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“We have been believing all our lives that cats are nocturnal and it is normal for them to wake us up”

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Those of us who have cats know that playing and meowing in the middle of the night are included in the package, but the reason why they do it is not what you are thinking. The fact that your cat decides that 5 in the morning is the perfect time to do parkour on your head is not because it wants to annoy you nor because it is a nocturnal animal. We have spoken with Noelia Hernández, feline educator from Feline Codeto find out what is behind this behavior. They seem nocturnal to us, but they are not.. The first thing to understand is that the popular belief that cats are nocturnal animals is not entirely true. “Cats are activated by the rising and setting of the sun. They are crepuscular in that sense,” Noelia tells us. The fact that some cats have peaks of activity around midnight and then very early in the morning makes us perceive them as nocturnal, especially in summer when the nights are much shorter. In reality, cats sleep at night, what happens is that they wake up much earlier than we do. It is the complaint that Noelia most often hears in her consultations: “Many times, sunrise is when they have the highest peak of activity. It is something recurrent in tutors: ‘he wakes me up too early’.” “Cats are activated by the rising and setting of the sun. They are crepuscular” An evolutionary question. The fact that the peaks of activity are at these times has to do with their natural hunting instinct. The cats They have evolved to hunt when it dawns and when it duskwhich is when their usual prey are most active. These hunting “schedules” are also why their vision has developed to allow them to see in low light conditions. what’s happening. If your cat wakes you up in the middle of the night, it is probably due to a lack of stimulation during the day, a poorly enriched environment and an incorrect play routine: “During the day we go to work, to the gym, to shop… We arrive, we do a poorly executed mini play session and on top of that completely dependent on us.” Because this is one of the problems that this behavior causes: our cats do not know how to play alone. “Many cats do not know how to resort to autonomous play, they only know how to resort to the play that we tutors give them with canes and other toys,” says Noelia. Another factor is the lack of environmental enrichment. Cats, especially those that live indoors, need a series of adaptations in the environment focused on their well-being such as offering them different smells, surfaces to scratch or allowing them to climb high. If we also add that many people have a cat and spend many hours alone, they are the perfect ingredients for early morning parkour. And let’s not forget the heat factor: “In summer they can be more active at night because it is the only time of day when you can live in general,” says Noelia with a laugh. How to avoid it. “With a well-structured sequence of games, a well-enriched environment and a good understanding of the cat’s needs, these episodes of ‘I get up at 5 or 6 in the morning’ can be reduced,” says Noelia. First, to encourage autonomous play, it is important to offer them a variety of toys and above all not to always leave the same ones, but to change them: “Toys must be rotated so that they can manage themselves at night if they need it.” Furthermore, when playing with our cat it is not about making it run after a toy like crazy and that’s it, it has to be done well. He cat hunting cycle It has five phases: stalking → chase → capture → bite/ingestion → rest. If we stay on the principle “We do not lower those hormones that have been prepared for the hunt and together with the arrival of dawn and of course, they wake us up.” To make it complete, you have to let him catch the toy and finish by giving him food or a snack. “With a well-structured play sequence, a well-enriched environment and a good understanding of the cat’s needs, these episodes can be reduced” Commitment and understanding. Being woken up by your cat at four in the morning is not pleasant, no matter how you look at it, but getting angry or punishing it is not going to solve anything (in fact, punishment will make the situation worse). get worse or cause other new problems). For Noelia, it is a matter of commitment and understanding: “There must be commitment on the part of the guardian to understand his cat, let him express his nature and give him tools so that he can channel alone autonomously when he has these types of needs, without waking up the guardian.” Image | Amparo Babiloni, Xataka In Xataka | If the question is how long can you leave your cat home alone, the answer is: less than you think.

the continent has just realized that its infrastructure lives in a world that no longer exists

