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Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas

Usually it seems, I start out with a rant about something. It gets my writer’s juices flowing and keeps me in my chair typing away. I receive mixed feedbacks on these rants. Some folks love them, while others hate them. If you’re a hater of them, just realize that’s how I get started.

No rant about anything today. Life has gone swimmingly as of the last week, so no complaints about terrible airline service or delayed deliveries. Instead, I’m going to get started by talking about a photo MD sent me that has become my all time favorite picture of MD and me. I’ve spent at least an hour over the past week staring at it, trying to work out the details.

I have absolutely no recollection of this photo being taken or who took it. MD doesn’t remember either. It is in our bedroom in our house in Little Rock, and was taken in 1996. I know when it was taken, because we were doing some kind of radio interview for Protein Power, which had been published earlier that year. It was in the summer, because we are both tan.

I also know that due to the matching Trim Line phones we were using. We bought those specifically for these kinds of interviews. We first tried talking on the same phone, but that turned out to be cumbersome. We tried a speaker phone, but the technology then wasn’t what it is today, so that didn’t work. There would be feedback. We got these phones and used a splitter, which worked great. I thought we would have a lot of feedback on that too, but we didn’t. That solution worked.

I know it was in 1996, because we moved our practice to Boulder, Colorado in 1997, which is were we wrote our next book, The Protein Power LifePlan.

What’s making it so difficult to figure out the circumstances of this photo is that something is awry. It looks like we just got out of bed to do this interview. MD is still in her sleep shirt. I’ve got a bed head. And MD always hops out of bed and makes the bed first thing, which obviously isn’t made. So most of the evidence would indicate an early drive time radio interview.

But, if you look closely, you can see that MD has ‘grocery store feet’. I sort of do, too, but not to the extent she does. (For those who aren’t from the South, grocery store feet means dirty soles.) So we must have been up and walking outside barefoot with a cup of coffee or something. You can see her coffee cup on the nightstand. Not in a million years would MD go to bed with grocery store feet; that I can promise you. But if we had been up and about, why isn’t the bed made, and why are we dressed as we are?

It’s a mystery we’ve both been talking about. Another mystery is who took the photo? Obviously one of the kids, but which one? And why? The only thing about the photo that isn’t cloaked in mystery is which nightstand is mine.

Just a family history note. The rocking chair you see to the right is the one MD was rocked in as a baby. Her father bought it for her mother just prior to MD’s birth. We still have it.

Next time you hear an author being interviewed on the radio, just remember this photo. You never know where they are or what they’re doing or how they’re dressed.

On one other note, I’ve had a lot of questions about the fenbendazole I wrote about a week or two ago. With a lot of help from readers, I’ve discovered an entire literature on the subject of not just fenbendazole, but mebendazole, and ivermectin as treatments for cancer. I’ll write much more on this in coming Arrows after I’ve had the chance to digest it all.

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The War On Meat

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there is indeed a war on meat taking place. From all sides, it seems, meat is under attack. The reality that it is the perfect human food never seems to discourage the naysayers.

When I say “perfect” that is exactly what I mean. What other single food could you make an entire diet out of and not develop deficiencies? How about the tomato diet, or the green bean diet, or the apple diet, or the healthy whole grain diet? Could you live on one of those diets forever? No, not without doing a lot of food combining to get enough of the correct amino acids to thrive.

Then there is the carnivore diet, which many people stay on for years without health issues. Try that with the tomato diet.

This subject came to the top of my mind today, because I received one of the many email medical newsletters I get. The one that set me off this morning was a summary of a lot of clinical trials about food and food service. In it were these four attacks on meat.

The first one is loaded with weasel words. “People who eat more meat…are more likely to have a higher risk of cognitive decline…”

“…are more likely to have a higher risk..” Now there is a major hedge. Not people who eat meat will develop cognitive decline, but will instead be “more likely to have a higher risk…” What does that even mean?

According to the linked synopsis,

And why might that be? You guessed it: saturated fat.

Couple of things here. First, a few years ago the Journal of the American College of Cardiology gave saturated fat a thumbs up. Cardiologists are the group most fearful of fat in general and saturated fat in particular. If the College of Cardiology puts its imprimatur on the idea that saturated fat isn’t a health risk, then you can be assured they dug deeply into the scientific literature and found no compelling evidence that it was harmful. I fear Dr. Dong Wang above is just giving us a knee jerk reaction.

