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Chemical records in teeth confirm elusive Alaska lake seals are one of a kind

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Hundreds of harbor seals live in Iliamna Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Alaska and one of the most productive systems for sockeye salmon in the Bristol Bay region.

These lake seals are a robust yet highly unusual and cryptic posse. Although how the seals first colonized the lake remains a mystery, it is thought that sometime in the distant past, a handful of harbor seals likely migrated from the ocean more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) upriver to the lake, where they eventually grew to a consistent group of about 400. These animals are important for Alaska Native subsistence hunting, and hold a top spot in the lake’s diverse food web.

Scientists now know these “colonizing” seals must have found the lake suitable enough to stay and raise their offspring. Generations later, the lake-bound seals appear to be a genetically distinct population from their ocean-dwelling cousins — even though they are still managed as part of the larger Eastern Pacific harbor seal population.

But if the lake seals are distinct and show signs of local adaptation to their unique ecological setting, this would mean that their conservation — especially in the face of the rapidly changing climate of western Alaska and proposed industrial developments — should differ from that of nearby marine populations.

Lifelong chemical records stored in their sequentially growing canine teeth show that the Iliamna Lake seals remain in freshwater their entire lives, relying on food sources produced in the lake to survive. In contrast, their relatives in the ocean are opportunistic feeders, moving around to the mouths of different rivers to find the most abundant food sources, which includes a diverse array of marine food items in addition to the adult salmon returning to Bristol Bay’s nine major watersheds. These findings are described in a paper published online in March in Conservation Biology.

“We clearly show these seals are in the lake year-round, throughout their entire lives,” said lead author Sean Brennan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “This gives us critical baseline information that can weigh in on how we understand their ecology, and we can use that information to do a better job developing a conservation strategy.”

This new study comes at a time when federal agencies are considering whether to permit mining activities in Bristol Bay, a region teeming with wildlife, including Alaska sockeye salmon. Iliamna Lake, and the seals and other animals that live there, is located in the heart of the proposed Pebble Mine project.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this spring released a draft environmental impact statement that analyzes the project’s proposal, presents alternative plans and gives the public a chance to comment. Ultimately, the document will help decide whether the controversial mine is approved.

Because of their current conservation status, the Iliamna Lake harbor seals aren’t assessed as a distinct and ecologically significant population in the project’s draft environmental impact analysis. If the seals are determined to be a distinct population, that has important implications for how the Iliamna Lake system is managed, the study’s authors said. The lake and its resident fishes would then be considered critical habitat for seals.

Separately, federal regulators have considered whether the lake seals should be named a distinct population, but scientists have been unable to agree on whether the seals are both distinct, and ecologically and evolutionarily significant, mainly because little is known about their ecology — including whether adult lake seals potentially migrate to the ocean to feed each year.

Brennan was a doctoral student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks when he heard about early efforts to evaluate whether the lake seals were a distinct population. Chemical tracing methods he was using to track the life patterns of salmon could also work for the seals, he realized.

“The light just went off in my head,” Brennan said. “What I was doing for salmon was directly applicable to this population of seals.”

Brennan and collaborators at the UW, University of Utah and University of Alaska Anchorage looked at the chemical signatures present in the teeth of lake seals during each year of their life to better understand where they moved and what they ate. Specifically, the scientists drilled into the growth lines of the seals’ canine teeth, then measured the ratio of heavy and light isotopes of carbon, oxygen, and strontium present in each growth layer.

Because of the young bedrock geology of the Kvichak (QUEE-jak) River watershed, which encompasses Iliamna Lake, strontium isotope levels in the ocean are consistently much higher than in the lake. Unlike other elements, strontium signatures in mammal teeth directly reflect what animals assimilate from their environment, in particular, what they eat. Therefore, by looking at the strontium isotope ratios over the course of a seal’s life, the researchers saw that the ratios were consistent with lake signatures — meaning these seals only live in Lake Iliamna, depend principally on fish produced within the lake, and do not migrate to the ocean.

They also determined that young seals eat very little adult sockeye salmon. But later in life, the seals shift to supplement their diets with the seasonally abundant sockeye salmon that return each summer to the lake.