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a tugboat approaching a dutch drawbridge and watering it with their hoses; stopped trams in Leipzig, British supermarkets without chilled products, melted roads… They seem like a bunch of curious anecdotes about how Europeans survive one of their first real ‘heat waves’. But they are not. Each of these failures is the symptom of a problem that, despite bombastic speeches and sickeningly detailed plans, we have persisted in forgetting: that climate change is serious. And here we are. A Europe that does not exist. For practical purposes, the event these days is the second heat wave that the continent has faced so far this year. We have seen incredible things: 37.3 in the United Kingdom, 37 in Denmark, 41.7 in Germany, 39.5 in Slovakia, 39.4 in the Netherlands… it is not only that the June highs have fallen in almost all the countries of Western and Central Europe, it is that absolute records have been broken (i.e. also July and August) in four countries. According to World Weather Attributionis the most severe episode ever measured in the region studied: in 1976, such heat would have been “virtually impossible” in June. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of these days: that the Europe of 1976 no longer exists. And we have begun to notice it in the worst possible way. Although we can make distinctions between what has happened these days (In Leipzig, the problem is that the sealant between the lane and the road surface softened to dangerous levels; while in Holland the bridges began to be refreshed by protocol without any problem being detected), the truth is that these are all signs that the European infrastructure is outdated. Many of Europe’s roads, bridges and highways were designed for maximums between 32-35. Before, exceeding that limit was something anecdotal (in the 119 years between 1881 and 2000 There was only one day in Germany that measured 40° or more), today is the ‘new normal’ (last week there were 4 days like this). It is important to note that so far I have not said anything about mortality. It will take some more time to have the complete data, but suffice it to say that France has already registered around 1000 deaths attributable to the heat wave. The obvious question is… what have we been doing all along? While all this is happening, no one can claim ignorance or surprise: in March 2024, the European Union itself recognized in its first European Climate Risk Assessment that “Europe was not prepared” for what was coming, that policies “were not keeping pace with the increase in risks” and that incremental adaptation “was not going to be enough.” I don’t want to say that nothing has been done. There are analyzes that say that without the adaptation of this century (things like heat plans, surveillance or the alert system) mortality would have been a 80% older. However, the data is there: no matter how much we have done, the deficit grows with each passing day. And that means we’re not doing enough. What can we expect? It seems like little or nothing. In recent years, public support for climate policies appears to have tempered. And there is a lot to do: we must not forget that estimates tell us that Europe’s air conditioning fleet will go from less than seven million devices in 1990 to more than one hundred million in 2030. That requires radical changes: an enormous reconversion that, given what we have seen, we do not know if we are going to want to undertake. Europe knows what is coming and knows what it has to do. You have it planned, signed and approved. The question is whether he will do it before this stops being an anecdote and begins to become an unmanageable crisis. Image | Bill Iliot In Xataka | ENT doctors agree: “Sleeping with air conditioning forces the nose to work excessively”

“The first forty years of our lives provide the text; the next thirty, the commentary”

