Its pretty much a given that teenagerseat junk food as oftenas they can. And, while junk binging isa normal habit for most teens, new research finds thatwhat kids eat can have a lasting impact on their brains well into adulthood.

For a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers raised mice on a balanced diet up until their teenage years, when some of the miceswitched to a diet that wasnt so balanced and some kept on with their perfectly balanced menu. Theteen mice who werefed a poorly rounded diet consumed food that lackedomega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids brain-boosting nutrients that are notproduced inthe human (or mouse) body butare easily found in fatty fish, walnuts, soybeans, and spinach.

The researchers found that the mice that ate baddiets as teenagers had lowered levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in several parts of their brains as adults; including the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. The mice who had stayed on balanced diets, had none of these deficits. In addition, thebrains of the mice that had been fed a poor diet had difficulty fine-tuning connections between neurons in those regions of the brain; the mice who had remained on a healthy, balanced diet did not.

As a result, the mice on the bad diet had increased anxiety-like behavior as adults, and performed worse on memory tasks than their healthy-eating counterparts.

Of course, thisstudy was conducted on mice not humans and more research needs to be done before scientists can definitively say that eating a poor diet as a teenager makes you more likely to have problems with your behavior and memory down the road. But many studies of human behavior are originally tested on mice, so this might not be too far afield. Additionally, whether or not this study shows a direct corollary to human behavior there is no doubt that what you eat can have an impact on your brain. Doctor Santosh Kesari, MD, PhD, a neurologist and neuro-oncologist and Chair of the Department of Translational Neuro-Oncology and Neurotherapeutics at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint Johns Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. who did not participate in the study, upheld this assertion telling Yahoo Beauty.

The brain is constantly developing and new connections are being made, he says. Whether youre young, old, or in adolescence, what you eat can have an impact on neurological issues such as anxiety.

The studys researchers didnt investigate whether a poor diet as a teenager has reversible effects on an adult brain, but Kesari suspects that making healthier dietary choices in adulthood could help. Poor diet can have a long-lasting effect if you dont fix the underlying issue of the diet, he says.

Thats why he recommends having omega-3 fatty acids at all stages of life, as well as eating a healthy, well-rounded diet that includes lipids (organic compounds found in olive oil, among other things) and carbohydrates.

The studys findings dont mean that everyone who ate a poor diet as a teenager is bound for issues with anxiety and memory it just may raise your risk. I suspect some people are more prone than others to developing these issues, Kesari says.

He stresses the importance of eating well for your brain and overall health: We dont pay much attention to diet and healthcare, but this highlights how diet can have significant effects on neurological health and prevent a lot of medical issues in the future.

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What You Ate as a Teenager Could Impact Your Brain Now - Yahoo Health

A slater-like crustacean that lives in the sand on Aucklands Piha beach has provided new evidence that animals have biological clocks influenced by the tide as well as the more familiar circadian clock that follows the day/night cycle and regulates human behavior.

While the molecular mechanism of the circadian clock in humans is well known, including its location in the human brain and the genes involved, the mechanisms of other biological clocks are not.

Many animals are known to have extra biological clocks that regulate feeding or reproduction according to the tide or lunar cycle, but scientists have been unsure of how they work, particularly over longer periods.

Senior lecturer James Cheeseman from the faculty of medical and health sciences, and Mike Walker from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland carried out a study of Scyphax ornatus, a nocturnal sand-burrowing isopod that feeds on the plant and animal detritus that is moved up the beach by the incoming tide.

Leaving their burrows only at night, the animals need to maximize the amount of time for feeding before the tide comes in. In the wild, they appear able to follow a semilunar or approximately fortnightly feeding cycle, meaning something other than the circadian clock must be regulating their behavior.

Taking the animals from Piha into the laboratory, the study used artificially manipulated light and tidal cycles to test several hypotheses for the mechanism of the semilunar clock that controls their behavior.

The study found the animals followed internal biological clocks even when deprived of external stimuli.

What we have found is that, in the laboratory, with light and tide cycles artificially manipulated, these animals follow the same rules of behavior as they would in the wild, says Cheeseman. So we can very accurately change the semilunar rhythm by changing the perceived length of the day and tidal cycles.

