The tax would be applied to manufacturers of milk-based drinks and dairy-based substitutes, under the plans.
Milkshakes and lattes could be covered by sugar tax
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Category Archives: Mind Building
Global study links consumption of ultraprocessed foods to preventable premature deaths
A study analyzing data from nationally representative dietary surveys and mortality data from eight countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, United Kingdom, and United States) shows that premature deaths attributable to consumption of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) increase significantly according to their share in individuals’ total energy intake. The new study, appearing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, reinforces the call for global action to reduce UPF consumption, supported by regulatory and fiscal policies that foster healthier environments.
UPFs are ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations that are made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories, with little or no whole foods in their composition. These have gradually been replacing traditional foods and meals made from fresh and minimally processed ingredients.
Lead investigator of the study Eduardo Augusto Fernandes Nilson, DSc, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Brazil, says, “UPFs affect health beyond the individual impact of high content of critical nutrients (sodium, trans fats, and sugar) because of the changes in the foods during industrial processing and the use of artificial ingredients, including colorants, artificial flavors and sweeteners, emulsifiers, and many other additives and processing aids, so assessing deaths from all-causes associated with UPF consumption allows an overall estimate of the effect of industrial food processing on health.”
While previous studies focused on specific dietary risk factors instead of food patterns, the current study modeled data from nationally representative dietary surveys and mortality data from eight countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, United Kingdom, and United States) to link dietary patterns, considering the extent and purpose of industrial food processing, to deaths from all causes.
Dr. Nilson explains, “We first estimated a linear association between the dietary share of UPFs and all-cause mortality, so that each 10% increase in the participation of UPFs in the diet increases the risk of death from all causes by 3%. Then, using the relative risks and the food consumption data for all countries (ranging from 15% of the total energy intake in Colombia, to over 50% of the calories in the United States), we built a model that estimated that the percentage of all-cause premature preventable deaths due to the consumption of UPFs can vary from 4% in countries with lower UPF consumption to almost 14% in countries with the highest UPF consumption. For example, in 2018, 124,000 premature deaths were attributable to the consumption of UPFs in the United States.”
High consumption of UPFs has been associated with 32 different diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, some types of cancer, and depression. For the first time, this study has estimated the burden of UPF intake on premature deaths from all-causes in different countries, showing that the attributable mortality is significant in all settings and that addressing UPF consumption should be a global public nutrition priority.
Dr. Nilson notes, “It is concerning that, while in high-income countries UPF consumption is already high but relatively stable for over a decade, in low- and middle-income countries the consumption has continuously increased, meaning that while the attributable burden in high-income countries is currently higher, it is growing in the other countries. This shows that policies that disincentivize the consumption of UPFs are urgently needed globally, promoting traditional dietary patterns based on local fresh and minimally processed foods.”
A vast molecular cloud, long invisible, is discovered near solar system
An international team of scientists led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick astrophysicist has discovered a potentially star-forming cloud that is one of the largest single structures in the sky and among the closest to the sun and Earth ever to be detected.
The vast ball of hydrogen, long invisible to scientists, was revealed by looking for its main constituent — molecular hydrogen. The finding marks the first time a molecular cloud has been detected with light emitted in the far-ultraviolet realm of the electromagnetic spectrum and opens the way to further explorations using the approach.
The scientists have named the molecular hydrogen cloud “Eos,” after the Greek goddess of mythology who is the personification of dawn. Their discovery is outlined in a study published in Nature Astronomy.
“This opens up new possibilities for studying the molecular universe,” said Blakesley Burkhart, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences who led the team and is an author on the study. Burkhart is also a research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York.
Molecular clouds are composed of gas and dust — with the most common molecule being hydrogen, the fundamental building block of stars and planets and essential for life. They also contain other molecules such as carbon monoxide. Molecular clouds are often detected using conventional methods such as radio and infrared observations that easily pick up the chemical signature for carbon monoxide.
For this work, the scientists employed a different approach.
“This is the first-ever molecular cloud discovered by looking for far ultraviolet emission of molecular hydrogen directly,” Burkhart said. “The data showed glowing hydrogen molecules detected via fluorescence in the far ultraviolet. This cloud is literally glowing in the dark.”
