We All Need To Stop Being Preoccupied With The Illusion Of Our Lives So That We Can Have Actual Lives

Sometimes if I go to a certain place or have a certain experience, it doesn’t feel real unless I have a photo to prove it. It’s a horrible mindset to have and I hate admitting it, but it’s the truth. I think a lot of us feel this way to some extent.

If we go out to dinner for a friend’s birthday, it didn’t happen unless there’s a photo on Instagram. If we’re witnessing a beautiful view, it’s not a full experience until we share it in our Snapchat story. Things don’t feel real anymore unless we have them validated by the likes and views of people we don’t even care about.

We’re so wrapped up in our virtual lives that at this point, the illusion of our life that we’re presenting to the world seems like our actual life. You may be tempted to believe that you are the exception to the rule, but think about it for a second. Most of the time, you share pictures of the cool things you’re doing, or you make a status when you’ve accomplished something noteworthy, such as a getting a job promotion or finishing in a marathon. Unless you are just incredibly honest, most of the things you share with your followers have been carefully selected by you and chosen for very specific reasons. They make you look impressive or interesting or worldly. You are presenting the best version of yourself to everyone, which is, in fact, an illusion.

We all have less glamorous sides too. Most people don’t make a Facebook status when their boss chews them out at work, and most people don’t tweet about sleeping until noon and then eating an entire sleeve of Oreos by themselves. Because that would make us seem like we are doing anything less than having an amazing time and an amazing life.

I’ve shared many a photo of myself having fun out at bars with my friends, or drinking a mimosa at brunch. But I don’t usually share any morning-after selfies with the world that consist of me looking hungover, with make-up smeared everywhere and a french fry halfway into my mouth. I don’t make Facebook statuses that inform people I just spent 4 hours watching Parks and Recreation and inhaling a bar of chocolate instead of going for a run. I don’t share that version of myself in my online profiles, but that’s still me too. That’s the same me as the one that seems to be living it up and having a blast and doing fun things. It’s just not the ideal version of me, so I keep it to myself.

Maybe we’re preoccupied with monitoring the illusion of our lives because it’s the only way that makes happiness seem like a real and attainable thing.

Maybe our virtual presence is our way of trying to measure success and contentment. Being able to tweak and perfect everything about our online presence makes us feel like we have some control over what happens to us in real life. We don’t want to share anything average or unpleasant about our lives because that would break the illusion that our lives are anything but perfect.

We all want to create a certain perception of our lives that will impress others, but I think we also just want to impress ourselves.

We all want to be able to look back through our Instagram feed and Facebook profile and believe that we have an impressive and noteworthy existence. We look at our virtual selves and imagine how we look from the perspective of another viewer – maybe an old friend or an ex. We scroll through our Instagram photos or our Twitter feed and we try to imagine what they would think if they were looking at our virtual life. Would they be impressed? Would they be jealous? Would they think we’ve done something with ourselves?

We imagine these situations over and over and over, subconsciously or not. We wonder what others think when they see us online. We wonder what thoughts go through their heads when they peek at what we’re up to. We wonder if they think it’s cool when we announce that we’re moving into our dream apartment. But no matter how many times we imagine what people are thinking, we will never actually find out. We will never know what’s going on in their heads or what their true opinions of us are.

We’re basically going around in circles and setting ourselves up for misery. We’re searching for validation in places where we’re never going to get it. You’re posting things and hoping for likes and shares and views, but what you’re really hoping is that someone is going to pull you aside and tell you that you’re doing it right. You want them to tell you that you’re living life to the fullest and you’re seeking out all the right experiences.

Our generation has a fear of not being extraordinary. We’re afraid of not leaving our mark and of not being admired and talked about. What we have to realize is being famous or wealthy or having thousands of online followers does not constitute an extraordinary life. An extraordinary life is made up of millions of ordinary moments, like laughing so hard that you lose control of your bladder, or laying in bed with your significant other during a rainstorm. These moments might not be captured in Facebook statuses and they might not be shared as filtered photos. But they’re the moments where you’re most present and most alive. So try to grasp onto them and hold on for dear life, because they are better than even the most perfect virtual life you could ever imagine.

Anti-Tech: The New Racism

I’m a tech enthusiast. It’s something that I can’t help – I was just born that way. Growing up, I couldn’t help the fact that my family had the resources to always have a new computer in our home, and I couldn’t help the fact that the education I was provided included classes on software development and future industries. I couldn’t help the fact that I came from money and means and that I was encouraged to go into app development – it’s who I am. It’s basically my race.

I don’t work in tech now, but I do identify with fellow technology enthusiasts. I identify with developers, and I pay close attention to the increasingly hostile attitudes towards my people in San Francisco.

While creating memes yesterday, I was looking at old photographs from WW2. Pictures from the camps. Pictures from the Polish ghettos in which Jews were required to wear gold stars, creating a sense of otherness and adding to the necessary fear that Hitler needed to create to justify the Holocaust. While these images were nothing new to me, something about them felt different. Something about them felt incredibly current.

“What if those little gold stars had cameras on them?” I thought to myself. “What if they could help you find restaurants or check your stock portfolio while you were on the go?”

As I jotted down my brilliant idea for a new piece of wearable tech, I realized that there’s not much of a difference between what those Jewish families faced in Poland, and what modern tech workers are facing in San Francisco. It’s just plain old racism, and it’s even worse now because people aren’t being attacked because of their faith or cultural background – they’re being attacked because they have lots of money and great ideas for gadgets.

When I read about rocks being hurled at the Google buses – the commuter system that ferries tech dynamos from “the ghetto” (recently gentrified neighborhoods where they have displaced longtime residents) to their “synagogue” (the Google headquarters where they make inordinate amounts of money to come up with things like Glasses that you can talk to) – I couldn’t help but think of the Freedom Riders in the south. I couldn’t help but think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A man, who like many in tech, had a dream. A dream that one day young white girls and young black girls would play together – hopefully assisted by some kind of app that matches interracial friends based on location and skin tone.

I thought about those Freedom Riders, and how they had to stand up to local police departments that were predominantly staffed by KKK members. I realized that those Freedom Riders are just like today’s tech workers. Except they didn’t have WiFi on their buses.