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His status as a star philosophical pessimism and his most famous portraitin which we see him as an old man, disheveled, gray-haired, with a tired look and a severe rictus, has made us observe Arthur Schopenhauer with some suspicion. In an already difficult world, who would want to dedicate a few minutes to a 19th century Prussian who stood out for the crudeness with which he approached life? The reality is that in 2026 Schopenhauer is still a philosophical beacon that helps us understand issues as basic as the meaning of life. Even “the crisis of 40”. Life, like a book. Throughout his long life (he died at the age of 72) Schopenhauer dedicated himself to writing on issues as diverse as politics, aesthetics, morals, psychology, rhetoric or even about ‘the art of insulting’. Towards the end of his life, however, he published a monumental work, Parerga and Paraliomenain which he leaves a vital reflection that over the years has become one of his most famous aphorisms. And it’s normal. Ultimately, it sheds light on the meaning of life using a universal metaphor: books. What does it say exactly? That just as essays, novels or plays follow an internal structure without which they would be chaotic, life can be divided into parts that, in a certain way, explain each other. To be more precise, in his ‘Eudemonology’, Schopenhauer tells us: “In a broader sense, it can be said that the first forty years of existence provide the text and the next thirty the commentary, which then makes us understand well the true meaning, then the morality and all the subtleties (…). At the end of life there is something that reminds us of the end of a masked ball, when the masked men retire.” Is it the only quote on the subject? No. In his work, Schopenhauer, who was already over 60 years old when it was published Parerga and Paralipomenagives us many other phrases that point in a similar direction. For example: “In youth, contemplation dominates; in mature age, reflection. That is why the first is the age of poetry; the second, that of philosophy. In practice, likewise, one is determined by perception and its impression during youth; Later, by reflection.” “This comes partly from the fact that in middle age images have been presented and grouped around notions in sufficient numbers to give them importance, weight and value, as well as to moderate at the same time, for custom, the impression of perceptions.”. “Only he who reaches old age receives a complete and measured representation of life, since he encompasses it at a glance in its fullness and in its natural course, in a special way and not merely as others do, only from its beginning, but also from its end, through which he perfectly recognizes its vanity. What do you want to tell us? May your reflections have had so much success It’s not surprising at all. Faced with frustration, defeatism or even pessimism due to the passage of time, Schopenhauer basically reminds us that each period of life has its function in the story of life, just like the parts of a book. During the years of youth we ‘write’ the text, we make decisions, we accumulate experiences, we make mistakes and successes and, ultimately, we form our character and set a path for ourselves both at a professional and personal level. In the second half of life, as we mature, turning 40, it is time to look back and adopt a critical approach that gives us coherence. Beyond Schopenhauer. As remember in TrendsSchopenhauer’s theory connects with those of other actors, such as the psychiatrist Robert N. Butler, who in the 1960s described the tendency of people to review their own biography when they reach old age to make sense of it. After all, we are not just a concatenation of decisions and events, but the story that we ourselves shape and build with those pieces, a story that is in the process of being rewritten. Why at 40 years old? Schopenhauer wrote in the 19th century, the one in which he lived, and this is perceived in his essays. For example, he marks the turning point at 40 years old and outlines a life horizon of another 30 years ahead. The reality is that right now life expectancy in Spain is over 84 years old. That being true, it is undeniable that the Prussian had amazing aim. Today experts use a concept called reminiscence bump (reminiscence peak) that describes how when entering adulthood, at 30 or more years old, our autobiographical memory becomes especially active. The phenomenon connects in some way with Schopenhauer’s metaphor. “He reminiscence peak refers to the disproportionate amount of autobiographical memories dating from adolescence and early adulthood. It has often been attributed to the consolidation of the mature self in the period encompassed by that peak,” they explain researchers Jonathan Koppel and Dorthe Berntsen. Other authors they define it such as “the increase in the proportion of autobiographical memories of youth observed in those over 40 years of age.” Centering the focus. Does that mean that after 40 the past defeats us? Are we condemned to live chained to continuous memory? No. What Schopenhauer tells us is that when we reach adulthood the focus changes: beyond the experiences or decisions, the story matters. We discover the meaning of the path we have traveled and see things more clearly. We move from the age of poetry to the age of philosophy, paraphrasing Schopenhauer. The reflection of Qarerga and Paralipomena It helps us better understand Schopenhauer’s multifaceted and nuanced thought. To that and something more: understanding that, beyond the patina it may have, philosophical pessimism it’s not exactly the same than psychological pessimism. On the contrary, authors like Schopenhauer offer a path that can be followed with a positive attitude and helps to avoid the goodness that has made happiness an industry. Images | Wikipedia 1 and 2 Via | Trends In … Read more

We have believed all our lives that “dying of grief” was a romantic myth. Science is clear that there is some truth