Eos poses no danger to Earth and the solar system. Because of its proximity, the gas cloud presents a unique opportunity to study the properties of a structure within the interstellar medium, scientists said.
The interstellar medium, made of gas and dust that fills the space between stars within a galaxy, serves as raw material for new star formation.
“When we look through our telescopes, we catch whole solar systems in the act of forming, but we don’t know in detail how that happens,” Burkhart said. “Our discovery of Eos is exciting because we can now directly measure how molecular clouds are forming and dissociating, and how a galaxy begins to transform interstellar gas and dust into stars and planets.”
The crescent-shaped gas cloud is located about 300 light years away from Earth. It sits on the edge of the Local Bubble, a large gas-filled cavity in space that encompasses the solar system. Scientists estimate that Eos is vast in projection on the sky, measuring about 40 moons across the sky, with a mass about 3,400 times that of the sun. The team used models to show it is expected to evaporate in 6 million years.
“The use of the far ultraviolet fluorescence emission technique could rewrite our understanding of the interstellar medium, uncovering hidden clouds across the galaxy and even out to the furthest detectable limits of cosmic dawn,” said Thavisha Dharmawardena, a NASA Hubble Fellow at New York University and a shared first author of the study.
Eos was revealed to the team in data collected by a far-ultraviolet spectrograph called FIMS-SPEAR (an acronym for fluorescent imaging spectrograph) that operated as an instrument on the Korean satellite STSAT-1. A far-ultraviolet spectrograph breaks down far-ultraviolet light emitted by a material into its component wavelengths, just as a prism does with visible light, creating a spectrum that scientists can analyze.
The data had just been released publicly in 2023 when Burkhart came across it.
“It was kind of like just waiting to be explored,” she said.
The findings highlight the importance of innovative observational techniques in advancing the understanding of the cosmos, Burkhart said. She noted that Eos is dominated by molecular hydrogen gas but is mostly “CO-dark,” meaning it doesn’t contain much of the material and doesn’t emit the characteristic signature detected by conventional approaches. That explains how Eos eluded being identified for so long, researchers said.
“The story of the cosmos is a story of the rearrangement of atoms over billions of years,” Burkhart said. “The hydrogen that is currently in the Eos cloud existed at the time of the Big Bang and eventually fell onto our galaxy and coalesced nearby the sun. So, it’s been a long journey of 13.6 billion years for these hydrogen atoms.”
The discovery presented itself as something of a surprise.
“When I was in graduate school, we were told that you can’t easily directly observe molecular hydrogen,” said Dharmawardena of NYU. “It’s kind of wild that we can see this cloud in data that we didn’t think we would see.”
Eos also is named after a proposed NASA space mission that Burkhart and other members of the team are supporting. The mission aims to broaden the approach of detecting molecular hydrogen to greater swaths of the Galaxy, investigating the origins of stars by studying the evolution of molecular clouds.
The team is scouring data for molecular hydrogen clouds near and far. A study published as a preprint on arXiv by Burkhart and others using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reports tentatively finding the most distant molecular gas yet.
“Using JWST, we may have found the very furthest hydrogen molecules from the sun,” Burkhart said. “So, we have found both some of the closest and farthest using far-ultraviolet emission.”
Other members of the scientific team included researchers from: Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel; Queen Mary University of London and University College London, both of London; University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, University of Science and Technology, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, all of Daejeon, South Korea; Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany; University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas; University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.; University of California, Berkeley; Université Paris Cité, Gif-sur-Yvette, France; Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Columbia University, New York; and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
Elephant instead of wild boar? What could have been in Europe
Elephants are among the largest land mammals on Earth and are often referred to as “ecosystem engineers” because they sustainably alter their surroundings through grazing, trampling, and digging. Europe, too, had an elephant: the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) lived on our continent for around 700,000 years. The species survived multiple ice ages before becoming extinct during the last one due to additional hunting pressure from humans. Throughout its existence, the straight-tusked elephant helped shape Europe’s landscape, maintaining open spaces and light woodlands. Many native plant species are still adapted to these conditions today.
“The German name Waldelefant (forest elephant) originates from the assumption that this species primarily lived in the wooded regions of Europe. However, fossil evidence shows that P. antiquus often inhabited open or semi-open habitats with mosaic-like vegetation, similar to modern elephants,” explains Prof. Dr. Manuel Steinbauer, Chair of Sport Ecology at the University of Bayreuth.