“Hey Glass,” I said to my 1500 dollar glasses that record strangers without their permission. “Look up pictures of black people from the 60’s.”

They used to dress so nice back then. Kind of like how tech workers dress now. I felt like I was going to cry. Luckily I am physically incapable of weeping, as I had my tear ducts removed last year as to not accidentally damage my expensive nerd goggles that are only available to an exclusive group of people.

It’s funny, according to everything I hear outside of the snotty lamentations of my fellow tech enthusiasts, white people like myself are considered universal oppressors. Especially rich white people that are displacing those without means. But, if you think about it, and look at it through the Lens Of Innovation, it’s actually the affluent tech workers who are oppressed. The Google employees are basically the Freedom Riders and the Jews in Poland.

The poor people are Nazis, and the poor people are the ones we should be throwing rocks at. Not the tech people – not the people that the rocks hurt more. We bleed just like the poor, but our clothes are more expensive and so is our wearable tech. You’re causing more damage by hurting us.

It’ll be interesting to see how history views this debate. It’ll be good to know that I was right. In 40 years, people will look back and recognize the struggle of the brave tech workers against the oppressive lower income families that sought to destroy and oppress the only people that actually cared about making the world a better place.

Literary Therapy: 11 Quotes to Motivate Your Soul

“You can’t drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.”

-Joyelle McSweeney, Flet

“We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

-Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“Just say no
to family values,
and don’t quit
your day job.”

-John Giorno, “Just Say No To Family Values”

“I can look back and recognize the things I’ve done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again.”

-Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever

“The only thing of value anyone has to offer
is their uniqueness
and individuality
no matter who you are or what you do.”

-Penny Arcade, “Manifesto”

“The meaning of mañana is ‘Wait until the signs are right.’”

-William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Both Henry and June have destroyed the logic and unity of my life. It is good, for a pattern is not living. Now I am living. I am not making patterns.”

-Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

“Move to the beat. Dance for hours. Plan and pack for a trip. Plan and pack for a scene. Set up camp in sub-zero weather. Cook over a fire. Sharpen a knife. Wield a scalpel. Fist her. Take a fist. Clean a wound. Kiss it better. Make ‘em laugh. Make ‘em cry. Lift weights. Pick up girls.
Wrestle.
Win.”

-Elaine Miller, “A Femme’s List of Incidental Skills or, Things This Femme Can Do”

“We keep moving. And as we do, things around us, well, they disappear.”

-Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.”

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.”

-Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

An Advancement and Missed Opportunity for Alzheimer's

Last week a paper was published in Nature Medicine that drew significant media buzz. The paper was titled "Plasma phospholipids identify antecedent memory impairment in older adults." You may know it better by the headlines "New blood test for Alzheimer's disease" or "Alzheimer's can be predicted three years in advance."

As a scientist, the discord between the popular mainstream media's presentation of this paper and the actual scientific paper was jarring. Firstly, there is a sharp contrast between the precise language of the Nature title and the more attention-seeking, market-sensitive language of the mainstream-media headlines. Secondly, the mainstream-media headlines are relatively misleading. There is no blood test available on the market today; there are still large scientific gaps that we need to fill before the technique can be used to predict Alzheimer's in a diverse population.

The typical quick reader of these headlines will leave with the impression that science is ahead of where it actually is. There is a confidence exuded by the media that is not echoed within the paper. This kind of approach to scientific news does everyone, from patients to scientists, a huge disservice. It is particularly troubling with a disease as prevalent as Alzheimer's, which is predicted to impact one out of every six women over the age of 65 and one out of every 11 men over the age of 65.

A few caveats are stated within the news articles: USA Today, NPR, and CNN all explained that there is still research to be done. According to CNN:

If any of these tests work out -- and that's still an if -- it would take years to make it to doctors' offices, since the test would need to be validated by other labs and with larger groups of people.
However, there is a wide gap between delivering the facts and explaining how the science works.

In this particular paper, the approach to a disease like Alzheimer's was impressive -- and is important for the public to understand. We really do not completely understand how Alzheimer's is triggered, and we can only diagnose it after it has developed past a point. As a result, the authors chose to assay blood from patients with and without cognitive impairments over a period of time, and see if they could find a predictive change in the lipid composition. If I lost you at "lipid composition," think of it like this: Lipids make up the walls of cells, including neurons (brain cells). If those walls change, it may correlate with neurodegeneration, or neurons dying prematurely. So it's smart to think of testing lipid levels in patients with Alzheimer's, and even smarter to think of running a five-year study in which you could track patients with initial cognitive impairments and patients who developed those over time. Identifying lipids as predictive is useful not only for earlier intervention but for identifying potential therapeutic targets. If the public fully understood the merit of this kind of study, setting up a second trial may be an easier, quicker and more thoughtful process.

The second trial is necessary for several reasons. This is the first study of its kind, and it took five years to run. The last paragraph of the Nature paper itself states:

This biomarker panel requires external validation using similar rigorous clinical classification before further development for clinical use. Such additional validation should be considered in a more diverse demographic group than our initial cohort.

In other words, for certain data analysis, they had as few as 41 patients, and depending on the genetic background of participants, they may not be able to make assumptions of predictability for everyone. This is important and is often overlooked when clinical trials are discussed. Scientists desperately need participants from a variety of genetic backgrounds -- and larger numbers of participants to build a test that is accurate and meaningful.

The public's appreciation of the scientific methodology and merit behind the paper are critical to the furthering of research like this. Within science, authors are careful and precise. We understand that there is a fine line between prediction and causation, between statistical significance and repeatability. Every paper that is peer-reviewed is vetted through critical, careful eyes. The claims are brought down to the facts, and the holes punctured quickly.

That process doesn't exist for science in the media world. It's particularly telling that in Nature's social-media indexing for this particular article, they show less than 100 direct Tweets to the paper. CNN's news article had over 500 comments, and it doesn't appear as though the majority had read or understood the actual paper.

As a scientist and as a patient, this is alarming. I understand the need for science to be scientific -- precise, complex and detail-oriented. As a patient, I want to understand things in a way that is relevant to me -- clear, evidence-based and friendly. No matter how empowered I am as a patient, if I don't have access to accurate, complete information, I am still fumbling in the dark. If scientists don't turn the light on for patients and take the lead with scientific education, they will lose out on a population that is eager and energized and wants to meet the same research goals.