The researchers say this method could be used to better understand the life patterns of other elusive mammals around the world, such as river dolphins in the Amazon or the Mekong Basin. Broadly, marine mammals in coastal regions are among the most endangered animals on Earth, Brennan said.

“In terms of the broader picture of aquatic mammal conservation across the globe, I think we show that strontium isotopes can be really powerful because they collapse a lot of uncertainty. This method is completely underutilized across the world,” Brennan said.

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Blood scandal teens made pact to discover their killer

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Stephen Nicholls told an inquiry into blood contamination that he was the only one of his friends still alive.

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Cwm Taf maternity: Welsh Government partly to blame, says MP

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A Labour MP says the Welsh Government should look at its part in the Cwm Taf maternity crisis.

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Vertonghen head injury: The rules in different sports

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Jan Vertonghen’s head injury has sparked a debate on concussion. How is it handled in other sports?

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Health24.com | Poverty could leave its mark on genes

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Poverty may influence how genes function, researchers report.

Specifically, they found that poverty is associated with levels of DNA methylation – which can shape gene expression – in nearly 10% of genes.

No nature vs. nurture

The findings are significant for a number of reasons, the researchers said.

“First, we have known for a long time that [poverty] is a powerful determinant of health, but the underlying mechanisms through which our bodies ‘remember’ the experiences of poverty are not known,” said study author Thomas McDade. He directs the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

The findings also show that life experiences can shape genetic structure and function.

“There is no nature vs. nurture,” McDade said in a Northwestern news release.

He was surprised to discover so many links between socioeconomic status and DNA methylation across such a large number of genes.

A lasting molecular imprint

“This pattern highlights a potential mechanism through which poverty can have a lasting impact on a wide range of physiological systems and processes,” McDade said.

Further research is needed to determine the health effects of these DNA changes at the genetic sites identified in this study, he said.

Many of the affected genes are associated with processes related to immune responses to infection, skeletal development and development of the nervous system, McDade noted.

“These are the areas we’ll be focusing on to determine if DNA methylation is indeed an important mechanism through which socioeconomic status can leave a lasting molecular imprint on the body, with implications for health later in life,” he said.

The study was published recently in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Image credit: iStock

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Health24.com | Antibiotics: beneficial side effects are starting to come to light

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The discovery of antibiotics in the 1920s has contributed to longer and healthier lives, and they are now being used more widely than ever before. The main reason that antibiotics are prescribed is to kill bacterial infections. They are usually given when someone is already unwell and are taken until the infection is cleared. But, despite being used for decades, we know very little about how antibiotics affect the body beyond destroying bacteria.

Antibiotics use is particularly important in poorer countries, where people die from preventable infections every day. In these countries, antibiotics can be given before people get sick and taken over the long term to prevent illness. Protective doses of antibiotics have been tested for children with HIV, malnutrition and high infection risk with clear health benefits in some conditions and no improvement in others.

At the same time, global overuse of antibiotics is driving antimicrobial resistance, meaning that antibiotics can no longer clear common infections. It leaves us with a dilemma: how do we balance the need to protect vulnerable populations now with the threat of infections becoming harder to treat in the future?

Making better decisions about antibiotic use will rely on a better understanding of what they do. Research shows that some antibiotics do more than just kill bugs – and these “side effects” may have an under-appreciated role in health.

Unexpected benefits

More than six decades ago, researchers first noticed that certain antibiotics had beneficial effects that were not explained by killing bacteria. When one of the first antibiotics, prontosil, was added to blood it made immune cells better at catching bacteria. Mice treated with the antibiotic trimethoprim before a skin transplant kept their new skin for longer than untreated mice and almost as long as mice treated with azathioprine, a drug that suppresses graft rejection by immune cells. These experiments suggest that antibiotics can affect the immune system.

More recently, a review of ten clinical trials of oral antibiotic use showed that antibiotic treatment promoted child growth. We also see this growth benefit in farm animals that have been treated with antibiotics. Growth was not only improved for children with infectious diseases but also those with malnutrition, where an overactive immune system and unhealthy gut also impede healthy growth.