To reconstruct the way of life of P. antiquus and, in particular, its actual habitat — known as the realised niche — the research team examined scientific literature and palaeontological databases for fossil finds of P. antiquus that could be assigned to specific Marine Isotope Stages. Marine Isotope Stages are periods in the earth’s history that reflect climate history, representing warm and cold stages. The Bayreuth research team assigned fossil finds from across Europe to either a warm or cold stage and used climate models from these periods to reconstruct the realised niche of the straight-tusked elephant. A comparison with modern climate data suggests that straight-tusked elephants would still be able to live in Europe today. The climate in Western and Central Europe would be particularly suitable, except for mountainous regions such as the Alps and the Caucasus.
“In the past, megafauna like the straight-tusked elephant and their regulatory mechanisms — such as grazing — were omnipresent. Many European species, particularly plants that thrive in open habitats, likely established in their diversity in Europe because they benefited from these ecological influences. Traditional conservation strategies in Europe primarily aim to protect biodiversity by shielding habitats from human activities. However, this strategy alone is unlikely to restore the lost ecological functions of megafauna,” says Franka Gaiser, a doctoral student in the Sport Ecology research team and lead author of the study.
Modern conservation projects actively reintroduce large herbivores to Europe. However, this comes with challenges, as the ecological processes that have shaped modern ecosystems are not yet fully understood. Additionally, today’s large herbivores cannot entirely replace the role of extinct megafauna, as both the animals themselves and the landscape structures, as well as species interactions, have changed significantly.
Mental health inquiry chair vows to ‘seek out’ truth
An inquiry led by Baroness Lampard is examining more than 2,000 deaths at mental health units in Essex.
Prescription charges frozen in England
The charge for a single item will remain at £9.90 in 2025-26, the government has announced.
Urgent care worse than pre-pandemic, think tank says
The Health Foundation argues that the NHS was “in distress” this winter with A&E waiting times reaching a record high.
CGC Year 9 Is Open: The Sensing and Thinking Behind the Invitation
Yay! Conscious Growth Club is now open for enrollment for our 9th year together. You can see the invitation here:
Conscious Growth Club Year 9 Invite
This year I posted a very different kind of invitation than ever before. CGC itself is very growth-oriented – a living entity – so it evolves every year. This is another big step forward, so I wanted an invitation that captured its essence well, something that strong matches would resonate with.
Here are some thoughts about the evolution of Year 9.
Building Upon CGC’s Strengths
Year 8 was a truly fabulous year in the club. We’ve had 103 members in the club this year, so there was lots of activity all throughout. We introduced many new types of Zoom calls, bringing the total to 14, so we had more range and variety than ever before. This was also the most interactive year in the club with all kinds of participation. That created some delightful intimacy inside. I got to know many members better than ever this year.
Year 8 was a truly loving, caring, and supportive container inside. That’s super satisfying because it’s hard to develop a community like this. It takes tons of nurturing and also filtering, always being careful to invite the right people in who can help us co-create this kind of field together, so we can all benefit from it.
Rachelle and I can’t do it all by ourselves, and my heart is so filled with joy for how much help and support we’ve received in making this a reality – from the vibrational level all the way down to the practical action steps.
Going into Year 9 then, my attitude wasn’t about fixing things but about flowing with the wonderful momentum we have.
One of my core recent lessons this year has been that even when life is going really well, don’t stop there. Keep growing. Don’t settle for limits because growth is limitless. When life is good, go for great. When it’s great, go for fabulous. When it’s fabulous, go for extraordinary… then for extra-extraordinary.
This was the mindset and heartset I used when crafting Year 9’s invitation.
Deep Reflection
It took a 3-night ayahuasca ceremony last month (intense!) to really drive this home for me. My lessons while sitting with Aya’s energy were all about letting go of old limits and not settling, especially when life is going really well. She reminded me to keep stretching. This includes stretching my imagination to keep discovering more ways to stretch.
Don’t settle for abundance. Don’t settle for love. Don’t settle for caring. Don’t settle for fun. As good as those vibes are, there’s plenty more to experience beyond them. There are even more abundant, more loving, more caring, more playful frequencies of life to tap into. There are no limits.
