You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

What causes your brain to switch from the quiet focus needed to read (or write) these words to the frantic, goggle-eyed arousal needed to confront a frothing dog or rabid boss?

That hyper condition, popularly called the fight-or-flight response, is a hormonally inflicted surge of stress that puts all systems on alert, raises the heart rate and blood pressure, and shifts blood from the gut to the muscles.

This is not when you want to be translating Latin or solving equations, but fight-or-flight certainly fulfills its evolutionary role of allowing the body and brain to survive threatening circumstances.

After the transition, the brain regulates attention differently: A person studying Japanese woodcuts is unlikely to notice someone prowling on the other side of the art library. A person cranked up on stress hormones is unlikely to miss the lurker.

Neuroscientists long ago fingered two “stress” hormones — cortisol and noradrenaline — as playing key roles in fight-or-flight and today, a study in Science helps confirm that noradrenaline, not cortisol, triggers the transition to a different level of attention. “Many people thought cortisol would have an effect on the attention process in the early phase, but our study shows cortisol probably is not as important” as noradrenaline, says first author Erno Hermans, of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Holland.

Putting the stress on stress

Image: Irréversible

According to some film critics, Irréversible was one of the most disturbing films of 2002. No wonder it stressed-out the study subjects!

To study the mental effects of stress, Hermans and colleagues put 80 subjects in a magnetic resonance imager and tracked the usage of oxygen in the brain to show which structures were active at any moment. Then the subjects watched parts of a French movie containing what Hermans calls “particularly horrific” scenes of violence.

The scans revealed changes in what’s called the salience network, which “is active in a general state of hyper-arousal, vigilance,” Hermans says. “It scans the environment for things that might be important, and allows you to redirect your attention.” The result is not just a change of focus, “but a switch to a state where a change of your focus becomes more likely.”

To confirm that the violent movie clip was triggering the stress response, the researchers measured heart rate and chemicals in the saliva.

Counting on cortisol

Long-term stress can lead to many problems, including the disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and cortisol, which makes memories more vivid and plays a major role in the constant arousal and intrusive memories of PTSD, has long been considered a major player in stress in general.

“Stress research in humans has been very focused on cortisol for very good reason,” says Hermans, “as it’s linked to a number of very important features of stress in the body and also in the brain.”

In a second phase of the experiment, Hermans and his colleagues used drugs to block either cortisol or noradrenaline. Blocking cortisol did not prevent the changes in brain networks, but blocking noradrenaline did. “Because blocking noradrenaline results in a reduction in the salience network, this shows that noradrenaline is important for this reorganization of the brain,” Hermans says.

Courtesy Erno Hermans

This animation shows which areas of the brain are switched on by a stressful situation.

Stress or distress?

The new study helps explain our world, says Christopher Coe, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in cortisol and stress. “As we all have subjectively experienced, a fearful stimulus can exert a galvanizing influence on us. It can reorient our attention and, when sufficiently provocative, make us feel more alert, energized and focused. This change in state is facilitated by the type of coordinated brain reaction described in this Science paper. We and our brains are mobilized in order to better analyze the situation, to quickly interpret and utilize incoming information … and to respond adaptively.”

Coe adds that although “it is reasonable to conclude” that cortisol is not initiating the change in salience, “nevertheless, because of cortisol’s widespread effects and potency, if its release into the blood stream is sustained, it may ultimately exert a more protracted effect on both the brain and other physiological functions.”

Changes in the mode of attention are a fact of life, Hermans says. “We are really selective about accepting information while doing a focused task,” but a threat “requires a switch so your brain can respond to significant things in the surroundings. The brain becomes more responsive to stimuli, the eyes are wide open, the pupils become larger, everything is focused on having more sensory intake.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Twelve years on, and another billion people are sharing the planet.

Starting half a century ago, the Green Revolution doubled or tripled production of the major grains, using modern seeds, heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation. The revolution helped India and China to feed themselves and averted widespread starvation.

Today, an estimated billion people go to bed hungry. Hundreds of millions are stunted by poor nutrition. And by 2025 another billion people will want to know what’s for dinner…

What to do?

After World War II, agronomist Norman Borlaug played a role in founding international farm research stations that invented and distributed seeds and technologies to Latin America and Asia, with a focus on the big three crops: rice, wheat and corn (maize).

The green revolution that resulted gave a dramatic boost to farm production. But population continues to rise, and funding for food projects tapered off after the initial gains were realized.

The green revolution averted massive starvation “in some situations, but in others, especially Africa, it failed terribly,” says James Lassoie, a professor of natural resources at Cornell University, and leader of Agriculture Bridge, which attempts to harmonize agriculture with conservation.

Small could be beautiful

As the green-revolution research organizations continue working on high-yield crops, a newer approach to raising food production is emerging that concentrates on methods and technologies that can be built and maintained locally.

For reasons related to economics, environment, and efficient technology transfer, the new projects have steered away from large-scale provision of food, equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and toward social and environmental goals. Many projects work in Africa, where food and population problems are most acute, and with women, who do most of the farming.

Although few would discount the role of high-yield seeds in feeding seven billion, “Economic development needs to support both environmental protection and livelihoods,” Lassoie says. “Technologies are not going to help if they don’t also deal with the social and political dynamics.”

Our look at a few of these projects only offer an educated scanning of the horizon. We neither visited these projects nor possess a crystal ball, and so can neither vouch for their results nor predict the end game. But farmers are smart people who gravitate to things that work — if they fit the local culture, economy and environment.

Enough introductory blather. Let’s take a look!

Progress on one acre in Kenya and Rwanda

Africa’s agriculture is dominated by “small-holders,” people who work an acre or two, mainly with family labor, and are an increasing focus of attention in the effort to feed ourselves.

Services are loans, not gifts, and as is common with micro-lenders, borrowers join small groups that guarantee each loan. One Acre says 99 percent of its loans are repaid.

The fund’s advisors offer farming advice during weekly visits that emphasize profitability as much as productivity. For example, because prices are usually lowest during the harvest, the advisors suggest that farmers hold on to their crops for a few months.