It is not fully understood how these unexpected health benefits work, but they may explain why antibiotics continue to have health benefits despite antimicrobial resistance.

Several mechanisms

Cotrimoxazole is one antibiotic that promotes health and survival, even though many of the bacteria it is used to kill are resistant. Cotrimoxazole is often given to people with HIV. Infections and persistent inflammation (ongoing activation of immune cells) make HIV worse. Our research team set up a study to see if cotrimoxazole could improve the health of HIV-positive children by blocking persistent inflammation.

In a randomised controlled trial in Uganda and Zimbabwe, HIV-positive children who were already taking antiretroviral drugs and cotrimoxazole every day were split into two groups. One group continued taking cotrimoxazole while the other group stopped. Both groups continued to take their antiretroviral drugs to keep the virus under control.

Continuing cotrimoxazole reduced harmful inflammation in the blood and gut. Interestingly, this was not because of lower infectious symptoms or fewer of the bacteria that cotrimoxazole is typically used to kill. Instead, we found that cotrimoxazole reduced inflammation in three new ways. One, it suppressed a group of gut bacteria called viridans group streptococci, which trigger gut inflammation. Two, it directly reduced harmful activation of blood immune cells. And, three, it blocked inflammatory signals from gut cells.

Our study is one example of the many ways that antibiotics can promote health beyond defeating infections.

Harmful side effects

Not all antibiotic side effects are beneficial, though. In the past decade, we have become more aware of the health-promoting characteristics of the microorganisms that live on and in our bodies – the microbiome. For example, a diverse and stable gut microbiome is necessary for digestion and protection against gut infections. Changing the microbiome with antibiotics can be helpful, as we found in HIV, but also harmful.

Research with animals shows that antibiotics increase the risk of weight gain and metabolic syndromes. These effects are most long-lasting when antibiotics are given to young animals, who are still growing and developing.

In cancer, a strong immune response is needed to fight tumours. Removing gut bacteria with antibiotics can prevent this protection.

Since changes to the microbiome can affect brain function, researchers have been looking into potential links between antibiotic treatment and mental health. One study examined medical records from hundreds of thousands of UK patients and found that antibiotic use was associated with a higher risk of developing depression. More research is needed to understand how this happens.

Antibiotic choices

This brings us back to the dilemma of antibiotic use: to treat or not to treat?

For antibiotics such as cotrimoxazole, continued use may be justified by its combined effects on infections and the immune system, which lead to significant health benefits for HIV-positive children in sub-Saharan Africa. Decisions about using other antibiotics more often or for different diseases in poorer countries should take both their benefits and risks into account.

Antibiotic use in animals, cancer and wealthy countries occurs in a very different context. The harmful side effects of antibiotics seen in these studies suggest that we should prescribe them more cautiously.

Not every antibiotic is suited to every situation, but we are only beginning to understand why. To guide better antibiotic choices, we need to look deeper than just their effects on infections that make us sick into the underlying body processes they can change. As antibiotic use continues to expand and change worldwide, its time we understood more fully how they work.The Conversation

Claire D Bourke, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Queen Mary University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Claire D Bourke, Queen Mary University of London

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Health24.com | Surge in US measles cases leads to extraordinary measures

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Quarantines in California. Fines in New York City. Orders for some people to avoid public places in Rockland County, New York.

As an outbreak of measles surges across the United States – with 704 cases this year and counting – some local health officials are trying to deal with contagion in unvaccinated communities by turning to extraordinary police powers from the past.

“Unfortunately, we are revisiting diseases from another generation,” said Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

“And now we are revisiting public health responses from another generation” in instances where vaccination programs have fallen short, he said.

Had been eliminated

Not long ago, measles was thought to be a problem that was mostly solved. The once-common disease became increasingly rare after a vaccine became available in the 1960s. In 2000, health officials declared the disease eliminated in the US, meaning that all new cases stemmed from infected travelers and not from homegrown transmission.

A decade ago, the cases numbered fewer than 100 a year. But they have been jumping since then, with the worst happening right now.

