Watch The Moon Cover Venus in a Rare Daytime Sky Event This Week

16 June 2026, By D. Dickinson, Universe Today

https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-the-moon-cover-venus-in-a-rare-daytime-sky-event-this-week

The Moon and Venus seen in 2023 from Kuwait City.

 (YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images)

If you're like us, you've been following the close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in the June dusk sky.

Next week, the Moon enters the evening scene, and actually occults (passes in front of) the planet Venus in what promises to be one of the top skywatching events for 2026.

It's rare to see the two brightest natural objects in the sky (after the Sun) meet up in the daytime sky.

It's also rare to see the Moon greet Venus a good distance from the Sun. Venus never strays farther than 47 degrees from the Sun as seen from the Earth.

The Moon approaches Venus on the 17th. 

(Stellarium)



This month's occultation sees Venus 38 degrees from the Sun, just under two months from greatest eastern (dusk) elongation on August 15th.

The event occurs on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17th, centered on 16:40 EDT (20:40 UTC).

The occultation transpires over northeastern South America under dark skies after sunset, and over the Caribbean, the contiguous United States (CONUS), northern Mexico, and southern Canada under daytime skies before sunset.

The Moon is an 11 percent illuminated, waxing crescent as it approaches Venus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtiKxO8xIbY&t=68s

The Moon will take 29 seconds to cover the 74 percent illuminated, 15″ disk of Venus. Venus shines at about -4th magnitude during the event.

The Moon passes New phase on June 15th, and slides 2.5 degrees north northeast of Mercury on the evening of the 16th. Mercury also reaches greatest elongation 24.5 degrees east of the Sun just one day prior.

If you've never seen Mercury for yourself, this coming week is a good time to try and cross the innermost world off of your skywatching life-list.

The phases of the Moon for June.

 (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This is actually the first of three lunar occultations of Venus for 2026. The other two occur on September 14th in Southeast Asia and on November 7th at the southern tip of South America.

Venus is the one planet that's prominent enough to see during a daytime occultation.

Here's a strange fact: the Moon actually has a much lower albedo than Venus, with a reflectivity of less than 14 percent, versus 70 percent for the Venusian cloud tops. Up close, the lunar surface resembles worn asphalt.

Concentrating what little reflected light the Moon does return into a small patch of sky translates its dull gray into pearly white in the eye's view.

But wait until dusk, and you'll see an encore performance, as the slender waxing crescent Moon also occults the open star cluster Messier 44 (Praesepe) in the heart of the constellation Cancer.

This occurs just scant hours after the Venus event. This favors the southeastern US at dusk. Venus follows suit, transiting just north of the cluster on June 19th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCXZeE9_K6s

This is one of the final favorable lunar occultations of Venus for the CONUS until 2029-2031.

Seeing Venus in the daytime requires persistence. A deep blue high-contrast sky will help.

The event will be well-suited to video capture, but beware of autofocus mode, which often stubbornly refuses to lock onto the daytime Moon. A wide-field view of the Moon paired with Venus should display the two nicely, as the planet slips behind the dark limb of the Moon.

The International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) has a list of ingress/egress times for select locations in the path, and Stellarium can help you zero in on exact times for your site.

Don't miss the 'Great American Occultation,' as a great opportunity to do a little daytime sidewalk astronomy with friends.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

A 'Useless' Organ That Doctors Often Remove May Actually Fight Cancer

16 June 2026, By C. Cassella

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-useless-organ-that-doctors-often-remove-may-actually-fight-cancer

(janulla/Getty Images)

There's a small fatty gland that sits behind your sternum and is often said to be 'useless' in adulthood.

Research, however, suggests the thymus gland is not nearly as expendable as experts once thought.

Although not all scientists agree on this.

In a study in 2023, US researchers found that those who get their thymus removed face an increased risk of death from any cause in the five years following the surgery.

They also face an increased risk of developing cancer during that time.

"We discovered that the thymus is absolutely required for health. If it isn't there, people's risk of dying and risk of cancer is at least double," Harvard University oncologist David Scadden said when the research was published.

The study is purely observational, which means it cannot show that removing the thymus directly causes cancer or other fatal illnesses.

But the researchers are concerned by their findings. Until we know more, they argue that preserving the thymus "should be a clinical priority" where possible.

