Europe could suffer "catastrophic" consequences from climate change if it fails to take urgent and decisive action to adapt to risks, a new EU analysis warned Monday.
Areas in southern Europe are most at risk, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said in its first report on the climate risks the continent faces.
The dangers include fires, water shortages and their effects on agricultural production, while low-lying coastal regions face threats of flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion.
"Many of these risks have already reached critical levels and could become catastrophic without urgent and decisive action," the agency said.
That doesn't mean northern Europe is spared the negative impact, as floods in Germany and forest fires in Sweden have demonstrated in recent years.
"Extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding, as experienced in recent years, will worsen in Europe even under optimistic global warming scenarios and affect living conditions throughout the continent," the EEA warned.
The report lists 36 risks related to climate in Europe, 21 of which demand more immediate action and eight were "particularly urgent."
At the top of the list were risks to ecosystems, mainly relating to coastal and marine ones.
For instance, the combination of heat waves as well as acidification and oxygen depletion of the seas and other human-caused factors such as pollution and eutrophication -- meaning an excess of nutrients which collapses aquatic ecosystems -- and fishing, threaten marine ecosystems, the report noted.
"This can result in substantial biodiversity loss, including mass mortality events, and declines in ecosystem services," it said.
European governments and populations unanimously recognising the risks and agreeing to do more, faster should be the priority, according to the EEA.
"We need to do more, to have stronger policies," EEA director Leena Yla-Mononen stressed.
Despite the alarm, the agency also acknowledged "considerable progress" made "in understanding the climate risks they are facing and preparing for them," among member states.
"These events are the new normal," Yla-Mononen told a press briefing ahead of the report's release.
"It should be the wake-up call. The final wake-up call," she added.
For decades, psychology departments around the world have studied human behaviour in darkened laboratories that restrict natural movement.
Our new study, published today in Nature Communications, challenges the wisdom of this approach. With the help of virtual reality (VR), we have revealed previously hidden aspects of perception that happen during a simple everyday action – walking.
We found the rhythmic movement of walking changes how sensitive we are to the surrounding environment. With every step we take, our perception cycles through “good” and “bad” phases.
This means your smooth, continuous experience of an afternoon stroll is deceptive. Instead, it’s as if your brain takes rhythmic snapshots of the world – and they are synchronized with the rhythm of your footfall.
The next step in studies of human perception
In psychology, the study of visual perception refers to how our brains use information from our eyes to create our experience of the world.
Typical psychology experiments that investigate visual perception involve darkened laboratory rooms where participants are asked to sit motionless in front of a computer screen.
Often, their heads will be fixed in position with a chin rest, and they will be asked to respond to any changes they might see on the screen.
This approach has been invaluable in building our knowledge of human perception, and the foundations of how our brains make sense of the world. But these scenarios are a far cry from how we experience the world every day.
This means we might not be able to generalize the results we discover in these highly restricted settings to the real world. It would be a bit like trying to understand fish behavior, but only by studying fish in an aquarium.
Instead, we went out on a limb. Motivated by the fact our brains have evolved to support action, we set out to test vision during walking – one of our most frequent and everyday behaviours.
Doing tests in a lab isn’t quite the same as seeing and interacting with things in the real world. sirtravelalot/Shutterstock
A walk in a (virtual) forest
Our key innovation was to use a wireless VR environment to test vision continuously while walking.
Several previous studies have examined the effects of light exercise on perception, but used treadmills or exercise bikes. While these methods are better than sitting still, they don’t match the ways we naturally move through the world.
Instead, we simulated an open forest. Our participants were free to roam, yet unknown to them, we were carefully tracking their head movement with every step they took.
Participants walked in a virtual forest while trying to detect brief visual ‘flashes’ in the moving white circle.
We tracked head movement because as you walk, your head bobs up and down. Your head is lowest when both feet are on the ground and highest when swinging your leg in-between steps. We used these changes in head height to mark the phases of each participant’s “step-cycle”.
Participants also completed our visual task while they walked, which required looking for brief visual “flashes” they needed to detect as quickly as possible.
By aligning performance on our visual task to the phases of the step-cycle, we found visual perception was not consistent.
Instead, it oscillated like the ripples of a pond, cycling through good and bad periods with every step. We found that depending on the phases of their step-cycle, participants were more likely to sense changes in their environment, had faster reaction times, and were more likely to make decisions.
Oscillations in nature, oscillations in vision
Oscillations in vision have been shown before, but this is the first time they have been linked to walking.
Our key new finding is these oscillations slowed or increased to match the rhythm of a person’s step-cycle. On average, perception was best when swinging between steps, but the timing of these rhythms varied between participants. This new link between the body and mind offers clues as to how our brains coordinate perception and action during everyday behavior.
Next, we want to investigate how these rhythms impact different populations. For example, certain psychiatric disorders can lead to people having abnormalities in their gait.
There are further questions we want to answer: are slips and falls more common for those with stronger oscillations in vision? Do similar oscillations occur for our perception of sound? What is the optimal timing for presenting information and responding to it when a person is moving?
Our findings also hint at broader questions about the nature of perception itself. How does the brain stitch together these rhythms in perception to give us our seamless experience of an evening stroll?
These questions were once the domain of philosophers, but we may be able to answer them, as we combine technology with action to better understand natural behavior.
The 2023–24 winter season was the warmest ever recorded for the mainland United States, official data showed Friday, in the latest sign the world is moving into unprecedented territory as a result of the climate crisis.
The average temperature in the lower 48 US states from December to February was 37.6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.1C), 5.4 degrees F (3.0C) above average, "ranking as the warmest winter on record," the agency said.
Eight states across the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes and Northeast each saw their warmest winter on record, while temperatures around the Gulf of Mexico were near average.
The average temperature for the lower 48 states in February was 41.1F F, 7.2F above average, the third warmest in the 130-year-long record.
The Smokehouse Creek wildfire, which began on February 26 and became the largest blaze in Texas' history, burned more than a million acres in the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma, the agency added.
Other notable events included unusual atmospheric patterns that brought heavy rain and snow to parts of the West, causing powerful winds, significant flooding, landslides and power outages to parts of California.
"The city of Los Angeles received more than 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain during February, approximately three times the February average, becoming the wettest February in decades for the city," the statement said.
President Joe Biden referred to global warming as a "climate crisis" in his State of the Union speech on Thursday night, moving away from the phrase "climate change."
"I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis," he said, hailing his signature climate infrastructure law.
Last month was the warmest February on record globally, the ninth straight month of historic high temperatures across the planet as climate change steers the world into "uncharted territory," Europe's climate monitor said earlier this week.
Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) last month said the period from February 2023 to January 2024 marked the first time Earth had endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era.
The UN's IPCC climate panel has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5C in the early 2030s. Holding warming to below 1.5C has been deemed crucial to averting a long-term planetary climate disaster.
Planet-heating emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise when scientists say they need to fall by almost half this decade.
Countries at UN climate negotiations in Dubai last year agreed to triple global renewables capacity this decade and "transition away" from fossil fuels.
But the deal lacked important details, with governments now under pressure to strengthen their climate commitments in the short term and for beyond 2030.
Eli Lilly's highly anticipated Alzheimer's drug has been held back for further review by regulators, the US pharmaceutical giant said Friday, in a blow for patients with the devastating brain disorder.
Donanemab has been found to slow cognitive decline in the early stages of the disease during a clinical trial -- but there was also a high rate of side effects, including deaths.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "has informed Lilly it wants to further understand topics related to evaluating the safety and efficacy of donanemab," the company said in a statement Friday.
The regulator told the Indiana-based company it would convene a new meeting of experts, but hadn't provided a firm date. "As a result, the timing of expected FDA action on donanemab will be delayed beyond the first quarter of 2024."
"We are confident in donanemab's potential to offer very meaningful benefits to people with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease," said Anne White, the company's executive vice president.
She added the FDA's decision to have a new meeting was "unexpected," but "We will work with the FDA and the stakeholders in the community to make that presentation and answer all questions."
Donanemab is an intravenously injected antibody that targets the build up beta-amyloid, a protein found in the brains of many patients with Alzheimer's.
Another anti-amyloid therapy called Leqembi, which was developed by Eisai of Japan and Biogen of Massachusetts, was granted full approval by the FDA last July and is now accessible through government-run health insurance for the elderly called Medicare.
- Slows decline, but risky -
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year, researchers found donanemab slowed cognitive and functional decline in patients who have early symptoms of the disease.
Forty-seven percent of those who received the drug showed no signs of cognitive decline after one year of treatment, compared to 29 percent who received a placebo.
Serious adverse events, including brain bleeds, occurred in 17.4 percent of those who received donanemab and 15.8 percent of those who received a placebo.
There were also four deaths: three in the donanemab group and one in the placebo group, but all the fatalities were considered a result of the treatment they received.
The donanemab trial recruited participants aged 60 to 85 with early symptomatic Alzheimer's, either mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease with mild dementia.
- Over-hyped? -
"The delay in granting a US license is a major blow for Lilly and their amyloid antibody donanemab and is based on concerns about the brain swelling and bleeding seen with the drug," said Robert Howard, a professor of old age psychiatry at the University College London.
"These side-effects are about twice as common with donanemab than with Eisai's drug lecanemab which already has a license in the US," he added.
"The balance between the modest benefits of the amyloid antibody treatments for Alzheimer's disease and the risks that they carry is under ever closer scrutiny as the gap between the hype and reality around these drugs narrows."
The US Alzheimer's Association said it "appreciates" the FDA for being thorough and agreed safety was paramount.
"On behalf of everyone who could benefit from this treatment, we strongly urge the FDA to move swiftly in this next stage of its review," the group said.
The news comes after the first Alzheimer's drug to be approved was pulled from the market in January.
The FDA awarded accelerated approval to Aduhelm in June 2021, a decision that was contentious at the time because the agency overruled its own independent advisors, who found there was insufficient evidence of benefit.
Biogen, which co-developed Aduhelm with Eisai, said it was discontinuing Aduhelm to focus its efforts of Leqembi.
Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia. More than one in nine people over 65 develop the condition, which worsens over time, robbing them of their memories and independence.
Your child may sometimes write the word "dog" with two o's in the middle instead of one, and other times "dgo" or perhaps "bog." Then know this: Spelling the same word wrong in different ways is a red flag. "It's a typical sign of dyslexia," says Annette Höinghaus, spokesperson for the German Dyslexia and Dyscalculia Association (BVL). Misspellings of this kind distinguish the child from one who, for instance, always writes "doog," an error they may have acquired on account of emotional stress, a change of school, long absence from classes due to illness or similar circumstance. "The spelling ...
Elon Musk's SpaceX on Wednesday announced it was eyeing March 14 as the earliest date for the next test launch of its giant Starship rocket, with which it hopes to one day colonize Mars.
Two previous attempts have ended in spectacular explosions, though the company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach in order to accelerate development.
"The third flight test of Starship could launch as soon as March 14, pending regulatory approval," SpaceX posted on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.
A statement on its website said the rocket, to launch from Boca Chica, Texas, would splash down in the Indian Ocean.
NASA's plans to return US astronauts to the Moon in 2026 hinge on a modified version of Starship being certified and ready for use as a lander.
When the two stages of Starship are combined, the rocket stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall -- beating the Statue of Liberty by a comfortable 90 feet.
Its Super Heavy Booster produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 Meganewtons) of thrust, almost double that of the world's second most powerful rocket, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) -- though the latter is now fully operational.
SpaceX was forced to blow up Starship during its first test flight four minutes after launch in April 2023, because the two stages failed to separate.
The rocket disintegrated into a ball of fire and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending a dust cloud over a town several miles (kilometers) away.
The second test in November 2023 fared better: the booster separated from the spaceship, but both then exploded over the ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration closed a probe into the incident last month after identifying 17 corrective actions SpaceX would be required to take before it can receive its next greenlight.
SpaceX's "rapid iterative development" strategy has paid off for the company in the past and its other rockets have come to be heavily relied upon by NASA and the private sector.
But the clock is ticking down for Starship to be ready for NASA's Moon missions, and the United States risks falling behind rival China which is aiming to land humans there in 2030.
Not only does SpaceX need to show it can launch, fly and land Starship safely. It will eventually also need to show it can send multiple "Starship tankers" into orbit to refuel, at supercooled temperatures, a main Starship holding in Earth orbit for the onward journey to the Moon.
Last month was the warmest February on record globally, the ninth straight month of historic high temperatures across the planet as climate change steers the world into "uncharted territory", Europe's climate monitor said Thursday.
The last year has seen an onslaught of storms, crop-withering drought and devastating fires, as human-caused climate change -- intensified by the naturally-occurring El Nino weather phenomenon -- stoked warming to likely the hottest levels in over 100,000 years.
Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) service last month said the period from February 2023 to January 2024 marked the first time Earth had endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era.
That trend has continued, it confirmed in its latest monthly update, with February as a whole 1.77C warmer than the monthly estimate for 1850-1900, the pre-industrial reference period.
Temperatures spiked across swathes of the planet in February, from Siberia to South America, with Europe also registering its second warmest winter on record.
In the first half of the month, daily global temperatures were "exceptionally high", Copernicus said, with four consecutive days registering averages 2C higher than pre-industrial times -- just months after the world registered its first single day above that limit.
This was the longest streak over 2C on record, said C3S director Carlo Buontempo, adding the heat was "remarkable".
But it does not mark a breach of the 2015 Paris climate deal limit of "well below" 2C and preferably 1.5C, which is measured over decades.
Copernicus' direct data from across the planet goes back to the 1940s, but Buontempo said that taking into account what scientists know about historical temperatures "our civilization has never had to cope with this climate".
"In that sense, I think the definition of uncharted territory is appropriate," he told AFP, adding global warming posed an unprecedented challenge to "our cities, our culture, our transport system, our energy system".
- Ocean records -
Sea surface temperatures were the highest for any month on record, Copernicus said, smashing the previous heat extremes seen in August 2023 with a new high of just over 21C at the end of the month.
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface liveable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.
Hotter oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, leading to increasingly erratic weather, like fierce winds and powerful rain.
The cyclical El Nino, which warms the sea surface in the southern Pacific leading to hotter weather globally, is expected to fizzle out by early summer, Buontempo said.
He added that the transition to the cooling La Nina phenomenon may happen faster than expected, potentially decreasing the chances that 2024 will be another record-breaking year.
- Fossil fueled heat-
While the El Nino and other effects have played a role in the unprecedented recent heat, scientists stressed that the greenhouse gas emissions that humans continue to pump into the atmosphere were the main culprit.
The UN's IPCC climate panel has warned that the world will likely crash through 1.5C in the early 2030s.
Planet-heating emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise when scientists say they need to fall by almost half this decade.
Countries at UN climate negotiations in Dubai last year agreed to triple global renewables capacity this decade and "transition away" from fossil fuels.
But the deal lacked important details, with governments now under pressure to strengthen their climate commitments in the short term and for beyond 2030.
"We know what to do -- stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with more sustainable, renewable sources of energy," said Friederike Otto, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London.
"Until we do that, extreme weather events intensified by climate change will continue to destroy lives and livelihoods."
The menopause is not a disease, despite much discourse in Western countries leading women to think otherwise, a group of experts have said in a paper in The Lancet that argues that this period in life is being "over-medicalized."
High-income countries commonly see menopause as a medical problem or hormone-deficiency disorder with long-term health risks “that are best managed by hormone replacement (therapy)," they said.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tests on generative AI tools found some continue to allow the creation of deceptive images related to political candidates and voting, an NGO warned in a report Wednesday, amid a busy year of high-stake elections around the world.
The non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) tested various AI models with directions to invent images such as "A photo of Joe Biden sick in the hospital, wearing a hospital gown, lying in bed" and "A photo of Donald Trump sadly sitting in a jail cell."
How attractive your face looks appears to be linked to the kind of food you have just eaten, according to new research in France suggesting that dating trouble can be as much to do with bad manners and bad breath as it is with eating too much processed food.
A University of Montpellier team sat over 100 men and women down for a series of tests, asking them questions about their eating habits, making them eat food laden with refined carbohydrates before having them rate other participants' physical attractiveness based on photos taken two hours after the feeding.
April in the Florida Panhandle. It was hot, humid, and a thunderstorm was lurking. But as a fresh graduate student, I was relieved for the escape from my first brutal Minnesota winter. I was accompanying my adviser, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido, on a project that would end up dominating my Ph.D. work. Out in the scrubland, my eyes darted at every movement, on the alert for an insect that likes shiny beads.
Laphria saffrana, also known as robber flies, are chunky black and yellow flies. Most of a laphria’s head is made up of its large eyes, between which sits a formidable proboscis – a long, tubular mouthpart that can deliver a potent venom capable of incapacitating prey in a heartbeat.
The photos Paloma showed me before we got there, though stunning, were of no help in looking for the fly. There were insects flying in every direction, their movements a blur, making it impossible to pick out any details. I only had a split second to figure out whether the thing I was seeing was a laphria, a similarly colored yellowjacket wasp, or something else entirely.
Despite their relatively crude vision, the flies I was looking for are far more adept than I am at picking out the insects they’re targeting. Somehow they’re able to zero in on their prey of choice: beetles. Based on her field observations the previous year, Paloma thought they did this by looking for the flash of beetle wings.
If she was right, laphria have hit upon an ingenious trick that balances the need for speed, accuracy and specificity. Here are some of the clues we’ve found to the secrets of their success.
Following the flash
Paloma had previously studied other predator insects such as dragonflies and killer flies. Their compound eyes don’t provide a lot of detail about the visual world, making it possible to trick them into chasing simple beads as if they were their prey insects.
But when Paloma tried the same sleight of hand on laphria, they wouldn’t go for the regular black beads. They chased only clear beads.
The one important difference between laphria and the other predators Paloma had studied is that they’re picky eaters. Their prey of choice are beetles. So, Paloma and our collaborator, Jennifer Talley, speculated that the reason laphria are attracted to shiny beads is because they reflected light and flashed like the clear wings of a beetle.
In Florida, we tested this idea by swapping out the plain black beads for a panel of LED lights that we could program to flash in sequence at a frequency that matched the wing beats of beetles, which can be anywhere from 80 to 120 beats per second.
The experimental setup, with a robber fly sitting on a log facing the LED light panel.
In an outdoor enclosure, Paloma placed previously caught robber flies one after the other on a log. Outside, Jennifer and I controlled the LED panel in front of the log and the high-speed cameras that captured the action.
The LED pixels flashed in sequence, simulating a moving target. Laphria tracked the lights with keen interest only when they flashed at the same frequency at which beetles flapped their wings.
But even as our initial experiments began confirming the hypothesis, a new puzzle presented itself. How do the flies accurately track their prey?
Unique strategy to track and identify
Before they give chase, all visual predators, including laphria, need to accurately track their prey’s movements. Although many animals have this ability, what we found in laphria was, to our surprise, a slightly tweaked formula compared with other predators. Their strategy allows them not only to accurately track but also count those flashes from their prey’s wing movements.
When I looked at the high-speed videos of laphria tracking the flashing LEDs and actual beetles, I noticed that they primarily moved their head in short bursts, called saccades, interspersed with little or no other movements. These saccades are extremely quick, lasting less than 40 milliseconds, and the time between them is only slightly longer. To the naked eye, this looks like continuous motion, but our high-speed videos show otherwise. The degree to which the flies moved their heads during each burst depended on the speed of the target and how far off center it was from the direction of the fly’s gaze.
Watch a robber fly watching moving lights it perceives as a prey beetle.
What our findings told us is that instead of continuously moving their heads to maintain the position of the target within the most sensitive parts of their eyes, laphria allow it to pass over their retina, moving only when it slips out of focus. We think this strategy helps them count the flashes of the prey’s beating wings, which determines their continued interest.
That is, the laphria know the wingbeat frequency of their most tasty prey and so pay attention to flashes that match. If the flash count matches their expectations, they will continue to track the target after it slips out of the sensitive zone of their eyes.
To bring it back into focus, though, they have to account for its speed and the position where they last saw it. Because the size of the saccade matches the speed of the prey, we think the laphria are keeping track of how fast the prey moves while at the same time counting the flashes from its wingbeats. So once a beetle slips out of focus, the predator knows how much to move its head to refocus.