That tells us their semilunar or fortnightly behavior continues to be regulated by the interaction of circatidal and circadian clocks even where there is either no external stimuli or they are in an environment with artificial light cycles or tidal cycles.

Walker said circalunar and circatidal behavior in animals was well known by early Maori who followed a fishing and planting calendar over the circalunar cycle.

The study is published in Scientific Reports.

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Animal Behavior Regulated by Interaction of Tidal, Circadian Clocks - Laboratory Equipment

★★

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. Mara Irene Forns wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Though she was a leader of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, the Southland knows her better from her establishing role in the also legendary Padua Hills Playwrights group and festival.

Now, her 1985 play, The Conduct of Life, is getting an airing at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles. In part because of her importance to theater but also for what the play still says about humanity, this highly stylized, challenging, disturbing work is well worth viewing.

It consists of a plotless series of scenes, many of them soliloquies or duologues, telling and not showing. It pulls from mismatched theatrical styles, the most easily recognizable of which is absurdism. It has no protagonist, no ones journey we wish to join in on. It ends in gunfire.

And yet, as a whole, it effectively and efficiently makes its points in a mere 60-minute running time, with a theatrical depth and richness not always achieved by plays with plots and standard exposition.

In what can be gleaned of story, we learn that military officer Orlando (Nick Caballero) interrogates and tortures captives in an unnamed, presumably Latin American, nation. His goal is maximum power.

He seeks that, too, in his relationships at home. His wife, Leticia (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), knows shes in a loveless marriage. But uneducated, though bright and articulate, she needs marriage to survive.

In a presumably secret room in Leticia and Orlandos home, he repeatedly rapes a child, formerly homeless and orphaned, now imprisoned there, though the play keeps us guessing, until the end, whether this is real or his fantasy.

Visiting the home, Alejo (Jonathan Medina), symbolizing passivity, cant stop himself from admiring Orlando. The sometimes-stuttering maid Olimpia (Elisa Bocanegra) disdains her employers. But she, too, cant walk away from her job (the time frame of this work seems ambiguous, though the dial telephone gives us an approximate era).

The child, Nena (Antonia Cruz-Kent), is last to speak, revealing her horrific childhood and her coping mechanisms. Likewise, the visual focus ultimately turns to Nena. Its director Jos Luis Valenzuelas statement that our actions leave the next generation to cope with the results.

Forns themes are status, gender, class, education and, in particular, how we blame others for what ails us and how our deepest misery shows up as violence, which becomes contagious.

Valenzuela makes visual and even more visceral the potent script. His actors, even working in various styles throughout the play, make their every moment believable, a pure reflection of human behavior.

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Symbolically, Franois-Pierre Coutures pristine all-white set design belies the messiness of the characters lives. It also serves as a canvas for Johnny Garofalos highly saturated lighting design that changes with the intensity of the scene.

John Zalewskis superb sound design underscores the scripts brutality, notably in the sounds almost cruel intrusions on our hearing and heartbeats, but also in the juxtaposition of classical music to the inhumaneness of words and actions here.

Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Rating: 4 stars

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

Continued here:
'Conduct of Life,' at LA's Rosenthal Theater, shrewdly examines human cruelty - San Bernardino County Sun

Theres a world of intriguing ideas in these new nonfiction books from five Bay Area authors. From Robert M. Sapolskys deep study of human behavior, to Steve Casners users guide to preventing injury and in between, Mugambi Jouets study of American exceptionalism, Adam Lashinskys look at the inner workings of Uber, and Jo Piazzas worldwide survey of women in their first year of marriage readers will find much to consider and perhaps put into practice in their daily lives.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky (Penguin, $35, 800 pages)

It cant be easy to define and describe the scope of human behavior, but MacArthur Fellow Robert Sapolsky, a San Francisco resident and a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explores the subject with passion, insight and wide-ranging vision. In 17 chapters, he examines the connection between emotion, aggression and empathy, considers the power of symbols and explains what childhood adversity does to our DNA, why nature and nurture are inseparable and how our brains divide the world into Us and Them. Its a big, sprawling mess of a subject, he admits, but Sapolsky makes the discussion fascinating and often very funny. Behave is brilliant and unusual a big book about science that offers hope for human nature.

Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other by Mugambi Jouet (University of California Press, $29.95, 368 pages) Mugambi Jouet, who teaches at Stanford Law School, takes a long look at the notion of American exceptionalism in this thought-provoking new book. Jouet was raised in Paris by a French mother and a Kenyan father, and he tackles his subject with a multicultural point of view, considering anti-intellectualism, fundamentalism, sex and gender roles and the politics of mass incarceration. The book takes the reader right up to the present; Jouet finished writing it just after the 2016 presidential election.

Wild Ride: Inside Ubers Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky (Portfolio/Penguin, $28, 228 pages) Recent news that Uber, facing claims of harassment, discrimination and inappropriate behavior, had fired 20 of its employees probably didnt surprise author Adam Lashinsky. An assistant managing editor at Fortune, Lashinskys been looking at the embattled $70 billion ride-sharing company for several years. In this revealing new book, he traces many of Ubers problems to its controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick, whom the author calls insensitive to customer concerns and indifferent to the plight of Uber drivers. Lashinsky briefly worked as a driver for the company getting the job required no test, no interview, no nothing, he writes and he sums up the experience in a few words: The pay stinks, and the work is difficult.

How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents about Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage by Jo Piazza (Harmony, $26, 304 pages) San Francisco travel editor Jo Piazza admits that life after marriage wasnt easy for her. As a single woman, shed been well-adjusted, with great friends and work she loved. Once she tied the knot, though, she just wasnt sure how well it was working. She began to feel a strange melancholy and wondered if other recently married women felt the same way. So for the next year, she asked them; along with her husband, Nick, she traveled to 20 countries on five continents and talked to women about their marriages. What she learned makes How to Be Married a practical and surprisingly helpful how-to.

Careful: A Users Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds by Steve Casner (Riverhead, $26, 336 pages) How careful are you? According to Steve Casner, a research psychologist who studies the accident-prone mind, modern life is driving the rate of injuries and fatalities sky-high. The San Francisco-based author lays out the science of safety, and offers practical techniques for thinking ahead, staying focused, and preventing accidents at home, at work, and on the road.

Read the rest here:
Books by the Bay: Robert Sapolsky's 'Behave' offers hope for human nature - The Mercury News

June 16, 2017 11:30 PM

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) Weve all seen reports about protests that spin dangerously out of control, it could happen anywhere.

Would you know what to do if you were caught in the middle? CBS2s Jessica Moore has some information that could save your life in the impulse reaction.

The protesters surged forward, the police pushed back, I got hit by a baton, CBS2s Dick Brennan recalled.

Brennan was reporting from the center of Occupy Wall Street protests that turned violent.

I remember having my hands over my head, someone stepping on me and thinking this is a really bad situation, he said.

What if you could predict how someone might react in a volatile situation, or even teach them how to stay safe?

Thats the concept behind Riot, a one of a kind interactive film.

It was created and designed by Karen Palmer. She said she was inspired by the events in Ferguson.

I wanted to create an experience that will show somebody how they would actually really respond in a conflict situation. I started thinking thats AI, thats facial recognition, she said.

While watching, a webcam tracks expressions using a complex series of algorithms. It can register calm, anger, or fear.

I was distracted by the person right in front of me, and that could have led to my demise, Moore said.

The viewers reactions determine the outcome.

It responds in real time to emotions, so the narrative will change depending on your emotional reaction, Palmer explained.

Hawk Newsome, founder of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, said hes seen situations change in a flash.

People see video on the news, but they dont experience. This is the closest that anyone can come to being on the front line, he said, You can feel it, something is going to happen.

He agrees a calm response can be most effective.

There may be pushing, there may be shoving, but stand your ground, be calm, and well get through this, he said.

Retired NYPD detective Joe Giacalone said having an understanding of how participants might react can also affect police response.

They can have it stream live into a temporary headquarters vehicle near the scene, and then be able to dictate what personnel needs to move at what location, he said.

Palmer said shes heard from some police departments and organized protest groups about her film and the findings to see how it might be helpful to both of these organizations in the future.