Thanks to Climate Change, West Nile Virus Could Be Your New Neighbor

Invasive species aren’t just species — they can also be pathogens. Such is the case with the West Nile virus. A mosquito-borne virus identified in the West Nile subregion in Uganda in 1937 — hence the name — West Nile wasn’t much of a concern to people elsewhere until it broke out of Africa in 1999. The first U.S. cases were confirmed in New York City in 1999, and it has now spread throughout much of the world. Though 80% of infections are subclinical — meaning they yield no symptoms — those who do get sick can get very sick. The virus can lead to encephalitis — inflammation of the brain and nervous system — and even death, with 286 people dying from West Nile in the U.S. in 2012. There were more than 5,500 cases reported that year, and the scary thing is that as the climate warms, West Nile will continue to spread.

That’s the conclusion of a new study from a team of researchers in the U.S., Britain and Germany, including those at the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. In a study published in the journal Global Change Biology, the researchers took climate and species-distribution data, and created models that try to project the spread of the virus as the globe warms. West Nile virus is carried by mosquitoes, and infected insects transmit the virus to human beings with a bite. But birds play a role too — if bitten by an infected mosquito, birds can generate high levels of the virus in their bloodstream, and can then transmit it to uninfected mosquitoes, which in turn can infect people. The biggest indicator of whether West Nile virus will occur is the maximum temperature of the warmest month of the year, which is why the virus has caused the most damage in hot southern states like Texas.

The UCLA model indicates that higher temperatures and lower precipitation will generally lead to more cases of West Nile, as well as the spread of the virus to northern territories that haven’t yet been affected by it. In California alone, for example, more than half of the state will see an increased probability of West Nile in the decades to come, and by 2080 the virus may well be prevalent in parts of southern Canada, and as far north as northern British Columbia, as you can see in this map:

The UCLA model looks only at climate data and doesn’t take into account the kind of control methods that can be used to combat West Nile on the ground, including pesticide spraying and land-use changes that deny mosquitoes the pools of stagnant water they use as breeding sites. That’s important to remember: while climate change can raise the risk of typically tropical diseases like West Nile or malaria, smart control efforts can offset at least some of that danger. (Malaria used to be common throughout much of the South — which is easily warm enough in the summer for the disease — before steps were taken to eliminate it, a process that led to the creation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) But the UCLA study underscores the fact that climate change operates as a threat multiplier for tropical diseases, one that will allow pathogens to invade new territory — and, ultimately, us.

The Happiest and Healthiest States Are In the Midwest

A new Gallup survey of nationwide well-being ranks North Dakota at the top and West Virginia at the very bottom.

The annual survey interviews more 178,000 American adults from all 50 states. The well-being index scores states on various factors, including life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. Hawaii was formerly the reigning state for the last four years, but it dropped to 8th this year. Based on the 2013 data, the states in the Midwest and West were generally the highest scoring, and the South had some of the lowest scores.

Other states reigned in their own well-being factors. For instance, Nebraska ranked highest for Life Evaluation Index, Alaska had the greatest score for Emotional Health Index, and Vermont held the top spot for Health Behaviors.

These are the top five states in the survey:

1. North Dakota
2. South Dakota
3. Nebraska
4. Minnesota
5. Montana

And these are the lowest-ranking states (starting from the bottom):

1. West Virginia
2. Kentucky
3. Mississippi
4. Alabama
5. Ohio

What Dreams Are Made Of: Understanding Why We Dream

Do they predict the future or simply rehash the past? By figuring out why we dream, researchers are hoping to nail down what the nightly cavalcade of images and events means. 

Ever since Sigmund Freud published his controversial theories about the meaning of dreams in 1900, we have been fascinated with the jumble of experiences we seem to live through while we slumber. Freud was convinced that dreams represent some unfulfilled desires or hoped-for wishes, while later investigators saw a more pragmatic quality to them, as reflection of waking life. None of these theories, however, have had the benefit of much in the way of solid, objective data.

At least, until now. Two new developments in research — brain imaging and big data — may offer some stronger answers. More detailed and timely snapshots of the brain at work, combined with the information researchers amassed about dreams from experiments in sleep labs, is gradually peeling away the mystery of dreams, and revealing their meaning.

From a strictly biological standpoint, scientists have learned much about the physiological process of dreaming, which occurs primarily in REM sleep. “During dreaming,” says Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University School of Medicine and the graduate school of Northcentral University in Prescott Valley, Ariz., “the limbic part of the brain—the emotional part—gets highly activated while the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the executive part of the brain, is under-activated. So the kind of cognitions we experience during dreams are highly emotional, visually vivid, but often illogical, disconnected and sometimes bizarre.” That suggests that our dreams may have some role in emotional stability.

That does not necessarily mean, most dream researchers believe, that dreams are random expressions of emotion or devoid of some intellectual meaning. While some scientists maintain that dream patterns are strictly the result of how different neurons in the brain are firing, Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, believes they represent something more.  “I think it’s a fallacy that knowing brain action negates a subjective, psychological meaning any more than it does for waking thought. I think dreams are thinking in a different biochemical state.”

Defining that state, not to mention understanding the rules under which that universe operates, however, is a challenge. It may represent a complex interplay between emotional and cognitive information, says McNamara, so that dreams serve to help our brains process emotional memories and integrate them into our long-term memories. And because traumatic events are associated with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, they can cause nightmares. Researchers believe that excessive amounts of cortisol can impair the interaction between the hippocampus and the amygdala, the two main brain systems that integrate memory. “The memories don’t get integrated,” he says, “but just sit around. In post traumatic stress disorder, they get re-experienced over and over.”

In fact, from sleep studies in which people were exposed to images, learning tasks or other experiences immediately before they dozed off and then examined when they awakened, many scientists believe that dreams can help us rehearse for challenges or threats we anticipate—emotionally, cognitively and even physiologically. In our dreams we may try out different scenarios to deal with what’s coming up. Although much of the evidence for this is anecdotal, McNamara says, someone practicing piano or playing video games in waking life may start to do the same while dreaming. People solving a puzzle or studying a foreign language, he adds, can have breakthroughs with dreams that go beyond the perceptions that simply taking a break from the problem can produce. 