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The classic scene of two old people who have been together their entire lives, and when one dies, the other follows him a few days later because “he couldn’t bear the pain” seems to be something that remains in the movies. However, what we have always dismissed as romantic hyperbole or statistical coincidence has, in reality, deep physiological support. It is studied. A recent deluge of scientific data puts on the table a conclusion that is quite devastating by pointing out that intense grief not only hurts emotionally, but also drastically increases the chances of suffering a fatal cardiovascular event that triggers long-term mortality. The most robust and recent confirmation comes through a study published in Frontiers in Public Health that analyzed 1735 people in a ground situation to be able to find out what happened in the long term with those who could not overcome a loss naturally. The results. The researchers here divided the patients into groups according to the intensity and duration of their suffering. What was precisely seen is that those who showed a high and sustained grief trajectory, which is called prolonged grief, not only needed many medical consultations and psychotropic drugs, but also presented a higher risk of mortality than the low grief groups. Translated into plain numbers: people trapped in persistent grief were almost twice as likely to die in the decade after the loss. The heart breaks. When we receive bad news, we sometimes say that the heart ‘has broken’ and for many it may seem strange, since physically the heart is intact. But this expression, which may be popular, has clinical demonstration behind it, as pointed out a published study in Circulation which shows that the first weeks after widowhood or the loss of a loved one are high risk. Specifically, in the first 24 hours after the loss, it was shown that the risk of suffering an acute myocardial infarction reached its maximum peakwhile in the following 30 days cardiovascular events also increased, including stroke. In the guides. As a curiosity, there is even a clinically documented pathology known as Takotsubo syndrome (or broken heart syndrome), which is a cardiomyopathy induced by extreme emotional stress that temporarily weakens the heart muscle, simulating the symptoms of a massive heart attack. The small print. What has been compiled in this case is a statistical correlation, that is, that those people who have had a deep mourning have seen their mortality increase. But this does not mean that there will be an event of this magnitude. What happens in these cases is that grief is a marker of constant vulnerability, since cortisol levels increase, keeping the body in a state of alert that exhausts the immune system. But in addition, those who suffer extreme grief often stop eating properly and reduce their physical activity to zero, and in many cases, forget to take their medication. All of this ultimately increases the risk of mortality, but not the loss itself. Images | Yosi Prihantoro In Xataka | More and more people die from a sudden heart attack in Spain: the sudden death pandemic

In atomized times, the Spanish generation Z is finding a strange refuge in ‘Los Serrano’ and ‘No one here lives’

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“I’m looking forward to the long weekend and finishing the season. The Serranos“A 15-year-old student I recently taught recognized me. Yes, 15 years. Possibly the combination of that phrase and that idea gives us a short circuit: we are talking about a series that ended in 2008; when she hadn’t even started kindergarten. I couldn’t contain myself and as someone who did grow up with Diego Serrano, the brush and the boom for Fran Perea, I had to ask him where that passion had come from. It came through clips on TikTok. That content of a few minutes and loose decontextualized fragments were not enough, and they turned something that began as a simple curiosity into a true marathon to know in detail what happened to Eva and Marcos, the most famous stepbrothers on TV in the 2000s. A fiction as iconic as that, but for generation millennialhad found its new primary audience in Generation Z. I was surprised, of course, but the idea stayed in the back of my head, like a specific issue to which I should not give more importance. Like when your friend tells you that she is pregnant and suddenly you start noticing people on the street and you discover something that we could almost classify as a baby epidemic; Shortly after, another teenage student, whom we will call Victoria, shows me her pending homework on her tablet. Between irregular verbs and vocabulary to learn, I look at the wallpaper: nothing less than ‘Santa Justa Klan‘, the fictional (and not so fictional) group that was formed in ‘Los Serrano’. At this point, I was already ‘mode’Queen’s Gambit‘, projecting theories on the ceiling about something so strange to understand and that he was also seeing everywhere. Just a few weeks ago, at the next table in a restaurant, a group of university girls revealed in their talk that this is not just about ‘The Serranos‘. To a certain extent, declaring yourself a fan of ‘There is no one who lives here‘It is understandable with the common thread that it has with an already veteran series, but still in broadcast, like ‘The one that is coming‘. The thing is that they start quoting ‘The boarding school’, ‘Physics or Chemistry‘, ‘The ship’ or ‘Paco’s men‘, debating passionately about how the revival Prime Video of the first one does not have one bit of the quality of the original. Once again, I could not contain myself, and I assailed them with my doubts about how they had arrived at these fictions so typical of my generation and not so much of theirs. The same pattern: discovery on social networks, the possibility of watching all seasons on platforms or even through those fragments, and the echo chamber that is created in classes and groups of friends. That week-by-week phenomenon effect that we’ve barely seen since ‘Game of Thrones‘, is being achieved organically in the middle classes of Spain. Some actors are still relevant today, and although it is difficult to think that all the youth have come to ‘El Barco’ by looking at the IMDb of Mario Casas or ‘El Internado’ doing the same with Ana de Armascould make sense in certain cases. None of that: it is the series itself is what hooks you so many years later. This is how Catalina, one of these girls, recognizes it: “I’m finishing The Boarding School; When I do it I plan to tell my little sister to start it.” The generational contrast is more than evident, and the lapidary phrase that unsettles an entire generation millennial who, like me, has grown up with ‘Three meters above the sky‘ and ‘SMS without fear of dreaming‘ is pronounced by Sara, to whom her friends were highly recommending ‘El Barco’: “Ah, but Mario Casas went out there? I had no idea.” From meme to marathon The furor over the story of Lucas and Sara from ‘Paco’s Men’ or the crazy theories that ‘El Internado’ sparked now do not begin on television, waiting week after week for a new chapter. Rather the opposite occurs; Like almost everything in recent years, it all starts with the mobile. If before you watched a series and then it was when the meme festival began on the networks, now the journey is the other way around, from the meme it goes to television. And whoever says meme says fancams or fragments of interviews that awaken interest in those fictions dosmileras. “I started watching the story of Teté and Guille in parts on TikTok and I couldn’t stop,” one of my students reminded me. So, the clip opens the door and the series does the rest, becoming almost an involuntary trailer. And, really, this fragmented and instant format is very much in line with the current consumption model. Everything has to be quick, that captures your attention in the first seconds and encourages you to consume something, of whatever nature. So it is no coincidence that the algorithm works as a perfect cultural programmer for generation Z, a tool that prioritizes the high emotional or humorous charge it has in the love drama of Lucas and Sara or in the phrases from Bethlehem to his greatest ally. This resurgence poses a very curious paradox: in the era of rapid consumption, these young people return to long, choral series designed to be watched without any rush. We are also talking about fictions that achieved audience figures that were unthinkable on current television (‘There is no one who lives here‘ either’ The Serranos‘ reached 7,000,000 spectators), so all the merit of their revival It cannot fall on social networks or on the virality of certain clips. In a sea of ​​platforms and on-demand content, available at any time, something unique and special must have that 2000s television imagery. One of the keys is probably the ID with the characters. Even today, many university students from Generation Z find in Belén or Emilio from ‘No one lives here’ that reflection of work … Read more