In childhood, the thymus is known to play a critical role in developing the immune system. When the gland is removed at a young age, patients show long-term reductions in T cells, which are a type of white blood cell that combats germs and disease.

Kids without a thymus also tend to have an impaired immune response to vaccines.

By the time a person hits puberty, however, the thymus shrivels up and produces far fewer T cells for the body. It can seemingly be removed without immediate harm, and because it sits in front of the heart, it is often taken out during cardiothoracic surgery.

Kids without a thymus tend to have an impaired immune response to vaccines.

 (Peopleimages.com-YuriArcurs/Canva)



But while some patients with thymus cancer or chronic autoimmune diseases, like myasthenia gravis, require a thymectomy, in which the thymus is surgically removed, the gland isn't always a hindrance.

It could even be a big help.

Using patient data from a state healthcare system, researchers in Boston compared the outcomes of patients who had undergone cardiothoracic surgery: more than 6,000 people (controls) who did not have their thymus removed and 1,146 people who did have their thymus removed.

Those who underwent a thymectomy were almost twice as likely as controls to die within five years, even after accounting for sex, age, race, and those with cancer of the thymus, myasthenia gravis, or postoperative infections.

Patients who had their thymus removed were also twice as likely to develop cancer within five years of surgery.

Illustration of a cancer cell being attacked by a T cell. 

(Science Photo Library/Canva)



What's more, this cancer was generally more aggressive and often recurred after treatment compared to the control group.

"This indicates that the consequences of thymus removal should be carefully considered when contemplating thymectomy, " said Scadden.

Why these associations exist is unknown, but researchers suspect a lack of thymus is somehow messing with the healthy function of the adult immune system.

A subset of patients in the study who had undergone a thymectomy showed fewer diverse T-cell receptors in their bloodwork, which could possibly contribute to the development of cancer or autoimmune diseases after surgery.

"Together, these findings support a role for the thymus contributing to new T-cell production in adulthood and to the maintenance of adult human health," the authors of the study conclude.

Their results, they say, strongly suggest that the thymus plays a functionally important role in our continued health, right up to the bitter end.

However, that's not the end of the story.

A subsequent study published in 2025 by researchers from the Yale School of Medicine sought to corroborate Scadden's team's findings, analyzing patient records in the National Cancer Database (NCDB) and the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database from 2004 to 2022.

Ultimately, the Yale study could not find any evidence in their data that removing the thymus had a negative effect on patient health.

This suggests there's more we still need to unpack, to definitively understand what the consequences of thymus removal really are.

"Thymectomy in adults with small or localized thymomas was not associated with increased five-year mortality or cancer death," the team wrote in their paper.

"Longer-term outcomes and specific immunologic end points deserve further study."

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

The Link Between Vitamin C And Brain Health Just Got Even Clearer

16 June 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-link-between-vitamin-c-and-brain-health-just-got-even-clearer

(d3sign/Moment/Getty Images)

We can't make our own vitamin C, so we need to imbibe enough of this essential nutrient through our diets.

Through our bodies it flows, from the stomach, into the blood, and up to the brain.

Past studies have hinted at how important vitamin C is to brain function. It concentrates in brain tissue, with the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain containing twice as much vitamin C as blood.

A decent vitamin C intake has also been linked to a lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

Now, new research tells us something more about how vitamin C may lead to better brain health in later years.

We know that vitamin C is an antioxidant and is involved in a flurry of chemical reactions in our bodies. But we don't know much about how levels of vitamin C in the blood (which is more easily sampled) might relate to brain health.

To get some more clarity, researchers at Hirosaki University in Japan took blood samples from 2,044 volunteers with a median age of 69, and studied how levels of vitamin C in those samples matched up to certain features on brain scans.

They were particularly interested in a key brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN) that ticks away quietly, connecting many parts of the brain, even when you think you're doing nothing.

A loosening of the DMN has also been linked to cognitive decline, so the researchers wanted to see how tight those connections were among elderly Japanese people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yESSv7OgCv0

There was a clear relationship across the participants in the study: More vitamin C in the blood was associated with a higher volume of gray matter, the brain tissue that handles memory, movement and emotion.

Higher vitamin C levels also correlated with stronger connectivity in the DMN.

