"A Good Death"

Shelli Feder

What does compassionate care look like at the end of life? What does it mean to have a “good death” today?

Yale School of Nursing (YSN) Associate Professor Shelli Feder:

What we think is a good death has changed over the decades. There is no single good way of dying. It’s really about what matters most to that person and how they want to die and where they want to die and what they want to do before they die. Part of providing good hospice care is trying our best to make sure that that happens.

One of the most beautiful things about hospice is about reframing end of life and living with a critical or a life-limiting illness. Oftentimes by the time patients get to hospice, which too often is too late, they’re tired. They have been in and out of the hospital; they’ve been stuck a gazillion times for IVs; they’ve undergone tests; and they’re tired of all that intervention and invasiveness. Hospice is an opportunity to sit down and talk about what matters most to you right now. We can’t change the fact that you’re dying. But what we can change is how you’re feeling in this moment. That’s the definition of dying well.

I have come to realize that dying is about letting go, which sounds trite because what is dying but letting go of life? But prior to that final act one has to let go of dreams unfulfilled, wishes for one's children, legacies that won't be completed. Once one releases oneself from those burdens, the feeling can be liberating. Then, perhaps, you are ready to go.

Still Appreciated by Termites, Though

Your humble blogger went to school before mobile phones, before the Internet, even before there were personal computers (I received my MBA in 1975, one year before Apple was incorporated).

Mine was a generation that did all its research in libraries, and index cards were the pathway to getting information. Today most index card drawers are empty--if they haven't been tossed out--but at Yale they have been repurposed:

If you open one of the hundreds of card catalog drawers that line the south side of the Sterling Memorial Library nave, you won’t find any cards; online catalogs have rendered them obsolete.

But you might find a surprise. Over the past few years, students and other visitors to the library have created a tradition of leaving notes in the drawers to be found by others. Some are inspirational (“keep chasing your dreams, but don’t be afraid if the path to your dream changes”) and some are aspirational (“2016. In eight years, I’ll return as a Yale student”), and they are written in many languages. It’s a delightful adaptive reuse: hardware that was once used to organize the search for knowledge now holds the promise of serendipity.

Now if I can just find a use for my slide rule....

Sticky Ivy

Harvard and Yale: joining against a common enemy?

The Trump Administration claims that Harvard University has violated civil rights laws through Harvard's DEI programs and threatens to withhold $9 billion of funding and Harvard's accreditation.

Influential Ivy alumni seem to be supporting Harvard, at least for now.

“You know the world is going crazy when Yale alums are making donations to Harvard!” —Ross Eaton ’03 on the Yale Alumni Facebook group on April 16, shortly after the federal government began freezing grants to Harvard.

Still Second Place

A problem that concerns approximately zero percent of the American population: some Manhattan Ivy League social clubs can't attract new members and are shutting down: [bold added]

New York’s storied Ivy League club circuit dates back to the 19th century. For years, these membership organizations were considered among the most prestigious in the country.

These days, say alumni and former members, the clubs have fallen out of fashion. The venues are victims of dated decor, mediocre food and in some cases lingering dress codes—for most of their histories, these clubs have required men to wear coats and ties—out of step with young alums.

It appears that the Yale Club will do almost anything to stay in business:

The Yale Club changed its admission process to accept members without an affiliation to the university. Most anyone can now apply to the club if she or he has the endorsement of at least two members, according to a club document.

...Still, the clubs have loosened their rules to some degree over the past several years. For decades, dress codes have been a fault line between older and younger alumni. In 1999, the Yale Club became the first of Manhattan’s Ivy clubs to allow casual dress on Friday in an attempt to attract younger members and creatives.

The Yale Club today allows jeans throughout the clubhouse, and the Harvard Club now permits “casual attire”—except in two of its main halls after 5 p.m.

The Harvard Club:  inviting guests is a good way
to let them know you went there.

Harvard has the oldest (1865) and wealthiest social club, and its membership is one of the few that appears to be growing. Yale's social club, as the New Haven university does in other areas of endeavor, is trying to keep up with Harvard's.

Your humble blogger thinks that Yale's strategy of letting anyone in is misguided. If the price of membership growth is the loss of exclusivity, the price is too high.

