At this time of year, our thoughts turn to religion, and in the US, around 80% of adults say they belong to an organized religion. Psychologists, sociologists and neurologists are still trying to figure out why some people are religious, while other people aren’t.
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Why do some of us get fat, while others stay skinny? It turns out that there is "good" fat and "bad" fat, and some of us have inherited too much of the bad (brown) stuff, which is found throughout the interior spaces of humans and other warm-blooded creatures. It may hold the secret to diets and weight-loss programs of the future because, unlike ordinary "white" fat (where the body stores excess calories), brown fat can burn calories to heat up the body. It’s one of the things that helps keep us warm on cold nights.
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It may have been the WEATHER that did them in. Researcher Julien Riel-Salvatore says, "It’s been long believed that Neanderthals were outcompeted by fitter modern humans and they could not adapt. We are changing the main narrative. Neanderthals were just as adaptable and in many ways, simply victims of their own success."
Researcher Michael Barton agrees and says, "Neanderthals could have disappeared NOT because they were somehow less fit than all other hominins who existed during the last glaciation, but because they were as behaviorally sophisticated as modern humans."
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Given the news in this week’s Climate Watch, it seems to us like a good time to provide free for Unknowncountry.com subscribers the classic Coming Global Superstorm read by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell. It is worth noting at this point that, despite the jeering that Whitley and Art took during their author tour in 1999, NOT ONE prediction in Superstorm has been shown to be wrong, and the word ‘superstorm’ has now entered the scientific vocabulary as paleoclimatologists have discovered one situation after another where climate change has been abrupt, violent and long-lasting. As difficult as the future it predicts is, Superstorm is also a story of human strength in the face of great change–and that, also, is part of its predictive value.read more