This was just a one-time assessment though, so it doesn't prove that vitamin C directly affected those brain connections. Rather, it suggests that vitamin C may have a role in keeping brains healthy – and maybe, at a stretch, help ward off dementia.

"This finding generates the exciting hypothesis that a diet rich in vitamin C might play a supportive role in maintaining brain health and mitigating age-related cognitive decline in older adults," says radiologist Tomohiro Shintaku, from Hirosaki University.

The DMN links several important brain regions, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex near the front of our brain (linked to processing risk, fear, and emotions), and the posterior cingulate cortex at the center (involved with memory and motor control).

The default mode network links several crucial processing regions of the brain. (Menon, Neuron, 2023)



As a whole, the DMN has been associated with a host of different cognitive functions, covering what we remember about ourselves and how we refer to ourselves, thinking about the future, and controlling our attention.

Past studies have found that people with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and depression tend to have weaker, less well-connected DMN.

There's a lot more research required to look into these relationships in more detail, but the implication is that a healthy amount of vitamin C could help keep the DMN running more smoothly, and ward off some of these brain health disorders.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate the association between plasma vitamin C levels and DMN connectivity," write the researchers in their published paper.

The researchers looked at three regions of gray matter that make up the default mode network, and related this to levels of vitamin C in blood samples.

 (Nagaya et al., PLOS One, 2026)



In their analysis, the researchers adjusted for several factors that may also impact brain health, including age, sex, and health conditions such as high blood pressure.

But they want to see whether they can replicate their findings in longitudinal studies that track people over several years, and in more diverse groups. That will help us understand if the associations found here, in relatively elderly people living in Japan, apply to other populations or age groups.

Even so, it's another reason to think about getting more vitamin C into your diet. It's found not just in oranges, the best-known source, but in many other fruits and vegetables.

Previous studies have linked optimal levels of vitamin C to a stronger immune system – but it doesn't do much for the common cold.

Suggestions that it may also protect against air pollution, be the secret to younger-looking skin – or boost brain health – may not be so clear-cut.

These associations are certainly worth exploring, and in the meantime, are a reminder of the benefits of eating a well-rounded diet while scientists dig into the details.

"What I found most fascinating about this research is that we were able to detect these subtle but significant associations between a single nutritional factor and large-scale brain networks by utilizing a robust, community-based cohort of over 2,000 older adults," says Shintaku.

"It truly highlights the potential impact of our everyday dietary habits on our brain structures."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Finally Discover How Venus Flytraps Snap Shut So Fast

15 June 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-finally-discover-how-venus-flytraps-snap-shut-so-fast

Venus flytraps can act fast enough to catch flies. 

(marcouliana/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

To succeed in a hunt, a predator often needs to be faster than its prey.

Plants are not known for their speed.

Even so, one plant has evolved a snappy survival strategy that lets it feast on insects and arachnids that, by most measures, should be safe from its clutches.

We're talking, of course, about the famous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) – a plant that lures prey into a leafy trap, then snaps shut around the unfortunate victim, holding it fast while the plant digests at its leisure.

Scientists have long puzzled over the mechanism that allows this plant to move faster than plants should be able to.

Now, a team of researchers led by physicist Jeongeun Ryu of the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) say they have identified the trigger.

To activate its jaws, the plant rapidly softens the cell walls in the trap's outer skin.

That change lets the outer surface expand more easily than the inner surface, bending the leaf until it reaches a tipping point and snaps shut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7eQKSf0LmY

"This represents the fastest modulation of wall mechanics reported in plants," the researchers write.

"Our finding reveals a mode of plant motility based on dynamic tuning of material properties, suggesting principles for muscle-free, bioinspired actuation."

Many plants can achieve relatively timely and precise movement. One of the more famous examples is seen in Mimosa pudica, or touch-me-not, whose symmetrical leaflets fold shut when touched, a delicate maneuver thought to help the plant evade predation or minimize damage from passers-by.

For a lot of plants, these movements are powered by the flow of fluid – simple hydraulics that change internal pressure and thus the shape of the plant.

Previously, scientists had supposed that the mechanism behind the flytrap's movements was similarly hydraulic, but that posed a problem.

The traditional hydraulic idea was that the trap closes because water moves from one side of the leaf to the other, causing one side to expand more than the other and bend the trap shut.