On Monday, US health officials said the national tally already has eclipsed the total for any full year since 1994, when 963 cases were reported.

Twenty-two states have reported cases, but the vast majority have been in New York – mainly in New York City and in nearby Rockland County. Most of the New York cases have been unvaccinated people in Orthodox Jewish communities.

Three-quarters of those who caught the extremely contagious disease are children or teenagers.

No deaths have been reported this year, but 66 patients were hospitalised.

Early warning sign

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says this year’s count includes 44 people who caught the disease while traveling in another country. Some of them triggered US outbreaks, mostly among unvaccinated people. That includes the largest outbreaks in New York.

Measles in most people causes fever, a runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. A very small fraction of those infected can suffer complications such as pneumonia and a dangerous swelling of the brain. According to the CDC, for every 1 000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.

The return of measles may be an early warning sign of a resurgences of other vaccine-preventable diseases such as rubella, chickenpox and bacterial meningitis, some experts say.

In recent decades, health officials have relied on doctors to prod families to vaccinate their children against measles and other diseases. That push has been bolstered by requirements in every state that children be vaccinated to attend public schools.

But as vaccination rates have fallen in some communities and cases exploded, officials recently have taken more dramatic steps. In Rockland County, officials last month banned all unvaccinated children from indoor public places.

Quarantined

In New York City this month, officials ordered mandatory vaccinations in four Brooklyn ZIP codes, threatening possible fines of up to $1 000 for noncompliance. City officials said 57 unvaccinated people have received summonses. The city also has shut down seven religious schools that failed to exclude unvaccinated children, though five were later allowed to reopen after submitting a corrective plan.

Last week in California, more than 1 000 students and staff at two Los Angeles universities were quarantined on campus or sent home after cases began to appear. It was a limited order, and half already are out of quarantine, officials said on Monday.

Dr Umair Shah, the head of Houston’s county health department, said “we don’t know” if these kinds of measures will become more common.

Health officials have had such measures available and have been prepared to use them in case of unusual and even exotic outbreaks – like a new flu pandemic or Ebola – “but here we are implementing them for measles”, he said.

It’s been more than 25 years since those kinds of measures were taken against measles, Schwartz said. The last similar instance occurred during a bad outbreak in Philadelphia in the early 1990s, when the city recorded more than 900 cases, most of them members of two fundamentalist church groups that did not accept vaccination or other kinds of modern medical care.

Sense of anxiety

The use of quarantines and other orders are driven in part by a growing concern that outbreaks of measles and other diseases could get worse, despite the availability of effective vaccines, some health experts said.

“I think there’s a sense of anxiety and even a little panic in the public health community” as officials see high levels of mistrust of government and science from a surprising number of people, said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health law expert.

That anxiety has led to what Gostin believes are missteps by officials.

It’s one thing to isolate someone with measles or to quarantine someone who has been exposed, he said. Those people are infection risks, and short-term limitations of where they can go and who they can meet are legally and medically appropriate, Gostin said.

But it’s another thing to take the kind of step Rockland County initially did, in which unvaccinated kids were placed under house arrest – not because they were infection risks, but because their parents weren’t listening to public health officials, he said.

“That’s overly punitive,” he said.

Recipe for disaster

Indeed, a judge struck down the initial emergency order.

One community had success without taking such measures. Officials in Vancouver, Washington, declared an end Monday to a measles outbreak that began in January but apparently stopped at 71 cases a month ago. It was a much smaller community than New York City or Los Angeles and was tamed by an intense investigation and vaccination campaign that involved 230 health workers tracking down infected people and those they had contact with, at a cost of about $865 000.

Meanwhile, there is a new wave of efforts in state legislatures to end philosophical and religious exemptions to vaccination requirements in schools.

Ed Day, a Republican who is the top elected official in Rockland County, on Monday joined Democratic state lawmakers to urge quick passage of a measure to eliminate religious exemptions for required vaccinations.

“This bill would be a godsend,” Day said at a news conference in Albany. “To wait is a recipe for medical disaster.”

Image credit: Reuters

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Has Leeds cracked the obesity problem?

