In this conversation, we sit down with a member of Doomberg to discuss the mindset of continuous improvement and other thought-provoking ideas that are important for us all to consider. 

Doomberg is an anonymous news publication that provides readers with an in-depth analysis of financial and economic trends – underscoring information missing from mainstream media. By utilizing the principles of continuous improvement, it has become the #1 paid finance newsletter on Substack, boasting more than 85,000 email subscribers and 250,000 Twitter followers. 

Dive in now to explore: 

• What continuous improvement is, and the many facets of it.
• How to turn mistakes into an opportunity to improve. 
• The difference between perfectionism and continuous improvement. 
• How to facilitate personal and professional growth.

How can you hone your skills over the span of your career? What actionable steps can you take to enhance your productivity and success? Doomberg is here with insights you can’t miss out on…

You can find more on Doomberg by visiting their Substack here.

Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

In this episode, we discuss teenage social anxiety with Kyle Mitchell, a Tedx Speaker, author, and the founder of Social Anxiety Kyle. With a passion for solving mental health problems and the impact they have on our communities, Kyle works with teens and youth to help them go from socially anxious to socially confident.

Kyle collaborates alongside teens, educators, parents, nonprofits, and other organizations to change the narrative and stigma surrounding social anxiety. Drawing from his own 10-year  mental health battle, he found his calling and purpose – and is eager to share it with the world…

Join us now to find out:

• How anxiety manifests itself in school environments.
• Why having supportive parents is so important for struggling teens.
• Programs that can help young people address their mental health issues.
• The biggest social struggles that students face in class.

What practical approaches and strategies can we utilize to make a difference in the lives of struggling teens? Tune in now to find out for yourself!

To learn more about Kyle and his mission, click here now!

Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

In this episode, we are joined by Matthew Moody, the President of Mental Health America of Arizona and a licensed counselor in Arizona. He has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Counseling from Arizona State University. 

Before his current position, Matthew oversaw over 100 employees in a crisis contact center and provided oversight to 2-1-1 Arizona, an organization that offers information and referral services to the state of Arizona. He also has over fifteen years of experience in the behavioral health field, specializing in police collaboration, 988 and crisis mobile teams. 

Matthew is on a mission to help other people better understand mental health and how to get help for it. Through legislative advocacy and alternate response strategies, he has been instrumental in fostering safer and more effective communities – all while reducing costs and liabilities for municipalities…

Jump in to now to discover:

• What it’s like working on a crisis line, and how calls are typically resolved.  
• The importance of supporting and de-escalating a person in crisis. 
• How working on a crisis line affects those handling the calls.
• Matthew’s experience working with people living with schizophrenia.

You can learn more about Mattew by visiting his website!

If you or a loved one are experiencing a mental health crisis, dial 988 to speak with a specialist now. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

Do pre and probiotics have healing and preventive powers? In an age of pharmaceutical solutions, finding sustainable and holistic health practices is critical. How can we leverage gut health to fight sickness and disease? Noelle Patno, the Chief Science Officer at Bened Life, sits down to explain…

Noelle has a Ph.D. and MS from the University of Chicago in molecular metabolism, nutrition, and translational sciences. She also has a BA in chemical engineering from Stanford University. With her work surrounding digestive health, the microbiome, and immune health, Noelle has designed and monitored clinical trials – resulting in publications on probiotics and prebiotics. 

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The top conditions that gut health can impact. 
• How altering serotonin and dopamine in the brain can impact children with autism.
• Why our gut microbiome is important to our brain chemistry and behaviors.
• Essential insights on the probiotic Ps-128.

To learn more about Noelle and her work with Bened Life, click here now!

Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

John C. A. Manley joins the podcast once again to discuss his daily email newsletter, Blazing Pine Cone Posts, and his work as a writer of fiction, freedom, and philosophy. John is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping, and other works of speculative fiction…

With a background in Eastern philosophy, fine art, and freelance ghostwriting, John’s perspective on the world is varied and analytical. Want to learn more about his worldview and upcoming projects? Tune in now! 

Jump into the conversation to find out:

• What John learned as he wrote his debut novel. 
• How Much Ado About Corona addresses the 2020 pandemic.
• What “moral injury” is, and how it is connected to society’s standards of being. 
• What John is trying to accomplish with his newsletter. 

To follow along with John and his writing, click here now!

Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

Bees are not alone in their fight to survive. While the backyard beekeeper might start with a pollinator garden, researchers are also busy strengthening and shoring up these vulnerable organisms that are an essential part of our food ecosystem.

Jay Evans explains some promising efforts, telling listeners

• What the main stressors for bees are, from diseases to pests,
• Why protecting a middle-aged bee from stressors impacts the entire colony, and
• What exciting new management strategies are in the works, including botanical medicines for bees.

Jay Evans is with the USDA ARS Bee Research Laboratory in Maryland. He and his colleagues are approaching bee health from every angle, assessing direct and indirect factors that increase bee health and lessening those that cause habitat harm. The list is long, from increasing nutrition to mitigating pesticide effects, parasites, and the spread of viruses.

online pharmacy online pharmacyOften the best solutions provide a path for the bees to help themselves.

Evans and his group in particular work on bolstering the honey bee immune system. Just as humans find their health affected by stress, so do bees, from temperature changes to chemical stress to nest disturbances. These stresses makes the bees more vulnerable to direct threats like parasites and pathogens.

online pharmacy buy ivermectin over the counter online pharmacyTheir close living quarters in the beekeeping industry make for further vulnerabilities.

Once a colony in an apiary is infected with a pathogen, it spreads fairly quickly through the apiary.

online pharmacy buy trazodone over the counter online pharmacyResearchers like Evans are helping them tolerate those invasions and push the pathogens out over time. He describes some of the most promising efforts, from breeding for "varroa-sensitive hygiene" to developing disease-fighting medicines from botanical sources.

For more, see the USDA-ARS Bee Research Laboratory website.

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

Is it possible to breed a species of bee with total viral immunity? Maybe, and the research being done in Michelle Flenniken’s lab could pave the way for it to happen.

Tune in to discover:

• Whether bees might utilize a form of preventative medicine
• In what way a honeybee model for insect immunity might be superior to the status quo fruit fly model
• Why the term “honeybee viruses” might be misleading

Michelle Flenniken is Assistant Professor in the Plant Sciences Department and Co-Director of the Pollinator Health Center at Montana State University whose primary research is focused not only on understanding the impact of viruses on honeybees, but on the molecular mechanisms that bees have evolved to combat viral infections.

Longitudinal monitoring projects looking at the prevalence and abundance of 16 pathogens across several bee colonies over time have led to interesting and useful findings. For instance, Flenniken’s lab has shown that bees that are infected with viruses have perturbation in the genes that are important for metabolic processes, and that even in so-called asymptomatic bees, there are more than a billion copies of RNA viruses per bee. The hypothesis that follows this finding is that this viral load could be energetically taxing on bees—even if the bees appear phenotypically normal.

More recent research in Flenniken’s lab has shown that a bee’s immune response is stimulated by double-stranded RNA, which is a molecule that viruses produce when replicating; this molecule stimulates RNA interference in bees—an antiviral mechanism. This has shown to be true also in bumblebees, but is not the case in the fruit fly, which is the go-to model for studying insect immunity. This has opened the door to more exciting and new research that Flenniken and her lab are gearing up to conduct.

If antiviral mechanisms in bees can be fully understood, then it may be possible to identify the genes associated with fighting off viral infection, which would make it possible to breed honeybees that are resistant or immune to viral infections.

Flenniken discusses the details of all this and more, including viral transmission in bees and across species, whether different castes of bees are differentially impacted by viruses, host-pathogen interaction studies, and which viruses most commonly impact bees.

Check out https://plantsciences.montana.edu/directory/faculty/1524085/michelle-flenniken to learn more.

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Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

Honey bees are one of the most fascinating and complex social organisms on our planet. Scientists like Gene Robinson research how their genomics play a central role in this behavior and how their environment in turn affects their genes.

Listen and learn

• How the honey bee colony is surprisingly flexible and adaptive to changes in numbers and situations,
• How the genomics discipline altered scientists' one-directional arrow from gene to behavior to a two-directional model, and
• What developmental milestones a honey bee passes to make it through to full-forager status.

Gene Robinson is the director of the Carl R.Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, an institute that practices team science within a multi-disciplinary scheme. He's been studying entomology and different species of bees for over 45 years. In this conversation, he shares some fascinating notes about honey bee behavior with listeners.

His group in the institute in particular looks at their social behavior mechanisms and evolution from a genomics perspective.

Interestingly, he says that studies indicate layers of individuality and adaptability in bee society—not only are they not all "marching to the same orders," they can change behavior depending on what is happening with the colony.