The 'traps' of a Venus flytrap are the tips of its leaves.

 (Paul Starosta/Stone/Getty Images)



The researchers identified two main flaws with this model.

The first is that water moves relatively slowly through plant tissue. The researchers measured how quickly water moves through a Venus flytrap and estimated that transporting water across the thickness of the trap would take between 30 and 150 seconds.

That's far too slow for the speed at which a flytrap needs to operate in order to grab its prey.

Sure enough, the movements that initiate closure occur on a timescale of about a second, much faster than water could move through the trap.

The other problem is that a water-driven mechanism should produce a delayed wave of motion across the trap as water gradually diffuses through the tissue. But the researchers found no sign of such a pattern.

Well, the next question naturally is: If not hydraulics, then what is it?

In their new study, the researchers described the two-stage process of a snap.

The first is the active bending phase, in which the trap begins to bend inward toward a critical tipping point. The second is the snap-closure itself, which takes just 0.2 seconds.

How the trap snapped under different experimental conditions. 

(Ryu et al., Science, 2026)

To isolate what kicks off the active phase, the researchers devised two tests. In the first, traps were cut into thin strips to hinder the snapping mechanism. Under this condition, the traps were still able to bend, but much more slowly.

In the second test, traps were clamped open and equipped with a force sensor to measure the force required to maintain separation between the two lobes. This produced a similar result, revealing a gradual bending motion that precedes the rapid snap-buckling stage.

The final piece of the puzzle was observing what the plant is actually doing during that active bending phase. The researchers used a tiny probe to measure the stiff, cellulosic walls of the cells inside and outside the trap before and after closure.

Cell walls on the inner surface barely changed – but those on the outer surface softened, losing about 40 percent of their rigidity.

A diagram illustrating the stages of the Venus flytrap trap closure.

 (A. Fisher/Science)

So, here's how it works.

Before triggering, turgor pressure – the force inside a cell that pushes the cell membrane against the cell wall – is evenly distributed across the inner and outer walls of the trap.

When a crawling critter triggers the trap by touching one of the sensitive filaments inside it twice in quick succession, the outer wall softens.

That allows the outer surface to expand more readily than the inner surface, creating a mismatch that bends the leaf.

In a relatively short space of time, this bending passes the snap-instability threshold, and the lobes slam shut, allowing the plant to respond quickly enough to a trigger to snap up a lovely dinner.

Here's the wild bit, though.

That cell-wall softening is essentially how plants grow. Venus flytraps essentially dialed up a tool they already had in their genetic kit so they could take a more proactive approach to securing nutrients.

"These fine-tuned adaptations that allow plants to have the upper hand when interacting with animals raise another question – how can they arise from a trial-and-error evolutionary process?" writes bioengineer Jacques Dumais of the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile in a related editorial.

We now know how the Venus flytrap works its magic, but it hasn't lost its allure, not while those bigger evolutionary questions remain to be answered.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Mapped Every Neuron in a Fruit Fly and the Brain Wasn’t Running the Show

By Harvard Medical School, June 14, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-mapped-every-neuron-in-a-fruit-fly-and-the-brain-wasnt-running-the-show/

The connectome maps how neurons in the fruit fly brain connect to those in its body via its spinal cord equivalent.

 Credit: Tyler Sloan

Scientists have created the first complete brain-to-body wiring map of a fruit fly, revealing that complex behavior may arise from distributed neural teamwork rather than a central controller.

A large international research team led by labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has reached a major neuroscience milestone: a complete wiring diagram of every connection between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.

The achievement gives scientists a new way to study how the brain and body work together to produce complex behaviors, including walking and flying. It also opens the door to deeper questions about the basic rules that govern nervous systems.

“We can see all of the neurons and their connections as a complete unit for the first time and ask, ‘What do we learn from that?’” said study co-senior author Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

First Complete Fruit Fly Nervous System Map

The detailed map of neural connections, called a connectome, adds the fruit fly’s version of a spinal cord, known as the nerve cord, to an earlier connectome of the fly brain.

“It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible so we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically,” said study co-senior author Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology at HMS and HMS professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

When the researchers analyzed the connectome, they found that many fruit fly behaviors are not directed by a single command center in the brain. Instead, they are often controlled by local neural circuits in the body parts involved in the action.