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The city is being lauded for success in reducing the waistlines of young children. Should others follow its lead?

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Why Would 100+ People Pay $2K to Join Conscious Growth Club?

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For some people it seems unfathomable to invest such an amount on a one-year membership to an online personal growth program. Seriously… you should see some of the reactions people are having to the Facebook and Instagram ads I’ve been running for the past few days to promote the launch. Those ads are actually doing well, and we’ve gained many great members in the past few days, but sharing such an invitation with a wide audience sure does unearth a plethora of limiting beliefs and irrational assumptions. So I’d like to address that since I know the price is a sticking point for many people.

Of course the exterior perspective looking in is often very different than the interior perspective looking out. I actually see my past self in a lot of those limiting beliefs, back when I had no clue about what such groups were really like on the inside.

I’ve personally been a paid member of private groups that range in cost from $2K to $30K per year, and all of them have been worthwhile. The first one I joined was in 2009, and as you might imagine, it was a stretch experience to spend that kind of money. But having done this multiple times now, I always felt like I got my money’s worth and then some.

These experiences helped inspire me to create and launch Conscious Growth Club, which has been going since April 2017. We have more than 100 paying members, so there are indeed plenty of people who like the idea enough to join, more than enough to make the group viable, sustainable, and abundant on the inside. (You can see the current member count at the top of the invitation page if you’d like. It increases whenever someone joins.)

Let me share a bit of the interior perspective, in the simple form of a bullet list. By the time you read to the bottom, you should have a better idea of why people actually do this sort of thing, including me.

Why would 100+ people pay $2K per year to join Conscious Growth Club?

  • For accessible connections with other people willing to do the same (which is an unusual group of people)
  • To immediately immerse yourself in a strong peer group
  • Filling your social circle with smart, fascinating, wickedly creative people
  • For the energy, excitement, and enthusiasm
  • Because it stretches you as a person
  • It changes your self-image, makes you think more is possible
  • Because the payoff from such an investment is worth it, often hugely so
  • Getting results you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten
  • Getting results faster
  • For the increased accountability of putting your money where your mouth is
  • Feeling fully committed to growth and change
  • Feeling certain that you’re going to move forward and make progress
  • To shatter your old limitations
  • It’s highly motivating and stimulating
  • It gets you taking action in a way nothing else will
  • Becoming more ambitious and goal-oriented
  • Feeling compelled to step up to the level of peers you respect and admire
  • Being surrounded by people who take lots of action and getting swept up in their energy
  • Because it will turn out to be one of the best decisions of your life
  • Having tons of fun playfully achieving your goals
  • Channeling your powerful heart energy instead of being stuck in your head
  • Going after bigger goals that you wouldn’t dare to pursue before
  • Having to redefine how you relate to yourself because you’ve blown through so many limitations
  • Because initially you think you can’t afford it, and then you somehow observe yourself joining anyway
  • Because you’re at your best when you do things you don’t feel ready for
  • Because you like speed
  • Because you like pausing now and then to appreciate the opposite of speed
  • Because you want to be fully present
  • Because you realize that this is an invitation from your simulation
  • Because you can’t stop thinking about the possibility
  • Because you want to explore what’s on the other side of “What if?”
  • Because achieving big goals can be so much more fun if you share the journey with good friends
  • Because lots of people have to stretch their possibility space to join, and befriending people who can and will achieve their stretch goals is inspiring
  • Because it upgrades your relationship with reality
  • Because the alternative is to say yes to a limiting belief instead
  • Because you’re done taking the blue pill
  • To keep inviting you to refocus on action steps towards your goals when you might otherwise have a tendency to drift
  • Finally letting that unapologetic genius inside you come out and play
  • Getting more clarity about what you want than you ever had before
  • Seeing your spiritual side being fully expressed into the world
  • Bearing witness to positive ripples you’re creating
  • Feeding and fueling the very best parts of you
  • Surrounding yourself with “Yes, and…” people
  • Enjoying the company of health-conscious friends who don’t need alcohol to socialize playfully
  • Staying consistent as you make progress
  • Getting used to a faster rate of growth and change
  • Future-proofing your career path
  • Feeling that your life is finally aligned
  • Really discovering what your best looks like instead of knowing that you could be doing better
  • Watching your social circle sculpt and chisel you into your best self
  • Observing that you’re finally becoming the powerful person you’ve always dreamed of being
  • Belonging to a caring and generous tribe that supports you in being your best
  • Waking up each morning feeling excited by the progress you’re making
  • Working, living, and connecting in the space of deep meaning
  • Looking back on the past year and thinking, “Wow… how did I do all of that?”
  • Feeling super secure because you always have smart, caring friends who’ve got your back
  • Having smart people you can immediately turn to for help and advice
  • Finding the best creative flow of your life
  • Receiving some of the best invitations of your life, which flow through your frictionless social network
  • Meeting an outstanding relationship partner and falling in love
  • Solving long-term problems you’ve been stuck with for years
  • Actually having those experiences you almost gave up on
  • Having friends who will raise you up
  • Having close friends that you respect, admire, and find inspiring
  • Deeply appreciating what you have
  • Expecting your life to keep getting better year after year
  • Seeing clear evidence that your life really is getting better
  • Leveraging your social abundance to upgrade your financial abundance
  • Easily affording experiences that were previously out of reach
  • Knowing what it feels like to live in abundance
  • Tackling meaningful creative projects and finally getting them done and published
  • Proving your critics wrong and making them lose all their hair and cry
  • Creating a new normal for yourself
  • Because that $2K will soon seem ridiculously small to you