One Acre says its growing and marketing strategies double the average farmer’s income, allowing small-holders to pay school fees and buy land to improve family income and food security. One Acre is reaching 55,000 families in Kenya and Rwanda, and aims to enroll 150,000 families by 2013.

Fish, water and wetland in Uganda

The realization that healthy ecosystems improve water quality and store carbon from the atmosphere has spawned a system called “payment for ecosystem services.” After all, if people downstream are getting clean water or hydroelectric power from a well-forested watershed, that should be worth paying for…

It’s a simple concept that conceals any number of complexities, but these payments do bring in outside money that can support environmental improvements.

In densely populated southwestern Uganda, the organization Nature Harness Initiatives is combining payment for ecosystem services with collaborative management to protect the environment of a wetland in the Kanyabaha-Rushebeya region.

The wetland provides fish for food, bees for honey, and fiber for thatch, mats and baskets, but farming and deforestation by people trying to make a living are causing serious soil erosion, harming the wetland and its many human and non-human residents.

Although baseline data on water quality is short, Nature Harness is convinced that it’s program works, and can be expanded to regions with similar problems.

Growing new farmers in Uganda

In Uganda – and elsewhere — farming is often seen as an occupation best suited to school dropouts and people who cannot afford college. Could interesting the younger generation of Ugandans in growing vegetables reverse this trend?

Through the Project for Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, more than 1,100 children in at least 31 schools have transformed schoolyards into gardens as they learn to grow local crops with traditional and environmentally-minded methods.

Project DISC was inaugurated in 2006 to combat rising food shortages and preserve Uganda’s culinary traditions. By allowing children to experience growing, tasting and cooking fruits and vegetables, it is cultivating a generation that values agriculture and quality, local food.

(The whole setup reminds us of the U.S. urban farming movement.)

The farming lessons includes methods for sustainably growing crops in Uganda’s increasingly hostile climate, as the children learn about raised gardens, drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops.

Project DISC does face obstacles, such as Uganda’s staggering population growth and declining soil fertility. All the more reason to encourage young Ugandans to see agriculture as a respectable livelihood, rather than a last-resort job.

Community grazing rights in Mongolia

In land-locked Mongolia, 2.7 million people coexist with about 10 times as many horses, cattle, sheep, goats and camels. The people of Mongolia have followed their animals for centuries, living a nomadic life in portable shelters called gers.

This windy, dry and cold land exists at the mercy of the weather; the harsh winter of 2010 killed 20 percent of the country’s livestock. Meanwhile, overgrazing is promoting erosion and making the pastures less productive, while the Gobi Desert encroaches from the South.

It’s a classic case of the “Tragedy of the commons,” the idea that resources owned by all are protected by none.

To avert tragedy, Mongolia is experimenting with “co-management,” a system for making joint decisions about the grasslands to maximize benefits and prevent long-term degradation. In co-management, groups of herders contract with the government to assume the regulation and protection of tracts of land. Contracts are adapted as needed during annual renegotiations.

The result has been a reduction in herd size and an attempt to breed better animals to maximize profits from a resources that is now managed with an eye to community prosperity. Evaluations say the process is raising family incomes by 5 to 10 percent annually, and the idea is catching on elsewhere in Mongolia and Central Asia.

Banking on the harvest in Niger

In many lands with poor people and marginal agriculture, the months before harvest are called the “hunger season.” In Niger, in the dry Sahel region just south of the Sahara Desert, the hunger season has been exacerbated by droughts and locusts.

Niger is second to last in the United Nations Human Development Index.

Micro-lending is catching on as a way to fight poverty, but there’s a twist in Niger: Instead of lending money, the Project for the Promotion of Local Initiative for Development in Aguie lends grain through “soudure” (pre-harvest) banks.

The cooperative buys grain from local farmers, and lends it when needed at 25 percent interest, a fraction of what moneylenders charge.

By the middle of 2010, about 168 soudure banks, managed by over 50,000 women, were storing enough millet – a local staple grain — to feed 350,000 people for at least a month. That storehouse helped villagers survive the hunger season (see #38) during the spike in global food prices in 2008.

Beating hillside erosion in Yunnan, China

After a devastating flood in 1998 in Southwest China (blamed largely on deforestation of steep slopes), a new reforestation project focused on planting trees that generate income. (Reforestation projects can drive farmers and herders from their land by planting trees that may offer long-term environmental advantages but do not provide income to local people.)

The World Agroforestry Center has sponsored a different approach to reforestation on a 42-square-kilometer watershed in Yunnan Province. The project began with a collaborative design process that focused on using trees for food, forage or other purposes.

Walnut trees provide edible nuts. Beneath the trees, medicinal herbs are planted as a cash crop. Women may spend four hours a day collecting firewood, but new fermentation devices transform pig dung into biogas for cooking.

Although the project is said to be working on the small scale, and is producing enough income so parents can send kinds to school, these techniques will only provide a meaningful benefit once they are applied more broadly.

WFARM-TV in Benin

Rice, a staple crop and food through much of southern Asia and tropical Africa, is usually grown on small farms. To stimulate and propagate farmer creativity, Africa Rice develops short videos with significant input from local farmers, and distributes them across the rice-growing region.

Farmers are inherently interested in the ideas of other farmers, and seeing their innovations legitimizes farmer experiments and leads to further improvements.

The 10- to 20-minute videos cover such topics as preparing land, transplanting seedlings, managing weeds and harvesting the rice. AfricaRice distributes the videos through farmer associations; the farmers line up the video equipment and stage the screenings, which are often held outdoors.

By 2009, 11 videos were available to communities in Africa; some have been translated into more than 30 African languages and/or been transcribed for radio broadcast.

– David J. Tenenbaum

Poke deep inside an insect cell, and you may be in for a shock. At least we were startled to learn that bacteria live inside many insects, including the fruit fly, one of the workhorses of biology.

Photo: Biodiversity Institute of Ontario

The star of the study, Drosophila mauritiana.

Today, we hear how bacteria of the genus Wolbachia boost egg production in certain fruit flies. The mechanism, says Horacio Frydman, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University, involves a two-step: first the fly makes more egg cells, and then it blocks a process that would normally prune away extra eggs.

