stephan

mountain guide, photographer, farmer.

[stephan @stepman]

@masaccio60 That brings back great memories on those switchbacks…

[stephan @stepman]

That study is from 2020, by the way.

https://t.co/4PHPXKWr7K

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.

[Nateinthewild | Nate Luebbe @nateinthewild]

I posted these last year and had a thousand chuds in the comments calling me slurs and saying that they would never touch national parks. I’d like to take this moment to say: fuck you.

[Priya Satia @PriyaSatia]

“The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you…”

[stephan @stepman]

I might need a RAM upgrade. Annoyingly that also means a new CPU.

[stephan @stepman]

@alexoakdev @RebeccaSlatkin If financial fear were a good motivator, I would have thought the US health system would be a great driver already.

[stephan @stepman]

. o O ( z )

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration has scrapped all protections for a critically endangered whale species known as the Rice's whale, allowing oil and gas drilling in their natural habitat.

The regulatory meeting dooming the 50 remaining Rice's whales lasted just 15 minutes.

[stephan @stepman]

Approaching the highest summit of Iceland. Full whiteout everywhere except at the summit. The descent was flying blind; skiing by the feel of our boots and occasionally stopping and checking with the GPS that we weren’t going to run off a cliff or into heavily crevassed terrain.

[stephan @stepman]

@cathsimard_ Oh yeah https://t.co/WwwHToQpt0

[stephan @stepman]

Words to live by
—
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.

(Adam Lindsay Gordon, 1870)

[stephan @stepman]

REINDEER XING

[stephan @stepman]

@nateinthewild Politics also seeks to be a good fit

[stephan @stepman]

If you recently sent me email, please do not expect a response before 2031.

[stephan @stepman]

@ClimbingCoachX The bolt more than the rock it is stuck into.

[stephan @stepman]

Sometimes the places you almost pass by are the most rewarding to have stopped at.

[stephan @stepman]

@jennadixonphoto GM

[stephan @stepman]

@the_gpc_ Do I need to have one?

[stephan @stepman]

@V1Zhual That's what it felt like, yup.

[stephan @stepman]

I never left.