A winning smile

I've been told I have "resting scowl face."  I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking down the hall in the school and a student has said, "Boy, you look pissed off," or at the very least, "He's on a mission."

It gets worse when I'm concentrating.  My wife has told me that when I'm performing with my band, I have a knitted brow and that my eyes look... "intense."

She always tries to phrase things kindly if she can.

The odd thing is that I honestly enjoy performing, so it's not that I'm having a bad time.  I have a hard time explaining why I do scowl so much of the time, because I'm really not an angry person.

Really.

On the other hand, I just realized I was scowling when I wrote that.

The reason all this comes up is some recent research into the connection between facial expressions and endurance while running. Noah E. Brick, Megan J. McElhinney, and Richard S. Metcalfe, in a paper called "The Effects of Facial Expression and Relaxation Cues on Movement Economy, Physiological, and Perceptual Responses During Running" that appeared in the Journal of the Psychology of Sport and Exercise last month, found that deliberately relaxing your facial muscles and smiling while on a run actually helps you to move with more economy, resulting in less discomfort and an overall improvement in performance.

As a runner, I found this fascinating.  I'm sure, given that I scowl a large percent of the time anyway, that I must look positively furious while I'm running.  I don't have much photographic evidence of that, however, because there's a natural tendency to mug for the camera when you pass a race photographer.  But I honestly can't imagine the smile lasting for much more than a second or two after the shutter clicks.

What is coolest about this is that the researchers didn't just ask runners for their perceptions before and after, they had them breathe through a mask that measured their oxygen uptake (a good measure of the efficiency of your muscles).  They had four groups -- one that maintained a neutral expression, one as genuine a smile as you can muster under those conditions, one that was instructed to scowl, and one that concentrated on relaxing their entire upper body.  (The last-mentioned group was instructed to pretend that "they were holding a crisp with both hands while they were running and trying not to break it.")

Okay, so maybe I don't scowl the whole time.

The results were astonishing.  The smiling group was 2.8% more efficient than the scowling group, and 2.2% better than the neutral group.  (The relaxed group fell in between the two.)  While this may not seem like much of an improvement, it's equivalent to six weeks of consistent jump training (plyometrics).  And, I might add, it's a hell of a lot more pleasant.  The authors write:

The improved RE [respiratory efficiency] is toward the lower end of the 2%–8% reported for short-term training modes (e.g., Moore, 2016) but is greater than the smallest worthwhile change for RE (2.2%–2.6%) suggested by Saunders, Pyne, Telford, and Hawley (2004).  As such, the improved RE can be considered a real and worthwhile change.  Furthermore, the lower VO2 when smiling is equivalent to the 2%–3% improvement noted by Turner, Owings, and Schwane (2003) following six-weeks of plyometric training in distance runners, and the 1.7%–2.1% observed by Barnes et al. (2013) after 13 weeks of heavy resistance training in male cross-country runners.

So I'm gonna try it.  My first race isn't for a couple of months, given that we're still in the third of the seasons in upstate New York's "four-season climate" (the four seasons are: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction) and the roadsides are covered with a nice layer of dirty slush.  But I can always try it while I'm training on the treadmill at the gym, although it might make my gym buddy wonder what's wrong with me.

What I find most fascinating about this is to speculate about the cause.  You have to wonder if it's because our expressions are so tied to our emotions -- that perhaps wearing a scowl puts your body on alert for danger, resulting in a combination of discomfort and an increase in adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol (which would boost the rate at which you burn fuel without necessarily giving you anything back in the form of speed or endurance).  That's all just guesswork, however.

In any case, it's worth a shot.  So if you see a skinny blond guy running down the road in upstate New York wearing a goofy grin, I'm not high, I'm just running an experiment.  Literally.

The Silpho Moor mystery

Pieces of one of the most enduring mysteries in UFO lore have allegedly been discovered in the National Archives of London.

Called the "Silpho Moor Crash," the incident occurred in November of 1957, when two men who were hiking on Silpho Moor in North Yorkshire, England, saw "a red light falling from the sky" and went to investigate, despite the fact that every time someone does this in a science fiction movie, they end up being messily devoured by evil aliens.  Fortunately for the two men, this did not happen.  Instead, they found a saucer-shaped object made of metal, eighteen inches in diameter, which upon opening was found to contain thin copper sheets covered with "unidentifiable hieroglyphics."

