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Whether you call him groundhog, woodchuck, or whistle-pig, or use the full genus and species name, Marmota monax, the nations premier animal weather forecaster has been making headlines as Punxsutawney Phil for decades. The largest ground squirrel in its range, groundhogs like Phil are found throughout the midwestern United States, most of Canada, and into southern Alaska. M. monax is the most widespread marmot, while the Vancouver Island marmot (M. vancouverensis) is found only on one island in British Columbia. In total, there are 15 species in the genus Marmota, found around the world from as far south as the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico and the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, and as far north as regions of Siberia and Alaska so dark and cold that the marmots must hibernate for up to nine months of the year. Hibernating to escape tough times Marmots, including all the actors who have played Phil over the years, are the largest true hibernators: animals that enter a torpor that reduces their biological functions to a level closer to dead than alive. Because this phenomenon is so interesting, scientists pay attention to all aspects of marmot anatomy and physiology. Basic observational science like this is important to advance our understanding of the world, and it sometimes leads to discoveries that improve human lives. Marmot studies are the foundation for experiments to address obesity, cardiovascular disease, mpox, stress, hepatitis, and liver cancer, and they may inform work on osteoporosis and organ transplantation. Aging seems to nearly stop during hibernation, as the marmot heart rate drops from nearly 200 beats per minute when active to about nine during hibernation. Similarly, their active body temperature can be 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius)about the same as a dog or catbut plummet to 41° F (5° C) when hibernating. Humans, in comparison, become hypothermic at a core temperature of 95° F (35° C). Fueling feast and famine Marmots only source of energy during the hibernation period is stored fat, which they may metabolize as slowly as 1 gram per day. But even that is a large amount when it must suffice for more than half a year. So, marmots need to double their weight during the summer, even in places where the season is only a few months long. To do so, they double the size of their hibernation-state gastrointestinal tract and liver, and then carefully select the most nutritious plants, including legumes, flowers, grains, and grasses. Despite their corpulence, they can also climb trees to eat buds and fruit. Gardener, architect, and menu item The digging and seed dispersal that accompany foraging create flower-filled meadows. Some marmots, like Mongolias Tarbagan marmot (M. siberica), are keystone species whose presence is associated with increased diversity of plants and predators. Marmot burrows are a key architectural component of many other animals habitats. Abandoned marmot excavations can provide temperature- and humidity-controlled housing for dozens of species, from frogs and foxes to snakes and owls. The same activities can make groundhogs a pest to people. In most of the Midwest, groundhog predators were largely eliminated at the same time that agricultural fields became vast marmot buffets. Today, many groundhog populations are tightly controlled by invasive coyotes, as well as recovering populations of bobcats. Because they are such a high-quality meal, marmots are an important conduit of energy from plants to carnivores. Everything from hawks to eagles, weasels to wolves, may eat them. And, like most native birds and mammals, marmots are on the menu of house cats, too. Humans also have long exploited marmots for meat and fur. As a result, once-common marmot species are rare in many places. But marmots breed like the proverbial bunnies and so have the potential to come back quickly from population declines. They can be reintroduced to former haunts, benefiting the ecosystem. Hibernation must end at the right time Shortly after waking from hibernation, marmots mate, giving birth about 4 weeks later to half a dozen or more offspring. Ideally, pups are born just as the first plants peak through the snowmeltmaximizing the time available to pack on fat for the coming hibernation season. Given the food needs of these big ground squirrels, and the fact they may be seen poking their heads above the snow before any food is available, it seems reasonable to assume that they have some power of weather prediction. Indeed, people celebrate scores of individual groundhogs across the U.S. and Canada for their ability to anticipate weather six weeks hence. This American groundhog tradition apparently started with German immigrants recalling the spring emergence of badgers and hedgehogs in the old country. Brown bears have a similar spring schedule and are still celebrated in Romania and Serbia. People ascribe weather-predicting abilities to other species, too, including woolly bear caterpillars, sheep, cats and dormice. One tradition holds that tree squirrel nests, called dreys, can predict the severity of the coming winter. Leafy dreys are well ventilated and privategood choices if you need less protection during a warm winter. More insulated hollow trees are cozy in the cold but communal, and so come with the risk of sharing parasites. As a squirrel researcher, I have noted the location, number, and size of nests for years but seen no discernible patterns related to weather. Weather responders, not weather predictors Despite traditional claims, youve probably already guessed that Phil and his friends are about as good at predicting the coming weather as that kid who answers C for every multiple choice question. A 2021 study on the subject reported that groundhogs predictions of spring onset (are) no better