We as humans may still be dealing with various self-imposed limits and filters, but life itself is not nearly so limited. So even as we release old limits, it’s important to remind ourselves to keep on stretching. This is where some of the most rewarding self-development work unfolds. This also speaks to the kinds of people I want to invite to join us for CGC Year 9 and beyond.
It was during the integration process for that Aya experience that tons of clarity about CGC Year 9 really flowed through, and all the dots began to connect. I’ll share some of those realizations here.
Even More Range
One of CGC’s core strengths is that we have massive range in what we’re able to cover. This isn’t a group just for entrepreneurs, wellness enthusiasts, lifestyle explorers, or online creators. CGC’s expression is like a self-development Disneyland. I love that we can talk about and work on anything in the club. Whatever impacts us is fair game since it’s a part of our journeys. We’re also very playful inside, where advancement is smoothed by approach life as a game much of the time.
Our 14 call formats are now going to be 18 formats for Year 9, which takes our range and variety from major abundance to ultra-major abundance. You can see all the formats listed about halfway down the invite page.
CGC has become a space of stretching, not of limitation. We’re not here to box you in but to invite you to really stretch your self-image much closer to how you imagine your higher self to be. This is a place where your strongest and most vibrant self gets to be nurtured into its fullest expression. It’s a place where we can relate to you as the being you’re becoming, not as your past baggage.
Connecting the Dots From Sensing to Thinking to Acting
At its core, every problem has a vibrational side and a physical side (at least). Solving problems vibrationally first, then physically, is a powerful way to advance. I’ve been sharing this method here and there in the club already, but this year I sensed it would be wise to go big with it.
One new call type we’ve added for Year 9 is called “Sense & Solve.” This is where we’ll get extra practice solving problems harmoniously, so that the practical solution not only works, but it feels very satisfying too.
I’ve been getting a lot of traction in using this approach across multiple areas of life. It’s been especially useful for stuck areas where projects were stagnant and not progressing. Earlier this year I completed some projects that had been stagnant for years, and I did them with a great sense of ease and flow. Because I paid attention to the vibrational side first, the physical solutions were very aligned with how I wanted to feel. Some of these were relatively simple problems – at least they appeared so – but once I unpacked them and got inside of them, I realized that these were powerful and meaningful vibrational lessons in disguise, just waiting for me to finally see them as such.
If you have some of this stuck energy somewhere in your life, like an area or project that’s lingering on the back burner and not progressing, bring it with you into CGC, and we’ll help you crack it open and get it moving. The process is different than you’d think. The key is to see even seemingly mundane problems as your vibrational teachers. Once you realize that your problems are actually here to help you grow stronger, that’s very transformational. The skill aspect is getting enough practice that you can do this consistently. Then your problems will start to look like Dominoes.
CGC as a Leadership Dojo
Many members in the club have been gradually evolving in the direction of leadership. I don’t mean the corporate or hierarchical kind. This is more of a vibrational shift. As members step into their power, they increase their ability to create more ripples in other people’s lives as well. As they begin to see some of these ripples revealed, that gets people thinking even more about purpose and contribution.
As this path to purpose has been unfolding at the individual level, I’ve been reflecting on how CGC could better support this opening. CGC’s core purpose is to lovingly and powerfully support our members’ paths of growth, so it too needs to grow as we do.
Las year we added the new Contribution Café call format to specifically focus more energy on purpose and contribution for members who align with this. We’re keeping these calls going for Year 9, but I’ve also sensed that it’s time to evolve the club to provide even more support for this direction.
The phrase “Leadership Dojo” came through several weeks ago, and I immediately thought: That’s it!
I love this framing because it speaks to who we’re becoming. We’re emerging leaders – first in consciously leading our own lives, then in creating positive ripples – and CGC is our training Dojo.
So if you’ve been seeing this leadership direction opening up in your life too, and you’re reading this now, that a good hint that you’re likely to be a strong match for CGC.
Being Seen
For CGC Year 8, our overall theme was Fire Infusion. Working with fire energy was a big through-line for the year as we burned off and released misalignments from our lives and amped up our motivation and centeredness.
For CGC Year 9, the theme is Be Seen. This has many facets, but I’d say the biggest one is allowing people to truly witness your unfolding growth journey. There’s something remarkably powerful about working through your advances in the presence of others inside the CGC field.
