Body & Mind – Things Are Good

Babies Make Dads Change

Some researches have been asking a simple question that has led to complex insights: what changes does the male body go through when they have a child? Indeed, there are some physical changes like producing less testosterone and more oxycontin, but it’s what goes on in the mind where researchers are finding the complexity. The fathers with lower testosterone spent more time with their children and the more time that fathers spent with their infants the lower their testosterone became. Fathers experience mental changes during their partner’s pregnancy and even men who just spend a lot of time with babies experience mental changes too.

Saxbe has been investigating whether the consequences of these hormonal shifts leave their marks on dads’ brains. “I thought fathers are actually a very interesting, almost a special population in the sense that they experience the transformations of parenthood without biological pregnancy,” she told me.

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In Father Time, she argues that as humans evolved into more complex societies, it was collective care that made humans flourish. It was valuable to have men that could provide primary care for a baby, and so we developed a capacity to do so – one we still keep.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: Let’s Get Growing!

When times get tough it’s time to get gardening! Actually, even when times are easy it’s time to get gardening. Even a small plot of land can produce a lot of benefit for you, your community, and improve where you live. Historian Dr. Kate Brown recently published a book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City about how little plots of land made bog changes in our modern cities.

After hearing or reading what Dr. Brown has to say I’ll bet you’re going to start plotting out your plot.

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Check out the book here.

A Human on a Bicycle: Incredibly Efficient

Graph showing how efficient a human travelling on a bicycle is, more efficient than a horse

With the recent Israeli and American attack on Iran the price of oil has shot up and shows no signs of going back down. This seems like a good time to remind people that a bicycle is the most efficient form of human-powered transportation. Indeed, the graph above is an update to a popular graph showing efficient transportation, but grouped into the animal kingdoms. Save gas, save money, and get fit by riding a bike this summer.

Travel involves two main expenditures of energy: fighting gravity and propelling yourself forward. Most terrestrial animals must expend energy first to stand up, then to take each step forward. (Longer-legged land creatures tend to be more efficient because they get more distance out of each step, which explains why mice are so inefficient.) Flying animals, though, can move forward cheaply by gliding through the air, carried more by currents than by their own power. Swimming animals can similarly glide through water while letting their natural buoyancy minimize the need to fight gravity.

Smarter Kids Emerge From Montessori Programs

If you’re looking for opinions on education all you need to do is ask parents what they think. If you want actually useful data to plan policy then talk to experts on how children learn. Those experts will all agree that inquiry based learning is the way to go. A recent study confirmed that the inquiry approach is the best way, and that following the tried and true Montessori methods is best for children and even cheaper for society.

By the end of kindergarten, children who won a random lottery to attend public Montessori preschools outperformed their peers in reading, executive function, short-term memory, and social understanding—all while costing approximately $13,000 less per child than traditional preschool programs.

Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data.
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“These findings affirm what Maria Montessori believed over a century ago—that when we trust children to learn with purpose and curiosity, they thrive,” said Angeline Lillard, Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. “Public Montessori programs are not only effective but cost-efficient.”

Forget Cremation, Get Eaten When You Die

hands

You will die. It’ll happen to everyone, yet too often people don’t think about the practical aspects in advance. One often overlooked question is what to do with your body when you’re done with it. In North America popular ways to be rid of one’s body are cremation (which requires oodles of energy and is quite bad for the planet), and displaying the corpse (which is requires oodles of chemicals that are bad for the planet). A safe, clean, and fast way to help bodies decompose is a burial container filled with mushrooms and it’s now available in Canada.

“If you compare it to wood [coffins] or even metal, those things take decades. And here, we’re talking about days or months,” he explained to me from Delft, in the Netherlands. On its website, Loop Biotech claims the coffin adds to the “biodiversity of the soil” around it as it degrades, and Hendrikx says other coffins may also contain chemical additives that could leach into the soil. Hendrikx estimates Loop Biotech has sold more than 2,000 cocoons in Europe, and has just started in North America.
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Valentine, also on the board of the Green Burial Society of Canada, sees natural burials as inclusive of different family rituals and desires, but can be as simple as burying a body in a shroud and ensuring native grasses and plants grow above. What’s more, an environmentally conscious death doesn’t need to be about measuring emissions.