than chance. Thats right, groundhogs are correct 50% of the time. One big problem with relying on any species on a specific calendar day is that seasons follow latitude and altitude. Anyone who has hiked the Appalachian Trail can tell you that trekking from south to north maximizes your time in cool spring weather. Similarly, if you venture to the peaks of the Rockies in August, youll find spring wildflowers. For this reason, groundhogs in Alabama emerge from their dens much earlier than those in Wisconsin. As one Canadian newspaper put it in 1939: Here in Manitoba, no woodchuck in his senses would voluntarily emerge into the cold on February 2. Animals senses are tools for survival Modern technology can accurately predict the average weatherthat is, climatefar into the future, and the precise weather five days in advance. But the accuracy of a forecast at a given point on Earth 10 days in the future is only about 50%as good as a groundhog. However, many animals are sensitive to phenomena that humans need tools to even notice. Flocks of warblers, sparrows, and other birds sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere before a storm. These species often migrate at night, navigating across land and sea by the stars and Earths magnetic fields. To avoid getting lost in fog or blown off course, theyll fall out of the sky at good resting spots when bad weather is building. At such times, take the warblers advice and dont venture out on the water. Frogs chirping in spring indicate that water temperatures are warm enough for eggs, while air temperatures influence caterpillar hatching and activity. Farmers over the centuries have recorded the blooming dates of flowers over the years as a way to predict when to plant and harvest. Noticing and tracking timing of annual events Phenology is the study of these natural phenomena and their annual cycles, from the first springtime peek of a groundhog to the last autumn honk of a goose. When does the first flower bloom in your neighborhood, the first thunder clap rumble, or the last cricket chirp? No individual observation, even Phils, has the power to predict the weather. But in aggregate, these observations can tell us a lot about what the world is doing and predict how it will change. You can be like Phil and look for your shadow, or for a nice legume to eat, and then contribute to science by adding your observations to the National Phenology Network. Traditions dont need to be factually true to be useful. Groundhog shadows bring people together at a cold time of year to look at the clouds, notice buds on the trees, and track down the earliest green sprouts, such as skunk cabbage, which warms the snow around it. This Groundhog Day, get out there and enjoy nature as you celebrate the lengthening days and increased activities of the organisms we share this planet with. Steven Sullivan is the director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History at Miami University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Dont eat at these times. Eat this food and youll lose weight. With societys obsession with food, health, and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms, and even healthcare offices. But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and nutrition are so common because of diet culturea morality imposed by society that sees falling outside the arbitrary ideal of thinness as a personal failure. Diet culture and the people promoting it expect you to pursue or maintain thinness at all times. Diet culture norms have led to a multibillion-dollar industry promoting diets that each come with their own set of rules, with each claiming its the only way to be healthy or lose weight. When access to nutrition information is at an all-time high online, people are often left digging through conflicting information when trying to figure out what to eat or what a healthy diet look likes. As a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders, the majority of my clients have been, and continue to be, harmed by diet culture. They wrestle with guilt and shame around food, and their health is often negatively affected by rigid rules about nutrition. Rather than improving health, research has shown that diet culture increases your risk of unhealthy behaviors, including yo-yo dieting, weight cycling, and eating disorders. If the solution to health isnt following the rules of diet culture, what is the answer? I believe an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition can offer an antidote. What is “all foods fit”? “All foods fit” may sound like eat whatever you want, whenever you want, but that is an oversimplification of this approach to nutrition. Rather, this model is based on the idea that all foods can fit into a healthy diet by balancing food and nutrition in a way that promotes health. It does this by enabling flexibility in your diet through listening to internal body cues to decide what and when to eat instead of following external rules. All foods fit allows for nuance to exist in health and nutrition. Diet culture is black and whitefoods are either good or bad. But nutrition and health are much more complex. For starters, many factors beyond diet affect health: exercise, sleep, stress, mental health, socioeconomic status, access to food, and healthcare, to name a few. Similarly, while general guidelines around nutrition are available, everyone has individual needs based on their preferences, health status, access to food, daily schedule, cooking skills, and more. The flexibility of all foods fit can help you make empowered food choices based on your health goals, tastes, exercise habits, and life circumstances. All foods fit in action A common pushback to the all-foods-fit approach is that you cant be healthy if you are eating unhealthy foods, and giving yourself permission to eat all foods means youll primarily eat the bad ones. However, research