The Silpho Moor artifacts, including the "hieroglyphic sheets" (lower right)

The objects were much talked about, and eventually (sources indicate in 1963) they were sent to the London Science Museum for expert analysis.

After that, they were "lost to history."

It's kind of weird how often this happens.  Somebody gets amazing evidence of some hitherto-unproven apparition -- UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, Donald Trump's integrity -- and then after a little bit of buzz and maybe a few blurry photographs, it mysteriously disappears.  The conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows suggestively about this, and say that of course the evidence disappears, because the powers-that-be don't want ordinary slobs like you and me to have proof of any of this stuff.

Why the powers-that-be would care if we proved the existence of alien intelligence (for example), I have no idea.  As far as I've seen, the powers-that-be are much more interested in destroying the evil, cunning environmental scientists' conspiracy to defeat a beleaguered but plucky band of heroic corporate billionaires.  I can't imagine they give a rat's ass whether UFOs exist, except insofar as these would really be undocumented aliens.

Be that as it may, the Silpho Moor artifacts were lost -- until now.  Maybe.  Just last week, some people digging around in the London National Archives found, hiding in an old cigarette tin, some shards that are supposedly from the Silpho Moor Crash.

What seems odd to me is that every photograph from the actual crash shows an intact object that looks like an almost comically stereotypical flying saucer, and everything in this latest discovery is just a bunch of broken-up metal.  I suppose the scientists back in 1963 could have hacked the thing apart, but isn't it funny that there's no record of that?

Anyhow, the objects were discovered by an exhibit developer named Khalil Thirlaway, who brought them to the attention of Dr. David Clarke, a journalism professor at Sheffield Hallam University.

"He [Thirlaway] opened the tin box and took out the pieces, it was an amazing revelation - it had just been sitting there for half a century.  There must be a lot of it still out there, sitting in someone's attic, or maybe these are the last remaining pieces...  I thought it was a prank, but the question remains -- who went to all that trouble at great expense and what did they gain from it?  It has been described several times as Britain's answer to Roswell, and I don't think that's too great an exaggeration."

Well, yes, in the sense that it's a sketchy set of evidence for an incident that no one is sure has anything to do with alien intelligence anyway.  But at least now the fragments are out in the light of day, and with luck some scientists will get involved and analyze them.

Still, I wonder what they'd find that could prove it one way or the other.  Metal fragments are metal fragments, whether they come from outer space or not.  Despite what Geordi LaForge would have you believe, an extraterrestrial spaceship would not be composed of whatsisium and thingamajite, because the periodic table is kind of full-up with elements we already know well.  So I don't see any way to differentiate between an alloy from Earth and one from the Klingon Home World.

But that's something we can worry about later.  At least the objects were relocated.  Myself, I'm all for submitting hard evidence for study, whether or not it turns up anything significant.  Otherwise, you're back at the level of personal anecdote -- which is the worst form of evidence there is.

Saturday science shorts

Because I am totally disheartened by the news, frustrated by the lack of critical thinking everywhere I look, and also because my blender exploded when I was making breakfast this morning and splattered orange juice and half-processed fruit over every square inch of the kitchen including myself, I am retreating to my happy place, namely: cool stuff in science news.

Let's start with a story from astronomy about something that is a near-obsession with me; the possibility of life on other planets.  This particular research involves the star system TRAPPIST-1, discovered last year and found to have not one, not two, but seven planets, three of which are in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone" (where the temperature is juuuuust right for water to be in liquid form).  Of course, that doesn't guarantee that water's there, just that if it was, it would be liquid, which scientists surmise would be a pretty good indicator of the likelihood of the probability of hosting life.

Now, researchers have found that all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets do have water -- in some cases, up to five percent of their mass.  So the three in the habitable zone might well be water-worlds.  All of which reminds me of the planet Kamino from The Phantom Menace, which otherwise was a dreadful movie, but I have to admit reluctantly that this part was cool.

Here's what we know about the TRAPPIST-1 system, although keep in mind that the illustrations of the planets are artists' renditions of what they might look like:

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So that's pretty wicked cool.  The difficulty, of course, is that even if they did host life, it'd be hard to see that if the inhabitants had not advanced technologically to the point that they were sending out signals.  But even that hurdle might not be insurmountable -- as I wrote in a post a couple of weeks ago, astronomers are now trying to figure out if life is present on an exoplanet by the composition of its atmosphere.