And now, Barrett says, brain imaging holds the promise of being able to help scientists “see” what until now could only be reported by subjective, possibly inaccurately recalled, dream accounts. For example, in research with rats trained to run through mazes to get rewards, investigators were able to record neuron activity in sleeping rats and determined that the rats were running the same mazes in their dreams.

In other experiments with humans, scientists monitored volunteers who slept inside an fMRI scanner while hooked up to EEG electrodes that measured brain wave activity. When the EEG indicated they were dreaming, the participants were awakened and asked what images they had seen in their dreams. The investigators were later able to match certain patterns of brain activity to certain images for each person.  “There’s a crude correspondence between the brain scan and the image. “From the scan, you can guess it’s an animal with four legs,” says Barrett. Despite the primitive state of this dream decoding, the ability to actually glean content from a dream is getting closer.

Mining big data bases of reported dreams holds another kind of promise. Until now, researchers have been working on relatively small samples of dream accounts, usually fewer than 200 per study. But new dream websites and smartphone apps like DreamBoard and Dreamscloud are encouraging thousands of people to report their dreams into larger repositories so researchers can finally answer their most urgent questions.  McNamara, for example, is excited to study dreams from different countries to see whether there are cultural differences in what people’s brains do when they aren’t awake.

The data bases also provide an opportunity to investigate the intriguing but under-studied realm of sex dreams. Until recently, says McNamara, they represented only 10% of reported dreams, likely because people are not eager to share this type of content with researchers in white lab coats. But self-reporting via the apps and websites, despite its potential biases, may provide more information on these types of dreams. “This is a wide open area crying for investigation,” he says.

McNamara is also eager to study individuals’ dreams over time to observe differences and changes in emotional tone, colors, words and other significant patterns and connect these to events in their lives. That would bring him closer to answering whether dreams are, in fact, prophetic — it might be possible, for example, that certain kinds of dreams precede getting the flu, or that other other dreams are more associated with happier events.

Such investigations could also reveal more about less welcome dreams, such as nightmares, and potentially lead to ways to control or avoid them. Barrett plans to mine the new database to study how often nightmares occur, and how they relate to an individual’s trauma or a family history of anxiety disorder. One of her first projects will involve the dream data from DreamBoard.com, which has accumulated 165,000 dreams over the last two years. Because Dreamboard has coded the dreams by the gender, colors, emotions (joy, anxiety, anger) and the number and categories of people in a dream, Barrett says she can identify basic patterns.

We already know, she says, that women dream equally about men and women while men’s dreams are two-thirds populated by men. Research so far also shows that men’s dreams may show slightly more anger and physical aggression while women’s display a bit more sadness and verbal hostility. Interpreting what these differences mean, however, will require deeper studies.

What’s been discovered so far, however, suggests that such studies could reveal an enormous amount about what role dreams play in our lives, and how important they are for biological, psychological or social reasons. With this research, McNamara believes, scientists can find out if what shrinks have been saying for years is true — that reflecting on our dreams is useful and can give us insight into ourselves. Psychologists say so, and many people think so. But this research, he says, gives us the potential to know.

The I CARE Foundation’s International Travel Child Consent Form Supported By Hague Conference Secretary General As Efforts Increase To Prevent International Child Abduction

As the I CARE Foundation increases their global initiative to prevent world-wide international parental child abduction and trafficking of children, The Hague Conference On Private International Law Secretary General, Mr. Christophe Bernasconi, who oversees The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction has voiced strong support for the utilization of the I CARE Foundation’s International Travel Child Consent Form.  Considered a landmark global parental child abduction prevention tool that may be used by both Hague Convention and non-Hague Convention signatory nations, the travel document focuses on preventing the epidemic problem of wrongful retention (abduction) of children abroad who travel during the Christmas Holiday or Summer Vacation period with a parent.

During the Christmas Holiday Season, international parental child abduction around the world surges as carefully planned abduction schemes are implemented. For the vast majority of targeted parents and children, the planned act of international kidnapping is often undetected until the child is wrongfully detained in a foreign country. Sadly, many of these schemes also focus on causing grave malice to unsuspecting targeted left-behind parents, who are often blind-sided by the actions that unfold. In order to protect against international child abduction schemes revolving around the wrongful detention of a child, the I CARE Foundation has created a groundbreaking international travel consent form steep in Hague Convention language intended to help prevent abduction or assist in the immediate return of a child if abduction occurs. Amongst a growing number of worldwide stakeholders who support use of the form is Hague Conference on Private International Law Secretary General Mr. Christophe Bernasconi, who previously stated, “I have had the possibility to look at the travel form and must say that I am impressed: this is the most comprehensive document of its kind that I have seen so far and there is little doubt in my mind that this is a most valuable and important effort to prevent child abduction.”

Secretary General Bernasconi recently issued the following statement as concern for abduction during Christmas is on the minds of all abduction prevention stakeholders: “While the winter holiday season is often one which presents many opportunities for festive family celebrations, it is also a period in which sadly more parental child abductions occur. As a result, it is more important than ever to take steps to prevent the wrongful removal of children so that abductions which are covered by the Hague Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction do not occur in the first place.

“Prevention can be achieved in several ways. For example, when one parent intends to travel with his or her child without the other parent, the other parent’s consent to the travel should first be obtained. One of the ways a parent can demonstrate that they have the approval of the other non-travelling parent is by having him or her sign a clear, comprehensive travel consent form which includes a statement that the non-travelling parent agrees to the travel but also that the child is to return to his/her place of habitual residence on or before a specific date. A model travel consent form for this purpose has recently been developed by the I CARE Foundation and is, I understand, already widely used by parents in various jurisdictions. Use of the I CARE Foundation's comprehensive Hague-centric travel form that addresses key aspects of the  Hague Child Abduction Convention pertaining to a  child's international travel are central to protecting against a child's wrongful retention abroad.  The I CARE Foundation's International Travel Child Consent form and similar comprehensive models deserve further encouragement so as to prevent child abduction and perhaps even limit instances of child trafficking in general.”