Insects, like other animals, are frequently “married” to bacteria in a relationship that benefits one or both parties. This is common: Bacteria in the cow’s rumen break down cellulose eaten by the cow. Bacteria in the human gut form vitamin K, necessary for blood clotting.

And bacteria in aphids synthesize essential amino acids that the aphids cannot make by themselves.
Wolbachia are not essential to the fruit flies, but their presence can quadruple egg production.

Speeding breeding

Producing four times as many offspring “is a powerful driver of infection,” Frydman says. “Wolbachia manipulate their host reproduction to favor their own spread in nature,” noting that in less than 20 years after Wolbachia was detected in fruit flies in southern California, the infection had spread as far as Canada. “It’s considered one of the largest pandemics in the recent evolution of life. Because Wolbachia influence their host reproduction, they also impact the evolutionary history of innumerable hosts.”

Wolbachia have been linked with a wide variety of effects in the insect realm. Wolbachia “lives in at least 20 percent of the world’s arthropods, including insects, spiders, mites, and crustaceans,” according to the Wolbachia project, making them an active area of investigation.

How could this symbiosis work to increase the number of offspring?

Using sophisticated microscopy, Frydman, Ph.D. student Eva Fast and colleagues tracked the location of Wolbachia in fruit flies. In D. mauritiana, a species native to the Mauritius Islands in the Indian Ocean, the bacteria congregate in the germline stem cell niche — a structure that supports stem cells that develop into eggs. In D. melanogaster, the bacteria accumulate in the niche that harbors a different type of stem cell, which produces the eggshell.

In the germline stem cell niche, the bacteria actually outnumber mitochondria, organelles involved in making energy for the fly.

Having the bacteria in the germline stem cell niche doubled the rate of division among those stem cells. Further investigation showed that the bacteria later also halved the rate of programmed cell death.
So the bottom line was a four-fold increase in egg production.

The virtue of pruning

“It’s remarkable that there are two mechanisms being manipulated by the bacteria, the rate of egg production and the rate of programmed cell death,” says Frydman.

Hitting both systems makes sense, Frydman adds, although the mechanisms remain unclear. “It is not surprising that Wolbachia would evolve to manipulate those two process, because they are key in controlling the rate of egg production, and therefore it has a profound impact in the reproductive success of the infected host and in spreading of bacteria in nature.”

Anything that increases the number of eggs and offspring is likely to be favored by natural selection, Frydman adds.

Photo: CDC, #373

Parasitic worms cause elephantiasis, which afflicts this man from the Philippines. Could killing Wolbachia prevent this disfiguring disease?

A healthy thing?

Beyond an insight into the fascinating biology of symbiosis, the finding could also have health implications. Parasitic worms that cause diseases like elephantiasis seem to benefit from Wolbachia infection.

And Wolbachia can affect insect immunity: Tests have shown that infected fruit flies are more resistant to some viruses, for example. And a recent paper in Nature found that mosquitoes in Australia could not transmit dengue fever if they carried a Wolbachia strain derived from Drosophila.

Mosquitoes also transmit malaria. Conceivably, better knowledge of the interaction between Wolbachia and insects might convert mosquitoes from a carrier of this ancient scourge into a defense against it.

– David J. Tenenbaum

With little notice until recently, a shortage of medicine is starting to impair treatment at America’s hospitals. Common, cheap and necessary drugs needed to fight bacteria or cancer, to ease pain or to nourish premature infants are running out.

Many of these meds are injectables, which must be made under sterile conditions. All are generics, which sell for pennies compared to the buck-buster drugs that feed the bottom lines at the big-name drug companies.

Most shortages are unnanounced until a wholesaler’s shipment arrives lacking an ordered drug. “It’s unbelievable,” says Sara Shull, manager of the drug policy program at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “Today I was trying figure out alternatives to papaverin,” an old drug used to prevent spasm in the many surgeries that involve grafting a blood vessel. “We have identified some alternatives, and I am now I working with the surgeon to figure out how to dose them, how to apply them. Is it bathed on? Sprayed on? He’s busy, we’re all busy, and sorting this all out takes a lot of time. The continual need to find replacements gives me a headache.”

Shortage-induced substitution played a role in Alabama, where nine hospital patients were killed by intravenous nutrients this summer, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a non-profit that targets medicine hazards. “Because of a shortage, this compounding pharmacy was making a product from raw material, and it got a bacterial contamination.” (The maker of the nutrient solution, Meds IV pharmacy in Birmingham, Ala., is apparently out of business.)

Medications on this rack will restock a robot that fills individual patient envelopes that will be sent tomorrow to nurses’ stations in the hospital. Actually, the robot restocks itself in its 24/7 delivery of thousands of prescription drugs.

Photo: The Why Files

ENLARGE

Source: U.S. House of Representatives

Shortages are growing, especially for injectable medicines.

Running long on shortages

Pharmacists have always had to find substitute medicines, as patients keep coming through the door, but Vaida cites Food and Drug Administration numbers to argue that shortages are now at “crisis” proportions. “The FDA shows 70 shortages in 2006, 129 in 2007 and last year, there were 211. So far this year, we are already above 200 shortages, and the year isn’t done. Shortages have been around forever, but they have never reached this number.”

Some drugs can be substituted, says Vaida, but “especially with chemotherapy and nutritional products, it’s not like are three alternatives for some medications, as there are with blood-pressure drugs. Some chemotherapies are specific for certain cancers, and if they are not available, you may have no alternative or [you] may have to use a third-line alternative.”

The pharmaceutical situation has never been more complicated, with more than 45,000 prescription drug products on the market, from about 1,400 manufacturers. Although we could not easily find numbers, drug shortages are also rising in the United Kingdom, where the supply situation is complicated by the restriction on exports within the European Union.

Shortages have many possible causes, but because manufacturers tend to be closed-mouthed, it’s not clear which problems are most momentous or easiest to solve:

How short is short?

A drug is considered “short” if a specific dosage and formulation is unavailable, and in some cases, a similar item can be substituted. But Shull says that’s still a problem in a big hospital. If a product that is normally purchased in a pre-loaded syringe is only available in a vial, University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics can no longer send a “unit of dose” to the nurse, and “that’s what the nurses are expecting,” Shull says.