We have been vaccinating our dogs and cats every year all our lives. Science is seeing that it is not the most correct

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When you have a pet in your care, visits to the veterinarian are mandatory almost every year to receive a check-up and also a vaccination reminder to be completely calm about its health. However, there are some voices that already suggest that we are overvaccinating too much in our country, since applying vaccines year after year is not only unnecessarybut it can pose a risk to the animal. A new paradigm. To understand the problem, we must look at the guides of the World Association of Small Animal Veterinarians (WSAVA) and the Latin American Committee on Vaccinology in Companion Animals (COLAVAC-Iberia). Both institutions have updated their guidelines with a clear message wanting to abandon systematic vaccination schedules and opt for personalized medicine. Two groups. Now the guidelines are to differentiate vaccines into two large groups, the first of which is the “essentials” which are those of distemper, adenovirus and parvovirus in dogs, and panleukopenia, herpesvirus and calicivirus in cats. On the other hand, there would be non-essential ones, which would correspond to leptospirosis. Here, science suggests that essential vaccines generate much longer immunity than we thought, making animals have defenses against these pathogens for a long time. For example, after vaccination in puppies and their first booster, the animals maintain levels of protective antibodies for at least three years, and in many cases it can last up to 9 or 14 years. This means that if we vaccinate every year we are literally ‘pouring’ immunity where there is already a good amount of it. A legal labyrinth. If science seems to have it so clear… What is happening in Spain? Here, most of the autonomous communities only provide that the rabies vaccine is mandatory, making vaccination against parvovirus or distemper only recommended because they logically cause fatal diseases. If we focus on numbers, a recent study Regarding the national protocols, a devastating fact stood out: only 28.6% of the vaccines available for dogs and 42.9% for cats are “adequate” according to WSAVA standards. And the reason is that the industry markets combined vaccines; That is, to give the dog the annual leptospirosis vaccine, the veterinarian uses the viral one that includes parvovirus and distemper, forming overvaccination. A personal solution. To avoid needlessly pricking the animals, what is proposed is that, instead of blindly setting a reminder, a blood test is performed to determine the amount of protective antibodies in the blood. In this case, if the animal has adequate levels, it is not vaccinated that year, and if not, it should be vaccinated. The problem is that this is more expensive than directly giving the vaccine, so the most convenient, fastest and cheapest option is chosen. More personal. The conclusion here is that experts point out that a booster should be applied to essential vaccines every three years, preserving the rabies vaccine, which is the only one legally required and whose deadlines comply with local legislation. Images | freepic.diller on Magnific In Xataka | We have been using our pets to relieve our anxiety. And now the stress is on them