The full connectome is freely available online, giving scientists around the world a new resource for advancing neuroscience research. The study was published on June 8 in Nature and received support in part from U.S. federal funding, including the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

Why Fruit Flies Matter in Neuroscience

One of neuroscience’s major unanswered questions is how neurons in the brain and body connect and cooperate to create behavior. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model for studying that problem.

Fruit flies are easy to breed and care for in the laboratory. Their nervous systems are relatively simple, with about 160,000 neurons, yet they can perform complex behaviors such as navigation, social interaction, learning, and responses to sensory cues. They also offer what Lee calls an incredibly sophisticated genetic toolkit, allowing researchers to access, control, and record activity from single neurons or groups of neurons.

In 2024, the FlyWire Consortium, led by Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton, who are also co-authors of the new study, published a complete connectome of a fruit fly brain. At the same time, Lee and his colleagues were building a connectome of the fruit fly nerve cord, which controls the legs, wings, and other appendages while also processing sensory information.

“The brain and nerve cord connectomes are each useful on their own, but until you can bridge the two, it’s hard to understand how information moves between the brain and the body,” said co-first author Helen Yang, a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab.

Co-first author Alexander Bates, also a research fellow in neurobiology in the Wilson Lab, noted that although most of the neurons are in the brain, the neurons in the nerve cord are “some of the most useful” because they are tied to functions such as sensation and movement and are easier to interpret.

Linking the Brain and Body

Murthy, the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton and director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI), said the FlyWire team was eager to shift its focus to the brain and neural cord, or BANC, dataset imaged in the Lee Lab.

“The new connectome represents a major advance for the field, with the ability to understand how circuits in the brain receive feedback from and control the actions of the body,” she said.

“For the first time, we can follow information flow from sensation to action across an entire nervous system,” added co-author Arie Matsliah of the PNI.

Building a 3D Connectome

To create the connectome, the researchers prepared thousands of thin serial sections from a single fruit fly. They imaged those sections with electron microscopy, generating millions of images that captured neurons and their connections. AI tools were then used to line up the images and assemble them into a unified 3D map.

The finished connectome shows, at the synapse level, how each neuron connects with other neurons in the brain and nerve cord. Although it does not cover the fly’s entire body, the researchers used identifiable neurons and previous scientific literature to link central nervous system neurons to many appendages and sensory organs. In doing so, they effectively “embodied” the connectome.

Lee said researchers can now use the connectome to generate new hypotheses that can be tested in the lab. He compares the resource to using the detailed information in Google Maps to plan a route.

“The connectome has shown us that most of our hypotheses are too simple. Now, we can develop more complex hypotheses and move forward with experiments to test them,” Lee said.

A Surprise in Motor Control

The authors have already used the connectome to investigate motor control, including how a fruit fly moves its legs and other body parts.

A long-standing idea in neuroscience is that the brain acts as a centralized controller, making decisions about which actions an animal will take.

That was not what the team found.

Instead, the researchers discovered that motor control in the fruit fly is largely organized locally. For instance, the movement of one leg is mainly controlled by the neural circuits associated with that leg. Those local circuits then communicate with circuits for other legs to produce coordinated movements such as walking.

The same pattern appeared in circuits for the wings, mouth, and other body parts. The researchers also found that motor circuits connect with other kinds of circuits, including those in the visual and endocrine systems, which supply additional information that helps shape behavior.

“Our findings suggest that control for actions is highly distributed in local modules that link up and work together in different ways,” Bates said.

What Comes Next

The researchers expect the connectome to support many future studies. Yang compares it to the Human Genome Project, another major open resource that has enabled a wide range of scientific advances.

In the near future, the team plans to expand the connectome by adding more information, including details about neuropeptides, the small protein-like molecules that neurons use to communicate.

The connectome could also help reveal core principles of how nervous systems work across species, including in humans. Bates said many discoveries in fruit flies have carried over from invertebrates to mammals, including findings related to navigation, olfaction, and memory.

Another goal is “to bring full-connectome mapping to much more complex organisms,” said Matsliah. He said advances in AI, computation, and open collaborative science are making that kind of work increasingly possible.

One major question is whether the distributed control of neural circuits seen in fruit flies is also found in other animals. Lee is now studying that question in mice.

