“True” should indeed be in quotation marks here—the term reflects the historically contingent tastes of Europeans, rather than any botanical category: The cinnamon of Sri Lanka was valued for its supreme quality as a spice, but various other Cinnamomum species have been, too, and are still used under the name “cinnamon.” But even today, botanists still call the cinnamon of Sri Lanka Cinnamomum verum (“verum” meaning true).

The rarity of cinnamon in the early modern period made it one of the most coveted spices of that era, and European countries without direct access to the cinnamon trade tried to imitate, substitute, steal, smuggle, or transplant the “true” product from Sri Lanka.

Experiments with “cinnamon gardens” (kaneeltuinen in Dutch) led to enormous successes, and the company eventually grew millions of cinnamon trees on plantations in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Imagine if you could concentrate your brain power into one bright beam and focus it like a laser on whatever you wish to accomplish.

When you’re comfortable and life is good, your brain can release chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which lead to happy feelings.

If you enjoyed this post, you will love Postanly Weekly (my free digest of the best productivity, behaviour change, and neuroscience posts).

Veloren is an open-world, open-source multiplayer voxel RPG.

The game is in an early stage of development, but is playable.

What are you waiting for?

However, if the balance is disturbed, either through the use of antibiotics, illness, or unhealthy diet, the body could become susceptible to disease.

In this study, Garland’s team looked for impacts on the microbiome after dividing their mice into four groups: half fed the standard, ‘healthy’ diet, half fed the less healthy ‘Western’ diet, half with access to a running wheel for exercise, and half without.

Muribaculum bacteria increased in mice fed a standard diet who had access to a running wheel and decreased in mice on a high-fat diet whether they had exercise or not.

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 4, 2021 - Researchers at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) demonstrate that changing the gut microbiome can transform patients with advanced melanoma who never responded to immunotherapy--which has a failure rate of 40% for this type of cancer--into patients who do.

UPMC Hillman Cancer Center is the region's only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and is one of the largest integrated community cancer networks in the United States.

The more than 2,000 physicians, researchers, and staff are leaders in molecular and cellular cancer biology, cancer immunology, cancer virology, biobehavioral cancer control, and cancer epidemiology, prevention, and therapeutics.

A young program that puts troubled nonviolent people in the hands of health care workers instead of police officers has proven successful in its first six months, according to a progress report.

A spectrum of solutions has sprouted from protests against systemic racism and police brutality that started last summer, including the idea of taking money from traditional policing and giving it to social programs not unlike STAR.

“We have more than enough work with regards to violent crime, property crime and traffic safety, and if something like STAR or any other support system can lighten the load on mental health calls for service, substance abuse calls for service, and low-level issues, that frees up law enforcement to address crime issues.”

Lately, Apple has been doubling down on data privacy by giving user’s a lot more transparency and better control over who uses their data.

To add more fuel to the fire, Facebook is also the firm that only recently tried to force WhatsApp users to either “send their data or lose the account” in the name of the privacy policy(though this backfired and they had to retreat).

Their whole anti-Apple marketing campaign was laughable, reeked desperation, and only showed how worried they are about the iOS 14 privacy features.

I understand it is a vague question but it is a topic I have recently become interested in because of digging deeper into mental models.

Mental models address a lot of 'practical' situations but I am realizing that they fall short when it comes to bigger questions of life.

What path did you follow to develop a personal philosophy?