Carolina Marín Pedreño, a partner at the prestigious London-based law firm of Dawson Cornwell and a fellow of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers known for her global work protecting children added, "As an international family practitioner I have seen how the introduction of the I Care Foundation's Travel Consent Form has reduced the anxiety of parents when agreeing to their children travelling abroad for contact with the other parent, but most importantly has prevented wrongful removals or retentions of those children in a country where they are not habitually resident. The Form is a significant safeguard for parents involved in cross borders relationships. The support of the Secretary General of The Hague Conference brings the hope that this tool will become a common instrument to be used by Child Abduction practitioners globally, to prevent child abductions and to continue to protect children reducing the number of these dramatic cases. I urge all parents and law practitioners to utilize this important tool when children intend to travel abroad.”

Peter Thomas Senese, the Founding Director of the I CARE Foundation and creator of the International Travel Child Consent Form added, "It is deeply rewarding to know that, the 'International Travel Child Consent Form' is having a significant impact on preventing international child abductions around the world. The doctrine has been embraced and utilized by a large number of families around the world. Impressively, children who have traveled using the form have come home. The I CARE Foundation believes that as courts around the world continue to uphold the sanctity of this landmark global child abduction prevention instrument unique in it being one of the first true Hague-centric private sector global abduction prevention tools, we will see a radical decline in international parental child abductions associated with the wrongful retention of children abroad. With our eyes set on protecting the lives of children around the world, I urge all parents who have children traveling abroad – with or without them – to use the I CARE Foundation’s travel form.”

Silvia A. Sejas Pardo, Silvia A. Sejas Pardo, a highly respected Argentinean and Spanish international lawyer based in Spain added, "This travel consent is an effective tool that establishes unquestionable determination of what courts are responsible for a minor’s welfare. Often in the case of international abduction a taking parent will attempt to seek to change jurisdiction of a child’s welfare which is safeguarded by the Hague Convention. However, in cases of abduction the taking parent will attempt to use certain provisions and delicate case law related to the treaty that would enable them to remain abroad with their child. The I CARE Foundation’s travel form protects against this while also providing a cost-effective and quick extrajudicial resolution of disputes in a minor’s mobility. Unquestionably, all children who travel internationally should do so under this document.”

Mexico's Carlos Alvarado is a partner at the International Law Group and considered one of the most knowledgeable international family law attorneys in Mexico. Mr. Alvarado was responsible for codifying and translating the I CARE Foundation's travel consent form into Spanish. Mr. Alvarado added, "As a law practitioner deeply familiar with Hague Convention law and the great challenges parents and lawyers have protecting children targeted for international abduction, it is critical that new and creative abduction prevention tools are utilized to protect children. The I CARE Foundation's International Travel Child Consent Form is an important tool that can and should be used to prevent children from being wrongfully detained in a foreign country. We intend to widely implement this new tool to protect children in Mexico and whenever possible, assist parents who have had a child abducted to Mexico who have utilized this agreement. This is a tool all attorneys should use."

To learn more about the 'International Travel Child Consent Form' please visit the I CARE Foundation: http://www.stopchildabduction.org/Child_Travel_Consent_Form.html

Senate Advances LGBT Anti-Discrimination Bill

Seventeen years after failing by one vote to win passage in the Senate, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed in the upper chamber Monday with 61 in favor, one vote over the minimum threshold to move the bill to a full floor vote. ENDA now moves to a floor vote in the Senate, where it is expected to pass. In the House, where the climate is much less favorable toward the bill, advocates are exploring all options to advance a federal ban on workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. If ENDA fails there, supporters might even push for an Executive Order to advance the cause.

By Monday morning, ENDA had the support of the entire Democratic caucus, plus four Senate Republicans (Lisa Murkowski, Mark Kirk, Susan Collins and Orrin Hatch). Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller’s announcement that he would support ENDA pushed the bill to the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. In the final tally, Ohio Senator Rob Portman became the sixth Republican to support the measure, pushing the total yeas to 61.

“We’re not going to take anything for granted, but things are looking good in the Senate this week,” said Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president of the Center for American Progress. “If the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were to come up in the House, there’s a path to passage,” she said.

Emphasis on “path” over “passage.”

As long as John Boehner holds the Speaker’s gavel, ENDA faces a much harder road in the House. After Heller’s announcement of support Monday, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel reiterated the Speaker’s long-standing opposition to ENDA.

“The Speaker believes this legislation will increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs, especially small-business jobs,” he told TIME.

ENDA advocates fired back. At a time when “this week alone we may see two additional states, Illinois and Hawaii, join the marriage column, it seems so relatively Fred Flintstone for John Boehner to be saying that gays are not deserving of workplace protections,” Fred Sainz, vice president at Human Rights Campaign, told TIME.

Nonetheless, in Boehner’s House, it’s unlikely ENDA will even reach the floor. The Speaker has shown himself fond of the so-called Hastert Rule, under which legislation is not allowed to come up for a vote in the full House unless such a vote has the support of “a majority of the majority.” With only five House Republicans openly in support of ENDA, it’s difficult to see how it even makes it to the floor.

Facing that reality, Sainz said, advocates are weighing other options.

“While the Speaker is definitely all powerful in terms of bringing things to the floor, there’s also a defense authorization bill where this could also go over to the House,” he said.

If ENDA fails in the House, the President, who took to the Huffington Post on Sunday to urge passage of the bill, could sign an Executive Order banning LGBT discrimination among federal contractors. Such a move could lend momentum that might push it over the threshold in another attempt down the road.

Senate Announces Deal to Avoid Default, House GOP Expected to Bend

Senate leaders announced a bipartisan deal Wednesday to reopen government and raise the debt ceiling, moving the country closer to ending weeks of brinkmanship over Obamacare, federal spending and debt.

“This is not a time for pointing fingers or blame. This is a time for reconciliation,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in announcing the agreement, which would reopen the government and extend the debt ceiling through early next year. The bill will also appoint Senators to work on a budget agreement over the next two months, in the hopes of avoiding another round of brinkmanship in 2014.