The exterior perspective is that you’d have to be crazy to do this. The interior perspective is that you’d have to be crazy not to. That’s basically why the border is hard to cross. The first time is the hardest, and after that it’s a lot easier because then you know what it’s like.

It’s not the price that matters per se. It’s the value derived from belonging to such a group, and that value can be tremendous.

What’s really interesting is that the objections to being in such a group are usually irrational. They’ll seem like rational objections at first, but it’s really your emotional brain fooling you.

Many people see the investment as an unfathomably big expense, yet they actually could afford it if they wanted to. And even if they couldn’t do so right away, the challenge of coming up with an extra $2K is an interesting one. It’s a solvable problem. It may take some creativity, but even children have been able to solve that type of problem if they’re motivated enough. If a highly motivated child could do it, why not an intelligent adult? In some ways it’s harder for the adult because their mental baggage makes it harder than necessary. It probably won’t surprise you to know that on the inside of such a group, you’ll find a lot of people who are willing to let go of their mental baggage and start blowing past their previous limitations. That’s how they were able to get themselves to join.

I share this from personal experience because I had much the same limiting beliefs about these types of experiences as anyone else. I had my financial comfort zone, and I stayed within its boundaries. But then I started getting some invitations that challenged me to question those boundaries.

People see that price tag as a big, scary risk. It feels unsafe. And yeah, it is a bit of a risk, but there’s an even bigger risk to assess. Considering the full breadth and depth of benefits that can (rather predictably) arise from belonging to a motivated and committed group of people, isn’t it a much bigger long-term risk to never test this? Wouldn’t it be wise to test it at least a few times, just to be sure? That’s how I framed it – what if a group like this is even more amazing and beneficial than I imagine on the inside, and I never allowed myself to have that experience in my entire life? I figured that if I took the risk and it didn’t pan out, oh well, I could always earn more money. It would be a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of my life. But what if it did pan out? What if the potential gain turned out to be one of the best bets and biggest wins of my whole life?

After all, it’s fairly predictable that if you were to join a group like this, you’re going to get lots of value out of it. And that’s because you’ll do your part to make damned well sure that you do. You wouldn’t let yourself waste that kind of money. You’ll push yourself to extract the value, if only because you don’t want to look like an idiot for making a bad decision. So you’re going to do what it takes to get your money’s worth. That’s always been true for me when I’ve joined such groups. I realized that if I’m going to do this, I’d better be all-in with it and do what it takes to extract the value. Otherwise I’m going to look really foolish. Believe it or not, this is actually good motivation for getting the value. We’ll often work harder to avoid looking like a fool than we will to look like a genius. In this case the risk of loss is your friend, as weird as that may seem.