For our first 8 years of CGC, we’ve had an old energy that’s been coming along for the ride, one that we must release for Year 9. That’s the energy of hiding – of being a background character inside the field of CGC.
On a practical level, this old energy took the form of some members attending Zoom calls in a non-participatory mode – camera off and not raising hands during opportunities to share. And that was okay for the first 8 years. We held space to work with this energy too. But this energy doesn’t mesh with where we’re heading. It doesn’t support a strong enough field. It doesn’t align with CGC being a Leadership Dojo.
So for CGC Year 9, we’re strengthening the field by releasing this background mode from live calls, at least for the ones that Rachelle and I host. That means that everyone is on camera, fully present, ready to participate.
In CGC Year 8, we introduced a “splash zone” feature to some calls. This meant if you were on camera, you were open to being called upon to participate – no need to raise your virtual hand. But there was still the option to turn off the webcam and just watch. Most calls, however, just had voluntary sharing, so even if you were on camera, you wouldn’t be expected to share unless you volunteered.
Near the end of this CGC year, we also began practicing “splash chaining,” whereby a member who shares gets to randomly call upon another member to share – anyone on camera is a fair choice. But again, there was still the off-cam option available too.
For Year 9 there isn’t a passive-attendance option for these live calls. If you’re in the space with us, you’ll need to be on camera and willing to actively participate. That doesn’t mean that everyone will be called upon to share something each time, but it does mean being open to it. Otherwise if someone tries to attend a call in hiding mode, we would invite them to join us on camera, and if they declined, we would drop them from the call.
This change isn’t to punish or shame anyone. It’s to elevate, protect, and strengthen our field inside. There’s a different energy on a call when everyone is on camera and fully seen. Having even one person in the space in off-cam mode shifts the vibe of the experience for all involved. It’s like having an intimate conversation while someone else is hiding behind the drapes, watching you engage. And even when you acknowledge their presence and invite them into the space to be seen and to participate, they still choose the drapes.
The whole experience on a live call is stronger and more aligned if everyone is fully present, just as if we were gathering in person. We want people who are in the space of these calls to really be in the space with us, not half-present. We want everyone shining their light together to help co-create the experience. That’s our standard for Year 9 and beyond.
Not everyone is willing to do this. We’re here to engage with the willing.
Every call in CGC is optional. None are mandatory. So if someone doesn’t feel up to contributing to our strong, mutually supportive, we-are-all-seen-here energy for these calls, they can skip the call. But in Year 9, they do not have the option of merely showing up to watch. We are releasing this energy starting on May 1st, so passive watch mode will no longer be part of the club.
If other members who host their own calls in CGC want to allow for an off-camera mode, that’s their choice, but all of the calls that Rachelle and I host together from May 1st onward will be on-camera for everyone.
This is an example of looking at the vibrational aspect of a situation first, finding the place of alignment, and then translating it into the physical layer. The transformational energy is clearly stronger when we all agree to harmonize our co-creative energy, and being seen together in our emergence is a big part of that. All this requires at the action level is a simple change to what we invite.
From Depletion to Overflow
In CGC Year 9, we’re placing an even stronger emphasis on living from overflow instead of depletion.
When you build excess capacity within yourself – energetically, emotionally, creatively – you have more to share without running dry. You can lift others without sacrificing your own footing. You can contribute with delight instead of draining yourself.
In CGC we’re making this our norm: to meet each other in a state of overflow. To give from abundance, not from scarcity. To share from wholeness, not from woundedness. This practice strengthens not just individuals, but the entire community field.
Overflow doesn’t mean perfection. It means investing in yourself first – restoring, nourishing, aligning – so you’re showing up fully charged, ready to support and be supported.
Year 9 is about learning to live there. What most people don’t realize is that living from overflow is a choice – one that must be made vibrationally before it can be engineered into existence physically.
Building a Stronger Club
Practically speaking, CGC has never offered a better value for members than it does now.
Once you join CGC from here on, you can continue renewing each year for $1111 – only a third of the new member price of $3333. This rewards commitment, consistency, and long-term investment in your growth. It recognizes that our core members are also contributing by helping us to hold and sustain the field in which we all grow together.
