Month: October 2019

Last Week’s Links

You’re Only as Old as You Feel

Here’s an interesting look at the notions of chronological (actual) age and subjective age (how old you feel). Some people say they feel either younger or older than they are. But others feel that even asking the question “How old do you feel?” plays into cultural stereotypical notions of aging as decline.

How old do you feel? Or do you resist being classified by your age?

Diet high in trans fats may increase dementia risk, study says

I was taken aback when I saw this article because I thought trans fats had been banned from foods here in the U.S. But here’s the truth:

Most trans fats were banned in the United States last year. But foods with less than a half-gram of trans fats can be labeled as containing zero, so some foods still contain them.

And according to recent study results from Japan: “After adjusting for other dementia risk factors — such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking — the researchers concluded that compared to study participants with the lowest levels of trans fats, dementia risk was 52 percent more likely among those with the highest levels.”

But if foods containing small amounts of trans fats can list their trans fat content as 0 (zero), how are we to avoid consuming them? The article contains at the end a link to the American Heart Association page on trans fats that has some information on what to look for on a product’s ingredient list that may suggest it contains trans fats.

What’s Modern Love?

When I saw Amazon Prime Video’s recent announcement for a new series called Modern Love, I didn’t know that Modern Love is a series of personal essays The New York Times has been publishing for 15 years.

This article contains links to the original essays on which the eight episodes of the Amazon series are based.

 ‘We’ve got 50 years to make up for’: DNA test reunites half brothers; both were cops in Florida

DNA analysis has propelled a lot of news stories lately, from identifying possible suspects for previously unsolved crimes to reunions of long-lost or never known relatives. This article from The Associated Press relates one of the latter, a meeting of half-brothers who look alike and are both police officers in Florida.

I just took the world’s first 20-hour flight: Here’s what it did to me

Were you as intrigued as I was with the recent news story about the world’s longest flight, a 10,100-mile, 19.5-hour Qantas Airways flight from New York to Sydney, Australia? Because Qantas hopes to begin offering this flight commercially within the next few years, they sent along a number of people to monitor passengers’ experiences.

In this article for Bloombert Angus Whitley details his trip and the measures taken to help minimize “its inevitable downside: Soul-crushing, body-buckling jet lag.”

© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Older Americans Are Increasingly Unwilling — Or Unable — To Retire

“About 1 in 4 adults age 65 and older is now in the workforce. That number is expected to increase, making it the fastest-growing group of workers in the country.”

This article from National Public Radio (NPR) looks at why so many older adults continue to work after age 65.

Lifestyle changes, not a magic pill, can reverse Alzheimer’s

Clayton Dalton, a medical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, reports on results of study out of UCLA that suggest lifestyle changes may be more important than medication in treating Alzheimer’s disease. 

the researchers used a protocol consisting of a variety of different lifestyle modifications to optimise metabolic parameters – such as inflammation and insulin resistance – that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Participants were counselled to change their diet (a lot of veggies), exercise, develop techniques for stress management, and improve their sleep, among other interventions. The most common ‘side effect’ was weight loss.

Dalton points out that the study was small. As with all medical research, further study is necessary to replicate and strengthen findings. Still, he concludes, “it’s time to start taking these approaches much more seriously. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease is expected to triple over the next three decades, to nearly 14 million in the United States alone.”

For Sale: Jane Austen’s Wince-Inducing Descriptions of 19th-Century Dentistry

Check out this interesting article from Atlas Obscura for photos and discussion of the state of dentistry when Jane Austen wrote this letter to her sister in 1813. “At the time Austen penned the letter, dentistry was still painfully unstandardized. Treatments varied widely, and troublesome teeth were often yanked out by people from all sorts of professions.”

The search for one woman’s family led a reporter to find her own roots using oral history, archives and DNA tests. It also led to stunning results

Deborah Barfield Berry explains “My search was sparked by an assignment from USA TODAY to write about a family in Hampton, Virginia, who believes its members are descended from the first Africans brought to the English colonies in 1619. If their claim is true, they are connected to a founding American family, heirs of a legacy history has ignored.” The family name is Tucker, and Berry knew that her grandmother’s last name was Tucker and that she was from a place near Hampton, Virginia. So Berry thought, “What if, in this world of six degrees of separation, I was related to the family I was writing about?”

‘I’M A NEUROLOGIST, AND THESE ARE THE 5 THINGS I DO TO KEEP MY BRAIN HEALTHY’

“Ajeet Sodhi, MD, a neurologist and the director of neurocritical care at the California Institute of Neuroscience, shares the habits and activities he does to promote and improve brain function every single day.”

© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

THE RISE OF THE ‘GRANNY STATE’ IN AMERICA’S NURSING HOMES

The growing number of older people entering assisted living facilities is spawning an accompanying fear of elder abuse:

More and more states are passing laws and introducing regulations requiring nursing homes to let relatives set up webcams in the private rooms of elderly family members. Until 2014, only three states — Texas, New Mexico and Washington — had laws on such cameras in assisted living facilities. But over the past five years, five more states — Illinois, Louisiana, Utah, Oklahoma and Virginia — have introduced statutes.

But the use of such cameras raise a whole menu of privacy concerns:

  • Who has the right to request such a camera, the patient or the patient’s family?
  • Is the patient mentally competent to either request or refuse placement of a camera?
  • Do caregivers in rooms with cameras have their own right to privacy?
  • Do roommates or significant others who live in the same space also have to consent?

These are significant questions that will have to be addressed in efforts to balance safety concerns with privacy issues.

The Decline and Evolution of the School Librarian

School budget cuts inevitably lead to reductions in support staff such as school librarians:

Between 2009 and 2016, more than 9,000 full-time equivalent school library positions were eliminated in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s about a 15 percent reduction in the country’s total number of school librarian positions. What’s at risk, advocates say, is not just children’s access to books, but also the development of their research skills, digital literacy, and critical thinking.

DASH HAPPY: 6 DASHING EM DASH EXAMPLES IN LITERATURE

This article about the em dash—“possibly the most adaptable and intuitive punctuation mark there is”—just warms this former college composition teacher’s heart.

Engineers Sprint Ahead, but Don’t Underestimate the Poets

David Deming, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues in The New York Times that, over time, liberal arts majors earn salaries comparable to their peers with scientific degrees.

Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction

Most humans find intense pleasure in stories about universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and triumph over adversity.

That may help explain why, when stories are done well, we love them so much. Just as artificial sweeteners fool our minds into thinking we’re eating sugar, stories—even weird ones like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—take advantage of our natural tendency to want to learn about real people, and how to treat them.

© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown