ALAN) to affect the camouflage mechanisms of coastal species.
Oak McMahon, who led the research while studying for an MSc in Applied Marine Science and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Plymouth, said: “This study clearly indicates that new lighting technologies will increase the conspicuousness of prey species by reducing the efficacy of their camouflage. Our findings revealed that species of Littorinid snails found commonly on our coastlines will remain camouflaged when illuminated by older style lighting. However, when illuminated by modern broad spectrum lighting, they are clearly visible to predators and at far greater long-term risk as a result.”
Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, this is the latest research by the University and PML to highlight the growing levels of ALAN and its impacts on coastal environments.
For this study, scientists used a well-established model to determine the conspicuousness of three distinct colour morphs of Littorinid snail found commonly along the world’s coastlines.
They compared how the species appeared to three common coastal predators when illuminated by different forms of lighting. This included 20th century narrow spectrum Low Pressure Sodium (LPS) lighting, three types of modern broad spectrum lighting — High Pressure Sodium (HPS); Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs); and Metal Halide (MH) — and the natural light provided by the sun and moon.
Under LPS lighting, all snails were effectively camouflaged. However, when illuminated by LEDs, MH, the sun or the moon, yellow snails were significantly more visible compared to brown and olive ones in the majority of cases.
Dr Thomas Davies, Lecturer in Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth and the study’s senior author, said: “As technologies develop, there has been a shift from narrow spectrum to lighting that enables us to live and travel in a safe, secure manner. However, estimates suggest that a quarter of the planet between the Arctic Circle and Antarctica is now being affected by night-time light pollution. Some predictions say that LED bulbs will account for 85% of the global street lighting market in around five years, and our study highlights that such advances will have repercussions for humans and animals alike now and in the future.”
Dr Tim Smyth, PML Head of Science for Marine Biogeochemistry and Observations and co-author on the research, added: “The ability to light our environment around the clock has transformed the urban landscapes over the past century and has ushered in what some call the Urbanocene. The shift from the orange glow over cities, typical of my youth in the 1970s and 80s, has now shifted much more towards energy efficient wide spectrum LEDs which even enables us humans to correctly perceive colour. This work shows that this advancement has additional ramifications for the natural world, which is having to adapt at an increasing rate to the artificial changes we are making to the environment. We need to learn to adapt our technologies to avoid the worst consequences of their adoption.”
What can be done to reduce the impact of artificial lighting on our coastlines
With estimates indicating that 23% of the world’s surface, between the planet’s polar regions, are affected by ALAN — and a rate of increase of 2.2% between 2012 and 2016 — the need to address the situation is pressing to say the least.
In the study, the researchers highlight a variety of mitigation methods available to planners and environmental managers when considering its ecological impacts.
These include reducing the amount of light used, shielding lights to reduce their effects on the surrounding environment, employing part-night lighting during times of peak demand, and manipulating the spectra of lighting to minimise ecological impacts.
The researchers highlight that while it may seem intuitive to suggest using narrow spectrum lighting to avoid these impacts, the effects of ALAN extend beyond those seen on camouflage and that all parts of the visual spectrum will likely have some ecological impact.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Plymouth. Original written by Alan Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
COVID-19 mixed with flu increases risk of severe illness and death
Adults in hospital who have Covid-19 and the flu at the same time are at much greater risk of severe disease and death compared with patients who have Covid-19 alone or with other viruses, research shows.
Patients with co-infection of SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, and influenza viruses were over four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they only had Covid-19, experts found.
Researchers say the findings show the need for greater flu testing of Covid-19 patients in hospital and highlight the importance of full vaccination against both Covid-19 and the flu.
The team from the University of Edinburgh, University of Liverpool, Leiden University and Imperial College London, made the findings in a study of more than 305,000 hospitalised patients with Covid-19.
The research — delivered as part of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium’s (ISARIC) Coronavirus Clinical Characterisation Consortium — is the largest ever study of people with Covid-19 and other endemic respiratory viruses.
ISARIC’s study was set up in 2013 in readiness for a pandemic such as this.
The team looked at the data of adults who had been hospitalised with Covid-19 in the UK between 6 February 2020 and 8 December 2021.