He was followed by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who said Republicans would continue to fight for a repeal to Obamacare, but there would be no victory this week. ”For today, the relief we hope for is to reopen the government, avoid default and protect the historic cuts we achieved under the budget control act,” McConnell said. He later added that he expected to have a vote Wednesday on the measure.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Barack Obama “applauds” the deal, and encouraged both chambers of Congress to expeditiously pass the legislation. But with an agreement that represents an almost total victory for Democrats, Carney asserted, “there are no winners here,” given the negative effects of the shutdown.

As the Senate gaveled to order, House Republicans gathered to discuss their path forward. Several staff sources suggested that Speaker John Boehner would move forward with a vote on the Senate measure, which would likely pass with the help of Democratic votes. “Looks like we’ll eat the Reid-McConnell deal,” one House GOP source told TIME. “It’ll rely on Democratic votes.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said it was his “understanding” that the House would act on the measure first, thereby avoiding time-consuming procedural hurdles in the Senate hours before Treasury runs out of borrowing authority. But House Republican leadership did not confirm the order of events. “No decision has been made yet,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP whip before the meeting.

Multiple Republican Senators, including Kentucky’s Rand Paul, said they expect the Senate plan to pass with a strong majority of Republican votes. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the original proponents of the failed plan to shut down the government to defund Obamacare, said he would not vote for the deal, but would also not try to block the Senate from moving forward.

The emerging agreement isn’t sitting well with some Republicans. Sen. Lindsay Graham, who has long argued for a grand bargain to address long-term fiscal issues, called it a “joke. “We took some breadcrumbs and left the whole meal on the table,” he said.

Graham continued to criticize the tactics the House Republicans have behaved over recent weeks. “The way we’re behaving and the path we’ve taken over the past couple of weeks leads to a marginalized party in the eyes of the American people,” he said. “It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times because they were out of the spotlight and didn’t have to showcase their ideas.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte expressed hope that more conservative colleagues will not repeat their mistakes of the last month. “We’ve been asking from the beginning how does this end, how do you achieve what you’re purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare,” she said. “And I never got an answer to that. I don’t think there still is an answer to that. So if we have learned nothing else from this whole exercise I hope we learn that we shouldn’t get behind a strategy that cannot succeed.”

According to a Senate Republican leadership aide, under the agreement, the government would be funded through Jan. 15, 2014 unless a budget agreement is reached sooner, while the debt limit would be raised through Feb. 7. The extraordinary accounting measures used to keep the government under the borrowing cap would not be prohibited under the deal. An anti-fraud measure will be added to Obamacare, requiring income verification for those receiving subsidies to purchase insurance under the law.

What’s to Blame For Stock Market Bubbles? Your Brain

If you lost money in the last bubble market there are a lot of things you can blame—a bad tip, a hunch gone wrong. But don’t let your dorsomedial prefrontal cortex off the hook. That bad boy can cost you a bundle.

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is located in the forward part of your brain and is usually quite the good citizen. It’s in that spot that you process feelings of altruism. It’s there too that you make the instinctive judgment about the person you meet at a singles bar who instantly—and usually correctly—strikes you as either a rare find or bad news. And, according to a new study in the journal Neuron, by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, it’s there as well that you make the often disastrous decision to jump into or out of a wildly fluctuating market.

One of the reasons people participate at all in market bubbles is their belief that somebody knows something they don’t. If real estate or tech or the health sector is booming, there must be a reason, and if you study the numbers and think hard enough, you can figure out what’s going on in the heads of other investors that’s driving prices up or down. This ability to know what someone else is thinking is not an illusion. It’s called the theory of mind, it lives in the dmPFC and it boots itself up early in life. In an oft-cited study, an experimenter playing with a toddler younger than three will conspire with the child to hide a toy. When another researcher comes into the room, the child will assume that that person too knows where the toy is—the assumption being that all knowledge is universal knowledge. It’s only a little later that kids appreciate that knowledge is particular to the person, and so are feelings. With that comes empathy (even if I’m feeling happy you might be feeling sad) as well as a willingness to learn from other people—and to try to intuit the knowledge they’re not actively sharing.

To test what role this plays in markets, the Caltech investigators placed subjects in a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and had them watch a recorded session of other people participating in a market-trading simulation game. In some of the trials, the game resulted in a bubble market, with the share price of the imaginary asset rising far above its intrinsic worth. In other sessions, the trading proceeded more conservatively and predictably. In all of the sessions, the subjects in the fMRI were periodically asked to imagine they were participating in the game and to invest part of a stake of $60.

Some of the subjects invested only sparingly in the boom and bust trials; others actively participated in them, risking a significant share of their own $60. During all of the trials, all of the subjects showed increased activity in a brain region known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is sort of our internal bean-counter, making judgments about the value and the cost of things.  In some subjects there was also an uptick in activity in the dmPFC, and the greater that activity, the greater the fluctuation in those subjects’ portfolio values.

To determine if this was indeed a sign of the brain trying to mind-read other market players, the investigators had the subjects take another, much simpler test, known as “the mind in the eyes” experiment. As the name suggests, the test involves looking at pictures of people expressing different emotions and identifying what those emotions are; to increase the degree of difficulty,  only the eyes and the region of the face immediately around them are shown. The people who did best on that test turned out to be the same ones who’d had higher activation of the dmPFC in the investment game and the greatest portfolio fluctuation—for better or worse. Said principal investigator Colin Camerer in a statement accompanying the release of the study:

“The way we interpret this is that these people were thinking more about what was going on in the market and wondering why people were behaving the way they were. Normally, in everyday social encounters and in specialized professions, this kind of mind reading is useful to the individual. But in these markets, when prices are going crazy, these people think, ‘Wow, I think I can figure these markets out. Let me buy and sell.’ And that is usually going to contribute to the bubble’s momentum and also cost them money.”

The idea that you can read the minds of the people who know what’s going on is not the only illusion at work. The other is that those knowledgeable people exist in the first place. Paradoxically, it’s the very volatility of the trading that creates that impression. Markets are supposed to be rational things, guided by the endlessly invoked invisible hand. If those markets are going nuts, someone must be steering the hand that way for a reason. Said Peter Bossaerts, another of the paper’s authors:

“When participants see the inconsistency in order flow, they think that there are people who know better in the marketplace and they make a game out of it. In reality, however, there is nothing to be gained because nobody knows better.”