"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."--Groucho Marx

Anglerfish: Two Become One

Male anglerfish fuses with larger female (scitechdaily)

We can't avoid lingering on the sensational aspect of anglerfish reproduction before getting serious: [bold added]

These anglerfishes, called ceratioids, reproduce through sexual parasitism, in which the tiny males attach to their much larger female counterparts to mate. In some species, the males bite the females and then release once the mating process is complete. In others, the male permanently fuses to the female. In a process called obligate parasitism, the male’s head dissolves into the female and their circulatory systems merge. He transforms into a permanent sperm-producing sexual organ.

The theory is that it is so difficult to find a mate at the bottom of the ocean that the male latches onto the female and becomes a "permanent sperm-producing sexual organ." (Insert jokes here.)

Somehow the female's immune system does not reject the male's foreign tissue, as it would in every other species. Despite her absence of protective "killer T" cells, the female is able to stave off infection by other means. Research into the anglerfish mechanisms could have profound implications for human health, where foreign tissue rejection is a major problem for transplant surgery.

“Better understanding how deep-sea anglerfishes lost adaptive immunity could one day contribute to advances in medical procedures, such as organ transplants and skin grafting, where suppressing immunity is crucially important,” [Yale Professor Thomas Near] said. “It’s an interesting area for future medical research.”

The science is interesting and important, but my takeaway is that the next time your friend says he's lost his mind over a woman, tell him that's nothing compared to the male anglerfish.

No Light and No Truth

When I was here, Frisbees were flying in April, not invective (WSJ)

When college "protestors" call for the extermination of the Jews, I finally saw how the Holocaust could happen. Throughout my high school and college years the Holocaust appeared to be an anomalous event in human history, when a uniquely evil and magnetic demagogue could persuade millions of Germans that all their problems were due to the existence of a specific race of people. That could never happen to us Americans--we could never blame an entire race for our problems, and we had a strong sense of individual morality that would stop us long before such madness took hold.

When I hear the chant, "from the river to the sea" or "death to the Jews," I think of my college roommate--would they kill him, too? He was the first Jewish person I was ever close to, and I admired him. He came from a working-class Midwest background, a graduate of a public school, and was the son of terrific parents who welcomed this nerdy kid from Hawaii to their home over Thanksgiving.

Nearing the end of our college years, when some roommates and I went out partying, he was studying Organic Chemistry--one of the toughest courses in the entire undergraduate curriculum--in order to get into medical school. He passed the MCATs, attended Case Western Reserve Medical School, interned at UCLA, and returned to his hometown where he practices internal medicine to this day.

He was no privileged member of the patriarchy and worked for everything he got. He was certainly no "oppressor" when I knew him, and his lifelong profession belies the notion that he was ever an oppressor lording it over other people in the hierarchy.

Nor would he, as would I, ever call ourselves oppressed. We were just lucky to have gone to a good college, and I, for one, weep for what it has become.

Educators Won't Support the SAT Now that Some Colleges Require It

Last month we posted about how some elite colleges are again mandating that applicants submit scores on standardized tests. Yale Admissions' Jeremiah Quinlan:

students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.

While neither the University of California nor California State University schools require test scores, many California students now want to sit for the Scholastic Aptitude Test because of the requirement from out-of-state colleges. (California private universities, e.g., Stanford and Caltech still don't require the SAT either.)

Fewer students took the now-optional SAT in 2021-2023 (Chron)

When COVID made group testing impracticable, the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities removed the test requirement in 2020. California high schools immediately stopped setting up testing sites. Now that this admissions precondition has partially resumed

Fewer than half of the schools that served as testing centers before the pandemic have returned,

Since many California educators subscribe to the ideology that testing is racist and inequitable, that ideology is probably a factor in their dragging their feet on resuming "School Day" testing, where the test is held at the students' school on a weekday. Some test-takers have to travel out-of-town on weekends in order to sit for the exam, which, of course, adds to the stress and inequity for students who can't afford to do so.

Some high-achieving but underprivileged students want to better their lives by going to and winning scholarships at out-of-state colleges, but educators won't support testing because they think they know what's better for the students than the students themselves.

The rot is pervasive, and it will take years to clean it up if that's even possible.

Life's Purpose: A Psychiatrist Has the Answer

I'm always interested in hearing what people have to say about life's purpose (while noting that a sizeable number who are overwhelmingly atheist assert that life has no purpose).

Yale Associate Professor of Psychiatry Samuel Wilkinson thinks he has found the answer based on his studies of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.

In an interview with Yale News, Wilkinson discusses what inspired his fascination with understanding life’s purpose, how nature instills in humans a “dual potential,” and the evolutionary forces that spur us to be our more altruistic selves.