The bar to get in is higher than it is to renew. Renewing is a breezier and lighter decision. For new members considering joining, we want you to pause and reflect first. Joining CGC, especially for Year 9, is a big deal. We don’t want this to be an impulse choice for anyone. We want you to make it thoughtfully.
We’re very protective of our space, and it’s definitely not for everyone, so it’s important that we continue to filter and deflect the misaligned – no Trump supporters, no prima donnas, just growth-oriented team players who align with our purpose. We’ve been doing a great job of that for many years now, which is one reason we have such a strong and aligned club inside. We filter for truth-alignment, love-alignment, and power-alignment at the door. The invitation is meant to deflect and repel as much as it is to invite. Only strongly aligned people are likely to find it enticing.
One of the best ways for us to keep attracting new members is also to grow from within. So we’ve added a simple and generous referral program starting this year. Members who refer a new member to join can get their own renewal totally free. So if you refer at least one new member to us each year, you can essentially lock in a perpetually free membership – simply by continuing to bring in highly attuned people who resonate with CGC’s energy and purpose. In this way we support those members who help support the club’s ongoing growth and evolution.
Infusing More Playfulness and Sexiness
Another theme weaving through Year 9 is the infusion of more playfulness and sexiness into the club’s energy.
Growth doesn’t have to be heavy. Alignment doesn’t have to be stoic. Transformation doesn’t have to feel like trudging uphill.
It can be lively. It can be sensual. It can feel like flirting with reality, dancing with your dreams, turning your own evolution into an art form.
In CGC we embrace the idea that conscious growth can feel good, energizing, and even a little mischievous. When your life feels deeply attractive to you, you naturally magnetize the right people, opportunities, and experiences into your field.
We’re allowing that aliveness to breathe through everything we do. And we’re also giving it even more space to breathe with new the Fun & Games and Mating Call formats this year. Many of us bond through fun and laughter, so we want to keep enhancing this aspect of the club’s field too.
Life Support Team
One of the aspects I appreciate most about CGC is the incredible level of support that flows through the club.
It’s not just Rachelle and me holding space. It’s a collective of caring, wise, heart-centered beings who know how to hold, love, uplift, and stretch each other.
CGC isn’t just a group you join. It’s a life support team you consciously weave into your journey – people who see you, believe in you, and encourage you to rise into your truest expression.
If you’re a very nurturing person yourself, you’ll find this to be a space where that quality is deeply appreciated. I’ve also seen how some members who weren’t very nurturing of others at first have really developed this quality in themselves, sensing the joy that comes from encouraging others.
I feel deeply held by this community too. It supports not just my personal growth but also the projects, courses, and events I create. Many of my best ideas and initiatives over the past several years were birthed and nurtured through the energy of CGC.
If you want to feel truly supported – not just tolerated or superficially encouraged but deeply witnessed and championed – CGC is one of the best places to experience that.
We don’t run CGC in some corporate way. We have a strong structure for it, and it’s maintained very responsibly, but it’s very important to me to keep the field caring, gentle, and intimate, even as we stretch ourselves.
Starfire Nursery – Discover Your Core Vibescapes
One of the most intimate and powerful additions for CGC Year 9 is the introduction of Starfire Nursery, an 8-week live series we’ll be hosting this fall. This is exclusively for CGCers and won’t be offered to anyone outside the club.
Starfire Nursery is about stepping into the vibrational roots of who you are. It’s not about goal-setting or external vision boards. It’s about discovering the inner stellar nursery that’s been generating your most meaningful desires, goals, and creations all along – the living frequencies that nourish your path.
Each week we’ll meet live online (but not recorded) to explore these core vibescapes – the emotional, energetic terrains that power your alignment. You’ll map, name, and begin cultivating your inner landscape with exquisite clarity.
The intention isn’t to force new outcomes. It’s to fall in love with the fertile vibrational ground inside you – to nourish it, trust it, and let it guide your expressions and creations more naturally.
These sessions will be highly interactive, playful, deep, and spacious. They’ll encourage emotional honesty, vibrational tuning, and creative revelation.
I sense that for many members, Starfire Nursery will become one of the most meaningful experiences we’ve shared so far – not just for what it helps you create, but for how it helps you become.
