Eye on Faith: March 2016

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Environmentalists felled along with the trees

Honduran Rain Forest (Photo by Dennis Garcia)

There has been a not-so-silent epidemic of felled environmentalists who were fighting big-money adversaries.

Two-thirds of these martyrs were from Latin America, the latest being Berta Caceres Flores of Honduras. The Washington Post reports that Flores and other murdered activists attempted “to halt such projects as dams and logging involving hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Many of these activists are indigenous people who are aching to save their homelands. Oppressed to begin with, they are "considered almost expendable by the powers that be.”

Resources

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/for-latin-american-environmentalists-death-is-a-constant-companion/ar-BBqVEsV?li=BBnbcA1

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Fido Flintstone

Pleistocene Glacial Ice (PD)

The close relationship between humans and dogs goes back a long way, seemingly more than 12,000 years.

Two preserved Pleistocene puppies were recently discovered “in the Arctic tundra of Siberia’s Yakutia region.” Their remains were near to an “early human settlement” named Tumat.

Were these pups pets of the Tumat people? Or did they simply hang out near human caves in search of food?

These questions might remain forever unanswered. Nevertheless, the well-preserved brains of these canines could reveal crucial evolutionary knowledge.

Lead researcher Sergey Fyodorov has stated: Discoveries of this kind of predators of mammoth fauna are extremely rare and can be counted on one hand.

Resources

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/03/28/Preserved-Ice-Age-puppies-could-be-first-domesticated-dogs/9461459169786/

Anxiety: Friend or foe?

Tough day! (Photo by LaurMG)

As with medications, emotions are neither 100-percent friend nor 100-percent foe. A little can go a long way, a lot can be lethal.

The Huffington Post reports that anxiety which stems from hand-wringing uncertainty can have a silver lining. According to a study from University College London, “the stress we feel during periods of uncertainty may give us a distinct performance advantage.”

So if you’re in the trenches and not at all sure what the outcome will be, uncertainty can be your new best friend. It might just ramp up your decision-making judgment enough to tip the scales in your favor. A certain amount of stress can therefore serve as a survival mechanism.

However, too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. Stress also kills. The trick is to channel just enough of it to keep things moving forward, while finding ways to let go of the rest.

Resources

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/uncertainty-stress-study_us_56f5ce4be4b014d3fe23378e