“The tiger cannot stop being a tiger but man lives in permanent risk of being dehumanized”

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“And here it matters to me what a tiger can or cannot stop doing?” That, I imagine, is the only reasonable question one can ask when listening to this famous phrase of Ortega y Gasset. “The tiger cannot stop being a tiger,” said the philosopher just before adding: “but man lives in permanent risk of being dehumanized.” This is the interesting thing: that for Ortega the tiger has it easy. Tiger is born, tiger lives and tiger dies. It’s not that I have a simple life, nothing in this world has simple lives. But, at least, there are no head warm-ups. Being a human, however, is something else. As explained in ‘The man and the people’human beings have a problem that no other animal has: they have to decide who they are going to be. It is a central idea of ​​Ortega’s thought: that the human being does not have nature (he does not have a fixed behavioral repertoire, nor a series of concrete capacities, nor a ‘way of being’ in the world that comes as standard), what he has is history. It is true that contemporary science (by pulverizing the qualitative distance between us and them) has questioned this idea, but on a personal level still makes sense. In many ways, the philosopher would tell us, we are a project that is being carried out over time. However, the idea has problems: on the one hand, it empowers us, it gives us tools to take control of our own lives. On the other hand, it subjects us to pressure and anxiety (that of being “the unique and non-transferable self”) that can be counterproductive. How not to dehumanize ourselves, then? “Dehumanize“It is not becoming bad, or anything like that: it is simply betraying our individuality. Whatever that means. What Ortega did give us some ideas about is how to avoid it. For him, life oscillates between two poles: self-absorption and “alteration”: between locking yourself inside yourself and letting yourself be carried away by what is happening around you. The key is not to fall into any of these poles: neither reject society, nor get confused with it. We have to orient ourselves within it to get closer to who we are in the midst of the chaos of the contemporary world. It is an invitation to stop living without autopilot on. The difficult thing, I imagine, is doing it. Image | ChatGPT In Xataka | What did Immanuel Kant mean when he argued that patience is not “a force of resistance, but rather one that hopes to make suffering satisfactory?”

We have spent our entire lives blaming spring for our tiredness. Science has just shown that we have lived deceived