Second, all the quotes above are absolutely constipated with weasel words. When you see the word “linked,” you should know it is meaningless. It’s just another word for an observational finding, which does not prove causality. When you see the word “may,” as in may increase, or may decrease, you know the same thing. It’s just a guess.

The next one on the list is a real doozy.

There are no weasel words in the very first phrase in this article. “Limiting red meat consumption is key to a sustainable and healthy diet,…” Of course, they have no idea whether or not this is true, but they’ve heard it parroted enough that they go ahead and write it as a categorial statement. Reducing your consumption of meat “is key to a sustainable and healthy diet…” Is key. Not may be, not linked to, but is key.

Since reduction in red meat is key, these researchers decided to see what factors might motivate people to eat less red meat. Once they know what those factors are, perhaps they can use them to motivate the rest of us.

What are the factors?

The authors surveyed more than 7,500 adults 18 and older as part of a larger study. After analysis of their data, the researchers discovered that only 12 percent of those interviewed did not eat red meat.

Those who reported not eating red meat indicated that they:

• were female

• were 65 years of age or older

• had a college degree

• had an annual income of $60,000 or less

• had voted for Democrats or Independents (vs. Republicans)

• self-identified as non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, or Asian (vs. non-Hispanic whites)

Here is the kicker:

I don’t know exactly what this means. Apparently, the non-red-meat-eating subjects were asked to articulate their top two concern over the past year, about equal numbers came up with the “environment or climate change” or “health/healthcare.” But in the survey data, it appears that environmental concerns were what put them off of red meat, not worries about health issues.

I’ll leave it to you, Dear Reader, to interpret what this all means through the lens of your own biases.

Just realize that all the above is not science by any stretch of the imagination.

And I’m not quite sure how the above data can be used to motivate people not to eat red meat. Looks more like a chart showing susceptible populations to try to proselytize.

I’m not sure of the make up of the 7,500 subjects the authors queried, but I would be willing to bet a chunk of dinero that if 7,500 average Americans were selected at random, climate change would not be the main reason the ones who didn’t eat red meat didn’t eat it. My bet would be on health concerns, because most of their doctors would have recommended they cut down on saturated fat.

But, based on the final paragraphs in this summary, I suspect the authors are climate changers of the deepest dye..

See the above bolded statements. No weasel words there. Simply statements of fact. And in my view, it is all bogus, as I’ll discuss later in this section.

The third study on this list is, in my view, totally spurious. Why? Because they did not present the subjects with the actual product, but instead showed them photos of the various burgers. And described the taste to them.

I’ve been around and worked with various marketers enough to know that surveys like this one are not particularly reliable. The only truly reliable method of sampling what subjects like enough to pay for it is to put it on offer and see if they will fork over money to buy it. Which is why most large corporations introduce new products in limited numbers in just a few locations. If people buy in enough numbers, then they roll it out at scale.

Here is what the authors did in this study.

Three quarters of those asked preferred the real meat burger. One third refused any plant-based alternatives. The fake meat burger came in last. And the falafel burger was the choice of all the plant-based burgers.

What does that tell us?

First, most people wanted the real meat burger, while one third wouldn’t eat any plant-based burgers. Of the plant-based burgers, the falafel burger got the nod. It tells me that people don’t want fake food. The real burger was real. The falafel burger was real—it wasn’t meat, but it didn’t pretend to be meat. The veggie burger was pretending to be a meat burger, while the plant-based pseudo burger came in dead last.

And just as an aside, if you want to see the very definition of ultra-processed food, take a look at the ingredients in fake meat.

The last one of the four is my favorite.

“Challenging conventional wisdom,” says the synopsis. This is one site. I wouldn’t extrapolate the entire history of early man based on this one site. And they call it a “major energy source,” which it may have been, But still it’s one isolated location.

Again, it does not contradict the prevailing narrative. Almost all research shows that early man consumed a diet that was primarily animal-based. Those who want us not to eat meat have kind of been stymied by the so-called Paleo diet, which, unlike almost all other diets, has it’s own narrative that makes sense. We have spent millions of years eating meat, so that is the food our bodies have evolved to do best on.