Changing procedures complicate care and raise costs, Shull adds. “All our people are working in a complex system, with lives on the line. These shortages can be a recipe for increased errors.” Her hospital must dedicate one staffer to securing supplies of the common blood-thinner heparin, she says. Searching for alternate sources is less rewarding than studying the efficacy of various medication treatments, she adds. “It’s not what I was taught in pharmacy school, but when your back is up against the wall, you have no other options.”

Beyond impairing patient care, shortages have also become a major burden in medical research. Tests of new medicines, often set up to run at several hospitals nationwide, must give standardized meds to the treatment and control groups, and chaos can result when the drugs become unavailable. “These shortages are now affecting clinical trial options for patients with cancer,” Robert DiPaola, director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on Sept. 23. “Due to the uncertainty of being able to obtain many of these drugs, enrollment of patients on clinical trials has been delayed or stopped in several of our trials.”

Howard Koh, assistant secretary of health and human services, reinforced that message to the committee: “Many of the cancer drugs in short supply … are mainstays of the anti-cancer arsenal, and were largely developed through federally funded research begun 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They are still essential to treatment and research,” he said. The National Cancer Institute is currently sponsoring 349 clinical trials that require these drugs, Koh added. “Taken together, these studies represent thousands of patients, as well as a significant federal investment in clinical trials research.”

At the same hearing, Mike Alkire, chief operating officer of Premier healthcare alliance, told Congress how widespread the shortages have become. In a recent Premier survey, 53 percent of hospital pharmacists said they had faced at least six shortages “that had the potential to cause a medication safety issue or an error in patient care.” And 34 percent of respondents said at least six shortages had “resulted in a delay or cancellation of a patient-care intervention.”

Premier estimates that the 2,500-plus non-profit U.S. hospitals in its membership pay an extra $66 million per year due to these shortages — which translates to $415 million at all U.S. hospitals.

Market going gray?

When the usual sources run dry, hospital pharmacists often get emails, faxes and phone calls from the “gray market,” sources outside the usual supply chain. In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices surveyed 549 hospitals and found that:

Alkire, of the Premier alliance, told Congress that the gray market is “appalling,” with an average markup of 650 percent. Forty-five percent of the offers were marked up at least 1,000 percent above normal price, and drugs for leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were marked up 4,000 percent. “We saw similar markups for medicines for sedation during surgeries; to dilate veins and prevent brain or heart spasms; and to prevent damage during a heart attack,” Alkire said.

For these reasons, University Hospital at UW-Madison does not buy gray, says Shull, although it does buy from a wholesaler that seems to have supplies of drugs when nobody else does.

The gray market arouses suspicion: How do some firms know about shortages before anybody else? How do they obtain drugs when normal sources are short?

“There is speculation going on,” says Vaida. “Some secondary wholesalers may try to buy up some available drugs and sell them for higher prices. Often times, they are looking for people who need the product, and try to obtain it from whatever sources. Some are playing it almost like Wall Street, anticipating what may go on shortage — if two manufacturers have just consolidated, and there’s a generic product that is only going to be made by one of them.”

Cures for missing meds

Many measures have been proposed to ease the medication shortage:

Photo: Armin Kübelbeck

Generic, injectable drugs comprise the majority of shortages.

The FDA seems to be getting the message. In testimony to the subcommittee on Sept. 23, Koh claimed that the agency had already headed off 99 looming shortages in 2011, compared to 38 for all of 2010. But Koh added that today’s shortages “include standard therapies for the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular and colorectal cancers, as well as several types of lymphomas and leukemias.”

Sometimes, Koh said, common-sense, proven measures can sidestep shortages. “… the FDA was able to mitigate a shortage by allowing the use of a filter to safely remove foreign particles contained within vials of injectable drugs, averting the obvious risk to patients of having metal shavings or other particulate matter injected into their veins.”

A pessimist, of course, could say the higher number of averted shortages simply reflects the greater number of shortages overall.

At any rate, organizations concerned with shortages say they are in a vise. “From our members’ perspective, it’s become [a] crisis,” says Hill. “We are seeing shortages nationwide. We have been tracking this for about 10 years, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in the numbers.”

Given the problem’s multiple and sometimes obscure, roots, Hill sees “no single solution, and that’s the troublesome part. Unfortunately we will be dealing with this for a while. But there are some things we can do. We’d like to establish a mandatory early-warning system, so a manufacturer that has a problem has to notify the FDA. The FDA says it has avoided 99 shortages in the past year when it had that information. When there are multiple sources, the FDA can reach out to other manufacturers and urge them to ramp up production.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Each year, as influenza season approaches, medical authorities must scramble to predict which strains of flu will be most important, and then to grow enough vaccine to inoculate the population. Why does this take so much time, and what are some alternative strategies that might speed the process?

Find the article:

Flu vaccine shortage

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss: How does the influenza virus benefit from having so many strains?
2. What are the key steps in the process for identifying and making flu vaccine?
3. How have scientists proposed to speed up this process?
4. What is the meaning of the “H” and “N” in the virus designations, and how do they help explain the activity of a virus?
5. How is a virus different from a bacterium?
6. Why is influenza so deadly in some years, and not others?

Lesson Plans/Activities

1. Bird flu, swine flu, ferret flu? The flu can be spread between all sorts of creatures. Explore the NCBI Influenza database to find out what kinds of animals have been the source of flu outbreaks. What factors cause diseases to spread from animals to humans?
2. Facebook status: Outbreak! Follow this lesson plan that teaches about epidemiology and contagious diseases using social media.
3. The flu through time. Have students research previous flu pandemics, such as the deadly 1918 outbreak. Have students identify the similarities and differences between these pandemics, including the specific strains of the flu and the symptoms they produced. Aside from vaccines, how can people help prevent the spread of the flu?

Almost four years after the economy started sliding into the Great Recession, unemployment in the United States is still at 9.1 percent. On Sept. 1, the White House announced that it expected a 9 percent rate at least through the presidential election.

