This by Voltaire is often paraphrased as "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Reducing our exposure to and belief in absurdities reduces injustice.

Cats are highly skilled predators with a strong instinct to hunt, even if they are well-fed domestic cats. They have exceptionally fast reaction times, ranging from approximately 20 to 70 ms, significantly faster than humans (around 250 ms).

Mind-blowing news for anyone who exercises: The stress from your workout might be the secret to getting stronger and more energetic with age. Plain, steady aerobic exercise? It helps but has some limitations. Gentle walking or easy cycling? It often fails to fully activate the powerful adaptation your cells need. In lab and human studies, researchers discovered that during higher-intensity efforts, free radicals turn on specific genes that build brand-new mitochondria — the tiny power plants inside every cell that boost endurance and energy. The surprising part? This mitochondrial-building response gets weaker as we age, which means older adults may need those short bursts of higher intensity to get the same payoff. It’s the full “stress-then-adapt” magic that creates stronger, more numerous mitochondria your cells thrive on. A small tweak to your routine (just one or two 15-second all-out bursts during your next walk or workout!) might help keep your cellular engines firing strong well into your later years. Exercise never stops surprising us. Who’s adding a quick high-intensity burst to their workout this week? #Fitness #Mitochondria Reference: Center, C. (2020, April 20). Why High Intensity interval Training Matters As We Age by Dr. Michele Couri, MD, FACOG, ABIHM. Couri Center.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.