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'Riot' The Film Seeks To Predict Human Behavior In Volatile Situations - CBS New York

Just a few years ago, the world was abuzz with the potential that beacon technology offered to reshape the retail industry. Now, several years on, there are even more technologies that offer similar promise. Beacons represent an important source of data regarding in-store customer movement, but the emergence of other sophisticated data collection technologies has added to the potential for understanding human behavior in the real world. To that end, what companies really need now is a solution that allows them to understand the fragmented data sets and their sources -- whether its beacons, sensors, or GPS -- and get a better sense of the bigger picture.

People spend an average of 5 hours a day on their phones. That sounds like a lot, but what happens in those other 19 hours? People have lives outside of their phones. The problem for marketers, then, is how to access that information to better understand how people behave in the real world, and then integrate that with what they already know about their online persona. At the moment, there are bits and pieces of data everywhere -- some proximity data here, some geodata there -- but otherwise, there are so many fragmented data sources that each tell a tiny piece of the story of a consumers offline activity. Moreover, the initial promise that beacons held to completely revitalize brick-and-mortar businesses and drastically increase in-store attribution has taken longer to materialize than expected.

Beacons were implemented so that retailers and other businesses could tell where a customer was at any given point, and allow businesses to send out targeted messages to phones that have activated a beacon. Businesses were quick to adopt this new technology, including Macys, Lord & Taylors, Major League Baseball, and American Airlines. However, there are still blank spots on the canvas. The real world is fluid, made up of many different behaviors and movements -- there is no one magic solution.

The information gleaned from one data source alone is not enough to get a complete view into peoples behavior or motivations. That said, proximity and location data have tremendous potential for filling in the blank spots on the canvas when used strategically. For the proximity industry alone, weve seen companies double down on their investments, validating the demand for technologies that provide a clearer understanding of how people behave in the real world.

Having a strong understanding of the various technologies on the market has also helped us determine that the efficacy of this data and technology depends on what goals companies wish to achieve. Deterministic methodologies used by beacon and Wifi technology can pinpoint almost exactly where someone was at any given point -- where they were in a store, for example, or even what floor they were on. Probabilistic technologies, such as GPS and geodata, on the other hand, provide massive scale as well as an overarching idea of people's movements in less densely-populated spaces.

In order for companies to understand a consumers offline behavior as accurately as they understand their online activity, they first need to stitch these different data sources together as they apply to their specific goals. That being said, there are over 400 proximity service providers (PSPs) alone, and thousands of GPS sources and geo-enabled apps -- just getting access to the data requires forming partnerships with each of those entities individually.

The Real World Graph

Unacast built the Real World Graph to provide a solution to that problem. Unacast has created a platform of proximity and location providers to paint a clear picture of how people move in the real world. Just as Google has indexed online behavior and Facebook has created the Social Graph, The Real World Graph provides a place where multiple data sets and technologies are collected and harmonized, all while ensuring individual privacy is respected. Our meticulous methodologies filter for quality to provide transparency, and highlight strategic data that can be used to marry online profiles with real world behaviors. Different data sources tell different stories, and The Real World Graph goes beyond the boundaries of industry to bring those stories together.

The mission at Unacast is to provide the technology and tools that will help data-driven industries understand the physical world the same way we understand the online world. Not only is this vital for the evolution of retail, advertising and other consumer-centric industries, but it can also significantly affect the evolution of e-commerce, financial technology, real estate, and health technology, among other industries.

Data from sensors, beacons, proximity data, GPS, NFC all tell an individual piece of a users behavior in the real world. But combined, the different data sources can tell the most in-depth, accurate story about what people are doing in the real world, and thats what matters most.

Thomas Walle, CEO & Co-founder, Unacast.

Email: hello@unacast.com

Web:unacast.com

Twitter:@unacast

Read the original:
Understanding human behavior through the power of data - The Drum

Greenberg a treasure

Many years ago, when Paul Greenberg was with Pine Bluff's then-daily newspaper, I received a handwritten note from him stating that he enjoyed my letter to the editor that had recently been published. It doesn't get any better than that, a note from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author saying that he enjoyed something that I had written.

Prior to Mr. Greenberg's semi-retirement at the Democrat-Gazette, he wrote about items of interest that needed to be written. Now he writes about subjects that he just enjoys writing about. Now that I think about it, he is still writing articles that need to be written. Long live Paul Greenberg!