And on Sept. 13, the Labor Department revealed that the poverty rate had reached 15.1 percent, a rate not seen since 1993. A family of four must have income below $22,314 to qualify as poor.

Those numbers hide even more grievous problems: Among blacks, the rate is 16.7 percent, and among all Americans under age 24, it’s 18 percent.

And if you count discouraged workers, who have quit looking for a job, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the rate soars to 16.2 percent — or 14 million Americans.

All this, and the average period of unemployment has stretched to 22.9 weeks.

Who is looking for work? It’s easier to ask who isn’t…. According to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, men, single parents, young adults, and people with less education have been hit harder. Marybeth Mattingly, a research assistant professor of sociology who directs research on vulnerable families, says, “Jobs in manufacturing and construction have disappeared in the recession and they may or may not be coming back, and these tend to be jobs held by men and the less educated.”

Beyond the numbers

Unemployment is not just about economics. Psychologist Maria Jahoda argued in the 1930s that employment provides latent byproducts, hidden things,” says economist Arthur Goldsmith of Washington and Lee University. “She said people always see the explicit benefit — the wage — but employment also organizes your day, gives you a way to connect to other people, status; there are many other things associated with work. If all you do is say, ‘We have a lot of unemployment, the GNP is down 1.4 percent,’ you don’t capture the potential psychological and social costs.”

Goldsmith adds that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson said “your sense of self is undermined by an incapacity to become a self-sustaining member of society.”

In 2011, the psychological effects of unemployment are compounded by a devastating surge in foreclosures: Millions of families are confronting poverty and being forced to find a place to live. “Foreclosure has been an enormous part of this narrative that does not always happen with a wave of unemployment,” says Goldsmith.

And so we got to wondering. Beyond the obvious — and ominous — economic harm from unemployment, what does it do to self-esteem, psychological health, the willingness to get up and face the world with diminished prospects? In a time when so many people identify themselves by their occupation – what does it mean to be out of work?

Suffer the children

Being laid off, even when you are one of millions with the same problem, can lead to “why me?” questions, and to doubts about your self-worth, about your role and utility in society.

When the story ends with a well-paid, fulfilling job, these doubts usually answer themselves.

Otherwise, these doubts can easily lead to brooding, depression, despair, isolation and anxiety – even apparently to child abuse. A study presented in April¹ found that the incidence of shaken baby syndrome had doubled in the Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2010), compared to a prior period of prosperity.

Babies have weak neck muscles, so severe shaking can cause violent head movement and serious, even fatal brain injury. Shaking, often by angry, frustrated care-givers who cannot stop the baby’s crying, causes an estimated 1,300 such head injuries each year. Surviving children can have varying degrees of visual, motor or cognitive damage, or even end up in a permanent vegetative state — a coma.

Beyond a doubling of the rate of such abuse, the researchers also saw trends toward graver injury and a higher death rate, though they were not statistically significant.

Suffer the teachers!

In a study of school behavior among children of single mothers that started in the 1990s, Heather Hill, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, found a higher level of problems among children of mothers who had been out of work years earlier.

The study was intended to explore the effects of welfare reform, which mandated that welfare mothers find jobs, and was performed when their children were 8 to 10 years old, five years after some of their mothers had been unemployed for at least three months.

The teachers reported a rise in both “external” problem behavior, such as acting out or disobedience, and “internal” behaviors, such as seeming depressed or anxious. “Problem behavior captures how they are coping, processing, as they have to sit in class, pay attention, stay on task, and do what they are told,” Hill told us.

Both categories of behavior were much more prevalent among the children of mothers who had been unemployed years earlier. The delayed reaction reflects the fact that early childhood sets the stage for future achievement and adjustment, Hill says. “The early years, prior to starting school, are very important for the developmental process.”

Life on the line?

The stakes in unemployment may be even greater, however. A new analysis of 42 studies, mainly performed in western nations, found a 63 percent increase in deaths (78 percent for men) among those who had been unemployed.

Although this deadly impact probably reflects financial and physical roots, not just emotional ones, “Our study results clearly indicate that unemployment is not just bad for your pocketbook; it’s also bad for your health,” said Joseph E. Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, in a press release. “The results suggest a causal relationship between unemployment and higher risk of death, as well as the need to identify strategies to minimize the adverse health effects of unemployment.”

Map: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The analysis of unemployment and mortality data, which covered 20 million people, showed that a significant history of job loss raised the risk of death by 75 percent among people younger than 50. The elevated risk of mortality was 25 percent among older people.

Bright spots in a dark picture

Could the woes of unemployment be temporary? In a study of 774 Germans who lost their jobs between 1984 and 2003, psychiatrist Isaac Galatzer-Levy of the New York University School of Medicine found that most people had regained their emotional equilibrium within a year.

The participants were divided into four groups based on how satisfied they with their lives. The largest group, 69 percent, reported a relatively high and stable level of life satisfaction before job loss, and although they were affected more severely by unemployment, a year later their life satisfaction was restored to its pre-unemployment level.

Although life satisfaction scores were less positive among the other subjects, the results tend to refute the standard view of unemployment, says Galatzer-Levy. “There’s a real concern that [unemployment] will have long-term implications on the mental well-being of a large portion of the work force. But this analysis suggests that people are able to cope with a job loss relatively well over time.”

We tried to reach Galatzer-Levy to ask how well results from Germany, where unemployment is lower than in the United States, apply to the United States, but we could not connect. But by looking at the same people before and after they lost their jobs, the study sidestepped a basic pitfall in understanding the psychological outcome of unemployment: the problem of causation.

A word on method

In science, an experiment is the cleanest way to establish cause and effect, but this technique does not apply to studying the psychology of persistent unemployment. Instead, researchers try to correlate unemployment and health, behavior or psychological well-being.

They ask, are people with jobs healthier, happier, or more stable than those without?

But finding that two things go together — are correlated — cannot distinguish cause and effect. To take an obvious example, unemployment could cause psychological depression, or depression could cause unemployment.