I almost didn’t join an amazing group a few years ago because I thought it wouldn’t be good timing for me. But that was actually another irrational objection, as I soon realized after pondering it more deeply. When I was invited to join, the timing wasn’t great because I had a lot of things going on at the time, but beyond that the timing was actually decent because I could always dive into it when I was ready, and I could still get plenty of value from the one-year membership even if I was only going to get 10-11 months worth. I’m really glad I didn’t miss out on that whole year just because I wasn’t going to be as available for the first month.

When is the timing ever going to feel right when you’re making the decision to create a major discontinuity in your path? Joining a group like this can feel like taking a hard turn – most likely an amazingly beneficial one – but where on your calendar have you made space for such a thing? In other to really think about this rationally, you must recognize and accept that the timing for a decision of this nature is most likely never going to feel like it fits all that well. If it does fit perfectly into your life, that’s unusual. Most people have to do whatever it takes to make it fit, as opposed to having it feel like a natural fit as soon as the invitation comes up.

In terms of making the decision to join Conscious Growth Club, I encourage you to think about the decision rationally, especially when it comes to the cost-benefit calculation. For many people, the price really isn’t such a big deal as they initially make it out to be. It feels like a big deal emotionally at first – I get that – but how does it look when you consider the big picture from a more rational perspective? Is it really such a huge expense relative to the potential gains you’ll invite into your life? Could the value be worth it to you?

That’s how I made the decision to start buying into such groups. Initially my emotional brain exploded with objections, and I almost got stuck there. Then I actually wrote down those objections and began analyzing them with my best logical thinking. I realized that if I was in a group of 100+ people who’d all paid the same amount, it was highly likely I’d get my money’s worth and then some. I knew I’d participate and make an effort, and so would the other members most likely. I knew I’d be in a group of smart people who were willing to risk some cash for the chance to team up and help each other make real progress. We’d all be on the same side, all wanting to help each other get the value we were paying for. We’d be so committed that we’d co-create the experience. Even if the program itself was only so-so, the kinds of motivated people it attracted would step up and help each other get results. The math added up. And really when I joined and reached the other side, my calculations were validated. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that I’d vastly underestimated the full range of benefits. Hence the bullet list I shared above, which covers a lot but not even all of them.

So I encourage you to do the same. This isn’t really an emotional choice. There’s actually a very rational assessment to be made in order to make an intelligent decision. And because of the rationality it takes to join this kind of group, what you’ll find on the inside of such a group are lots of very grounded, rationally minded people. They’re enthusiastic and motivated of course, but they’re also sharp, intelligent, and down-to-earth.

You see… the $2K price for Conscious Growth Club is actually something of a rationality filter. People who can’t get past their emotional blocks aren’t going to join. They’ll get hung up on some reflexive objection like I can’t afford it or it’s not good timing. But those who can calm themselves and look at the big picture are more likely to determine that joining a group like this is a good bet with a positive expected value.

Just look around at other forms of social media these days. Haven’t you noticed that there’s been a brain drain from these services since you first joined them?

I remember when Google+ first launched some years ago. I was an early adopter and signed up right away. I actually liked it because the people I encountered there seemed very bright, especially compared to what I saw on Facebook and Twitter. But the Google+ community gradually died off, and Google finally shut it down. In the rest of the social media world, it’s been feeling like we’re stuck in a race to the bottom. They’re good places for interacting in quantity, but are there lots of quality interactions focused on making real progress towards full self-actualization? Not so much…

More and more, what I’ve found is that the smart, successful, and ambitious people are flowing into paid, private communities to connect with each other away from the constant noise and drama of social media. It’s in these private communities that people genuinely help each other to make intelligent progress. Such communities favor quality over quantity, and this is perhaps the main reason they pay off so well.

I’m not saying there aren’t good free communities out there – we hosted a large one several years ago – but they seem increasingly rare these days. By pushing for quantity over quality, these services just don’t provide very good value for smart, ambitious, growth-oriented people. They’re more likely to distract you from focusing on your goals and making real progress. This is partly why I’ve been seen paid community participation on the rise – and also why I created one.