“When you combine the concept that we are free to choose with the dual potential of human nature, to me this strongly implies that life is a test,” said Wilkinson, who is also director of the Yale Depression Research Program. “The purpose of life is to choose between the good and evil impulses inherent within us.

“This seems to be written into our DNA.”

...I totally acknowledge we have a capacity for selfishness, but in other ways we also have a deep capacity for altruism. In a way that was unexpected to me, evolution has shaped us such that we are pulled in different directions. This is a core example of how nature has left us conflicted, what in the book I call the “dual potential” of human nature.

Prof. Wilkinson has a scientific explanation for the selfish and altruistic duality of human behavior--it's built into our DNA. But I'm still at a loss to see why one is necessarily better than the other, or why life is a "test" to see whether we will choose altruism. Who is the Grader?

Science is excellent at explaining why things work, but it's so far been lacking in determining answers to basic questions, for example, if I died today did my life have value? By the way, by what criteria does one determine that value?

Or maybe I had value because I left children behind. So that's it: propagate the species? If so, individual rats and cockroaches do more for their species than I did for mine. And so on and so forth.

For now I'll search for answers in the writings of philosophers and theologians rather than psychiatrists. One good things about Prof. Wilkinson's attempt is that it prompted me to get cracking on reading Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin while there's still time to do so.

Living Fossils

Alligator gar (Yale News)

No, this isn't a post about politics.

"Living fossils," (Darwin's term) specifically the gars, have little species diversity and have evolved so slowly that their genome is nearly the same as gars during the age of the dinosaurs. Importantly, understanding gars' cellular mechanisms could lead to a cure for cancer (!).

The researchers speculate that gars have an unusually strong DNA repair apparatus, allowing them to correct somatic and germline mutations — alterations to DNA that occur before and after conception — more efficiently than most other vertebrates.

If confirmed, these findings could have profound implications for human health, said [Prof. Thomas J.] Near, the Bingham Oceanographic Curator of Ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

“Most cancers are somatic mutations that represent failures of an individual’s DNA repair mechanisms,” he said. “If further study proves that gar DNA repair mechanisms are extremely efficient, and discovers what makes them so, we could start thinking about potential applications to human health.”

Another Eureka moment in science, this time from a species that is little changed from its ancestors a hundred million years ago.

Seeing the Light

Poor little lambs who have lost their way with social justice,
diversity, equity, and inclusion, Yale may be returning to
its motto light and truth (lux et veritas)

After a four-year hiatus Yale University is again requiring standardized tests on admission applications. [bold added]

After four years with a test-optional policy that allowed applicants to decide whether or not to submit test scores, Yale will resume requiring scores of all applicants. But it will expand the list of tests that fulfill the requirement to include AP and IB exams in addition to the SAT and ACT.

Dean of undergraduate admissions Jeremiah Quinlan:

we found that test scores have continued to predict academic performance in Yale College. Simply put, students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.

A similar study by Dartmouth and Brown also showed that test scores were an accurate predictor of college grades, and that applicants who did not submit test scores performed less well.

It found that students who didn’t submit scores earned college grades equivalent to students who earned a 1307 or an ACT of 28. The average scores at highly selective schools generally top 1500 on the SAT and 34 on the ACT.

Dartmouth and Yale are the two Ivies who reinstated standardized testing this month.

When my high-school class sat for the exams a half-century ago, there was a different, undoubtedly naïve, perspective about testing. We were asked to perform the best that we could, but on the other hand we wanted to go to schools that were the right "fit." For example, I knew that my science and math skills weren't sufficient to do well at MIT or Caltech, regardless of my scores.

There was very little advance preparation. Your humble blogger took the SATs, six Achievement tests, and four Advanced Placement exams. Our teachers told us that we couldn't really prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests--and I didn't know anyone who did--but because the ACH and AP tests were presumably based on subject knowledge, I did spend a few hours reviewing textbooks and lecture notes; unlike students today I didn't take practice tests or six-week prep classes or had a tutor.

I did well enough to get into some good schools and ended up going to one where I was in the middle of the pack. The important take-away was that I didn't encounter anyone who didn't have the smarts to do the work, and that I attribute to the testing screens.

It's comforting to know that Yale and Dartmouth have seen the light. Perhaps others will follow.

