Strengthening the Brain

The MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet (its name is a combo of those two diets). And it just passed its latest test.

In a study published in September in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease scientists show the MIND diet can slow cognitive decline and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease dementia.

This held true despite the fact that study participant’s brains still developed the abnormal clumps of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

First author Klodian Dhana is an assistant professor at Rush University. His focus is on identifying risk factors of dementia. In the absence of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, scientists aim to identify which modifiable lifestyle factors can lower the risk of cognitive decline. Nutrition, he tells me, “has gained interest because it can be readily modified.”

“I hope the findings of this study motivate people to practice a healthier lifestyle through nutrition, exercise, and cognitive activities,” he says.

HOW THE DISCOVERY WAS MADE — Dhana and colleagues examined data pulled from Rush University’s ongoing Memory and Aging Project representing 569 participants. These individuals lived in the greater Chicago area and began sharing their vitals in 1997. In 2004, an annual food frequency questionnaire was thrown into the mix, which evaluated how often they ate specific foods. All participants agreed to undergo clinical evaluations while they were alive and a brain autopsy when they died.

Each participant was assigned a MIND diet score based on how closely they adhered to meals within it. Within the MIND diet are 10 brain-healthy food groups and five unhealthy groups: The unhealthy group includes butter and stick margarine, cheese, fried and fast food, pastries and sweets, and red meat.  READ MORE...

Scratcher

 

Rule of Reappraisals

"It's 6:00 p.m. already???"

I was in disbelief. The day was over and I still had a mountain of tasks on my desk. Where had the time gone?

The day was a failure.

Or was it?

As I sat back in my chair, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work ahead of me, I remembered a lesson a friend taught me some years ago.

It's a lesson I now like to call:

The rule of reappraisal

What's the rule of reappraisal?

As a young man, many years ago, I embarked on a major undertaking: I began learning Tagalog (Filipino), my father's native language.

It was exciting and rewarding to learn a new language, especially one that taught me so much about my father's culture and my own roots. But it was also extremely frustrating -- because as hard as I worked, I couldn't always express myself the way I wanted. The word I needed often seemed to be just beyond my grasp, and my grammar was full of mistakes.

After one especially challenging day, I broke down in frustration to a close friend. He told me something I've never forgotten, and his advice is what I refer to today as the rule of reappraisal:

Don't focus on what you have ahead of you. Instead, look back on what you already accomplished.

This pearl of wisdom helped me to change my perspective. Learning a language is a never-ending journey -- even for native speakers -- so focusing on the path ahead is self-defeating. After all, there will always be more to learn.

But what happened when I took a look behind?

Just a few years before, I could barely say a few words in Tagalog. Now, I could hold a full conversation. I could enjoy Filipino movies and humor (although I didn't get every joke). I even took a trip to the Philippines, by myself, which turned out to be a life-changing experience.  READ MORE...

Nylons

 

A Few Laughs

 

Biden and the Dems

 

Relocating

 

Cleaning Coffee Mugs

Whose bright idea was it to make all insides of coffee mugs white? As a coffee expert, I’m all too familiar with coffee stains in general, but especially the ones that mar the insides of my favorite mugs, thus making them look embarrassingly dirty. “Thanks for coming over for dinner! Here’s coffee in a gross-looking mug!”

While these stains don’t come out with regular hand-washing or stints in the dishwasher, there are a few different things you can do lift them. Which one is best and easiest? I was determined to find out! So I tried five different methods and recorded my results. Here are my findings.

How I Tested the Methods for Cleaning Coffee Stains Inside Mugs
I rooted around in the cabinet and found my five favorite mugs, which, with near-constant use, also happened to be the most stained. I brewed a strong batch of coffee and poured about two ounces of liquid in the bottom of each one. Then, I let it all sit on the counter to soak in. Once the liquid had evaporated and the coffee oils had left a nice, tough layer on top of the already-lingering stains, it was time to get to work by cleaning each one using five popular and proven methods!

The ratings: I ranked each stain-removal approach from 1 to 5, with 5 being the easiest and/or most efficient and 1 being the hardest and/or least efficient. While each technique and tool managed to leave the mugs clean, some required more work either during or after the job was done. Along with the rating, you’ll find more detailed notes from my tests.  READ MORE...

Elephant Dance

 

Neanderthal Man

A recreation of a Neanderthal man’s face is turning heads all over the world – not only for its strong resemblance to our own physiognomy today but also because of the good humor it exudes, as much as 70,000 years after the man died.

What almost everybody instantly recognizes is that this man, nicknamed “Krijn,” who was not even a Homo sapiens, has a magnetic personality that still radiates over the millennia.