Now if I could just remember where I stashed that note for safekeeping.

FLOYD FRY

Star City

Our behavior up to us

Re Al Case's letter: First, I had to locate Onia. A beautiful part of Arkansas indeed, but I did not see his glass house on Google Maps.

I would like to suggest that he plow a couple of rows with the rest of us. When I was about 20 years old, I announced to my father that organized religion was the cause of the worst tragedies in human history. I remember he opened his mouth, the paused to look at me, and seeing a closed mind, closed his mouth and walked away. I smiled and nodded my head, confident that I had won. What we both knew as we continued the conversation 20 years later was that God does not necessarily do or condone everything done in his name. I had come to know that human behavior is (barring medical reasons) up to each human.

I do not propose to try to convince Case of God's existence. That is his decision and it does not affect mine. However, please do not use a sweeping generalization as I did at 20. The Ten Commandments, regardless of whether you believe they came from God, extraterrestrials, or were just a grain from Moses' cultivated mind, are the basis of living peacefully with your fellow human beings. They do not make you complacent or dull. Quite the contrary. They demand that you hold yourself to very high standards of respect for yourself and for others, and that you be a kind, generous and respectful good citizen.

Neither do I say he is entirely wrong. Swindlers and greed of all kinds are rife among us, and common courtesy seems to have been abandoned for screaming or shooting at those with whom we disagree. But I beg that he keep seeking good people with which to associate. They are out there, and as he grows in understanding, he might just find that most of them admit to belonging to an organized religion.

CAROL MOSELEY

Mabelvale

Different life and day

Glen Campbell could not have paid a higher tribute to Arkansas farm families than the song "Arkansas Farmboy" on his latest album. As he sings, you can feel his memory of growing up on a Pike County farm. And you, the listener, cannot help but remember your days on the farm.

Thanks, Glen Campbell, for reminding us of a different life and a different day.

JAMES B. DAVIS

Hot Springs

Amazing statement

In the High Profile story about Chad Hunter Griffin, Griffin made this statement about homosexuals: "They're second-class citizens, and they're judged and they're attacked because of who they are, because of how God made them."

This statement is amazing in light of the fact that three of the major religions in the world (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that homosexuality is an "abomination" to God as a perversion of his image. I am aware there are some among these groups that want to reform their traditional views and accept homosexuality as inborn rather than learned behavior. Yet all three of the named religions base their beliefs on what they consider divine revelation, which is not subject to human alteration.

There are many changes taking place in the world that lie within the permissive will of God, but not his purposive will. Yet God has not changed nor does he compromise his eternal word. I am a Christian who has no desire to see homosexuals persecuted or mistreated in any way, and will defend them from such abuse. I believe that God loves the sinner, but abhors sin. I have served as the pastor for homosexuals as well as for others whose lifestyle was condemned in the Bible. I loved these whom I served in behalf of God as I loved all in my congregations.

Hate and oppression have no place in the heart of a person who truly knows God. But God, who is the very essence of love, never refrained from condemning what he deemed to be sinful, but acted in that love to forgive the sinner and make him to again reflect his own image in which he created him. I regard myself as a sinner who has been saved by God's grace! This is sincerely shared without ill will.

DENNIS M. DODSON

Monticello

On promoting causes

Your statement of core values doesn't mention promoting particular social causes. However, in the last two years you have printed many articles that appear to be promoting lifestyles that were once identified as alternate lifestyles, LGBT. The feature on Mr. Chad Griffin was filled with references to his advocacy of those suffering because of their lifestyles. This is a polarizing subject. Why would you choose to alienate those who disagree with those embracing LGBT?

I'd like to make a suggestion. Please find other areas of advocacy to promote. Can you find people feeding thousands of hungry children in Arkansas? Or maybe there are people that are helping wounded warriors with visible and hidden disabilities due to their military service. Perhaps firemen, policemen, teachers, or medical personnel are giving extraordinary service in seriously adverse conditions.

Please give LGBT a rest. Readers have many choices of sources for news and other stories of interest. Continuing to subscribe to your publication is in question for those disagreeing with continued promotion of the LGBT lifestyle. The Bible has specific teachings about LGBT. I choose to follow those guidelines.