Ovarian Tissue Freezing

Oocyte and ovarian tissue cryopreservation (Science Direct)

Most of us have heard about egg retrieval, in which egg cells are extracted from the ovaries. The cells can be fertilized in a lab in the process known as in-vitro fertilization (IVF). They can also be frozen ("oocyte cryopreservation") for future use to extend a woman's childbearing years past menopause.

It now turns out that menopause can be delayed--and fertility retained--through ovarian tissue freezing: [bold added]

[Yale School of Medicine (YSM), Kutluk Oktay, MD, PhD], who developed and performed the world’s first ovarian transplant procedure with cryopreserved tissue for a patient with a medical indication in 1999, sees a future in which healthy women could use this process of freezing tens of thousands of eggs within the ovarian tissue to stave off menopause for as long as several decades—or even prevent its onset altogether.

“For the first time in medical history, we have the ability to potentially delay or eliminate menopause,” said Oktay, who is also an adjunct professor of obstetrics, gynecology & reproductive sciences at YSM.

Deciding how much ovarian tissue to extract and freeze is complicated:

The more tissue a surgeon removes, the longer the procedure can potentially delay menopause. However, the removal of too much tissue can lead to early menopause. “This model gives us the optimum amount of tissue to harvest for a person of a given age,” said Oktay.

In addition to extending fertility, delaying menopause may confer health benefits:

Studies show that women who experience menopause later may live longer and have a lower risk for a range of conditions, including cardiovascular disease, dementia, retinal disease, depression, and bone loss. However, uncertainty remains over whether later menopause actually reduces those health risks. Oktay hypothesizes that those risks also may be mitigated in healthy women who delay menopause via ovarian tissue cryopreservation.

If risk for such chronic diseases is reduced in healthy women who undergo this procedure, it could be a significant benefit. However, Taylor said that “additional research is needed to determine long-term benefits as well as risks.”

Much more work needs to be done to perfect the model calculations and test their applicability to real world decisions. However, it does appear that the technology will soon exist to extend a woman's fertility--and her life span--by decades, with ramifications that are difficult to imagine.

Juneteenth 2023

From the papers of Harlem poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Beinecke Library:

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Now that Juneteenth is a Federal holiday, let's all of us just celebrate it and forget about the political calculations behind it.

Smell Test

Olfactory bulb (Yale School of Medicine image)

One symptom of Parkinson's Disease is the loss of the sense of smell, and Yale researchers may have discovered the connection.

Using buried food tests, the researchers found that the mice with later stage symptoms of Parkinson’s disease exhibited olfactory impairment. They found that those mice with olfactory deficits exhibited severe pathology in projection neurons of the olfactory pathway.

They also found these mice showed reduced neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb. In contrast, studies have shown that healthy aging brains continue to form new neurons in the olfactory bulb throughout life.

The Parkinson's finding on the degradation of olfactory cells may also provide a clue about why some COVID patients experience "brain fog" and the loss of their sense of smell.

Decarbonising the Gut

(Image from katygastro.com)

"Good" gut bacteria can multiply faster by starving them of carbon.

The Yale team...found that the beneficial gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron responded to starvation for carbon — a main building block for all cells — by sequestering a portion of the molecules for an essential transcription factor within a membrane-less compartment...

An awareness of these membrane-less compartments actually goes back a hundred years, [Yale geneticist Eduardo] Groisman said. [Postdoctoral fellow Aimilia] Krypotou’s key insight, he said, was to deduce novel properties for the bacterial transcription factor — termed Rho — based on the extra region. Sequestration of the transcription factor takes place by a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation, a ubiquitous phenomenon present in a wide variety of cells including those of humans.

My college roommates who were going to medical school said that molecular biology was their toughest course, and the preceding paragraph is an example of the concepts they had to deal with. Far be it from this non-STEM major to understand bacterial transcription and membrane-less compartments, but I am able to figure out from the article that if one is starving in general, then one is starving for carbon.

The bottom line is that this research provides yet another reason--gut health--to go on a fasting diet.

“The eyes are truly the window to our souls”

Maybe her eyes can tell us what she's thinking

The nature of consciousness has long been a fundamental question of human existence, and it's no surprise that scientists are employing scientific methods to improve our understanding of the subject.

For example, human beings are not "conscious" when they are asleep, so one criterion of consciousness is that a person must be aware of objects in the person's surroundings: [bold added]

[Researchers] used a combination of artificial intelligence, mathematics, and a close examination of the eye movements of individuals as they were shown images of people’s faces.