As Live Science reports, experts from Kennis & Kennis Reconstructions created the face of the young Neanderthal man from a piece of skull discovered from the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands twenty years ago.

Face of Neanderthal charms the world
Using what they already knew from the Neanderthals’ sturdy bone structure, the researchers also gleaned information from other skulls that have been found and data regarding their eye, skin, and hair color to help in the recreation of the Neanderthal’s grinning face.

Believed to have lived in Doggerland, which was once dry land but now forms the seabed in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and continental Europe, he died between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, according to the researchers.  READ MORE...

Sheep Dogs

 

Dark Energy On Earth

DARK ENERGY ISN’T just dark — it's nigh invisible.

Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see.


Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects — and the shape of space itself — is a major goal of major NASA missions, such as the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

But in a new paper published September 15 in the journal Physical Review D a group of cosmologists suggests researchers might not need to peer deep into the cosmos to make second-hand observations of dark energy — it may have been detected right here on Earth.

WHAT’S NEW — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.

The team, comprised mostly of theorists, looked at data from the XENON1T, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.

The odds that dark energy has been detected directly are admittedly low, Jeremy Sakstein, assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Hawaii and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.

“There are other explanations for this signal as well,” he says, and at the moment, “we don't know whether it's just a statistical anomaly.”

Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain — there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous.  READ MORE...

It's Raining

Lightning Strikes

 

Life Expectancy

New research this week puts the enormous loss of life caused by the covid-19 pandemic into greater context. The study of 29 countries across Europe and North and South America found that nearly all experienced a reduction in life expectancy last year, while some countries had the largest drops seen since World War II.

Life expectancy at birth is a commonly used metric of a country’s overall health. It estimates how long the average person born in a particular year (2020, for example) would be expected to survive, given current trends in mortality among different age groups. 

Over time, life expectancy has trended upward in many countries, thanks to more people living longer into their senior years. But when annual deaths increase significantly for whatever reason, especially when these deaths involve younger people, life expectancy can go down. 

In the U.S., for example, life expectancy had inched lower in recent years due largely to drug overdoses.

Researchers in the UK and Denmark tried to quantify the impact of the pandemic last year on the life expectancy of 29 countries, using mortality figures from 2015 to 2020. These countries included the U.S., Chile, and most of Europe. The results were published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Overall, life expectancy dropped from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries, and 22 countries experienced a drop larger than half a year. 

Many countries saw a loss that effectively wiped out five years of progress, with women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries having a life expectancy lower than what was recorded in 2015.

Some, including the U.S., also experienced a year-to-year drop not seen since other great calamities like the end of the Soviet Union or World War II.  READ MORE...

Sheep Dogs

 

Stick Bugs

Nature’s most terrifying creatures can sneak up on us, and a perfect example showed up days ago in a photo shared by Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

A large bug is prominent in the photo, but finding it quickly wasn’t easy.

“Camouflage is a marvelous adaptation that allows some critters to exist practically undetected,” the park wrote.

“As September days grow cooler and shorter, a variety of critters still scuttle around in the undergrowth. Whether or not you can find them, however, is another story!”

So where was the bug in the photo?

Right in the middle, apparently. It’s the dead stick — with legs, park rangers said.

Known as a stick bug, the insects are infamous for not only looking like sticks, but they also “may even sway back and forth to more closely resemble a twig moving in the wind,” according to the National Wildlife Federation.

“Depending on the species, walking sticks can grow from 1 to 12 inches (2.5 to 30 centimeters) long,” the federation says. “Stick insects are the biggest insects in the world — one species measures over 20 inches (51 centimeters) long with its legs outstretched.”

The park’s photo has gotten hundreds of reactions, including some who wanted to know if they could get stung by a stick in the park.  READ MORE...

Solace

 

Yemen's Well of Hell

Cave explorers from Oman have become the first individuals to descend to the bottom of the 367-foot (112 meters) deep "Well of Hell" sinkhole in Yemen, which many local people believe is a genie-infested gateway to the underworld, according to news reports.

The natural sinkhole, officially known as the Well of Barhout, has an eerily circular entrance that spans 98 feet (30 m) in diameter and is located in the middle of the desert in al-Mahra province in eastern 

Yemen, close to the border with Oman. Amateur cave explorers have entered the sinkhole before, but until now nobody was known to have made it all the way to the bottom.

Last week, a team of 10 explorers from the Omani Caves Exploration Team (OCET) explored the Well of Barhout using a pulley system that lowered eight of the members to the bottom while the remaining two stayed at the top. 

A small crowd of intrepid spectators gathered to watch the event, despite local fears surrounding the sinkhole. A video of the explorers descending into the cave was shared by the BBC.  READ MORE

Small Animals