“I would be shocked if this is unique to the fly,” Yang said. “We don’t have this level of resolution in other animals, but we know that they have a lot of these local circuits.”

Fruit Fly Connectome and AI

The work may also have implications for artificial intelligence. The connectome offers concrete biological data that could help guide the design of artificial agents that move through virtual worlds, which are increasingly used to study intelligence and improve AI training.

“One thing that always amazes me is that this tiny little fly does a hell of a lot; even our best AI agents and robots can’t do everything that a fly does,” Yang said. “There may be lessons for AI in how the nervous system is organized.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

What Is Alexithymia? The Hidden Experience of Millions Explained

14 June 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-alexithymia-the-hidden-experience-of-millions-explained

(AegeanBlue/Canva)

Imagine feeling a knot in your stomach, or your heart racing, and being unable to tell whether you are feeling anger, anxiety, or excitement.

For millions of people around the globe, this is a daily experience.

It's called alexithymia, a word derived from ancient Greek that means "no words for emotions".

Contrary to some simplifications, it does not mean an inability to feel emotions. Rather, it describes a struggle to identify and understand one's own emotional states.

That might sound like a minor inconvenience. But emotions do much more than tell us how we feel.

They help us interpret our experiences, communicate with other people, navigate relationships, and make decisions. When emotional signals are difficult to recognize, the effects can ripple through many areas of life.

The term alexithymia was coined by psychotherapists in the 1970s to describe a pattern of difficulties.

This typically includes struggling to identify one's emotions and to describe them to others; getting confused between emotional states and physical sensations; and a tendency towards fact-focused external thinking rather than emotional introspection.

People with reduced interoception can't easily tell if they are hungry, thirsty, tired, aroused, or in pain.

 (Ron Lach/Pexels/Canva)



It's difficult to know how many people live with alexithymia, since people may not know that they have it, but according to current estimates, it may affect around 5 to 10 percent of the general population.

But what does alexithymia actually feel like?

One of the most common features of alexithymia is an inability to distinguish an emotional state from a physical one. That knot in the stomach may just register as nausea, the racing heart as exertion. You know that something is happening, but its emotional root is out of reach.

Another common feature is what psychologists call externally oriented thinking. People with alexithymia often focus on the observable details of a situation – what happened, what was said, what needs to be done.

The implications of this extend beyond the moment, however.

Emotions are one of the ways humans communicate with each other. They help us explain our needs, build connections, and understand how other people are feeling.

When a person struggles to identify and describe their own emotions, this can become much more difficult. Others may interpret the emotional reserve demonstrated by people with alexithymia as disinterest or detachment, even when they care deeply.

Alexithymia describes difficulties in identifying, distinguishing, and expressing emotions.

 (LittleCityLifestylePhotography/Canva)



Research has linked alexithymia to a range of interpersonal difficulties, including problems with emotional intimacy and relationship satisfaction.

Someone may know they are upset with a partner without being able to explain why, for example, or care deeply about a friend while struggling to express that feeling.

In addition, people with alexithymia often struggle to regulate their emotions, which can contribute to maladaptive coping strategies.

Research has linked alexithymia to behaviors such as social withdrawal, emotional suppression, and avoidance, all of which can further complicate relationships and communication.

The effects may also extend to decision-making.

Our emotions provide information that helps us assess risks and navigate uncertainty. Several studies have linked alexithymia to differences in decision-making, particularly in situations where there is no obvious right answer and emotional cues help guide choices.

If a person cannot easily tell whether a feeling is fear, excitement, apprehension, or intuition, they may lose one of the signals many people unconsciously rely on when weighing difficult decisions.

Alexithymia is not classified as a mental health disorder in its own right. However, it does appear more frequently in people with a number of conditions.

Perhaps its best-known association is with autism. Around 50 percent of people with autism are estimated to also have alexithymia.

However, it has also been linked to conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and a range of chronic illnesses, such as cancer.

Not everyone with these conditions has alexithymia, and many people with alexithymia have none of them. Nevertheless, the overlap has led researchers to investigate whether difficulties identifying emotions may contribute to some of the challenges experienced across these very different conditions.

The overlap can also make alexithymia difficult to spot. Patients may seek treatment for a condition without realizing that failing to recognize their emotions may be part of the puzzle.

While alexithymia can be challenging, it doesn't have to be set in stone.