shows that removing the morality around food can actually lead to healthier food choices by decreasing stress related to food decisions. This reduces the risk of disordered eating, resulting in improved physical health. To see what an all-foods-fit approach might look like, imagine youre attending a social event where the food options are pizza, a veggie and dip tray, and cookies. According to the diet youre following, pizza, cookies, and dips are all bad foods to avoid. You grab some of the veggies to eat, but are still hungry. Youre starving toward the end of the event, but the only food left is cookies. You plan on eating only one, but feel so hungry and guilty that you end up eating a lot of cookies and feel out of control. You feel sick when you go home and promise yourself to do better tomorrow. But this binge-restrict cycle will continue. Now imagine attending the same social event, but you dont label foods as good or bad. From experience, you know you often feel hungry and unwell after eating pizza by itself. You also know that fiber, which can be found in vegetables, is helpful for gut health and can make you feel more satisfied after meals. So you balance your plate with a couple slices of pizza and a handful of veggies and dip. You feel pretty satisfied after that meal and dont feel the need to eat a cookie. Toward the end of the event, you grab a cookie because you enjoy the taste and eat most of it before feeling satisfied. You save the rest of the cookie for later. Rather than following strict rules and restrictions that can lead to cycles of guilt and shame, an all-foods-fit approach can lead to more sustainable, healthy habits where stress and disruptions to routine dont wreak havoc on your overall diet. How to get started with an all-foods-fit approach It can be incredibly hard to divest from diet culture and adopt an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition and health. Here are some tips to help you get started. Remove any moral labels on food. Instead of good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, think about the name of the food or the nutritional components it has. For example, chicken is high in protein, broccoli is a source of fiber, and ice cream is a dessert. Neutral labels can help determine what food choices make sense for you in the moment and reduce any guilt or shame around food. Focus on your internal cueshunger, fullness, satisfaction, and how food makes you physically feel. Becoming attuned to your body can help you regulate food choices and determine what eating pattern makes you feel your best. Eat consistently. When you arent eating regularly, it can be hard to feel in control around food. Your hunger can become more intense, and your body less sensitive to fullness hormones. Implement an eating schedule that spaces food regularly throughout the day, filling any prolonged gaps between meals with a snack. Reintrduce foods you previously restricted. Start small with foods that feel less scary or with a small amount of a food youre anxious about. This could look like adding a piece of chocolate to lunch most days, or trying out a bagel for one breakfast. By intentionally adding these foods back into your diet, you can build trust with yourself that you wont feel out of control around these foods. Check in with yourself before eating. Ask yourself, how hungry am I? What sounds good right now? How long until I can eat again? And sometimes, more support is needed. This can be especially true if youre experiencing disordered eating habits or have an eating disorder. Consider working with a dietitian to help challenge nutrition misinformation and heal your relationship to food. Charlotte Carlson is the director of the Kendall Reagan Nutrition Center at Colorado State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age normallywho live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible agehave almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time. This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 years of that life representedin leadership, in organizations, in the mediathen most of your working life remains unimaginable. There is no shared script for what professional authority, ambition, or success look like at 60. When women in their 50s or 60s are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look 10 or 20 years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisiblepresent only if their age is erased. This narrows ambition, encourages self-censorship, and makes later-life leadership or reinvention seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from aging women by making long careers harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Theres no point in blaming the women Let us be absolutely clear: This is not about condemning womens individual choices. Gray hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filters or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they give in to beauty standards would be both unjust and profoundly naive. We do what we can with the constraints and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the contradictory injunctions we receive. The problem is not that women try to look younger. Thats perfectly understandable. The problem is that older women are either not there or only tolerated if they do not look old. As a result, the normal faces of aging womento borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perezhave almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but accidental.It reflects the demographic structure of power in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workspace are expected to remain in their placesubmissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye, whatever their job and position. A double disappearance: organizations and media Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibilization of women in U.S. organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. In Fortune 500 companies, women now make up roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress is uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over 50and especially over 60are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience. This organizational invisibility mirrors what happens in the media. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media consistently shows that women are both underrepresented and age-erased on both the big and small screen. Women over 50 account for a small fraction of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women age, they quite literally vanish from movies, television, and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age be visually erased. Across film, TV, and ads, female bodies are toleratedeven in leadership or expert rolesonly if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted, and polished. We want women leaders, but not their wrinkles of concentration nor the visible marks of 25 years of work. When aging becomes a defect to be corrected Criado Perez describes how she started collecting images of actresses whose faces have not been artificially rejuvenatedEmma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Kate Winsletbecause encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On-screen, its exceptional. Thus, we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 40s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal featureslines of expression, changes in skin texture, saggingare now perceived as signs of neglect and personal failure. The traits of a normal age have been reframed as flaws. New generative AI tools are making this visual amnesia even worse. Ask an image generator to show you a 50-year-old woman, and you will usually get either a smoothed, poreless face that could be 35or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology merely reproduces and amplifies the biases of the image databases it is trained on. AI does not show us women of 50; it shows us what the internet imagines they should look like. It is just as pervasive in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials, and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The world of work, as it is depicted today, is populated by smooth, vaguely thirtysomething faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absentexcept when they are used to illustrate end-of-career narratives, mentorship, or decline. The enduring double standard of aging This brings us back to a concept articulated more than 50 years ago by Susan Sontag: the double standard of aging. Male aging is associated with added valueauthority, gravitas, experience, powerwhile female aging is framed as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After 45, women are expected either to fade into the background or to invest enormous energy into looking younger, but never to sho visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called the convent syndrome: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualized visibility are presumed to be over. This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where womens careers are still shaped by narrow and unforgiving norms of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders, or lovers; aging women are quietly written out, unless they conform to increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates womens worth with youthand treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived. That is precisely what makes the sketch Last Fuckable Day, from Inside Amy Schumer, so powerful. Schumer unexpectedly runs into her show-business heroesTina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquettewho are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made 10 years ago, the sketch does not feel dated at all. It turns ageist erasure into a sharp piece of feminist satireone that feels even more relevant today than when it first aired. Why this matters so much at work The absence of older female role models is extremely costly. First, it deprives younger women of projection. How can you imagine a long, evolving career when most, if not all, visible success stories stop at 40? In a world where working lives are getting longer, this lack of role models is deeply destabilizing.Second, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are perceived as exceptions rather than as the norm. This fuels stereotypes about atypical careers and legitimizes bad decisions in hiring, promotion, and training. Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, aging becomes something to fear. This anxiety affects all womennot just those who are already older.Finally, organizations lose out. Women over 45 represent a massive pool of experience, skills, and leadership potential. Treating them as obsolete is economically irrational. Its about diversity Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rulewhether to go gray or not, to reject aesthetic medicine or embrace it. The aim is not to replace one norm with another, but to leave room for choice. What we desperately need is more diversity of the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth ones. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable. Every woman who chooseswhen she can, when she wantsto show her real, aging face widens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I am aging in my own way. And I matter. In doing so, she not only challenges stereotypes todayshe also helps shape the images, datasets, and representations that will train the technologies and imaginations of tomorrow. Older female role models at work are not a niche demand. They are a condition for fairer careers, healthier organizations, and a society that can finally accept womens lives in their full lengthnot just in their youth. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. 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