The correlation between unemployment and psychological harm dates to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Goldsmith says. To get a better picture of causality, researchers began to follow individuals over time, as the German study did. Having evidence of mental-health and job status in 2010 and again in 2011 helps pinpoint cause and effect, Goldsmith says, but “Unfortunately, many things could also happen during this period,” and some could override employment status.

A grimmer picture

In an effort to refine the methodology, Goldsmith and colleagues are completing a study on the psychology of unemployment, using data from 2002 and ‘03. The first step was to exclude people with a history of psychological difficulties.

“We focused on people who have never had a psychological problem, or had a first bout of poor mental health in the past year,” Goldsmith says. “We all lose girlfriends, dogs, our surfboards get dented, but these are pretty tough people.”

Among subjects who were fully employed and then were unemployed, the researchers statistically controlled for education, work experience, marital status, having children, and church membership, all of which can buffer assaults on mental health.

The goal, Goldsmith says, was to tease out the psychological effects of unemployment from the other slings and arrows of unfortunate fortune. “Suppose you were unemployed last year, and had your first ever bout of poor emotional well-being. It’s hard to believe that caused your unemployment, because we know you are resilient.”

The study, which has not yet passed peer review, included contributions from Tim Diette, Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. The results, Goldsmith says, show that long-term joblessness has an especially severe emotional impact among those with more education. “This is not surprising, those are the kind of people who have an internal locus of control, a lot of self efficacy, have always had the sense that they could govern the things that happen to them.”

Similarly, a study of 9,570 people found that those who were conscientious — and likely to fulfill their obligations — had a 120 percent greater decrease in life satisfaction during unemployment. “Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being,” the authors wrote².

Although Goldsmith found a small detriment following unemployment of less than 15 weeks, people with longer unemployment were almost twice as likely as employed people to evince depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not trivial diagnoses, they are very serious, can be long lasting,” Goldsmith says. “They can spill over and have effects on people around you.”

Thus the emotional fallout is not restricted to the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged, or involuntarily working part time, Goldsmith contends. “These people have spouses, children, grandchildren, and former coworkers. This says to policy makers that the cost of joblessness is more than financial, there is a substantial social consequence, and while we are having this debate about budget deficits, we ought not to forget that putting people to work does not just produce output, but also greater well-being as a society.”

— David J. Tenenbaum

We guess you could call that a failure, but Diana Nyad’s 29-hour quest to swim from Cuba to Florida was called on account of shoulder pain, waves and asthma. But no matter how disappointed Nyad may have been, we’re impressed.

Jolted by the thought that a 61-year old would jump into the ocean to embark on a 103-mile swim, we looked around and saw a mushrooming number of insanely hard runs, swims, triathlons and bike rides — and spotted a trend.

In running, ultra-endurance events are defined as longer than the 26-mile marathon. In cycling, longer than the 100-mile century. There’s no set definition in swimming, so far as we can tell, but Australia’s 19.7 kilometer, open-ocean Rottnest Channel Swim, has to qualify. The race had 173 solo entrants in 2011, up from 100 in 2001.

While the rest of us may wonder what it takes to run 26 miles or ride 100, ultra-athletes don’t stop with such paltry challenges. The Ironman triathlon, which features a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26 mile run, once seemed intense, the far end of endurance.

No longer. The ultra-bikathons include Wisconsin’s Dairyland Dare, which maxes out at 180 miles of hills.

And from there, things get worse. Much worse. The Tour de France bike race is one of three “grand tours” that normally exceed 2,000 miles in length. There’s the Furnace Creek 508, which bikes non-stop across 508 miles of Death Valley and the Mojave Desert.

And there’s the Race Across America, an annual, coast-to-coast sufferfest where sleep is optional and minimized, and where the bikers sometimes use duct tape or bungee cords to hold their heads up.

France has a triple-Ironman, and Africa has the Marathon des Sables, a gritty, six-day, 155-mile jog ‘n slog through the Sahara Desert.

Once a year, you can swim around Manhattan. It’s only 28 miles, and we hear raw sewage has stopped spewing into the Hudson River…

So we got to wondering. How (and why?) do these athletes attempt the near-impossible? Are the barriers physical — or mental? What are the rewards – and what are the risks of attempting such outlandish performance?

Why – the motivation question

Let’s start with the hardest question. Why in the world would anyone attempt these distances without being paid for it? “There are extremists in all activities,” says Ronnie Carda, a marathoner who heads the physical education activity program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These are very committed individuals. Everyone looks at it as challenge, but most have a real love for it. I had a good friend who used to do ultra-endurance runs, absolutely loved it. But I assume there are people who get obsessed, and I have talked to some who have tried double Ironmans [swim 4.8. miles, bike 224 and run 52] and said one was enough.”

“Certain people, personalities, have to keep proving things to themselves,” says Bob Mazzeo, an associate professor of kinesiology and applied physiology at the University of Colorado, who studies high-altitude athletes.

“People ask, why am I doing this, and I say why do people climb Mt. Everest or do any other tough athletic endeavor?” says Charles Olson, who rode the Furnace Creek 508 last year under the nickname Brooklyn Beast. “It’s to see if you can. I was doing the Ironman, but it wasn’t enough. I’ve always been interested to see how far I could push things, including myself. As a child, I had slot cars and model trains, would see how fast they would go until they fell off the tracks or the engines would burn out.”

Finally, there’s the age factor. Ultra sports are made for older folks, says David Tanner, 61, who has completed Ironmans, the Race Across America (RAAM) and other ultra rides, swims and runs. “I have been around ultras in a lot of different sports, and most competitors weren’t superfast when they were 20. This is an opportunity for people who have perseverance and a good mental attitude to do well in a sport where they weren’t maybe fast enough when they were younger. In an ultra-marathon, sometimes the older you are, the wiser you are, and wisdom is more important than a high VO₂ max or muscle mass.”

VO₂ max measures the amount of oxygen a person can take in; higher levels allow greater athletic performance.

Tanner, a research associate at the Indiana University Human Performance Lab, added one more reason to push the limits. “Everything in your life can be going down the tubes, but you can enter an ultra, forget your problems for a day or two, finish dead last, and still feel good about yourself. It all comes down to self-satisfaction and personal achievement.”

