With Congressional Republicans almost giddy about cutting programs designed to help struggling people and even President Obama proudly showing what a “super serious person” he can be by cutting home heating assistance for poor people, it’s important to reflect on what the latest research says about the long-term damage the extreme stress of poverty and joblessness can cause. From Seed Magazine:

[Princeton Professor Elizabeth] Gould’s insight was that understanding how stress damages the brain could illuminate the general mechanisms—especially neurogenesis—by which the brain is affected by its environ-mental conditions. For the last several years, she and her post-doc, Mirescu, have been depriving newborn rats of their mother for either 15 minutes or three hours a day. For an infant rat, there is nothing more stressful. Earlier studies had shown that even after these