Conscious Growth Club can’t compete with what Facebook and Instagram provides in terms of quantity, but we can and do absolutely, positively blow them away in terms of quality. Seriously, even our cat pics are better. 😉

When I ask most reasonably intelligent people, “Do you still see yourself being active on Facebook 5 years from now?” I can never seem to get a yes. Well, those who use it for business will often say yes, but not those who use it on the personal side. If you’d rather not be on Facebook for the rest of your life, then what other doors are open to you. I can think of one…

Join us or don’t join us. There are no fence sitters inside the group.

Our enrollment period for 2019 ends at midnight Pacific time on May 1st, so if you’re going to join us, please do so soon. There’s something of a welcoming party for all the new members happening inside the group right now. 🙂

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Genetic testing has a data problem; New software can help

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In recent years, the market for direct-to-consumer genetic testing has exploded. The number of people who used at-home DNA tests more than doubled in 2017, most of them in the U.S. About 1 in 25 American adults now know where their ancestors came from, thanks to companies like AncestryDNA and 23andMe.

As the tests become more popular, these companies are grappling with how to store all the accumulating data and how to process results quickly. A new tool called TeraPCA, created by researchers at Purdue University, is now available to help. The results were published in the journal Bioinformatics.

Despite people’s many physical differences (determined by factors like ethnicity, sex or lineage), any two humans are about 99 percent the same genetically. The most common type of genetic variation, which contribute to the 1% that makes us different, are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”).

SNPs occur nearly once in every 1,000 nucleotides, which means there are about 4 to 5 million SNPs in every person’s genome. That’s a lot of data to keep track of for even one person, but doing the same for thousands or millions of people is a real challenge.

Most studies of population structure in human genetics use a tool called Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which analyzes a huge set of variables and reduces it to a smaller set that still contains most of the same information. The reduced set of variables, known as principal factors, are much easier to analyze and interpret.

Typically, the data to be analyzed is stored in the system memory, but as datasets get bigger, running PCA becomes infeasible due to the computation overhead and researchers need to use external applications. For the largest genetic testing companies, storing data is not only expensive and technologically challenging, but comes with privacy concerns. The companies have a responsibility to protect the extremely detailed and personal health data of thousands of people, and storing it all on their hard drives could make them an attractive target for hackers.

Like other out-of-core algorithms, TeraPCA was designed to process data too large to fit on a computer’s main memory at one time. It makes sense of large datasets by reading small chunks of it at a time.

“In 2017, I met some people from the big genetic testing companies and I asked them what they were doing to run PCA. They were using FlashPCA2, which is the industry standard, but they weren’t happy with how long it was taking,” said Aritra Bose, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Purdue. “To run PCA on the genetic data of a million individuals and as many SNPs with FlashPCA2 would take a couple of days. It can be done with TeraPCA in five or six hours.”

The new program cuts down on time by making approximations of the top principal components. Rounding to three or four decimal places yields results just as accurate as the original numbers would, Bose said.

“People who work in genetics don’t need 16 digits of precision — that won’t help the practitioners,” he said. “They need only three to four. If you can reduce it to that, then you can probably get your results pretty fast.”

Timing for TeraPCA also was improved by making use of several threads of computation, known as “multithreading.” A thread is sort of like a worker on an assembly line; if the process is the manager, the threads are hardworking employees. Those employees rely on the same dataset, but they execute their own stacks.

Today, most universities and large companies have multithreading architectures, but FlashPCA2 doesn’t leverage it. For tasks like analyzing genetic data, Bose thinks that’s a missed opportunity.

“We thought we should build something that leverages the multithreading architecture that exists right now, and our method scales really well,” he said. “TeraPCA scales linearly with the number of threads you have. FlashPCA2 doesn’t do this, which means it would take very long to reach your desired accuracy.”

Compared to FlashPCA2, TeraPCA performs similarly or better on a single thread and significantly better with multithreading, according to the paper. The code is available now on GitHub.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. Vassilis Kalantzis, a Herman H. Goldstine Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM Research, is a co-first author of the paper.

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