In one study, his lab monitored the entry and exit of the hive and found that a minority of the hive worked as foragers. In addition, a small group within the foragers took on a significant 50% of the work. However, when they removed those power-house foragers, the colony did not collapse. Rather, the other bees "upped their foraging game" and made up for the loss.

"So while labor is apportioned, it's not fixed and there's flexibility," adds Robinson.

He describes other remarkable modes of flexibility, from pheromone releasing and withholding to determine maturity rates to how a hive survives a queen loss. Along the way he explains how the history of genomics has rearranged how biologists look at bee behavior and development from transcriptomic studies. In fact, dramatic changes are evident in bee brain gene activity depending on their rearing conditions. Based on these studies, their genome is very sensitive to the environment.

For more, see the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and Gene Robinson's lab website.

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Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

“…Their society and community is so complicated, that in fact you cannot really have a straight answer for why something is happening. You need to see it from a global perspective, and look at it from different angles…it’s the complexity that makes it fascinating for me,” says Dr. Fani Hatjina of bees, which have been the subject of her work for her entire professional life. She focuses specifically on social honey bees, and joins the show to discuss her current research goals and insights.

Press play to discover:

• What royal jelly is, and how it is used by bees and humans
• How nectar is converted to honey
• Why beekeepers and scientists are particularly interested in studying and monitoring beehives during the winter months, and the challenges to doing so
• How bees carry pollen back to the beehive

Dr. Hatjina is Director of the Institute of Animal Science & Department of Apiculture in Greece. After completing her PhD on the pollination behavior of bees, she went on to pursue additional research.

Currently, her focus is on finding ways of increasing the resistance of local honey bee populations against a primary pest (the varroa mite), searching for alternative methods of controlling disease without chemicals, improving and preserving the local population of honey bees in Greece for the benefit of the species and for beekeepers, and studying the effects of pesticides and other environmental stressors on bees, such as the presence of heavy metals, and even chemicals that are used by beekeepers inside bee colonies.

Dr. Hatjina explains ‘pollination behavior,’ which includes the way bees move inside the colony and on flowers or crops, how efficiently they transport pollen, and when they transport pollen. The idea is that by gaining a deeper understanding of this behavior, pollination efficiency can be increased.

She also comments on the “many gaps in knowledge” when it comes to understanding what triggers the increase of pathogens and bee mortality in winter. Sensors inside or underneath bee colonies are being implemented in order to gain a better idea of the possible variables contributing to it, as well as generate some sort of image of what is going on within a bee hive during winter months. Infrared light can also be used to gather valuable information about the heat generated by the bees, the size of the swarm inside a colony, the position of bees inside a colony, and how these things can change according to the external temperature.

Interested in learning more? Tune in for the full conversation and check out Dr. Hatjina’s publications at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fani_Hatjina.

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Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

Bees can generate five pounds of honey a day under prime nectar-gathering conditions.

Numerous factors make that possible and researchers like William Meikle work on modeling honey bee populations, keeping track of how different stressors might affect honey bee colony health.

Listen and learn

• What measures are important for beehive modeling and why,
• How bees are able to keep their brood area at a constant warm temperature, and
• What bee health productivity stressors are being analyzed and why, such as neonicotinoid exposure. 

Willliam G. Meikle is a research entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture. He studies the colony-level behavior of bees through placing sensors on colonies and monitoring them over long periods of time. This can gather evidence for how they might respond to sub lethal pesticides and other stressors. He's therefore constantly measuring things like hive weight, temperature, CO2, and internal humidity. These measures are akin to numbers from a monitor your doctor might have used to check your health. Various measures might indicate your activity, from sleeping to eating to drinking a cup of coffee. 

No, bees don't drink coffee, but they do get exposed to neonicotinoids, which are a common type of agriculture insecticide affecting bees. Even at low amounts, he says he can see some sort of impact. Higher levels seem to cause bees to stop foraging, for example. Temperature is another abiotic factor he monitors. Bees have an amazing ability to keep the center area, the brood area, quite warm and constant.

Bee social behavior is more than just an inclination. Rather, they work as a superorganism, teaming up and taking turns to use their thoracic muscle movement to warm the center of the hive one by one. A healthy brood is dependent on this constant warmth, and bee population increase can only happen with successful brood rearing.

Listen in for more indications of bee colony health.

For more about his work, see the USDA Honey Bee web page.

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Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9