Quartz: The Japanese practice of ‘forest bathing’ is scientifically proven to improve your health

From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in the immune system before and after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and respond to tumor formation, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods. [...]

Experiments on forest bathing conducted by the Center for Environment, Health and Field Sciences in Japan’s Chiba University measured its physiological effects on 280 subjects in their early 20s. The team measured the subjects’ salivary cortisol (which increases with stress), blood pressure, pulse rate, and heart rate variability during a day in the city and compared those to the same biometrics taken during a day with a 30-minute forest visit. “Forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments,” the study concluded. [...]

Trees soothe the spirit too. A study on forest bathing’s psychological effects surveyed 498 healthy volunteers, twice in a forest and twice in control environments. The subjects showed significantly reduced hostility and depression scores, coupled with increased liveliness, after exposure to trees. “Accordingly,” the researchers wrote, “forest environments can be viewed as therapeutic landscapes.”

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The Atlantic: The Low-Tech Way to Colonize Mars

But one man’s cupcake decorating with mud is another man’s prototyping of 3D-printing on Mars. And 3D-printing could solve the single biggest hurdle to a crewed Mars expedition: the cost of transporting everything humans need to survive on the red planet.

It’s a mass problem. The more mass you have to take, the more expensive it is to escape Earth’s gravity and get to Mars. And some of the heaviest cargo will be material to shelter astronauts from the radiation zipping through Mars’ thin atmosphere. With 3D-printing, you don’t need to bring shelter. You build it out of dirt or ice already on Mars.

NASA is all aboard the 3D-printing train. Last year, it unveiled winners of its first 3D-printed Mars habitat design challenge, and the architectural renders of the winning entries were all sleek and futuristic, as renders of unbuilt buildings always are (see above). In reality, the current state of the art for Martian 3D-printing looks more like the clay logs Metzger has been documenting on Twitter.

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The School of Life: How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives

The love stories we read and see are often hugely unhelpful to our chances of having satisfying relationships, for the expectations they raise are as naïve as they are cruel.

Quartz: The rise of magic realism in TV reflects society’s increased frustration with reality

The early days of television were often an idealized version of middle-class life, an aspirational counterpart to the American Dream. The art form has gotten darker as it has matured though, and since the turn of the millennium, TV has been more concerned with depicting the failings of our society in the here-and-now than providing a pleasant vision of the future.

In the 2000s, television was filled with symbolism that reflected middle-class uncertainty. Show after show depicted people whose lives appeared secure and full of certainty suddenly falling through a trapdoor into some sort of bizarre and threatening underworld. Walter White, Nancy Botwin, and even Tony Soprano were all characters whose comfortable, normal lives are snatched away in an instant—and in a way that could just as easily happen to you, the viewer. [...]

Like any other narrative form, TV has long embraced the supernatural. But its presence has largely been limited to what we might call “genre” TV: horror-based shows such as The Walking Dead, fantasy worlds like Game of Thrones, and all sorts of other unrealites. Now, the supernatural and surreal are seeping into the world of “normal” TV, wherein the lead characters and their backstories are as seemingly average as you or I. As with the literary genre, magic realist TV isn’t fantasy as such—instead, it presents a naturalistic world where fantastical things happen, often for allegorical or narrative purposes.

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Quartz: Oxbridge and politics: Three-quarters of Britain's prime ministers since the 1720s went to either Oxford or Cambridge (but mostly Oxford)

Earlier this year, Theresa May became the 27th Oxford graduate to become prime minister. Cambridge, by contrast, has sent only 13 prime ministers to Westminster (or 14, if you count Charles Watson-Wentworth, whose educational history is the subject of some debate). The last Cambridge man to sit as prime minister was Stanley Baldwin in the early 1920s; there have been 10 Oxford grads who have led the government since then.

Since 1721, 40 of Britain’s 54 prime ministers went to either Oxford or Cambridge, collectively known as “Oxbridge.” The rivalry between the two elite institutions manifests itself in an annual boat race, which is how Oxford Today, a magazine sent to graduates, explains the situation in its latest issue:

If this contest morphed into the boat race, Oxford would be ahead by several lengths and still pulling away.  [...]