Evolution ‘r us

This outburst of ultra-athleticism may amount to a return to our evolutionary roots, says Joel Stager, in the department of kinesiology at Indiana University. “There is a lot of evidence that humans may be some of the best endurance athletes on the planet, that we evolved to out-endure most animals.”

This excellence shows up in the most basic measurement of metabolic capacity, the volume of oxygen that can be delivered to the muscles per unit time. “Humans have a high value for VO₂ max per kilogram of body weight,” Stager says. “We have the ability to out-metabolize, and the ability to run long distances at a relatively modest pace, so if you put those together, we can out-endure most other species.”

What must training accomplish?

Training for an endurance sport has both emotional and physical goals, and while each event has its particular needs, the focus is on high-endurance, slow-contracting muscles.

Physically, training for an ultra-endurance event should:

Tanner says one of the biggest improvements in endurance athletics concerns nutrition. “Most of us used to make do with homemade brews, whatever you could get in real food. Today, so many companies engineer food that is specifically designed for endurance. You do need protein during a long event, people did not think that before. We have products that are more easily digestible, so you can get close to matching your caloric intake to your output.”

Not just a body game

Sources differed on whether ultra-endurance sports are tougher on the mind or the body, but there is no question that a multi-day race can tax the willpower. Having swum 10 miles or run 50 – do you have what it takes to swim another 10 or run another 50 to reach the finish line?

Training eases the inevitable confrontation with the pain and suffering of a long event, says Olson. “There are tough times in training. Last summer, I would be training 18 hours a day, would leave at 4:45 a.m., and on such a long day, it’s a struggle to find places to eat and drink.”

Olson, who trains in all weather, says “Through the training, you are learning how to deal with adversity.”

Mind control also helps during a race, Olson adds. “When you start getting negative, you have to be cognizant of that, typically you are getting hungry or thirsty, or your mind is playing tricks on you to get you to stop. I eat, change my cadence, or take a five-minute break; do what I need to do to get my mind back in synch. I tell myself I don’t want to let my children down, try to set an example, show that you can do anything you put your mind to.”

How to train

If the goals of training are clear, there’s no clear agreement on what it takes to reach them. Just as carbo loading in preparation for a long race faded 30 years ago, training hours are also on the wane, says Tanner. “Some people thrive on a massive amount of training, but most ultras are not doing the mileage we were 20 years ago. For [the 1989] RAAM, I was training 600 miles a week. I think most people now do not do that much, they substitute quality, hills, intervals, time trials, indoor efforts. There is whole lot more science to training.”

The nature of the training depends on the goal. “There is a huge difference between the people who are competing for the trophy versus the people who are out there for the challenge of going the distance,” says Carda of Wisconsin. “I can’t tell you the number of people that do an Ironman and don’t have a whole lot of intention of running much in the marathon.” Instead, many people many walk a large section of the marathon, which concludes the event. “It’s more about going the distance.”

And those differences affect the training, Carda adds. “If I’m going to compete, there has to be an intensity element. If your goal is strictly a finish, to meet the challenge of the distance, [you will use a different training routine]. It really depends on what your goals are.”

But even a moderate training schedule for, say, an Ironman or a 100-mile foot race will be intense – and time-consuming. Many ultras “are very good time managers,” says Carda. “One gentleman I know who does the Ironman annually found a way to train on an hour a night during the week, and went for long ride on the weekend.” Another would start a 100-mile bike ride at 5 a.m. Saturday, then met his wife and kids at a park. “They would have lunch and he’d be finished for the day. He found a way to put his family into it.”

Running risks

Even in sports that require an extraordinary physical effort, it’s possible to overdo it, says Mazzeo, who focuses on high-altitude athletic performance. “At Pikes Peak, in August, they have a half-marathon, starting at 8,000 feet, up to the summit at 14,000 feet. The next day, there’s a full marathon, up and down, and there are people who run both of them. That is crazy.”

The result of too much exertion, day after day, is called staleness or over-training syndrome, and the symptoms include lowered performance, sleep disturbances, unusual muscle soreness and a feeling of heaviness, even depression. These symptoms are “pretty common here in Colorado, with many triathletes training twice a day for six or seven days a week,” says Mazzeo. “Full-blown over-training syndrome can take a year for recovery, it’s quite significant.”

Ultra-endurance sports can hurt. Bikers can suffer neck seizures and genital numbness, or crash. Runners injure feet, joints and soft tissue.

And there is some evidence linking regular, long-term exertion with atrial fibrillation, a sometimes permanent heart-rhythm abnormality. “Endurance sport practice increases between 2 and 10 times the probability of suffering atrial fibrillation, after adjusting for other risk factors,” according to a 2008 study.¹ This surprising rate of atrial fibrillation may be due to genetics, changes in heart structure or inflammation.

And benefits

And what are the pay-offs of such exertion? We’ve all seen research showing manifold benefits of regular physical activity, and we have to suspect that many apply to ultra-athletes. “When we look at people who have maintained a highly active lifestyle for decades, we don’t find a lot of downsides,” says Indiana’s Stager. “They have lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, less body fat, and muscle mass, better cardiopulmonary performance, more heart capacity, and more elasticity of the arteries.”

High-level exercise helps the brain’s ability to think and make decisions. According to a 2010 ³ review of exercise in older adults, “A relatively high level of physical activity was related to better cognitive function and reduced risk of developing dementia; however, there were mixed results of the effects of exercise interventions on cognitive function indices.”

Stager says that in an ongoing study, the cerebellum, a part of the brain that is involved in voluntary motion, “appears to have a greater mass, more cells and more connectivity. As we age, we start having balance and gait problems that lead to falls and injury. What if we found that one hour of exercise a day would offset as many as 20 years of aging, which is what we appear to be finding?”

“There are some pretty surprising” results, Stager says. “The message for years was that the brain wasn’t involved in exercise, but that does not seem to be the case.”

Stager recognizes that these benefits are not affecting the majority of the population, which is growing more sedentary and obese. “What’s happening is that in term of fitness is that the haves have more, the have-nots have less.”