One of my favorite quotes is by a crusty old New York physician named Blake Donaldson. When patients came to him for almost any problem, he put them on meat diets, which pretty much solved their issues. He wrote a book about it titled Strong Medicine. I looked it up on Amazon to see if any used copies were available, and, as it turns out, someone has republished it. I got a real copy years ago, and they can be had if you troll the used book websites. And, I’m pretty sure you can find a pdf or two kicking around, if you don’t want to buy the reprint.*

Anyway, Dr. Donaldson said “During the millions of years our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh fat, meat, and water was bred out.”

And that is pretty much the basis of the Paleo diet, which is a comfortable narrative for many people. It makes sense. And the plant-based folks have a difficult argument against it. So now every time they come across an anthropological or archeological study showing some evidence of plant consumption, they become orgasmic.

I’m sure early man ate a few plants here and there. If a donut had been available, he would have eaten that, too. And when meat was scarce he’d eat whatever he could. But from the vast amount of evidence out there, early man was primarily a meat eater.

A few weeks ago in the Odds and Ends section, I posted on the press report of a study of the diet of a woman in Montana 12,800 years ago. (Study)

This is a more typical finding in Paleolithic times. So don’t be thrown by a random study here or there trying to make the case that early man dined predominantly on plants.

Just to be balanced, there is a study of a cave society in Morocco that dined primarily on acorns circa 15,000 years ago. These people ground acorns and prepared them in a number of ways, so they could indeed be considered carb eaters. Sticky carbs, at that.

I’ve written about this study in The Arrow, but it was years ago. So, for all the new readers, here it is.

The heavy consumption of acorns basically destroyed the teeth of these people. The strongest material in the human body is the enamel in our teeth, which is why forensic scientists always look for the teeth to try to identify people who have been traumatized beyond recognition.

If we as a species had evolved over millennia eating carbs, I’m sure we would have evolved some material besides enamel to coat our teeth. Just about the only thing that can eat through enamel is acid-producing bacteria that feed on carbs, especially sticky carbs.

These cave people from the Moroccan cave had terrible dental health as opposed to typical meat eaters from the same era, who had perfect teeth.

Here is a photo of a mouth from one of these people, which is basically at atlas of dental pathology.

Here is your dental pathology:

• A. Heavy tooth wear

• B. Contact caries (cavities)

• C. Evulsion

• D. Attrition caries

• E. Gross caries

• F. Abscess

This person would have been miserable. In fact, the abscess may have been responsible for his/her death. Abscesses can spread bacteria into the blood leading to septicemia and death. Just having an abscess like this would make you want to be dead. It would have been extremely painful. The pus from the abscess would eat into the bone below the tooth. I feel terribly sorry for this person from 15,000 years ago. Life would have been awful.

Out of the 52 skeletons studied from this cave, only 3 were without cavities. All the rest had dental pathology of varying degrees. Makes me wonder if the three that didn’t have it were some kind of leader or shaman or whatever who ended up getting meat.

Based on the mass of evidence in the scientific literature, I wouldn’t let myself get carried away by studies of individual groups who ate carbs. They are in the minority.

While we’re on the subject of meat…

Most of the red meat critics espouse health concerns, mainly because red meat contains saturated fat. But the paper linked above from the JACC debunks the idea that saturated fat is bad for us. Those red meat critics who move off the idea that red meat might be bad, generally migrate to the position that processed red meats are bad. The first article quoted at the top of this section brought that canard up.

But are processed meats harmful?

I suppose some might be if they’re processed with all kinds of crap added to them, but the meats that have been processed in Spain, France, Italy, and other European countries for centuries are probably fine.

One thing about processed meats is that the processing actually increases the amount of protein available for absorption. It’s just the opposite with plant proteins. With them, the greater the processing, the lower the digestible protein goes. We discussed the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS) a few weeks ago. It is the most up-to-date means of measuring the digestibility and availability of protein in various foods.

Here is a slide from my friend, Peter Ballerstedt, who is a PhD forest agronomist and an expert in protein availability.