Then, from the realm of biology, we have a study elucidating how those tiny jet fighters of the avian world -- hummingbirds -- maneuver as well as they do.

A group led by Roslyn Dakin and Paolo Segre of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute of Ottawa examined hundreds of hours of high-speed video of hummingbirds in flight, looking at twenty-five different species and examining how they do their amazing aerobatics, including pivoting while in flight, hovering, and moving in an arc so narrow that it almost defies belief.  

The research took them to remote places in Panama, Costa Rica, and my favorite country of Ecuador -- the tiny nation that is host to 250 different species of hummingbirds, including the preternaturally beautiful Violet-tailed Sylph (Aglaiocercus coelestis):

Where I live, we have a paltry one species, albeit a beautiful one -- the Ruby-throated Hummingbird.  So it's no wonder the researchers decided to head south.

Another hummingbird researcher, Christopher Clark of the University of California-Riverside, has said that the new study is like moving from analyzing individual gestures of a ballerina to looking at how the moves fit together.  "Now," Clark says, "we're putting together the entire dance."

Last, some scientists at the University of Zurich have for the first time been able to see new neurons being formed in the brains of embryonic mice.  

Starting out by tagging 63 neural stem cells in the hippocampus, Sebastian Jessberger and his team were able to watch as the neurons grew outward and formed connections (synapses) with neighboring neurons.  What was most intriguing was that some of the new neurons had short lives -- perhaps acting as scaffolding for the developing brain and then self-destructing (undergoing apoptosis) when their task was complete.

Amongst these tagged cells, the red ones are the newest, orange next, and continuing through yellow and green (the oldest cells).

What is most exciting about this is that being mammals, it's expected that the knitting together of the embryonic human brain probably proceeds in a very similar fashion.  So what Jessberger et al. are doing might well inform us regarding how our own neural systems form.

So there you have it -- three cool new developments in the world of science.  Which has cheered me up considerably.  That's a good thing, considering the fact that now I have to go clean my kitchen, which I'm definitely not looking forward to.

Not fair

Being fascinated with population genetics and human evolution, I was pretty excited to see that scientists have sequenced the DNA of "Cheddar Man," a 9,000-odd-year-old fossil human skeleton found in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England.  Cheddar Man, as the earliest human fossil from Britain, has been studied extensively, and it's been found that he was probably suffering from an infected wound on his head at the time he died -- but succumbed to a second injury before the infection could kill him.

Just last week, Ian Barnes of the British Natural History Museum released the results of the DNA analysis of Cheddar Man, and amongst the findings of his team were the fascinating results that he had genes coding for dark skin, curly hair, and blue eyes.

A reconstruction of Cheddar Man [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The blue eyes were kind of a surprise to me, as blue eyes are a relatively new innovation.  Research has shown that all blue-eyed individuals descend from a single common ancestor in whom the mutation occurred, somewhere between six and ten thousand years ago.  This is why blue eyes are pretty well limited to people of European descent -- and brown-eyed people are a great deal more common, pretty much everywhere.

Despite the fact that we're talking about England, I wasn't surprised by the dark skin, as fair skin is also thought to be a fairly recent development.  It's connected with the presence of two mutated genes, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, both of which first occurred around eight millennia ago, and which are presumed to have spread in northern latitudes because light skin confers an advantage with regards to vitamin D synthesis.  So it's not to be wondered at that an early human from 9,000 years ago would have dark skin.

But when I read this, I couldn't suppress a wince, and said, "Torrent of racist remarks in 3... 2... 1..."

I wish I could say I was wrong, but there was something of an explosion on social media when Barnes et al.'s results were announced.  I give you below a list as a sampler.  Grammar and spelling is as written, so I don't have to write "sic" five hundred times.

• Bullshit political agenda, if you believe this, you'll believe anything.
• Hello, What a load of bloody bollocks.  Next 'they' will be telling us that Jesus was also 'not white'.  Bloody vegans, feminists and gender neutralists at it again! trying to appease the ethnic minority!
• Yeah its attempt to undermine our identity.  He doesn't look African, if that's what they are implying -- its a European skull shape.  If they would release the DNA data people would be able to make their own conclusions on his skin tone.
• BS.  Just more blackwashing of our history.  My grandad was white and his grandad was white. And that's science fact.  Nuff said.
• It's okay, we don't believe the rubbish scientists' sprout.
• What a load of shit.  Serves a purpose though under current scheme of mass immigration.  Typical mainstream media lies.