As it turns out, they found that important clues are revealed in the eyes. When people were shown clear images, their eye movements showed a distinct pattern that indicates they were aware of their surroundings. However, as the subjects were presented with progressively dimmer images of faces, the pattern of eye movement changed. Tracking these changes, [Yale Prof. Hal] Blumenfeld said, allowed researchers to discern whether the subjects actually perceived the face or not without asking them.

“The eyes are truly the window to our souls,” he said. “We can tell if people are aware of something by simply looking at their eyes.”

The eye-tracking tool allowed researchers to explore the amorphous dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, a state most obvious as we awake from sleep. People become progressively more aware of their surroundings as slumber recedes, a process that is controlled in a region of the brain known as the thalamus.

Ultrasound waves directed at the
thalamus can "jump start" coma
patients (Medindia)

The Yale researchers found that when people awake the thalamus discharges a brief pulse which jumpstarts the transition to consciousness. However, this activity is only a first step in a series of actions throughout the brain that leads to full awareness, they found. For instance, that initial pulse from the thalamus may fail to activate other neural networks, keeping the individual unconscious of most surrounding stimuli. However, the pulse can also activate neurons involved in processing visual cues in the frontal cortex, which in turn amplifies circuits involved in arousal and attention. At the same time, signals irrelevant to the event are turned off.

To those of us who have friends or relatives who regularly experience visual and/or auditory hallucinations, the research into consciousness and awareness can't proceed fast enough.

But for those like your humble blogger, whose brain is healthily grounded in reality (!) and is concerned about scientists being able to read thoughts through eye movements, wearing sunglasses is strongly recommended.

Relevant Article

Deadlines are not friendly to headline writers. Current events can impart unintended meaning and emotions to an unlucky choice of words.

The Yale Alumni Magazine (YAM) cover story is a cheery one.

The women's ice hockey team made it to the NCAA Final Four ("Frozen Four"), where the Bulldogs lost to the eventual champion, Ohio State, 2-1.

Speaking of current events, YAM also has a relevant article on research into the effect of trauma on children's brains.

Children who have endured chronic stress, such as living in a violent neighborhood or within an unstable home life, tend to have thick branches near the brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) and weaker ones near its off switches (the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex). The alarm system blares and there’s nothing to stop it...

(Wiley Online Library)

For children who have endured severe trauma, one option is Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). Dylan Gee is involved in a study designed to assess TF-CBT. Previous studies have shown that it works very well for about half to two-thirds of those who go through it, but less well for others. Her goal is to figure out which children are most likely to benefit from TF-CBT and what might improve the process for those who don’t.

Gee is assessing volunteers, aged 10 to 17, before and after therapy. The theory is that the reason many children show fewer symptoms of trauma after TF-CBT is because the therapy strengthened their regulatory centers. In other words, the children have better control over their brain’s alarm center than they had before.

Children exposed to traumatic events, especially those involving extreme violence, will, of course, need therapy ("TF-CBT").

The Yale study indicates that physical intervention in the development of children's brains at the cellular level is also necessary to right the ship.

Although we are years, if not decades, away from devising the methodology, at least we know the direction in which we're headed.

A Fundamental Principle of Their Own Profession

Starting to get holes, literally and figuratively.

Two years ago the college bookstore sent me the wrong T-shirt, but I decided not to return it. For $20 I got a comfortable cotton shirt, plus people might think I went to a prestigious law school as long as no one asked me any questions about the law.

The institution's star has fallen, so I'm not going to wear the shirt any more.

Progressivism and woke-ism have made inroads ("taken over" would be too strong) into Yale Law School.

David Lat (YLS '99) writes:

in an academic community based on free expression, there are limits to how much [Progressives] can act on the view that their opponents are Bad People. Progressives can’t shut down duly organized events because they disagree with the speakers. They can’t weaponize anti-discrimination policies to punish the protected speech of their opponents. They can’t make up and spread lies about professors with unpopular views (or the students who dare to associate with those professors).

Freedom of speech is not only a bedrock right embedded in the Constitution, it's fundamental to the operation of the legal system. The arguments for opposing sides are accorded a respectful hearing despite the raging emotions that may surround an issue, and one's notion of justice doesn't prevail because of feelings. It's very disappointing that elite law students don't understand a fundamental principle of their own profession.

And I didn't have to go to law school to figure that out.