The slide above shows how dramatically the DIAAS falls when wheat, for example, is processed.

The opposite happens when meat is processed.

As you can see, when pork belly (DIAAS of 119) is processed into bacon, the DIAAS rises to 142.

The bottom row of meats requires a little explanation. If you start with the roast, which is second from left, its DIAAS is 111. Simply processing it into ground beef raises the DIAAS by ten points. If it is converted to jerky, the DIAAS jumps to 128.

The third panel on the bottom shows other types of processing. The processing of salami (fermentation) and bologna (finely-ground and cooked) also increase DIAAS - increasing the nutritive value over the raw meat ingredients.

So, with meat, the more processing, the greater the protein availability.

I have thought and thought and thought about why there is such an animus toward meat eating when it is literally the food we cut our evolutionary teeth on. Over the time I’ve been involved in nutrition, meat eating has been attacked from multiple fronts. Too much cholesterol, too much saturated fat, it’s worsening climate change, and on and on. Once the climate change notion goes by the wayside, there will be some other reason to attack meat, which is the perfect food. Since we, ourselves, are made of meat, meat provides us with all the vitamins and minerals we need to support and maintain us. Why do so many people want to see it gone from the table?

I have a paid subscription to a little investment newsletter that I enjoy not because I invest, but because I enjoy the author’s take on what is going on in the world. I got one about a month ago that dealt with the widespread efforts of multiple groups to reduce meat consumption. It was a take I hadn’t thought about, but makes perfect sense. (It might be behind a paywall, but I’ll excerpt the part about food.)

Since the legacy media gets its talking points from the government, it tries to make the government look good. One way to do this is to push people away from meat so their grocery bills will be less.

I don’t know if this is valid, but it is an interesting hypothesis I thought I would pass along.

What I do know for sure is that there is a war on meat. And it might be working. US cattle herds are at record low levels currently. Which means the price of meat will go up even more, unless folks stop eating it in even greater amounts. The crazy war against it won’t stop me from eating it, and I hope it won’t stop you.

*Note on the Blake Donaldson book. I don’t know if the reprint available on Amazon has been bowdlerized or not, but if not beware. The book was published in the 1960s and is totally politically incorrect. It would never get published today as it was. And if it were to be published today, both Donaldson and the publisher would be canceled within 24 hours. Yet a major publishing house published it in the 60s. How times have changed.

More RFK, Jr. Treachery from the WSJ

I think RFK, Jr. has probably got it made as HHS Secretary. The big hurdle was in getting through the committee. It all broke down to a party line vote with Bill Cassidy (R-La) being the cypher. He finally came through in the end after extracting a promise from Kennedy to leave vaccines alone.

Cassidy is a physician and, from what I could find, the third largest recipient of Big Pharma money behind Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I’m sure the GOP exerted immense pressure to get his vote. And one would have to figure that Nicole Shanahan’s threat to fund a primary challenger piled on. He probably figured she would contribute more against him than Big Pharma would contribute to him. Here’s what he said brought him around. Only he knows what the motivating factor was. Whatever, I’m glad it all worked, and he made it out of committee. I suspect the Senate will confirm him along a party line vote.

The bizarre thing about it all is that had Biden put Kennedy up for this same position, the vote would have been completely reversed. Same guy, same opinions, different party affiliation.

The Wall Street Journal is obviously in the pocket of Big Pharma, which surprises me. If it were the highly partisan NY Times or Washington Post running this hit job against Kennedy, I would understand. But the staid, slightly center-right WSJ doesn’t typically do this. Yet a number of opinion columnists and the editorial board have savaged Kennedy. Now a non-opinion piece in the news section of the paper is also getting into the action. And in a sleazy way. Or maybe the reporters just didn’t dig deeply enough. I suspect the former.

Before I get into the details of the article, I’ve got to say that Kennedy played it well. He told the truth about his vaccine stance, but left a lot out.

He said repeatedly that he had his own children vaccinated. His youngest child will be 28 this year, so he had his children vaccinated before the list of recommended vaccines grew to the huge number it is today. And he said he believed in vaccines (he had his own children vaccinated, after all), but just wanted the vaccines to be safe and effective.