Five years almost to the day after the crash of Lehman Brothers, a phrase like “nothing to be gained because nobody knows better” should perhaps be tattooed on the forehead of every trader on the planet. Theory of mind is a wonderful thing when there’s actually another mind to be read. Markets don’t have minds, however, they only have wealth. Forget that fact and they could have yours.

Hong Kong, World’s Shark Fin Hub, Sees Huge Drop in Infamous Trade

Hong Kong, which received roughly half of the world’s shark fin harvest last year, has seen a 30% drop in imports as a long-running environmental campaign begins to bite.

Hong Kong Marine Productions Association chairman Ricky Leung also cited a slowing economy and a crackdown on lavish entertaining among mainland Chinese officials — who see shark’s fin as a prized banqueting delicacy — as other reasons for the downturn

A campaign by 60 advocacy groups, including Greenpeace, and Humane Society International, led major airlines to introduce a total ban on shark fin haulage last year, with Emirates announcing its support just last week.

Shark fin is a popular Chinese ingredient but environmentalists condemn sales of the product, claiming that it fuels barbaric fishing practices. Hong Kong imported 1,162 tons of shark fins in 2012, according to government figures. In January, the discovery of thousands of shark fins drying on a rooftop in the city sparked outrage.

Mapping 320,000 New Animal Viruses Crucial to Preventing Global Contagions: Report

At least 320,000 previously unknown viruses could be circulating in animals and identifying which might spread to humans is vital to prevent future pandemics, says a new study.

Prof. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the University of Columbia, says that identifying these viral diseases could cost more than $6 billion, but this is still a fraction of the cost of dealing with a major contagion.

“What we’re really talking about is defining the full range of diversity of viruses within mammals, and our intent is that as we get more information we will be able to understand the principles that underlie determinants of risks,” he says.

Nearly 70% of viruses that infect humans — including HIV, Ebola and Swine Flu — originated in wildlife. The new research, published in the journal mBio, is based on data collected from flying foxes in Bangladesh that has been applied to the 5,486 known species of mammal.

Population Plus Climate: Why Coastal Cities Will Face Increased Risks From Floods

Living in New York, it’s easy to forget that the ocean is right on our doorsteps. This isn’t Miami with its beaches or Venice with its canals or New Orleans with its history of storms and floods. New York has always been a supremely self-involved city—this famous magazine cover pretty much sums it up—and though Manhattan is an island, it’s one that has its eyes turned inward, not out toward the water that rings it.

Hurricane Sandy ended that illusion last year. The storm surge flooded tunnels, subway lines and apartment buildings; swamped power lines and transformers caused a blackout over much of Manhattan that lasted for days. Altogether Sandy cost the city of New York some $19 billion in public and private losses, nearly all of it due to the water. Sandy wasn’t even that powerful a storm, its winds barely ranking as a category 1 when it made landfall along the East Coast last October. What it had was something any New Yorker who’s hunted for apartments could appreciate—location, location, location—hitting the biggest city in America and flooding it with all that forgotten coastal water.

For coastal cities like New York, Hurricane Sandy was a coming attraction for what is likely to be a very wet and destructive future. According to leaked drafts of the forthcoming new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists believe that sea level could rise by more than three feet by the end of the century is carbon emissions keep growing at a runaway pace. And a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change laid out the enormous flood losses that major coastal cities could face in the future. Average global flood losses could rise from approximately $6 billion per year in 2005 to $60 to $63 billion per year by 2050, thanks to population and economic growth along the coasts and the multiplying effect of climate change-driven sea level rise. As Robert Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in Britain and a co-author of the study, put it in a statement: “There is a pressing need to start planning how to manage flood risk now.”

The Nature Climate Change study looked at both present and projected future flood losses in the 136 largest coastal cities in the world, looking at their financial risks both in absolute terms—taking into account protections like sea walls and dikes—and as a percentage of the city’s GDP. The cities ranked as most at risk today range from Guangzhou in southern China to Mumbai in India to, yes, New York City. What those cities tend to have in common is high wealth and population levels and relatively little flooding protection. (By contrast, Dutch cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam—which are extremely flood-prone geographically—aren’t found on the list because the Netherlands government has invested heavily in coastal protection.) Three American cities—Miami, New York and New Orleans—are responsible for 31% of the total losses across the 136 cities surveyed in 2005. When it comes to losses as a percentage of total city GDP—which gives the very richest cities like New York an advantage—Guangzhou, New Orleans and Guayaquil in Ecuador are most at risk.

The situation changes a bit in 2050. The study assumed that climate change will lead sea levels to rise 0.65 to 1.3 ft. by 2050, with some cities facing additional sea level rise because of local subsidence—literally, the earth sinking. Developing cities like Guangzhou, Mumbai and Shenzhen face the biggest risks, though Miami and New York rank highest among cities in developed nations. If no improvements are made in flood defenses, the study estimates that the world could be facing as much as $1 trillion or more per year in losses. Now, that number is the worst of the worst case, assuming that cities do absolutely nothing to protect themselves from sea level rise, suffer major floods and then pay to immediately rebuild everything they lost. But even assuming improvements in coastal defenses, potential losses will increase significantly, thanks to the risk of bigger floods and more immediately, a huge increase in the number of people and the value of property along the coasts.

That second bit is important. It’s vital for governments to gain a better understanding of flooding risks from global warming—and sea level rises of the sort apparently projected by the IPCC will endanger major world cities. But the most immediate threat is the sheer increase in people—and their property—put in harm’s way in coastal cities. In the U.S. 87 million people now live along the coast, up from 47 million people in 1960, and globally six of the world’s 10 largest cities are on the coast. Of the $60 to $63 billion in flood risk the Nature Climate Change study estimates the world’s cities will face by 2050, $52 billion is due to economic and population growth—the rest is due to sea level rise and land use change.

That doesn’t mean that climate change-amplified floods and storms don’t present a danger to coastal cities—or that we don’t need to worry about reducing carbon emissions. But the numbers don’t lie—the single biggest increase in the risk from flooding comes from putting people and property in places where floods have always been likely to happen. As Sandy showed, coastal cities are at risk from major flooding right now if a storm should hit at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s location, location, location—which is why it’s so important to spend money now to improve coastal defenses. We don’t have to wait for climate change to come.

