7/18/2015 Marriage works, and it’s the answer to the misery of loneliness ­ Telegraph

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Marriage works, and it’s the answer to the misery of loneliness
With so many Britons living alone, the Government should promote getting wed

Almost two and a half million Britons aged 45 to 64 have no one with whom to share their home ­ up 800,000
households on the mid­Nineties Photo: Alamy

By Graeme Archer
8:52PM GMT 02 Nov 2012

A This week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed that more of us than ever are
living alone. This won’t trouble the author Colm Tóibín, who once eulogised the freedom that
living alone gives him, likening his solitary existence to that of “a cloistered nun”. A terrifying 
image, surely, and not a metaphor for a life most of us would seek to inhabit. Certainly not my 
friend Helen: successful, well­off, homeowner; but tired of her single life, of the near­constant 
awareness that she’s running out of time to have children, as fast as she’s running out of the 
energy to embark on another round of futile first dates. Nor my friend Mark, divorced dad, 
active in his daughter’s life – but who still, at the end of the weekend, returns the child to her 
mother, before driving back to his re­emptied house, where he passes the evenings with 
PlayStation and Sky Sports.

B In discussing solitary lives, we should ignore the Colm Tóibíns – financially independent
people who realise that, for them, to live alone brings more advantages than otherwise.
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7/18/2015 Marriage works, and it’s the answer to the misery of loneliness ­ Telegraph

Most people of my generation had such a stage in their lives – between university, and settling 

down – but we didn’t want it to last forever. In any case, with property prices as they are, such 
self­selected solitary living is not an option for much of the succeeding generation. Set aside, 
too, those figures pertaining to the very elderly; not because there aren’t real problems faced by 
those (usually female) “survivors”, but because their existence is a function of the uneven impact 
of medical advances and lifestyle changes on the longevity of each of the genders.

C It’s not the relatively young, or the very old, who are the main drivers of this demographic
change. As the ONS makes clear, the largest increase in solitary living is down to the 45­64 age
group. Almost two and a half million Britons in that age category have no one with whom to
share their home, an increase of more than 800,000 households since the mid­Nineties. Even
allowing for the increase in total population size, that’s still a noticeable change, and they don’t
all enjoy the experience. I suspect there are more divorced parents, like my friend Mark, poking
about their fridges for an M&S meal for one, than there are cloistered Irish novelists.

D Which would be fine, were this phenomenon merely to affect matters as concrete as housing.
But evidence suggests a link between solitariness and poorer health outcomes (mirroring,
bleakly, the evidence about the outcomes for children raised in single­parent households). One
paper I read showed a significant increase in the prescription of antidepressants to the solitary,
compared with cohabiting couples. Correlation doesn’t prove a sociological theory, of course,
but it’s hard to ignore the link between living alone, and other deleterious life choices.

E Which demands a political response: marriage is the most important institution to act as a
bulwark against loneliness, and the Government should promote it. Iain Duncan Smith is
unwinding the insidious “couples penalty”, the financial cost to setting up a home with your
partner, and the other probable cause, after divorce, for the change in living habits. His Centre
for Social Justice discovered that the people most penalised for living together are – surprise –
among the poorest. This must be fixed (and couples who “live apart together” shouldn’t be
demonised for rationally navigating the snares of the benefits system).

F But if it’s understandable that a financial penalty can cause the poorest to avoid marriage,
why assume that monetary considerations don’t affect the better­off? First, because politicians 
are scared to reward marriage in the tax system, and second, because our divorce laws so scar 
those who endure them that, I suspect, we’ve produced a generation with the motto “once bitten, 
twice shy”. The changes to child benefit for the well­off hardly help: a middle­class “couples 
penalty”.

