ADHD Coaches - Paternal Behavior - Screens & Attention - Whale Song

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Feb 21, 2026, 6:30:43 AM (3 days ago) Feb 21

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/what-to-know-choosing-adhd-coach

Looking for an ADHD coach? Choose carefully

By Katherine Ellison

For most of her adult life, Katherine Sanders had what she calls a typical career for someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

After finishing her doctoral thesis on Bronze Age Syrian mythology, she bounced between unrelated jobs. She tutored university students. She sewed Victorian corsets for bridal outfits. She designed stained glass and sold picture frames. She enjoyed the work, but none of it felt like a calling.

Life got harder when she found herself juggling part-time work with caring for a spirited five-year-old. Sanders, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, burned meals on the stove and forgot to pick up her daughter from school.

Finally, she decided to work with a coach to help her cope with her ADHD, a bedeviling condition whose hallmark symptoms are distraction, forgetfulness, restlessness and impulsivity.

She began by enrolling in a digital course called Your ADHD Brain is A-OK. Like most ADHD coaches, Tracy Otsuka, the course producer, has herself been diagnosed with the disorder. Otsuka, based in Northern California, says she focuses on helping her clients shed shame as a prelude to finding their purpose and living more fulfilled lives. Participants in the self-paced course watch 26 videos and fill out worksheets designed to identify their values and strengths.

Sanders says working with Otsuka led to a lightbulb moment for her. “This woman is very smart, she’s very savvy,” she says. “And she still did stuff like forget to pick her kid up from school.… She still does the same things as me.” The experience made Sanders realize that she, too, was smart but had a specific challenge she needed to learn to manage.
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/social-behavior/single-gene-sways-caregiving-circuits-behavior-in-male-mice/

Single gene sways caregiving circuits, behavior in male mice

By Natalia Mesa

Most male mammals do not dote on their young and may even attack them, but some African striped mice actively feed, groom and nuzzle their own and even others’ pups.

These profound behavioral differences come down to a single gene: agouti. This gene controls pigment production in the hair or skin of many animals. But in African striped mice, it also acts as a volume knob to silence caregiving circuits in the brain, according to a study published today in Nature.

“It’s remarkable that this one gene is able to lead to a dramatic change in behavior,” says Robert Froemke, professor of genetics, neuroscience and otolaryngology at New York University, who was not involved in the work.

Male African striped mice that live in isolation for roughly 2 months after weaning tend to nurture pups later in life, even those that are not their own, whereas their peers that live with other mice tend to be indifferent fathers or even infanticidal, the study found. The fatherly mice express lower levels of agouti in the brain compared with their more aggressive counterparts, the study shows.

“Agouti, we think, is a molecular integrator of environmental experience,” says study author Ricardo Mallarino, associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton University.

Despite the fact that only about 5 percent of mammalian species show fatherly behavior, parental care may be the default mode in striped mice, the research suggests. Both males and females use the same brain circuitry to care for their young, but enhanced agouti expression in the brain suppresses these instincts in the former.
© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

Books and screens

Carlo Iacono

Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.

This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.

I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.

The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/listen-to-the-oldest-known-recording-of-a-whale/

Listen to the oldest known recording of a whale

By Meghan Bartels

On March 7, 1949, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat called the R/V Atlantis that was sailing off the coast of Bermuda.

They lowered a primitive underwater recording setup into the ocean, and a boxy machine more regularly found in offices began etching the sounds of the sea—a chorus of eerie howls and rustling waves—into a thin plastic disk. That disk made its way to WHOI’s archives in Massachusetts, where it sat, an overlooked relic of the earliest days of underwater acoustic recording.

Fast-forward nearly eight decades, and experts at WHOI have rediscovered the recording and determined it’s probably the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely vocalist? A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae).

The scientists who stumbled on the rare recording are eager to use it for science.

“Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI, in a statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, as well as serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.”

The recording dates to a time when the North Atlantic Ocean’s humpback whales were struggling because of decades of commercial whaling. By 1955, the population had likely fallen below 1,000 animals, experts have since estimated. And although humpback whales are due for a thorough census, even outdated estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times the number of these animals in the region today.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00531-x

Blood test holds promise for predicting when Alzheimer’s symptoms will start

Heidi Ledford

A simple blood test might one day serve as a molecular ‘clock’ that predicts not only whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease — but when.

Blood tests are now approved for Alzheimer’s: how accurate are they?

The test, published in Nature Medicine on 19 February1, is based on an abnormal form of a protein called tau that circulates in the blood, and begins to accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s well before symptoms such as memory loss appear. If validated in larger studies, the test could provide a way to intervene in the neurodegenerative disease at an earlier stage, when treatment is more likely to be effective.

It could also provide a measurable biological marker, or ‘biomarker’, to make clinical trials of potential Alzheimer’s disease treatments easier and cheaper. “Predicting if and when patients are likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms could be useful in designing trials of interventions to prevent or delay symptom onset,” says Howard Fink, a physician at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Minnesota.

But until further studies are done, people should not take the test themselves, says Suzanne Schindler, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and lead author of the study. (In-home blood tests for the form of tau that the study focuses on are available to consumers.) “At this point, we do not recommend that any cognitively unimpaired individuals have any Alzheimer’s disease biomarker test,” Schindler adds.

Abnormal tau proteins can form tangled fibres that disrupt communication among the brain’s nerve cells. Brain-imaging tests that detect tangled tau are sometimes used when diagnosing Alzheimer’s, and preliminary studies suggest that such tests might also be able to predict when a person’s Alzheimer’s symptoms will appear2,3.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ozempic-osteoarthritis-arthritis-semaglutide

Meds like Ozempic could ease arthritis

By Meghan Rosen

Ozempic’s key ingredient may act directly on cartilage to repair creaky joints.

In mice and people, semaglutide can ease symptoms of the joint disease osteoarthritis and thicken the cartilage pillowed between bones, researchers report February 9 in Cell Metabolism.

Thicker cartilage suggests the tissue is being rebuilt, says Di Chen, a physician and biologist at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology in China. “That’s a good thing,” he says. “That’s the key thing.” More cartilage means more cushion, which means less bone-on-bone grinding and less pain.

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. The disease can affect the hands, knees, hips and other joints, causing severe pain as cartilage wears away and tissues inflame. There’s no cure, and no medications that prevent it from becoming worse. Doctors can only help patients try to manage pain, Chen says.

Scientists think weight loss can help alleviate symptoms by reducing the load on joints. That’s why semaglutide, the smash weight loss drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, is considered a contender for osteoarthritis treatment. And indeed, in 2024, a clinical trial in people with obesity reported that the drug improved joint pain and function. Doctors assumed those benefits were due to weight loss, Chen says. His team wasn’t so sure.

The researchers conducted a similar study in mice with a form of osteoarthritis. One group received semaglutide, the other did not. In the drug-free mice, Chen’s team restricted food intake to match that of the semaglutide group. Both groups shed weight, but only the treated mice saw joint-based benefits. These mice had less pain, less broken-down cartilage and more cartilage growth, the team found. The results suggest that weight loss isn’t driving semaglutide’s benefits.

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