All of which made me want to weep softly and pound my head on the desk.

Sure!  Let's not listen to the "rubbish scientists' sprout!"  Let's give these nimrods the actual DNA data so they can "come to their own conclusions," because people who use "my grandad [sic] was white" as proof of a scientific claim are clearly capable of doing a detailed genetic analysis!  Otherwise people will listen to the vegans, and we'll start thinking Jesus was from the Middle East or something!

When I see stuff like this, my first reaction is, "How did we get here?  Aren't we better than this?"  Of course, I know that the great likelihood is that racism overall is far less now than it was even fifty years ago, but the idea that people could freak out to this extent over the fact that one of their ancestors has been shown to have dark skin just appalls me.  It bears mention that the concept of race has little genetic meaning; it's primarily a cultural, not a biological, phenomenon.  (Consider, for example, that a Khoisan and a Bantu, living right next door to each other in South Africa, are more distantly related to each other than a typical Japanese is to a typical Caucasian American -- even though most people would put the Khoisan and the Bantu in the same race -- "Black" -- and consider the Japanese and the Caucasian to be in separate races.)

But people who are committed to the whole concept of racial superiority (whichever race they've decided is superior) are going to have their fragile and counter-factual version of reality shaken by the fact that all humans go back to the same, fairly small, group of people who came out of Africa 60,000 years ago or so.  And they almost certainly had dark skin, brown eyes, and black hair.

If that bothers you, well, tough.  Science is under no compulsion either to comfort you or to reinforce your biases.  Or, as my grandma used to put it:  "You can wish all you like, but wishin' don't make it so."

The IV league

At the risk of beating a dead horse, can I implore you to avoid whatever appears on Gwyneth Paltrow's aptly-named site Goop?

I know we've been here before, and frankly, after the episode of the "psychic vampire repellent" she was selling last fall, I thought I was done with her.  But thanks to a reader of Skeptophilia, I am reluctantly forced back to "Goop" to consider the concept of:

"Holistic IV treatments."

You're probably thinking, "This can't mean what it sounds like."  But yes, sadly, it does.  Unsatisfied by taking dubiously-useful alternative health products by mouth, or even squirting them up your ass with what amounts to a turkey baster, now Gwyneth wants you to hook yourself up to an IV so that these products can be introduced directly into your bloodstream.

Yes, I know that last summer a woman died from the effects of having an extract of turmeric (curcumin) delivered into her vein by an IV, ostensibly to treat her eczema.  Yes, I know that there is a good reason why your average bloke off the street isn't allowed to jab a needle into your circulatory system and inject some random compound.

No, this does not appear to bother Gwyneth.

She tells us about lots of places where we can go to get these "natural alternative" IV treatments for everything from migraines to (I shit you not) hangovers.  Why the better "natural alternative" to hangovers is to stop drinking so damn much alcohol, I don't know.  Be that as it may, we are given a smorgasbord to choose from.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There's the "IV Doc," which has not only "partnered with Goop" but has expanded overseas so "you can now get a refreshment sesh in London or a much-needed hangover fix in Ibiza."  Gwyneth tells us that this one's especially good because it's "managed by physicians," which makes it sound like this is unusual and should put you on notice that the bottom of the barrel here is very, very deep.

Then there's "VIVAMAYR" of London, England and Lake Worth, Australia, which can "reset your digestive system" and also specializes in "oxygen therapy."  "Oxygen therapy," which involves introducing into your body one way or the other a higher concentration of oxygen than you are generally exposed to, is pretty clearly snake oil -- in fact, breathing oxygen-enriched air is, for a healthy individual, fairly dangerous due to oxygen's reactivity with organic materials.  (It is, unsurprisingly, what chemists call a "strong oxidizer," which means that it's good at grabbing electrons away from other molecules -- which in the case of organic compounds, generally makes them fall apart.)

Then there's the amusingly-named "NutriDrip" of New York City, which offers you four different choices of stuff to put in your IV -- under the categories "Immunity," "Toxins," "Beauty," and "Performance."  The word "toxin" immediately sets my teeth on edge, and I challenge you every time you hear someone talk about "detox" or "flushing out toxins" to demand to know one specific toxin that they're referring to.  That's it.  One.  A single compound that your liver and kidneys are incapable of handling, so you need to take purified extract of papaya seeds or some such nonsense to take care of it.

Let me know what they say.