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7/18/2015 Marriage works, and it’s the answer to the misery of loneliness ­ Telegraph

G Michael Howard deployed a powerful phrase in defence of his criminal justice policy: prison
works. It’s time we used a similar phrase, in defence of social justice: marriage “works” too. It
works for most people and definitely for civic society, yet we find it hard to say this, and shy
away from its political implications. What started as a desire not to judge “lifestyle choices” has
bred a generation living in lonely, quiet despair. Loneliness is a much harder political issue to
tackle than, say, house­building, but – if we believe in “society” at all – hardly one of lesser
significance.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2015

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7/18/2015 Giant camels in the high Arctic? It's not as far­fetched as it sounds… | Science | The Guardian

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Giant camels in the high Arctic? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds…

Fossil research using 'collagen fingerprinting' shows that large camels once lived on Ellesmere Island. Now the technique
might be used to identify other extinct species.
Robin McKie
Sunday 10 March 2013 00.02 GMT

T he idea that giant camels once roamed the Arctic along with polar bears and walruses is startling. Yet
this is the key implication of research, published last week, by scientists working on Canada's Ellesmere
Island.
Lying deep inside the Arctic Circle, opposite Greenland's northern coast, Ellesmere is one of the world's
coldest, bleakest spots. Yet researchers have also found it was the home of a 3.5m-year-old species of
camel that later evolved into the creatures that now roam the Sahara and other hot spots. Evolution can
still throw up surprises, it seems.
But there is more to the project than merely uncovering the camel's unexpected evolutionary history.
The researchers' work has also demonstrated the power of a dramatic new technique for investigating
the prehistoric past. It is known as collagen fingerprinting, and many researchers believe it could
transform our understanding of life on Earth.
"This is the first time that collagen has been extracted and used to identify a species from such ancient
bone fragments," said Dr Mike Buckley, of Manchester University's Institute of Biotechnology. "This
unlocks the huge potential of collagen fingerprinting to better identify extinct species."

Collagen is a protein that forms the connective tissue that holds bones together in an animal's skeleton,
and it was only by analysing scraps of the material, found in the bones on Ellesmere, that scientists
were able to identify the remains as those of an ancient camel. Indeed, it was not evident at first that
the remains were actually fossils.
"The first time I picked up a piece, I thought that it might be wood," said expedition leader Dr Natalia
Rybczynski, of the Canadian Museum of Nature. "It was only back at the field camp that I was able to
ascertain it was not only bone, but also from a fossil mammal larger than anything we had seen so far."
However, it was the analysis of the collagen attached to the bones that provided proof that these once
belonged to the family Paracamelus, from which all modern camels are descended. The results,
published in Nature Communications, show an almost identical match to the modern-day one-humped
camel, the dromedary. A comparison of chemical makeup of the collagen with the issue from Ice Age
Yukon camels revealed more than similarities - they were found to be closely related, and possibly the
same species. In addition, anatomical data suggest the leg bone found on Ellesmere was 30% larger
than the same bone in a modern camel indicating that this giant creature would likely have stood
about 3.5 metres tall at the hump. The findings suggest that mineralisation worked along with cold
temperatures to help preserve the proteins in the bones. 'This specimen is spectacular and provides
important clues about how such exceptional preservation may occur' said Dr Buckley.
In the past, scientists have speculated that the camel still bears features that could have evolved to
cope with harsh polar winters. Traits found in modern camels, such as their humps which serve as a
fat store, would have benefited their ancestors during the deep winters when food was scarce. Other
camel characteristics that would have been useful in the frozen conditions include the species' flat
feet, which support the animal on soft ground such as loose sand or in the same way that a snowshoe
helps a person walk on snow. Their large eyes would also have helped them peer through low light
and forage for food during the long, Arctic winter. At that time, annual average temperatures in the
area was about -4 degrees C, barely below freezing but still about 18 degrees C warmer than the
modern average. The camels that evolved in North America may have then migrated across Asia via a
land bridge between Alaska and Russia.

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The Ellesmere Island site is about 1,200 kilometres further north than any previous camel find.
Fossils unearthed at a location about ten kilometres away from the camel find and from rocks of
approximately the same age, reveal that the landscape hosted an open forest inhabited by bears,
rabbits, beavers and a pony-sized three-toed horse. The findings indicate that these animals were
living, even thriving, at latitudes where few mammals can now exist.
The idea is intriguing – but it is only the start, added Buckley. "Collagen fingerprinting is several orders
of magnitude more effective at establishing links between ancient fossils and modern species
compared with DNA fingerprinting, which we have used until now. Collagen does not break down as
speedily as DNA and we can use it to study animals that are millions of years old and establish links
with modern species by studying slight changes in their amino acid structure." As a result, scientists are
now focusing on a wide range of species, from angelfish to zebras, to uncover links between ancient
and modern animals. 'This is going to provide some startling results', said Dr Buckley.

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