The most recent non-Oxbridge prime minister, Gordon Brown (prime minister from 2007 to 2010), also studied in Edinburgh. John Major, who held the post from 1990 to 1997, was the last leader who didn’t go to university at all. Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the opposition Labour party, started a course at North London Polytechnic but didn’t finish it.

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BBC: ‘It was an ancient form of sex tourism’

Today in Cyprus, Aphrodite's name is used to sell everything from car rentals to villas but in the pre-Christian era, she was called upon for a quite different reason: the hoards of pilgrims who came to her shrine would evoke her name before having intercourse with her temple maids.  It was an ancient form of sex tourism.

‘No, no!’ you may cry. But yes, the multitudes came not only to worship and pay homage to the Goddess but to enjoy the riotous festivals (banned by the Roman emperor Constantine in 400 AD) in her name – where having sex with strangers was not only possible but obligatory. [...]

The same account is given in the monumental study of comparative religions The Golden Bough by James Frazer. "In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess," he writes, adding that the same practices took place in Babylon, Byblos and Baalbek and in both Armenia and Turkey.

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The Guardian: Putin's paranoia: fear and loathing inside the Kremlin

Zygar’s book lists several sources inside the government who say that Putin was so convinced that the backstabbing and politicking of the hit Netflix series House of Cards accurately mirrored western politics that he instructed his colleagues to watch it.

Zygar claims that for Putin, the scheming protagonist Frank Underwood “represents the typical American politician” – which is why he prefers to support figures such as Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump, who are more “practical” and “cynical”, says Zygar.

Russia’s decision to illegally annex Crimea, formerly part of Ukraine, was not part of a long-term strategy to “reclaim” the peninsula but was rushed through in three months, the book claims. [...]

The most important event shaping modern political life in Russia was the staging of opposition protests in winter 2011-12, when thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest against the government.

According to Zygar, this left Putin with one conclusion: that his support base was no longer the middle-class intellectual elite living in the capital, but the working-class heartlands across the country, who were “more conservative, more religious, distrustful of reformers and feel more nostalgia for the Soviet period” – a legacy evident in many of Putin’s subsequent policies.

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The Huffington Post: England's Choice Is Very Clear: It Is Either Brexit Or The 'Precious Union' With Scotland

At present Scotland is faced with the frightening prospect of such a ‘hard Brexit’, most likely forced onto Scotland by the Westminster government with little consultation or involvement. The framework for Brexit - as defined at present by the UK executive government - s to be decided by a small handful of ministers, with very little regard to either the Westminster Parliament or the devolved governments and parliaments/assemblies of the other nations of what is currently the United Kingdom.

In short, as a part of the United Kingdom, Scotland faces being subjected to the tyranny of the English majority, as articulated by the UK Prime Minister, on behalf of the whole of the ‘one UK‘. The collective ‘we’ (of the one UK) have voted to leave, so shut up and get on with it Scotland, even though you don’t want it. Opposition to such a position is then labelled as ‘divisive nationalism‘.

In response to this, if the SNP government do follow through with the plan for a second independence referendum, then there is a very strong chance that Scotland may vote ‘Yes’ this time.

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Business Insider: Britain's Lord Chief Justice was 'baffled' by the key argument in the Article 50 case

Jason Coppel QC, representing the government, argued that EU citizenship rights, which Brits currently enjoy, have never been part of parliament's decision-making remit. He added that "none" of the rights Brits have as EU citizens would be affected by Article 50 being triggered.

Basically, he argues, that the UK parliament has never been under obligation to consider or discuss EU citizenship rights in parliament, so any change to the current situation does not need approval granted by MPs.

Lord Chief Justice Thomas, the most senior judge in the country, said he was "baffled" by this arrangement and suggested that EU citizenship rights, which will be lost once Article 50 is invoked, are a matter for parliamentary consultation.

"I'm baffled," Lord Thomas said. "These rights are under treaty. If amending the treaty, parliamentary approval is needed. So, I don't understand why the content of these rights are not controlled by parliament?" 

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