KAY HICKS

Little Rock

Editorial on 06/17/2017

Read the original:
Letters - Arkansas Online

Every year, over2 million people take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which assigns each test taker a 4-letter personality type basedon a combination of fourbinary choices: extraversion/introversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling, and perceiving/judging.

For many of those people, MBTI is more than a personality test: it's a way of understanding themselves. And the influence of the test has even spread to the workplace, with80% of Fortune 100 companies claiming to rely upon the test for hiring and team building.But whilesuchtests arewildly popular, they aren'texactly clinical.

Most personality tests are novelties. Even the gold standard MBTIcreatedby a housewife and her daughter in 1943is largely ignored by the field of psychology.

Personality testing is an industry the way astrology or dream analysis is an industry: slippery, often underground, hard to monitor or measure, Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Cult of Personality, wrote for NPR. Human beings are far too complex, too mysterious and too interesting to be defined by the banal categories of personality tests. And in addition to dismissing human nuance, personality tests dont take into account scientific studies about human behavior. As industrial psychologist Tom Skibatold ATTN:,In the last 50 years, there has been a bevy of research in personality psychology, behavioral genetics, and neuroscience that have enabled psychologists to create accurate, insightful, and useful tools to assess personality." He added,The problem is that Myers-Briggs and other tools do not leverage this research."

Relying on these non-scientific tests can be problematic, particularlyin the workplace.Making personnel decisions solely based on labeling a persons psychological type is unfair,"Skiba said.Personality tests can be very blunt instruments, more like a cleaver than a paring knife. The shorter the test, the blunter the results have to be, placing people into broad either/or categories. Where is the nuance?"

AsIlina E. Strauss told The Atlantic, Stereotyping people using the test seems risky at best and harmful at worst. In particular, screening potential employees through the MBTIis probably a mistake, since theres no proof that you can link MBTI to how effective people will be at their jobs.

In addition to limiting employee success and creating unfair measures in the hiring process, putting too much weighton personality tests can also cause interpersonal issues. Psychologist Joel Mindentold ATTN: thatrelying too much on personality test resultscan negatively impact relationshipswhen a person rigidly refuses to adapt to situations because "that's just their personality."

"For example, someone with a high score of introversion mightput up a fight if a relationship partner wants to go to a party, and someone with a high scoreon a measure of conscientiousness might plan excessively and resist a partner's effortsto be spontaneous," he said.

So while they're not inherently harmful, issues arise when personality test results are seen as a sort of destiny.

"Can a right-handed boxer learn how to be a southpaw? Can an introvert deliver a political speech?" Skibaasked, and added,"One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that broad personality traits mean that someone is incapable of learning something outside of their comfort zone."

Read the rest here:
How Personality Tests Get It Wrong - ATTN:

The grasslands of the Great Plains have seen one of the sharpest increases in large and dangerous wildfires in the past three decades, with their numbers more than tripling between 1985 and 2014, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the average number of large Great Plains wildfires each year grew from 33 to 117 over that time period, even as the area of land burned in these wildfires increased by 400 percent.

This is undocumented and unexpected for this region, said Victoria Donovan, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Most studies do document these shifts in large wildfires in forested areas, and this is one of the first that documents a shift, at this scale, in an area characterized as a grassland.

Donovan published the study with two university colleagues. The research looked at large wildfires, defined as fires about 1,000 acres or more in size.

In other parts of the globe, such as Africas savannas, grassland fires are extremely common and that used to be true for the Great Plains as well. But in the past century or more, Donovan said, wildfire suppression techniques such as rapidly catching fires and putting them out had largely eradicated them from the region.

However, theyve begun to come back, a trend that has been consistent not only with climate change but also an incursion of more invasive plant species that could be providing additional fuel, Donovan said. However, the study merely documented the trend toward increased large wildfires without formally attributing its cause.

The year 2011 saw a particularly large surge of Great Plains wildfires, which accounted for half of the total acreage burned in the United States that year.

By specific region, some of the largest wildfire increases occurred in the Cross Timbers region of Texas and Oklahoma (which saw a 2,200 percent increase in the total area burned), the Edwards Plateau of Texas (a 3,300 percent increase), and the Central Irregular Plains, encompassing parts of Iowa and northern Missouri, as well as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma (1,400 percent increase).