Test results for respiratory viral co-infections were recorded for 6965 patients with Covid-19. Some 227 of these also had the influenza virus, and they experienced significantly more severe outcomes.
Dr Maaike Swets, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and Leiden University, said: “In the last two years we have frequently witnessed patients with Covid-19 become severely ill, at times leading to an ICU admission and the employment of an artificial ventilator to help with breathing. That an influenza infection could give rise to a similar situation was already known, but less was understood about the outcomes of a double infection of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses.”
Professor Kenneth Baillie, Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said: “We found that the combination of Covid-19 and flu viruses is particularly dangerous. This will be important as many countries decrease the use of social distancing and containment measures. We expect that Covid-19 will circulate with flu, increasing the chance of co-infections. That is why we should change our testing strategy for Covid-19 patients in hospital and test for flu much more widely.”
Professor Calum Semple, Professor of Outbreak Medicine and Child Health at the University of Liverpool, said: “We are seeing a rise in the usual seasonal respiratory viruses as people return to normal mixing. So, we can expect flu to be circulating alongside Covid-19 this winter. We were surprised that the risk of death more than doubled when people were infected by both flu and Covid-19 viruses. It is now very important that people get fully vaccinated and boosted against both viruses, and not leave it until it is too late.”
Dr Geert Groeneveld, doctor at Leiden University Medical Center’s infectious diseases department, said: “Understanding the consequences of double infections of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses is crucial as they have implications for patients, hospitals and ICU capacity during seasons that SARS-CoV-2 and influenza circulate together.”
Professor Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College London, said: “Being infected with more than one virus is not very common but it’s important to be aware that co-infections do happen. The vaccines that protect against Covid-19 and flu are different, and people need both. The way that these two infections are treated is also different so it’s important to test for other viruses even when you have a diagnosis in someone who is hospitalised with a respiratory infection. This latest discovery by the ISARIC consortium again adds significantly to improving the way we manage patients.”
The findings have been published in The Lancet. The research was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and by the Department of Health and Social Care through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) as part of the UK Government’s Covid-19 rapid research response.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Edinburgh. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Ukraine war: WHO says attacks on hospitals are increasing daily
The World Health Organization has verified more than 70 attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities.
New study reveals why HIV remains in human tissue even after antiretroviral therapy
Thanks to antiretroviral therapy, HIV infection is no longer the life sentence it once was. But despite the effectiveness of drugs to manage and treat the virus, it can never be fully eliminated from the human body, lingering in some cells deep in different human tissues where it goes unnoticed by the immune system.
Now, new research by University of Alberta immunologist Shokrollah Elahi reveals a possible answer to the mystery of why infected people can’t get rid of HIV altogether.
Elahi and his team found that in HIV patients, killer T cells — a type of white blood cells responsible for identifying and destroying cells infected with viruses — have very little to none of a protein called CD73.
Because CD73 is responsible for migration and cell movement into the tissue, the lack of the protein compromises the ability of killer T cells to find and eliminate HIV-infected cells, explained Elahi.
“This mechanism explains one potential reason for why HIV stays in human tissues forever,” he said, adding that the research also shows the complexity of HIV infection.
“This provides us the opportunity to come up with potential new treatments that would help killer T cells migrate better to gain access to the infected cells in different tissues.”
After identifying the role of CD73 — a three-year project — Elahi turned his focus to understanding potential causes for the drastic reduction. He found it is partly due to the chronic inflammation that is common among people living with HIV.
“Following extensive studies, we discovered that chronic inflammation results in increased levels of a type of RNA found in cells and in blood, called microRNAs,” he explained. “These are very small types of RNA that can bind to messenger RNAs to block them from making CD73 protein. We found this was causing the CD73 gene to be suppressed.”
The team’s discovery also helps explain why people with HIV have a lower risk of developing multiple sclerosis, Elahi noted.
“Our findings suggest that reduced or eliminated CD73 can be beneficial in HIV-infected individuals to protect them against MS. Therefore, targeting CD73 could be a novel potential therapeutic marker for MS patients.”
Elahi said the next steps in his research include identifying ways the CD73 gene can be manipulated to turn on in patients living with HIV and off in those with MS.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Alberta. Original written by Tarwinder Rai. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