This last statement rang true with Cassidy and most other physicians who haven’t bothered—as I hadn’t until Covid came along—to seriously study vaccines. They all believe vaccines have been tested and are safe. Kennedy played to their beliefs, and they bought it.

He has said repeatedly in interviews over the years that he wishes he hadn’t vaccinated his children. And he has repeated that no one knows if vaccines are truly safe or not as they have never been tested against placebo. He is 100 percent correct on that.

But by asserting that he had his own children vaccinated and by saying he was all for vaccines as long as they were safe and effective, he was able to pour oil on the turbulent waters. And, I, for one, am most thankful.

Now to the WSJ…

A week or so ago in the news section of the WSJ appeared a long article titled “RFK’s Measles Claims Conflict With Science.” (The WSJ has the annoying habit of changing the title from their hard copy version to a similar, but different one, when they put it online. The title you see if you click the link above will be different from the one in the hardcopy pictured below. But it is the same article.)

As you can see, the measles vaccine article takes up about two thirds of a page, while the bottom third is another article on Kennedy and the vaccines carried over from the front page. These are not opinion pieces. They are allegedly news.

The article starts off thus:

The second sentence (bolded) is mainly false. Measles is highly contagious and infected damn near every kid exposed to it. According to the CDC, there were between three and four million kids infected with measles in 1963, the first year the vaccine became available.

The half a million people infected, as reported above by the WSJ in bold, is way off the mark. That was the number supposedly reported to the CDC, which I highly doubt. I’ve never reported anything to the CDC, and when I questioned my doctor friends they have never reported anything to the CDC.

Back before the vaccine, when a kid got the measles, everyone knew what it was. Mainly because the symptoms were so obvious and everyone was coming down with it. It was as they said ‘going around’. No parent would take their kid to the doctor for measles. If they did, the doctor would say, “He’s/she’s got the measles.”

The only cases that might be reported to the CDC would have been those in immunocompromised kids or others who had some sort of serious other underlying disorder. I’m pretty confident that’s where all the deaths came from, too.

Measles was such a nothing disorder that even the inane 1960s sitcom The Brady Bunch made a show about having a measles party so the kids could all get measles and escape school. I went to pull the episode from YouTube (which was there last time I looked), but it’s been pulled. Apparently because it minimized the severity of the measles, despite this being how it actually was in those days. It was an excuse for kids to get a week off school while not being particularly sick. Someone put up the brief clip below. Better watch quickly before it is pulled.

Anyone who has been a reader of The Arrow for any length of time has seen the two graphics below a few times. Indulge me once more for the new readers. The first one shows the decrease in deaths from various infectious diseases over the last century or so.

As you can see, deaths from all these diseases had fallen off to about nothing before the vaccines were even developed. Even deaths from scarlet fever, a major killer of kids, especially in the 19th century—dropped to nothing, and there has never been a vaccine for the disease. Penicillin kills the bacteria that causes scarlet fever, but deaths from the disease had fallen to almost nothing before penicillin came into widespread use.

This is the evolutionary course of all infectious diseases. Over time they become less virulent (they attenuate in the lingo of immunology) and more infectious. If a particular infectious agent kills its victim, it also kills itself. It can no longer be spread. Those mutations that are less deadly are the ones that spread. So over time these agents evolve to be less deadly (or not deadly at all)) and more infectious.

At some time in the distant past, the common cold probably killed a lot of people; now it’s just a nuisance.

Now let’s look at deaths from measles in the US.

You can see that measles deaths fell precipitously in the 1940s, long before the vaccine became available. I’m sure this was a combination of attenuation of the virus and improvements in sanitation and diet in America.

Now look at the chart at the time the vaccine was introduced. And remember, no kids really got the vaccine other than babies. The episode of The Brady Bunch above was filmed in 1969, so the vaccine had been available for six years, but kids the age of kids in the show didn’t get the shot. Most babies don’t get the measles. It’s more of a childhood disease.

Compare the above chart with the one below from the WSJ article.

The authors of the article did not reproduce the graph shown above this one, because it didn’t prove their point. They clipped off the very flat end of the bigger picture and spread it out to make it look like the vaccines stopped measles deaths in their tracks. Had they reproduced the graphic above showing the fall in measles deaths over the previous 60 years, it wouldn’t have been as impressive. In fact, it wouldn’t have been impressive at all. It would appear that the vaccine hadn’t really done anything.