Guido van der Werf, a scientist at VU Amsterdam who studies global forest fires and was not involved with the current study, said it was difficult to attribute causes behind the recent uptick in burning.

These grassland fires are somewhat different than the forest fires we are probably more used to, and follow-up research is needed to better understand what the drivers of the upward trends were, he said by email. Agricultural abandonment could be one, wetter conditions later in the record another one (leading to higher and more continuous fuel beds), climate change leading to warmer temperatures, etc.

Max Moritz, a wildfire researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who also was not involved in the study, said the new results are consistent with other work. But he added that he suspects they reflect not so much human-caused climate change but rather changing human behavior.

In particular, he cited a study from earlier this year led by Jennifer Balch of the University of Colorado at Boulder that found that humans were overwhelmingly responsible for lighting U.S. wildfires over the past 20 years (presumably, mostly by accident).

That study shows the Great Plains to have increasing patterns of both lightning- and human-caused fires over this period; yet the vast majority here are caused by humans, he wrote in an email. This suggests that the trends in question may largely be due to shifts in the amount, type, and timing of human activities.

For some time, wildfire researchers have worried about the growth of what they call the wildland-urban interface, in which more and more people are living in proximity to areas conducive to burning.

Here is the original post:
UNL researchers find 400 percent spike in wildfire destruction in Great Plains - Omaha World-Herald

★★

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. Mara Irene Forns wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Though she was a leader of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, the Southland knows her better from her establishing role in the also legendary Padua Hills Playwrights group and festival.

Now, her 1985 play, The Conduct of Life, is getting an airing at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles. In part because of her importance to theater but also for what the play still says about humanity, this highly stylized, challenging, disturbing work is well worth viewing.

It consists of a plotless series of scenes, many of them soliloquies or duologues, telling and not showing. It pulls from mismatched theatrical styles, the most easily recognizable of which is absurdism. It has no protagonist, no ones journey we wish to join in on. It ends in gunfire.

And yet, as a whole, it effectively and efficiently makes its points in a mere 60-minute running time, with a theatrical depth and richness not always achieved by plays with plots and standard exposition.

In what can be gleaned of story, we learn that military officer Orlando (Nick Caballero) interrogates and tortures captives in an unnamed, presumably Latin American, nation. His goal is maximum power.

He seeks that, too, in his relationships at home. His wife, Leticia (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), knows shes in a loveless marriage. But uneducated, though bright and articulate, she needs marriage to survive.

In a presumably secret room in Leticia and Orlandos home, he repeatedly rapes a child, formerly homeless and orphaned, now imprisoned there, though the play keeps us guessing, until the end, whether this is real or his fantasy.

Visiting the home, Alejo (Jonathan Medina), symbolizing passivity, cant stop himself from admiring Orlando. The sometimes-stuttering maid Olimpia (Elisa Bocanegra) disdains her employers. But she, too, cant walk away from her job (the time frame of this work seems ambiguous, though the dial telephone gives us an approximate era).

The child, Nena (Antonia Cruz-Kent), is last to speak, revealing her horrific childhood and her coping mechanisms. Likewise, the visual focus ultimately turns to Nena. Its director Jos Luis Valenzuelas statement that our actions leave the next generation to cope with the results.

Forns themes are status, gender, class, education and, in particular, how we blame others for what ails us and how our deepest misery shows up as violence, which becomes contagious.

Valenzuela makes visual and even more visceral the potent script. His actors, even working in various styles throughout the play, make their every moment believable, a pure reflection of human behavior.

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Symbolically, Franois-Pierre Coutures pristine all-white set design belies the messiness of the characters lives. It also serves as a canvas for Johnny Garofalos highly saturated lighting design that changes with the intensity of the scene.

John Zalewskis superb sound design underscores the scripts brutality, notably in the sounds almost cruel intrusions on our hearing and heartbeats, but also in the juxtaposition of classical music to the inhumaneness of words and actions here.

Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Rating: 4 stars

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

The rest is here:
'Conduct of Life,' at LA's Rosenthal Theater, shrewdly examines human cruelty - LA Daily News