Starfire Nursery begins this September and will run weekly through late October. It’s woven directly into the Year 9 flow – part of the living expansion we’re stepping into together. The exact dates and times are shared on the Year 9 invite page.
Gathering In Person
I’m thrilled to share that we’re planning our first in-person CGC gathering for April 2026 in Las Vegas.
It will be a four-day event, free to CGC members as part of their membership. You’ll just cover your own travel, lodging, and personal expenses like food.
I’m envisioning a vibrant, co-creative experience – not just passive consumption but active participation and spirity collaboration.
This gathering will be another step forward in weaving the CGC field even tighter and deeper. For many it will be the first time meeting face-to-face with people who’ve already been walking alongside them for years, supporting, challenging, and inspiring them.
Feeling the Call
If you feel the call, if your spirit stirs when you imagine yourself growing and co-creating alongside other conscious, courageous souls, I encourage you to step through the portal and join us for Year 9.
We only open once a year – and enrollment closes at midnight Pacific on May 1st.
Explore the full invitation here:
Conscious Growth Club Year 9 Invitation
I’d love to welcome you into CGC if it resonates for you. If you’re a match for the energy we’re cultivating, you’ll feel it. Trust that.
And if you’re already walking alongside us, thank you for being part of what makes this journey so extraordinary.
Here’s to the next extraordinary chapter.
Less intensive farming works best for agricultural soil
The less intensively you manage the soil, the better the soil can function. Such as not ploughing as often or using more grass-clover mixtures as cover crops. These are the conclusions from a research team led by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Surprisingly, it applies to both conventional and organic farming. These important insights for making agriculture more sustainable are published in the scientific journal Science today. ‘It offers clear evidence to help farmers manage soils better.’
Growing food more sustainably: what’s the best way to do this? It is one of the big challenges: producing enough food without compromising the soil. After all, healthy soil has many functions — called multifunctionality — and for sustainable agriculture these must be preserved.
‘A multifunctional soil is essential for sustainable food production, because plants get their food from it,’ state the researchers from NIOO and Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands), and the Universität Tübingen (Germany). ‘Soil also has indispensable roles in water storage, coping with climate change and disease suppression.’
Organic vs conventional
Research on farms across the Netherlands now shows that it is mainly the intensity of tillage that determines whether the soil can retain all its functions. Interestingly, the difference between conventional and organic farming has less of an influence. In both types of agricultural systems, a lot of variation is found in soil tillage and management.
‘The good news is that in conventional agriculture, which is the vast majority, there is a lot to gain,’ states soil ecologist and NIOO professor Wim van der Putten. ‘On all farms, including organic ones, it is important at this point not to cultivate the soil too intensively. For example: ploughing less. Inverting the soil during ploughing is a very big disruption for soil life.’
More than ploughing less
Not only less frequent ploughing but also making more use of mixtures of grasses and plants from the bean family, such as clovers, contributes to multifunctional healthy soil. You can alternate these with growing cereals such as wheat, barley, spelt and rye.
The research team took samples and carried out measurements at more than 50 Dutch agricultural farms on both clay and sandy soils. This was always done in pairs: a farm with conventional agriculture plus an organic neighbouring farm. The soil type and other conditions were then very similar. ‘That way, we could compare them like twins,’ clarifies Guusje Koorneef. Together with Sophie van Rijssel, she conducted her PhD research on this topic.
Sustainable and productive
A wide array of soil properties was measured and farmers shared what farming practices they applied. The organic carbon present in the soil proved to be the best predictor of soil multifunctionality, and for biological indicators this was the bacterial biomass. Koorneef adds: ‘We looked at both sandy and marine clay soils. These are two very different soil types in the Netherlands. And we see the same picture in both soil types.’
‘The popular term of sustainable intensification is contradictory to our results,’ argues contributing researcher Kyle Mason-Jones, now working at the Universität Tübingen. ‘More intensive soil management leads to reduction of soil functions and is thus less sustainable.’ Therefore, the researchers propose a new, appropriate goal. ‘Productive de-intensification. If it is successful, you will get more functions from a less intensively cultivated soil while retaining the crop yield as much as possible.’