And while these benefits are not exclusive to ultra-endurance athletes, the rise of these long-distance events does seem to represent the extreme of a significant shift toward higher intensity. Marathon runs, to take one gauge of popularity, are surging: In 2011, more than 100,000 people applied for the New York marathon, and almost 27,000 ran the Boston marathon. And the 160-mile Race Across Indiana had about a dozen participants when it started 25 years ago; 1,250 finished the 2011.

Is it about togetherness?

Another factor that explains the explosion of ultra-endurance sports is marketing, Carda says. Ultras, Carda adds, are “just the next phase. In the ’60s, people started running, there was a fitness craze. There were marathons — not everybody got involved – but suddenly every city had a marathon.” In a beneficial spiral, cities have realized that ultra events – from the marathon up, can attract dollars. “There have always been bikers and runners, and the triathlon has been around for a long time, but the marketing end of things has caught up. “The Ironman is one of those events that has cachet, it’s the in thing to do.”

One more thought. Most people cannot relate to the idea of completing a marathon, let alone an ultra event, but the utterly ridiculous nature of these challenges brings the participants closer. “There is an ultra family, it doesn’t seem to matter what sport,” says Tanner. “There is competition between individuals, but the real competition is you against the distance, against the course. If you finish, then you win, in your own mind. You enjoy the people you are with, make a lot of friends, and when you go back to work on Monday, you have the satisfaction that you were able to push your limit, do something you thought maybe you could not do.”

That’s pretty much what we heard from Olson, who’s heading back to the Furnace Creek this fall. “Anybody who is going an ultra distance, even the real racers, will look to help you along in your journey. They will offer advice because they want you to finish.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

It’s an old, grim axiom of neuroscience: After an injury, the nerves in your hand, arm or leg may grow back, but neurons in the brain and the spinal cord will not.

Part of the reason is a molecule called proteoglycan — a biological insulation that separates tissues. During gestation, for example, proteoglycans prevent the placenta from growing too deeply into the uterus. “The proteoglycan molecule has been known as nature’s own barrier molecule,” says Jerry Silver, a professor of neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University.

Proteoglycan strongly inhibits the growth and movement of cells, and explains why cartilage has neither nerves nor a blood supply.

In the spinal cord, proteoglycan serves to lock the nerves into position, preventing unwanted growth. Unfortunately, when the spinal cord is injured, a new burst of proteoglycan “walls off the injury site, but also blocks nerve regeneration,” says Silver.

A bacterial balm?

Now, using an enzyme made by a deadly bacterium, Silver and his colleagues have learned to restore normal breathing in rats with a damaged spinal cord. The study, published in Nature yesterday, shows that a combination of grafting and a proteoglycan-eating enzyme called chondroitinase may sidestep the proteoglycan’s growth-deadening effect – and open a path to the holy Grail of partial repair to the spinal cord.

As scientists continue trying to rebuild the spinal cord with stem cells, the new study shows an alternative route to healing.

The technique is rooted in evolution, Silver says. “Proteoglycans are boundary molecules that have evolved over millennia. One bacterium, proteus vulgaris knows that, and has figured out how to release this enzyme to eat through our defenses.”

That ability allows the bacterium to cause deadly septic shock.

What they did

To demonstrate that grafts plus chondroitinase enzyme could restore function, Warren Alilain, the paper’s first author:

It’s important to realize that when the graft was first connected to the spinal cord, it no longer contained neurons. The graft serves as a tunnel lined with cells that supply growth factors and nutrients to nerves that are growing from the upper part of the spinal cord.

The wait for recovery seemed interminable, Silver admits. “Warren Alilain, my genius post-doc, had given up, he saw no substantial return of function at two months … but at 10 weeks, he ran into my office, he saw some activity coming back.”

After another two weeks, the disconnected nerves had regained at least 80 percent of their normal electrical output in 9 of the 11 animals that got grafts and enzyme.

Spinal cord: A brainy organ?

Just getting neurons to grow in the central nervous system is not enough: the nerves must connect to the motor nerves that activate the diaphragm. After all, the spinal cord contains more than ten thousand nerve cells, and neurosurgeons cannot hope to connect them individually; and instead want to coax a process of self-connection.

The coaxing worked: among about 3,000 spinal-cord neurons that grew through the graft tube, 400 to 500 linked to the neurons that used to control the diaphragm. In other words, the growing neurons seem to be “looking” for precisely those nerve cells that must be reconnected so the diaphragm can return to work. The spinal cord, Silver says, is “smart, and that’s encouraging news. I am more optimistic than I have ever been: The gain in function is really high.”

Yet despite the crying need for better treatments for spinal cord injury, at best this technique will not be available for some years.

The technique seems unlikely to restore the complicated connections needed for walking or typing, but severe paralysis would be eased just by activating a single muscle, Silver says. Bladder control is a major issue after a lower spinal injury, and many quadriplegics require a ventilator, which can fail or cause deadly infection. Learning to reactivate the diaphragm – and to breathe — could produce huge gains in quality of life.

Courtesy Jerry Silver, Case Western Reserve University

Enzyme and graft treatment each restored nerve function in most of the rats, but the best response came from a combined treatment.

“This is an interesting study,” says Daniel Resnick, associate professor of neurosurgery at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a fairly vigorous model, measuring the diaphragm motion is a fairly clean measure.” Not only did the grafting process restore fairly normal breathing, but when the researchers cut the nerve graft at the end of the experiment, that removed the improvement in breathing. “That’s pretty convincing evidence that you have got neurons growing through the graft.”

The repair was not a true replacement for the spinal cord, Resnick adds. “They are not regenerating across the injury itself, but are by-passing it, going directly to the muscle. It’s not a cure for a spinal cord injury, but is a means to promote focal re-enervation, but for a high spinal cord injury, if you could get them off a ventilator, that is a big deal.”

Silver says the data also suggest that the bacterial enzyme may in some cases be effective enough to avoid grafting. “I am enthusiastic about using just the enzyme, in spinal cord injury and stroke rehabilitation,” Silver says. “Given the success to date – in our lab and others — it’s simple to do and seems to carry almost no risk — it’s just putting in a shot of enzyme as a way of stimulating neural plasticity.”

– David J. Tenenbaum