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March is coming, the days are getting longer, temperatures rise and suddenly our body begins to fill with a feeling tiredapathy and drowsiness that takes over us. Traditionally, this is considered ‘spring astheniaand people, logically, do not stop searching for their symptoms on the Internet and buying expensive vitamin complexes to compensate for the bad feeling that the change of season leaves. But… What is true in all this? A paradigm shift. Until recently, evidence on this phenomenon was scarce and contradictory; however, a key investigation published in the Journal of Sleep Research has recently come to shed light on the matter. The research, led by Dr. Christine Blume from the Center for Chronobiology at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Basel, followed 418 adults from Germany, Switzerland and Austria for more than a year, from April 2024 to September 2025. Every six weeks, participants answered questionnaires about fatigue, drowsiness, insomnia and sleep quality, and at the end of the research they only had to cross-check information to determine if there really was any interfering pattern. with our health. The results. Here what was seen is that a resounding 47% of the participants claimed to suffer from “spring asthenia”, but the reality is that when the information was cross-checked there was absolutely no seasonal or monthly variation in the levels of fatigue, daytime sleepiness or quality of sleep. And statistically the tiredness that people feel in spring is statistically identical to what they feel in autumn or winter. In fact, fatigue in daily activities tended to decrease slightly as the days had more daylight hours, without any specific “peak” of fatigue being recorded during the spring. In this way, the conclusion drawn is that the discrepancy between what people think they feel and what objective data shows suggests that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon and not a genuine seasonal syndrome. Why do we believe it? This is where the study gets genuinely interesting, since the authors do not simply deny the phenomenon, but rather propose a psychological explanation for why we experience it so convincingly. Nocebo effect: if we expect to be tired in spring, we interpret any sign of fatigue as confirmation of what we thought was going to happen. Cognitive dissonance: good weather generates high social pressure to enjoy it with outdoor activities. The problem is that when the energy does not appear, saying that you have ‘spring asthenia’ is a good excuse to not feel guilty for not following the group. Labeling effect: Like wine tasting better when we’re told it’s expensive, knowing that “you get tired in spring” actively changes how we interpret our own physical sensations. What chronobiology says. It is a reality that we are not robots and that our body reacts to the environment, and this is where chronobiology confirms that there are seasonal variations in sleep linked to the number of hours of daylight we enjoy. Studies in pre-industrial populations in Tanzania, Namibia or Bolivia show that in winter they sleep approximately one hour more than in summer. Likewise, recent research on university students in Seattle confirms that exposure to daylight is vital for our circadian rhythm, however, none of these physiological changes translate into a “clinical picture” or a peak in fatigue in spring. In medicine. Nowadays, when you go to your primary care doctor, it is impossible to receive treatment for ‘spring asthenia’ because it is not included in any official classification. However, doctors warn that a patient who arrives with great fatigue for consultation should not be sent away, even though he relates it to the arrival of spring. It must be remembered that there are many diseases that can cause this condition, such as anemia, a severe allergy, an infection or even thyroid disorders, among others. A lucrative business. While science dismisses the existence of ‘spring asthenia’, the reality is that people’s sensation is the perfect breeding ground for private clinics and dietary supplement brands. When we feel bad, we want a quick solution with a pill, and this makes the sale of multivitamin complexes, caffeine pills and a host of products related to reducing fatigue increase their sales. Images | Vitaly Gariev Arno Smit In Xataka | Only one in four Spaniards has rested on vacation. The culprits: work anxiety and the inability to disconnect

We have been talking about “time immemorial” all our lives as if it were a remote past. Well it’s a specific year

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You’ve heard it a thousand times. Someone is talking about a custom, a tradition, a deep-rooted habit and suddenly, to underline that idea, they pompously claim that it dates back to “immemorial times”. You, too, have probably uttered that phrase more than once. What you may not know is that “immemorial times” does not take us back to a very distant and diffuse past of which there is no written record, but to a date very specific and not so remote: the summer of 1189. That is, just under 840 years ago. To understand it you have to travel to medieval England. Of laws and customs. It’s easy to forget when you get a fine, but living in a world regulated by clear laws is a fortune. For example, if you believe that your neighbor has taken something that belongs to you, you know exactly what to do: find a lawyer, go to court and appeal to legislation that applies equally to everyone. In medieval England the thing was more complicated. Justice was dispensed, but in a way that would seem rudimentary to us today. “Until 1275 law in early medieval England was constantly evolving and was based largely on the idea of ​​long usage, custom and royal decrees,” explains Amy Irvine in Histoy Hit. “The legal framework was decentralized, with no unified or systematic legal code for the entire country. Individual regions and communities had their own local courts and were governed by customary laws developed over time. These rules were often unwritten and passed down from generation to generation.” putting order. Over time that framework evolved. An important change came with the ratification of the Magna Carta of 1215, which placed certain restrictions on royal authority. Another (key) was completed in 1275, with the Statute of Westminstera document that codified the laws in force throughout the kingdom. Throughout his 51 chapters The statute addresses issues such as criminal legislation, the rules that regulate commerce or an issue that may seem minor to us today but in its day played a fundamental role: consolidated rights. As Irvine recalls, during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), as the legal system consolidated, more and more people began to defend their rights, claiming legitimacy over plots or grazing areas. What arguments were they using? The custom. Often those who claimed a right relied on the fact that they had enjoyed it for a long time. The problem was how to prove it. The Statute of Westminster wanted to clarify that point with an ingenious solution, one that played with the idea of ​​’memory’. “Immemorial” times. Basically what the statute of 1275 did was divide history into two large blocks, at least for legal purposes. What divided them? The ‘legal memory’. On the one hand, there was the vast period that came to be considered ‘time immemorial’. On the other hand, the valid ‘memory time’. Today it may sound far-fetched to us, but it made sense in the eyes of medieval Englishmen. At that time one of the arguments usually used in property trials was oral tradition transmitted from one generation to another. That is, someone claimed a piece of land arguing that their father, grandfather, great-grandfather… claimed that they already farmed on that plot of land. The Statute of Westminster wanted to put some order in this mess, establishing a time of ‘legal memory’, a border between an oral company and another regulated in writing. What exactly did he do? “It became the date of legal memory,” explains Russell Sandbergprofessor at Cardiff University, in statements reported by IFL. That is, he established a framework that anyone who wanted to defend that something had happened “since” time immemorial “had to adhere to.” The change also had important advantages for English landowners, who until then had to go back several centuries, until the norman conquest of 1066, to demonstrate the validity of their property titles. One year: 1189. The next question is obvious: What barrier separated ‘immemorial’ time from the time of legal memory? What year made the difference? The answer is 1189, the year of the coronation of King Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart. Taking into account that the Statute of Westminster dates back to 1275, this means that legal memory was limited to 86 years, a reasonable time to use the testimonies of parents and grandparents. ‘Immemorial time’ thus became limited (at least in the eyes of medieval English law) to any time prior to the summer of 1189. When exactly? It is not easy to define it. There are those who set the exact border July 6 1189, the day of Richard I’s accession to the throne after the death of Henry II. Others delay it until his coronation, September 3 of that same year. Laws… and something more. That 1189 was chosen as the temporal border also has a symbolic reading: by choosing that date, Edward I paid tribute to his predecessors, the monarchs Henry II and Richard I, which in a way also served to reinforce his legitimacy on the throne. The truth is that the formula worked and still today is used frequently the concept of “time immemorial”, although those who use it do not always have Richard I and medieval legislation in mind. For the RAEFor example, “immemorial” is that time “so old that there is no memory of when it began.” Images | Andrik Langfield (Unsplash) and Wikipedia In Xataka | In the Middle Ages it was common to sleep inside wooden closets. The big question is why we stopped doing it.