Then there's "IV Vitamin Therapy" of Los Angeles, which not only has various combos of stuff to put into your IV bag, has flat-screen televisions and lots of books to distract you from your infusion of snake oil.   In New York City, however, they have "House Call Aesthetics," which can bring the snake oil right to the comfort of your own home.

There are probably readers who are still on the fence, or who doubt my credentials to make these sorts of criticisms.  As far as the latter, I admit you are right to ask; I'm a biology teacher, not a medical professional.  So perhaps you'll give more weight to Scott Gavura, a pharmacist who has acted as an advisor on new drug development in Ontario, and who wrote the following for the wonderful site Science-based Medicine:

With so many purveyors of vitamin infusions, one would hope the practice was grounded in good science.  But it isn’t, and that shouldn’t be a surprise.  Despite the lack of good evidence, there is a near-obsessive devotion to touting the benefits of intravenous vitamins while railing against the mysterious entities which are blocking The Truth.  But the reality is more mundane.  In the absence of a deficiency, vitamin infusions don’t do much of anything.  To the worried well, intravenous vitamins are going to be a harmless panacea that just succeed in enriching the revenues of the purveyor.

In any case, it's clearly unwise to buy something (literally or figuratively) from someone who has the track record for veracity of Gwyneth Paltrow.  Myself, I'm going to keep taking vitamins the regular way -- from a good diet -- and avoid "Goop's" recommendation to have some random substance injected directly into my bloodstream.  Call me overcautious, but there you are.

Scientific clickbait

I know I've said it before, but I hate the way media represents science (and hooks readers with inaccurate, misleading clickbait titles).

I ran into a good example of this, and saw numerous examples of people coming to the wrong conclusion because of it, in Business Insider a couple of days ago.  The article was called "A Chemical Used to Make McDonald's Fries Could Help Cure Baldness, Japanese Scientists Say," by Rosie Fitzmaurice.  And you'd think people would realize that saying that a chemical in McDonald's fries can help with baldness is not the same as saying eating McDonald's fries cures baldness.

You'd be wrong.  As of this time, I've seen four people crowing about how their diet of Big Macs and large fries is going to make them keep their hair (or grow it back), and one that, no lie, proposed rubbing McDonald's fries on your head.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's worst about all of this is that if you read the actual research, you find out that the chemical in question -- dimethylpolysiloxane -- isn't even what's stimulating the hair growth in the lab mice, it was merely used as an inert matrix in which to grow the stem cells that produced hair follicles.  (If you're curious about how it's ending up in french fries, it's because it's used as an anti-foaming agent in the cooking oil.)

So the article's bad enough, but along with the ridiculous title, it amounts to "How to completely misunderstand some scientific research in under five minutes."  It reminds me of the moronic article that appeared a couple of years ago over at (surprise!) Fox News Online called, "Study Says Smelling Farts Can Be Good for You."

I hope I don't need to tell you that no, that's not what the study found.  If (once again) you go to the actual research, you find out that one of the chemicals in farts (hydrogen sulfide) is also used in vanishingly small amounts as an intercellular chemical signal.  A new drug candidate called AP39 is showing potential therapeutic use because it causes the targeted release of hydrogen sulfide into your mitochondria, showing promise for treating a lot of age-related disorders that are associated with mitochondrial slowdown or malfunction.

In short: you do not experience the same effect if you take a deep breath when your coworker rips a big one.

Last, we have an article that appeared over at CNN this week (although I've read a bit about this research before) with the title, "Hot Tea Linked to Esophageal Cancer in Smokers, Drinkers," which isn't wrong so much as it is misleading.  This makes it sound -- and the article itself does little to correct that impression -- that a guy like me, who often has a beer or glass of wine with dinner, and likes a nice cuppa in the morning -- is boosting my risk of cancer of the esophagus, one of the deadliest of all forms of cancer.

If you're in the same boat, allow me to put your mind at ease.  What the research actually found was that people who drink "burning hot" beverages of any kind, not just tea, run the risk of esophageal cancer, especially when coupled with the esophageal damage caused by two other bad habits, smoking and heavy drinking.  It's been known for years that smoking and heavy alcohol use are the prime risk factors in what's called "Barrett's esophagus," where the esophagus becomes scarred and partially replaced by tissue similar to the stomach lining -- a condition that often presages cancer.  (Other risk factors are severe untreated or intractable reflux disorder, and being overweight.)  So it's unsurprising that if you already have predisposed yourself to esophageal damage by other habits, you're only going to make it worse by gulping down boiling hot liquids.