Which is why the article and graphics are dishonest.

There is absolutely no doubt that the vaccine has gotten rid of the measles. No question.

But the question should be, is that a good thing?

Since measles have been around forever, did the virus have a role in imprinting on our immune systems? Did exposure ramp up our immune surveillance against other infectious diseases? Do those taking the measles vaccine end up with other problems those who don’t take the vaccine avoid?

We don’t know, because the vaccine has never been tested against placebo in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study over time. It has been tested against only earlier versions of the vaccine or other vaccines.

Big Pharma doesn’t do placebo-controlled trials on vaccines, because they have persuaded the FDA that it would be unethical to withhold the vaccine from those children who would be randomized into the placebo group.

Measles would have been the perfect virus to do such a study on, simply because it is so innocuous to most people. A randomized, placebo-controlled trial back in 1963 would have provided a ton of valuable information.

Currently, the only studies we have are those in which kids who didn’t get vaccinated are compared to kids who did. Those studies show the kids who weren’t vaccinated have fewer infections, fewer doctor visits, and fewer emergency room visits. But these aren’t randomized, controlled studies. Kids who don’t get vaccinated may have completely different home lives, parental influence, diets, a zillion things. We just don’t know. The measles vaccine would have been the perfect time to do a real study, but we didn’t. And no one wants to do one now for fear the entire vaccine edifice would collapse if the outcome was worse for the vaccines.

Anyway, you can see from this one article how the media—the WSJ in this case though others are worse—stretched the truth in an effort to blackball RFK, Jr. Fortunately, it appears that it hasn’t worked.

Your Brain On Plastic

Maybe the title of this section should have been plastic on your brain, but it wasn’t as catchy.

A troubling new study appeared in Nature Medicine this week showing that microplastics are accumulating in human brains. Which, in my view, is not a good thing.

Unlike other organs, the brain has a complex surveillance system called the blood-brain barrier that is ever vigilant. It is always scanning for anything in the circulation that might be harmful to the brain and shuts it out. Many drugs and other chemicals, including even dopamine, can’t cross the blood brain barrier. Which is why it is a tricky proposition to make drugs that affect the brain. They have to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier to get to the brain.

Despite this formidable defense system, somehow microplastics in fairly large amounts have been able to breach the defenses, allowing them to accumulate in the brain.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico analyzed 52 brain specimens from autopsies. Of these 52 specimens, 28 came from 2016, and 24 came from autopsies done in 2024. The concentration of microplastics in brains increased by about 50% between 2016 and 2024, which correlates with the increase in plastic production over that same time.

According to an interview with the lead author, there was substantially more microplastic in the brains of those with dementia versus those without.

How these microplastic particles get into the brain is unknown, but apparently they are there in greater numbers than in any other organ.

What kinds of issues might this plastic accumulation cause?

Then Dr. Campen goes on to say that he suspects

Of course, my hackles went up reading that. Just more of the war on meat. Then I read on.

He’s right. A reader of The Arrow emailed me this past week with photos of how hay is wrapped in plastic for storage. Who knows how much of that plastic makes it’s way into the cattle that eat it? And the high plastic content accords with the table I posted last week showing the Whole Foods ribeye steaks had just about the highest levels of a particular endocrine disruptor (which primarily come from plastics) of any food on the list.

We don’t know if this microplastic accumulation is problematic or not, but I can’t imagine that at some point it won’t be, if it’s not already. And I have no idea how to fix it other than to ban plastics, and that would be a major uphill battle.

It’s just another tradeoff we make to live in the modern world, I suppose. Just as MD and I are being extremely careful of what we eat and avoiding anything with a lot of additives, we will start watching the plastic situation, too. It’s difficult to get products in glass any longer, but we’re going to try.

Odds and Ends

• Did giant ice age ground sloths carve these vast caves in South America?

• Did Wernher von Braun predict 70 years ago that Elon Musk would rule over Mars? That’s what he wrote in a sci-fi novel at the time. But “Elon” was a title in the book, not a person’s name. Strange coincidence.