Vital soil
These findings are the final result of the Vital Soils project. The project was subsidised by NWO Groen, coordinated by NIOO and carried out together with Wageningen University & Research. Besides the scientific partners, there were also several social partners involved: Eurofins-Agro, BO Akkerbouw, Open Teelten (formerly PPO-AGV) and LTO-Noord.
Previous research using satellite imagery, within the same project, measured the ‘greenness’ of crops in the field. This gives us an estimate of production levels. It showed that the degree of greenness (the crop yield) did not suffer from a decrease in management intensity. Interestingly, organic farming could return to being as productive as conventional farming about 17 years after the transition.
Back to the current research. ‘You don’t necessarily have to have gone through the entire transition to organic farming to still have a positive impact on soil health,’ says Koorneef. ‘I find it really promising that in both conventional and organic farms you can strengthen the functioning of the soil by working it less intensively.’
Are ‘zombie’ skin cells harmful or helpful? The answer may be in their shapes
Senescent skin cells, often referred to as zombie cells because they have outlived their usefulness without ever quite dying, have existed in the human body as a seeming paradox, causing inflammation and promoting diseases while also helping the immune system to heal wounds.
New findings may explain why: Not all senescent skin cells are the same.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have identified three subtypes of senescent skin cells with distinct shapes, biomarkers, and functions — an advance that could equip scientists with the ability to target and kill the harmful types while leaving the helpful ones intact.
The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.
“We’ve known that senescent skin cells are different from senescent immune cells or senescent muscle cells. But within a cell type, senescent cells are often considered the same — in essence, skin cells are either senescent or not, for example,” said Jude Phillip, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “But we’re finding that when a skin cell goes into senescence, or a zombie-like state, the cell could go down one of three different paths, each leading to a slightly different subtype.”
Leveraging new advances in machine learning and imaging technology, the researchers compared skin cell samples from 50 healthy donors between the ages of 20 and 90 who participated in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study, an NIH-funded project that is the longest ongoing study of aging in the United States.
Researchers extracted fibroblasts — cells that produce the scaffolding to give tissues their structure — associated with skin tissue and pushed them toward senescence by damaging their DNA, something that happens with aging. Because senescent cells build up naturally as people grow older, the aged samples contained a mix of healthy/nonsenescent and senescent fibroblasts.
Using specialized dyes, the researchers were able to capture images of the cells’ shapes and stained elements that are known to indicate senescent cells. Algorithms developed for this study analyzed the images, measured 87 different physical characteristics for each cell, and sorted the fibroblasts into groups.
Fibroblasts come in 11 different shapes and sizes, three of which are distinct to senescent skin cells, the researchers found. Only one subtype of senescent fibroblast, which the researchers named C10, was more prevalent in older donors.
In the petri dishes, each subtype responded differently when exposed to existing drug regimens designed to target and kill zombie cells. Dasatinib + Quercetin, a drug being tested in clinical trials, for example, most effectively killed C7 senescent fibroblasts but was limited in killing the age-associated C10 senescent fibroblasts.
Though further research is needed to verify which fibroblast subtype is harmful and which is helpful, the findings show that drugs can target one subtype and not the others.
“With our new findings, we have the tools ready to develop new drugs or therapies that preferentially target the senescence subtype that drives inflammation and disease as soon as it is identified,” Phillip said.
More precise targeting of senescence could benefit cancer treatments, the researchers said.
Certain therapies are being designed to trigger senescence in cancer cells, converting uncontrollably replicating cancer cells into dead-in-the-water zombie cells. While these therapies could stop tumor growth, they leave senescent cells in their wake. Conventional chemotherapies also push cells like fibroblasts toward senescence as a side effect. The buildup of senescent cells during treatment can be problematic as those cells may promote inflammation at a time when a patient’s immune system is at its most vulnerable.
Patients may benefit from a drug administered after chemotherapy that can sweep up the mess, removing harmful senescent cells while leaving behind the helpful senescent cells. These types of drugs are called senotherapies.
Next, the researchers plan to look at senescence subtypes in tissue samples, not just in flasks and petri dishes, to see how those subtypes might be associated with various skin diseases and age-associated diseases.
“We hope, with some more development, our technology will be used to help predict which drugs might work well for targeting senescent cells that contribute to specific diseases,” Phillip said. “Eventually, the dream is to be able to provide more information in a clinical setting to help with individual diagnoses and boost health outcomes.”