The rarest chicken in Spain is blue and lives in Extremadura. What we don’t know is for how long

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Human beings are ungrateful animals. For decades, while we miserably worked the land, those blue chickens (rustic, tough and independent) were very good for us. The battered farmhouses of Extremadura, toasted by the sun, extractivism and simple life, were full of them. But then modernity, cities and supermarkets came… and they became a hindrance. Today, despite the fact that in recent years the institutions have stepped up, there will be about 2,000 chicken specimens Extremaduran blue. The Extremadura Blue Hen Breeders Association has 23 farms, but most people raise them for personal consumption or as a simple hobby. It is the rarest chicken in Spain and that, believe me, is saying a lot. A country without half measures. In Spain there are 21 poultry breeds in danger of extinction. This means that 95.4% of all registered native poultry breeds are threatened. In fact, 84% of all native breeds (whether they are birds or not) are in danger. And it is curious because, in short, we live in an unparalleled agricultural power. Spain is the second largest chicken producer of the European continent (only behind the United Kingdom), the third in beef and the first in pork (although swine fever can change this). Although, to tell the truth, it is not that curious. In fact, that is the problem. The emergence of industrial poultry farming since the 50s it was cornering local breeds for the benefit of commercial hybrids specialized in pure and simple production. Therefore, deep down, we are not talking about a problem of great economic magnitude. We are talking about two central issues in the present and the future of the ‘Spain emptied‘: the territorial management model and the question of what we do with genetic heritage. Since its recovery began in 1991 (when only specimens were found in five towns in the region), the situation has improved greatly. But not enough: all those questions are still on the table. And they are not easy questions to answer. Because, and in this case the blue Extremaduran hen, is a good example of the problems that arise as soon as we start working on the matter. because the underlying question is whether a livestock breed can be preserved if no one can make a living from it. And not only because the regulations They are designed for industrial poultry farming (and represents a very considerable obstacle), but for the paradox that hides in a simple Extremadura hen: the realization that not even at the time with greater institutional support (MAPA logo, breeding programs, germplasm banks, etc…) this breed can take its commercial leap. Is it a warning to sailors? Is it the future we have to live? Image | Mentxuwiki In Xataka | China is so clear that the future of pork lies in ‘skyscraper farms’ that it is doing something: taking them to other countries

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