• BBC asks: Could the UK actually get colder with global warming? No matter which way the temperature swings, climate change has got you covered.

• Fifteen more new studies published in 2024 document meters-higher sea levels across the world a few millennia ago, when CO2 hovered near 260 ppm.

• Forensics scientist claims that Columbus may not be of Italian heritage after all, but was actually born somewhere in Spain to parents of Jewish ancestry.

• Nebraska Cornhusker senior Luke Farritor named co-winner of $700,000 prize for ID’ing passages of scrolls scorched by Vesuvius in AD 79. Now hard at work at DOGE.

• The calcite-encrusted skeleton of an ancient human, still embedded in rock deep inside a cave in Italy, has yielded the oldest Neanderthal DNA ever found.

• Astronomers say that a newly identified space rock, potentially as big as a football field, has a better than 1% chance of crashing into Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.

• Take a look at our almost 4-million-year-old ancestor Lucy run. Interesting recreation given her anatomical structure.

• FDA dysfunction rewards Chinese black marketeers at the expense of children.

• Article on rationing in the UK during WWII shows the citizens got way more sweets, including pure sugar, than any other food.

• Do you ever get annoyed when traveling internationally that you have to cart a handful of different plugs and adapters? Here is why.

• Supposed perfect DNA match that identifies Jack the Ripper. I’m not so sure. His victims were prostitutes, so just finding DNA on a shawl and tracking it to what has to be a fourth or fifth generation later descendant doesn’t prove a lot. The DNA could be from a client, not the killer.

• More than 200 earthquakes have rattled the Greek island of Santorini since Friday. Experts say the quakes, many with magnitudes over 4.5, are not linked to Santorini's volcano, but they acknowledge that the pattern of seismic activity is cause for concern.

• Genetic analysis suggests humans have been herding sheep for at least 11,000 years. Makes sense as the animals provide meat, milk, and clothing.

• Researchers report that the population of North America reached its maximum circa the year 1150 C.E., then fell at least 30% by 1500. The population was beginning to rebound when the Europeans arrived.

• California governor Gavin Newsom issues order to ‘maximize’ water capture during storms. Critics say it sounds just like Trump.

• The former president’s 11th-hour action does not have the authority to protect Fauci from state-level charges. Those could come soon. Maybe Fauci hasn’t skated after all.

• Nature study on the mass of humanity at Spain’s Running of the Bulls shows the collective motion of large crowds may be predictable past a certain density of people in a given area.

• Birds similar to today’s ducks and geese may have lived in the same time and place as the dinosaurs.

Newsletter Recommendations

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Video of the Week

The VOTW this week is MD’s choice. I’ve heard her sing this selection many times in countless performances. It’s beautiful in a haunting sort of way, but not necessarily my cup of tea. Singing it versus listening to it doubtless brings a different dimension. Since she knows the music much better than I, I asked her to write the description.

Here’s what she had to say.

This outstanding performance by one of my favorite groups of one of my favorite a cappella choral pieces came across my social feed the other day. And I've probably listened to it a dozen or more times since it did.

The group, Voces8, is a world-class British vocal ensemble, and they turn in an award-worthy performance—they have been Grammy nominated for other recordings—of modern (current) Norwegian composer Ola Gielo's setting of the Ubi Caritas. (If you don't know his music, I urge you to dip into it online. He's young (only 46) and immensely talented and will be composing glorious, lasting choral music for a long time to come.)

The words Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est -- Where caring and love abound, there God is -- are traditional plainchant thought to have originated in France somewhere between the 4th and 10th Centuries. But the first (and perhaps most famous) modern setting of the words was by French composer Maurice Durufle in 1960. I've performed that version many times with the Santa Barbara Choral Society, and it is a joy to sing and to hear and has become a standard of the choral repertoire. I believe it was sung at the wedding of Prince William to (now) Princess Catherine. And my chorus once performed that setting during mass at St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican while on tour. (Have a listen to Cambridge King's College Choir perform it, here.)

But the Geilo version, like so much of Gielo's music, is both mystical and luminous. The lush chords, intoned to perfection by these singers, simply fill your heart to bursting. The pure, clear tones blend and wash over you like a soothing balm. Start or end your day with it and see if you don't agree.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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