Almost a Killer App

Krystal Pollitt

The Yale School of Public Health has developed a wearable "Fresh Air Clip" that can detect low concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: [bold added]

“The Fresh Air Clip is a wearable device that can be used to assess exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in the air,” said the clip’s creator Krystal Godri Pollitt, an assistant professor of epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) at YSPH and an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale.

“With this clip we can detect low levels of virus that are well below the estimated SARS-CoV-2 infectious dose,” Godri Pollitt said. “The Fresh Air clip serves to identify exposure events early, alerting people to get tested or quarantine. The clip is intended to help prevent viral spread, which can occur when people do not have this kind of early detection of exposure.”

COVID-19 is primarily transmitted through the inhalation of virus-laden aerosols and respiratory droplets that infected individuals expel by coughing, sneezing, speaking or breathing. Researchers have used active air sampling devices to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 in indoor settings; however, these monitors are typically large, expensive, non-portable, and require electricity. To better understand personal exposures to the virus, Godri Pollitt and her colleagues sought to develop a small, lightweight, inexpensive, and wearable device that doesn’t require a power source. The Fresh Air Clip was the result.

The device captures virus-laden aerosols that deposit on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface. The team tested the air sampler in a rotating drum in which they generated aerosols containing a surrogate virus, a bacteriophage with similar properties to SARS-CoV-2. They detected virus on the PDMS sampler using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) protocol, showing that the device could be used to reliably estimate airborne virus concentrations...

Godri Pollitt said she hopes to make the clips available to the public in the future.

The device has been tested in the field and appears to be reliable.

If it has the features that have been reported--small, lightweight, inexpensive--then the device is a significant weapon against viral transmission. The Clip has to be tested for virus aerosols in "a rotating drum" after possible exposure, so it falls just shy of being a world-changing breakthrough. However, now that we know what the objective is, I am sure that speedy, inexpensive Clip-testing mechanisms are on the drawing board.

Meanwhile, companies that are trying to develop wearable health-related technology should take note: blood-pressure and oxygen content are one thing, but detecting coronavirus in the air will be a killer app.

Dark Beginnings

(Illustration from EarthSky)

One question I have zero expertise in answering:

Black holes and dark matter — are they one and the same? [bold added]

If most of the primordial black holes were “born” [after the Big Bang] at a size roughly 1.4 times the mass of Earth’s sun, they could potentially account for all dark matter, said Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, the paper’s theorist.

Natarajan and her colleagues say their new model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. Also, she said, primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes...

“Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of super-massive black holes,” [Miami physics professor Nico] Cappelluti said.

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infra-red radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. Natarajan and her colleagues said growing, primordial black holes would present “exactly” the same radiation signature.

Best of all, the existence of primordial black holes can be proven — or disproven — in the near future, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope and ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission announced for the 2030s.

Major discoveries are occurring in every field of science at a rapid rate, thanks to the development of tools like the Webb Space Telescope. That's a good reason for us Boomers to stay sentient as long as possible, just to see what happens.

In the Book of Genesis readers rush past the beginning where everything is formless, void, and dark in order to get to the light and the creation of the world. It appears that the study of darkness would be very much worth our while.

Donald Kagan, 1932-2021

Donald Kagan (Yale Daily News photo)

We noted his retirement eight years ago. Donald Kagan, 89, passed away earlier this month.

Kagan, who came to Yale in 1969, was a distinguished scholar of Ancient Greek history. His monumental four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War (1969–1987) was characterized by George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century”....

From his first years at Yale, Kagan was heralded as a dynamic and influential teacher, a galvanizing presence whose lectures on Ancient Greek history, delivered with eloquence, dry wit, and deadpan humor, filled classrooms to overflowing, despite his strict grading policies. The Socratic dialogue of his seminars made entry into one of them a winning lottery ticket for aspirants.

In 1970, without knowing what I was getting into—-how much can one find out from a brochure?—I signed up for Directed Studies, an integrated liberal arts program that immersed freshmen in the Western canon. First year Literature, Art, Philosophy, and European History courses all began with the pre-Socratic Greeks and ended before World War I.

Having joined the faculty the previous year, Donald Kagan already was one of the rock stars of Directed Studies, and his 90-minute lectures were organized, incisive, and chock full of information. (By the way, he had a slight speech impediment that I only mention because he was the first really smart person that I knew who had one.)

Though I eventually majored in Finance in graduate school and received a CPA, 1970-71 was the most intense and interesting educational year I ever had, and Professor Kagan had a lot to do with it.