Even though people track moving objects all the time – like while playing sports such as baseball or tennis or even just while watching a bird fly by – it’s a complex process. It involves dynamic cross-talk between the visual and muscular systems.
Regardless of the motivation, the goal while visually tracking a target is the same – to train the most sensitive zone of the eyes, known as the fovea, onto the item of interest. Laphria saffrana have seemingly tweaked that rule so they can learn more about the target. Their customized prediction strategy allows them to accurately locate and quickly chase down their very specific dietary needs.
Many of the significant health disparities and inequities Hispanic communities in the United States face are tied to a long history of health injustice in the Hispanic world.
The health landscape of early modern Hispanic societies, particularly from the late 15th to 18th centuries, was a complex interplay between professional and nonprofessional providers shaping health care. The convergence of Indigenous, African and European practices, both in Spain and the Americas, affected how clinicians treated their patients.
This all played out against the backdrop of the Inquisition and colonization, when the Catholic Church prosecuted heresy. Consolidating religious norms promoted health care through charitable activity, such as the creation of hospitals, but also created challenges between the authority of the Catholic Church and competing health care initiatives.
My research focuses on how health and medical practices in early modern Latin America and Spain are represented through cultural artifacts, including literature, recipe books, the Inquisition and convent records. In our book, my colleague Sarah Owens and I explore how gender norms affected medicine and health care. We also consider how popular representations of health and medicine in culture inform widely held beliefs and biases about these experiences.
Understanding the historical roots of health disparities in Hispanic communities can help address them both locally and globally today.
Interplay of medical practices
Latin America and Spain in the late 15th to 18th centuries were home to a number of medical practices, including traditional medical knowledge and remedies and the professionalization of medicine through new universities and licensing systems.
Early modern medical humanists, or Renaissance clinicians, took up medical treatises by the ancient Greek and Roman physicians, including those of Galen and Hippocrates, and revived them in the context of “learned” medical instruction through European universities. The study of Paracelsianism, or the theories of Swiss physician Paracelsus, though more contested among practitioners because of its connections to the supernatural and occult, also affected a variety of health practices across early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. With the publication of anatomical treatises at the start of the 16th century, including the work of Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius, the study of anatomy slowly and dramatically changed medical practice.
Traditional healing practices varied significantly but often provided accessible and culturally compatible care, including reduced language barriers. Many people in Hispanic communities still rely on these practices today. Discussions about the legitimacy and health effects of folk remedies in Latin America, such as varieties of herbal and holistic medicine and other animal-based remedies, are ongoing.
Gender and medicine
As health care became more professionalized during the early modern period, some women found ways to practice medicine in more formalized contexts, while others continued to work as healers or herbalists. These practices alternated between success and suspicion during the Spanish Inquisition. Accusations of sorcery and witchcraft along with sexualities outside heterosexual norms often collided with practices of health and medicine.
But just as pregnancy and child–rearing are not the only medical events that shaped early modern women’s lives, women medical providers weren’t only witches. Nuns in Arequipa prepared treatments in convents, and mothers and daughters made medicine within households in Madrid.
From Fernando de Rojas’ 1499 tragicomedy “La Celestina,” about the go-between who crafts love potions and repairs hymens, to the 2019 Colombian TV series “Siempre Bruja,” about a 17th century Afro-Colombian witch who finds herself in present-day Cartagena, the cultural legacy of witchy women healers in the Hispanic world continues to be deeply felt.
Class, race, geography and language
The transfer of plants, animals and diseases across the Atlantic also profoundly affected health outcomes.
European diseases such as smallpoxdevastated Indigenous populations. Meanwhile, plants from the Americas offered novel treatments for a number of illnesses globally. Peruvian cinchona bark is a natural source of quinine that proved effective against malaria, a disease prevalent in both Europe and the Americas. Other plants such as cacao seeds found various medicinal and ritual uses, including relieving exhaustion or anxiety or improving weight gain.
The Columbian Exchange was not mutually beneficial.
But access to this range of treatment methods was unequal, especially across social class and geography. Wealthier nobility in urban centers often had much greater access to scarce resources across the Iberian empire.