But that's not what the article implies.  What the article implies is that it's the tea that's the problem.  Which, of course, is much more likely to make people click on the link and give the website ad revenue than if they'd portrayed the findings correctly.

Anyhow.  I know I'm accomplishing nothing by bitching about this (what my dad used to call, appropriately enough, "a fart in a windstorm").  But it's really maddening.  If I can reach a few people, and encourage you to find the original research before you buy what the clickbait headline is telling you, that'll be enough for me.

Now, if y'all will excuse me, I'm gonna have a cup of tea.

Silence is golden

Odd to say, for a veteran high school teacher, but I am not someone who thrives in a noisy, chaotic environment.

I can tolerate it for a while, and then I have a number of (often quite sudden) reactions.  First, I get a jolt of tension, sometimes manifesting as a physically painful clench in my stomach.  Second, I lose the ability to process voices individually -- something that is most striking in a crowded pub, where the voice of the person I'm talking to, sitting right next to, vanishes into a uniform, overwhelming Wall of Sound within which I can distinguish nothing at all.

Third, I feel like running away.

Turns out I'm not alone.  Some studies in the last couple of years have elucidated the restorative role of silence -- something all too few of us get to experience.  At least when I'm done at school, I can go home to my quiet house on a rural road, and immerse myself in something close to complete quiet.  But I can't imagine what it'd be like to live in a big city.

I think I'd go mad, honestly.

A 2013 study by Imke Kirste et al. of the Research Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden, Germany found a neurological underpinning to our desire for silence.  Baby mice exposed to various sorts of noise (music, white noise, the human voice, the vocalizations of other mice) showed, as you would expect, varying responses in terms of growth and interconnectedness of brain cells, levels of stress hormones, and so on.  What was surprising was that the group which was supposed to be the control -- a group of baby mice kept in total silence -- exhibited a statistically significant improvement in growth over any of the others in the number of new neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation.

Silence, by sculptor Alix Marquet (1921) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It doesn't just work with mice.  A study by Arline Bronzaft, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that installing noise-reduction technology in P. S. 93, a public school in the Bronx that was located very close to elevated railroad tracks, resulted in a significant uptick in student reading scores -- and, most tellingly, an equalization of scores in classes on the side of the building facing the tracks with the ones that were further away.

Then there's the study by Allyson Green et al. that appeared in the Journal of Residential and Environmental Public Health in 2015 that went even further, showing that noise was positively correlated with cortisol levels in a gold-mining community in Ghana.  Cortisol is not only a stress hormone, it's a natural anti-inflammatory; repeated long-term exposure to high blood levels of cortisol causes a receptor-weakening effect much like high sugar diet does in type-2 diabetes, with the result that inflammation all over the body increases.  Years of high cortisol levels have been associated with heart disease, ulcers, and arthritis -- so it's hard on you physically, not to mention the obvious psychological toll it takes.

What's most frightening about all of this is how much we've come simply to accept the amount of noise in our lives.  As much as I like listening to music on the radio, sometimes on my way home from work I have to switch it off -- I'm still too overwhelmed by the noise I experienced in the school to subject myself to more sounds (albeit pleasant enough ones) on my drive home.  But I'm struck then by how much noise the tires and engine make.  Even when we think we're in quiet, we seldom actually are -- and we view it as inevitable and unavoidable.

And we're so often unaware of it.  Look at how instantaneously you're aware of it when the power goes out, even in the daytime.  The sudden cessation of the noise of heaters, refrigerators, air conditioners, and so on can be as startling as a thunderclap.

It's getting worse, too.  Studies have concluded that the amount of ambient noise doubles roughly every thirty years -- outstripping population growth.  A 2015 study by Matthew Zawadski, Heather Costigan, and Joshua Smyth of Pennsylvania State University found that test subjects had a lower cortisol spike in their saliva (an indicator of stress) if they had a period of quiet and leisure prior to a high-stress activity (such as giving a speech to an unfriendly audience).  Being around turmoil and noise for extended periods of time leaves us less able to cope with the difficulties, large and small, that we face every day.

Me, I'm all about giving a try to having more silence in my life.  Maybe you'll give it a try, too -- turn off the radio, take out the earbuds, find a way to get out of the chaos of the city for a while.  Let me know what happens -- if the studies are correct, it should do you nothing but good.