The knot in the stomach, the racing heart, the tension in the shoulders – all may be carrying information. The task is learning how to read it.

Tools such as improving emotional literacy, meditation, and various types of therapy can help people living with alexithymia to connect with their emotions and learn to interpret what their body is trying to tell them.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chuck's photo corner to June 14, 2026 😎🌸🍓🌞

A great end of spring week, Sun rain, and the end of having to water potted seedlings, as they are almost all in the ground now. The colours, sounds, and smells of spring are in such contrast, to the experience of winter. Life abounds.

Chamomile ready to start harvesting.

chives seem happy enough

wild phlox behind some iris in the barn yard island

ready for rain

my garden nemesis

peonys opened this week

The port owned by the township, not that it makes my township taxes any less.

The Federal gov. keeps giving the port money for infrastructure as well, mainly for grain.

The port has moved a couple of boat loads of steel pipe this year so far. The first load was larger pipes.

potentilla

the current shrub

back yard iris

this current doesn't produce edible berries, I think it is the vulgaris current.

these guys nested on the front porch last year in one of my hanging baskets (golden pothos plant)

a shrub variety of euonymus, I believe.

a later flowering well behaved lilac (French lilac I think)

she just keeps after me , lol

out the front door

Rachelle's drive home after a birthday supper with her brother and 4 generations of family at the table

Thurso ferry

The sunsets June 13, 2026

Enjoy the day

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Earth's Core May Be Wrapped in an Ancient, Unexpected Structure

12 June 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-core-may-be-wrapped-in-an-ancient-unexpected-structure

A representation of the underground imaging used in the study. 

(Edward Garnero and Mingming Li/Arizona State University)

The highest-resolution map yet of the underlying geology beneath Earth's Southern Hemisphere revealed something we had never known before: an ancient ocean floor that may wrap around the core.

This thin yet dense layer lies at a depth of about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the surface, according to a study published in 2023.

That depth is where the molten, metallic outer core meets the rocky mantle above it. This is the core-mantle boundary.

"Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet," said geologist Samantha Hansen from the University of Alabama when the results were announced.

"We are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought."

Researchers lower seismic equipment into place at one of the stations as part of research into the Transantarctic Mountains. 

(Lindsey Kenyon)




Understanding exactly what's beneath our feet – in as much detail as possible – is vital for studying everything from volcanic eruptions to the variations in Earth's magnetic field, which protects us from the solar radiation in space.

Hansen and her colleagues used 15 monitoring stations buried in Antarctic ice to map seismic waves from earthquakes over three years.

The way those waves move and bounce reveals the composition of the material inside Earth.

Because the sound waves move more slowly in these areas, they're called ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs).

Rock movements in the mantle. 

(Hansen et al., Science Advances, 2023)

"Analyzing [thousands] of seismic recordings from Antarctica, our high-definition imaging method found thin anomalous zones of material at the core-mantle boundary everywhere we probed," said geophysicist Edward Garnero from Arizona State University.

"The material's thickness varies from a few kilometers to [tens] of kilometers. This suggests we are seeing mountains on the core, in some places up to five times taller than Mt. Everest."

According to the researchers, these ULVZs are most likely oceanic crust that has been buried for millions of years.

Seismic waves from earthquakes in the southern hemisphere were used to sample the ULVZ structure along the Earth's core-mantle boundary. 

(Edward Garnero and Mingming Li/Arizona State University)



The sunken crust isn't near recognized subduction zones on the surface – zones where shifting tectonic plates push the rock down into Earth's interior.

But simulations reported in the study show how convection currents could have moved the ancient ocean floor to its current resting place.

It's tricky to make assumptions about rock types and movement based on seismic wave movement, and the researchers aren't ruling out other options.

However, the ocean floor hypothesis seems the most likely explanation for these ULVZs right now.

There's also the suggestion that this ancient ocean crust could be wrapped around the entire core. Though, as it's so thin, it's hard to know for sure. Future seismic surveys should be able to add further to the overall picture.

One way the discovery can help geologists is by figuring out how heat from the hotter, denser core escapes into the mantle.

The differences in composition between these two layers are greater than those between the solid-surface rock and the air above it in the part we live on.

"Our research provides important connections between shallow and deep Earth structure and the overall processes driving our planet," said Hansen.

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