Hello, My Name Is Dolphin: The Mammal That Never Forgets

In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, the late, great British satirist Douglas Adams wrote that dolphins are the second most intelligent creatures on earth — before humans and after mice, which spend their time running complex lab experiments on scientists. The mice might not quite live up to their No. 1 billing, but the more we learn about the cognitive abilities of dolphins, the more they indeed seem to have the No. 2 spot locked up. Not only do dolphins have impressive memories for tasks, the ability to use tools and elaborate social structures, but they also have their own names, distinctive identifying whistles that they develop themselves. Now a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports that dolphins can recognize the whistles of others they shared a tank with as long as 20 years ago, the most enduring social memories ever observed outside of humans.

The study, undertaken by Jason Bruck, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, used 43 dolphins ranging from 4 months to 47 years old that are cycled among various institutions as part of a captive breeding program. Some of them had lived together for only three months; others had shared a tank for more than 18 years before being separated. Bruck first obtained recordings of each dolphin’s name whistle. Then he set up an underwater speaker in the dolphins’ tanks that played whistles from strangers and from former tankmates. The difference in the dolphins’ reactions was unmistakable.

“When they hear a dolphin they know, they often quickly approach the speaker playing the recording,” Bruck said in a prepared statement. “At times they will hover around, whistle at it, try to get it to whistle back.” They paid far less attention to a stranger’s whistle-name.

Moreover, it didn’t matter how long the animals had been separated — a dolphin could recognize the call of a companion it had last seen decades ago just as easily as one it last saw six months ago. Nor did it matter how short or long the animals had been housed together; they responded with the same recognition to a long-term friend or a more fleeting acquaintance. In the most impressive case, a dolphin named Bailey recognized the whistle of Allie, her tankmate 20 years and six months ago. “This shows us an animal operating cognitively at a level that’s very consistent with human social memory,” Bruck said.

Wild dolphins have a life expectancy that ranges from 20 to 50 years (though such superannuated adults are rare), and they live in ever shifting pods, with individuals constantly splitting off and reuniting with the group. Bruck suggests that animals with such a social structure may benefit from a long memory for one another, perhaps supporting a connection between complex social behavior and the evolution of memory. But it may also be that a prodigious memory for names is just part of the larger, fascinating package of dolphin intelligence, included for no particular evolutionary reason — another element of the hidden depths of a mammalian cousin that we continue to explore.

The Great, Belching Black Hole — Eats Gas, Burps X-rays

Was Einstein smarter than a sixth-grader? When it came to black holes, maybe not. For much of the 20^th century, astronomers and physicists were unsure about whether black holes — which were predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity Theory — even existed.  That was a fair enough doubt, since the idea of a superdense star remnant with a gravity field so powerful not even light could escape it did defy credibility. Even Einstein himself thought they were just a mathematical curiosity that couldn’t possibly exist in the real universe.

Today, every schoolchild knows better. Astronomers have found giant black holes lurking at the cores of galaxies, the Milky Way among them, and more modest black holes all over the place, including up to 60 in our home galaxy. Now, that cosmic census has expanded dramatically: using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astronomers have spotted 26 of the more modest variety of black hole in the Andromeda galaxy, which is not only the Milky Way’s closest neighbor, but also its near twin.

Along with nine black holes detected previously, that brings Andromeda’s total to 35. If that many are detectable, says Harvard astronomer Robin Barnard, lead author of a report on the new objects in The Astrophysical Journal, “we know there must be lots we can’t detect — maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.”

The reason: a star-size black hole like the ones Barnard and his colleagues found can be detected only if it’s gulping down gas, and that’s relatively rare. It only happens, in fact, when the black hole orbits an ordinary star and dines on its outer atmosphere. As it does, the gas heats up to millions of degrees as it tries to cram its way down the black hole’s voracious gravitational throat, and in so doing emits bursts of X-rays—sort of giant, electromagnetic burps.

In the handful of cases in which that’s happening, Chandra can easily spot a star’s digestive blast. “If you look at the central region of Andromeda in visible light,” says Barnard, “you see a huge mass of stars — billions upon billions of them.” If you look with Chandra, though you see just a few hundred bright dots — the ones emitting x-rays.

Some of those emissions are actually not produced in Andromeda, but rather, come from the giant, gas-sucking black holes at the cores of other galaxies which just happen to lie in the background, but much, much farther away. “These background galaxies are incredibly bright,” says Barnard, but they’re easy to identify because their X-ray light varies up and down relatively slowly as their gas supply waxes and wanes, a pattern different from that produced by the smaller black holes in Andromeda itself.

Other dots of X-ray brightness come from stars in Andromeda that orbit neutron stars, the dense remnants of dead stars that aren’t quite massive enough to collapse into black holes. These pull gas from companion stars as well, and while the gas merely collides with their surfaces, that impact heats it up enough to produce X-rays too. The difference, says Barnard, is that the mix of X-ray “colors,” or wavelengths, is quite different from those generated by black holes.

Once you weed out the X-rays from background galaxies and from neutron stars, says Barnard, what’s left is black holes, ranging from five to ten times the mass of the Sun. Getting a perfectly clear picture might, in theory, require the astronomers to weed out emissions from the giant black hole at Andromeda’s core too. Unlike those in the background galaxies Chandra sees, however, Andromeda’s black hole, says, Barnard, is “wimpy. It’s ten to a hundred times fainter than the small black holes we can see, even though it’s a million times more massive.” That’s because there doesn’t happen to be a lot of gas available for swallowing these days — which is the case for the Milky Way and most nearby galaxies as well, although that could change before too long, thanks to an interstellar gas cloud spotted in 2011 that’s hurtling toward our galactic center and could arrive in September or October. (Astronomers expect some x-ray fireworks, but little more.)

There’s actually one more class of black holes that physicists have speculated about: teeny tiny ones, smaller than an atom, which might have formed in the intense turbulence of the first moments of the Big Bang. These probably would long since have vanished, although there was some speculation that new ones mightemerge from the Large Hadron Collider atom-smasher in Europe.

That would have been a triumph for science — but since it could in theory have destroyed the Earth, it’s just as well that it didn’t happen.