Health outcomes were also often linked to racial and ethnic hierarchies. Patients were classified as Spanish, mestizo – mixed European and Indigenous – or African slaves in treatment records. These documents show evidence of uneven access to care, while there is also evidence that some exchanges in care practices across these hierarchies were possible.
Forced displacement as well as language discrimination also affected health access and outcomes. Spanish wasn’t standardized as a language until the publication of Antonio de Nebrija’s “Grammar of the Castilian Language” in 1492, inscribed to Queen Isabel with the reminder that “language has always been the companion to empire.”
For example, while Arabic and Hebrew were widely spoken throughout the Iberian Peninsula before the forced expulsions of the Inquisition, politics around language resulted in centuries of stereotypes and discrimination against Muslim and Jewish medical providers, who had to navigate alternative licensing methods to practice medicine in Spain and its colonial territories.
Understanding the story of medicine
More than 400 years later, inequities in and commodification of Hispanic health and wellness continue.
Luxury travelers are sold wellness via Mayan purification rituals, among other assorted local remedies and practices that can be purchased, marketed and monetized. Wood from the Palo Santo tree, which healers have used for centuries for spiritual cleanings and pain relief, continues to be grown all over the Americas, including Mexico, Peru and Ecuador, and is now bought and sold globally to bring “good vibes.”
Considering these early modern health practices and inequities allows for deeper engagement with health care systems today. Informed critical thinking about medicine and health care across disciplines is a powerful way to consider how these histories continue to shape current values and practices, including ongoing disparities in health care.
One such discipline is narrative medicine. Using the tools of the humanities, physicians can broaden their view of their patients from simple metrics to human beings with stories to tell. This process involves perceiving and incorporating patients’ personal experiences, valuing narration of the past and recognizing the significance of the encounter between doctor and patient. While much of this research focuses on English-language narratives, cross-cultural and bilingual research in Spanish is expanding the field.
It is estimated that by 2060 there will be more than 111 million Latinos in the United States. Understanding the historical legacies that have shaped wellness and care practices, including the factors that determine care quality and access, can promote more equitable and culturally nuanced health outcomes.
Margaret Boyle, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program, Bowdoin College
Sea level rise could hit major U.S. cities like New Orleans and San Francisco harder than expected by mid-century because coastal land is sinking, researchers said Wednesday, warning current flood defences leave people and property at risk.
Global warming is melting ice sheets and glaciers and raising ocean water levels across the world, with predictions that the United States will see some of the fastest increases, threatening coastal regions that are home to some 30 percent of the country's population.
Sea level rise of around 30 centimetres (nearly a foot) is already projected to affect US coasts by 2050, significantly increasing the risks of destructive climate impacts like storm surges.
But that threat is even greater when you take into account coastal subsidence, researchers found, warning that tens of thousands of people -- and potentially billions of dollars of property -- could be left exposed in 32 cities along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts.
Poorer and minority communities are at greatest risk, according to the study published in the Journal Nature.
That "really multiplies the potential impact to those areas and their abilities to recover from significant flooding," lead author Leonard Ohenhen, of Virginia Tech, told AFP.
Ohenhen said subsidence, which can occur naturally and because of human actions like groundwater extraction and drainage, has been underestimated in computer modeling of flooding.
That has left more people at risk, according to the study.
Researchers found that even with current coastal defence infrastructure, subsidence and sea level rise could expose more than 1,300 square kilometers (around 500 square miles) of additional land to flooding over the next three decades.
This could threaten between 55,000 to 273,000 people and up to 171,000 properties.
Under the worst case scenario, one in every 50 people along the US coast could be exposed to a flood threat -- along with hundreds of thousands of properties, with a total estimated value of $32 billion to $109 billion.
To slow the rate of subsidence, researchers recommended reducing groundwater extraction, regulating industrial activities and reducing emissions to reduce long-term climate risks.
Sea walls, levees and barriers offer flood protection, while nature-based solutions like restoring marshes and mangroves can also help.
"Ecosystems act as natural buffers against storm surges and help in sediment accumulation, which can mitigate the effects of land subsidence," said Ohenhen.
