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Opinion | Your Brain Is Not for Thinking - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.
  • Your brain runs your body using something like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. The budget for your body tracks resources like water, salt and glucose as you gain and lose them
  • Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs
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  • this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful. Anxiety does not cause stomach aches; rather, feelings of anxiety and stomach aches are both ways that human brains make sense of physical discomfort
  • There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body. This is one reason physical actions like taking a deep breath, or getting more sleep, can be surprisingly helpful in addressing problems we traditionally view as psychological.
  • Your burden may feel lighter if you understand your discomfort as something physical. When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”
  • I’m not saying you can snap your fingers and dissolve deep misery, or sweep away depression with a change of perspective. I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it
  • Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.
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Climate Researchers Enlist Big Cloud Providers for Big Data Challenges - WSJ - 0 views

  • “Sustainability, climate mitigation and climate adaptation is incredibly data-intensive. You’re talking about large amounts of data and you’re talking about large complex data sets,” he said. “Absolutely, cloud will play an increasingly important role.”
  • Microsoft Corp.’s AI for Earth program, for example, offers grants and technical help from Azure, its cloud division, for just such projects.
  • More broadly, tools like Amazon SageMaker, launched in 2017, allow software developers in any industry to build, train and use machine-learning models more quickly and with less technical complexity than in years prior, he said.
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Merck CEO Ken Frazier Discusses a COVID Cure, Racism, and Why Leaders Need to Walk the ... - 0 views

  • Frazier: It means that no matter where you are in the world, you should have access to this vaccine because it is a global pandemic. And my view is unless all of us are safe, none of us are safe.
  • when you think about the world that we live in with climate change, with ecosystem disruption, with populations moving around the way they do with human mobility the way it is, this pandemic is just the first of many that we could experience as a species because those conditions are only going to get worse going forward.
  • Neeley: The EU union has barred Americans from traveling to Europe. Frazier: Yes, because they see the spikes in this country, which goes back to the fact that we aren't doing the things that we could do to suppress the epidemic. We Americans, we value liberty. I know this is not a political science conversation, but the fact of the matter is if you think about the United States of America and its history, liberty has been a very strong theme in our politics. And I've always believed it's because historically, we've had these two big, beautiful oceans protecting us from the rest of the world. And so we could say it's all about my liberty. It's not about security or group security.
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  • Harvard Business School, I think put out a study a few years ago, showing that something like 30% of all hiring for what's called sort of bachelor's level jobs are for skill sets that don't require a bachelor's. So that alone exclude something like 70% of African Americans for no reason.
  • This whole pandemic, what it's done, it's unmasked the huge disparities that exist in our society already. I mean, the fact of the matter is this educational one we just talked about in terms of access to broadband and hardware. But you look at the disparities. I mean, the African American according to a study at Yale is 3.5 times more likely to die from COVID than a white. Somebody who's Latinix is three times more likely to die. So this has unmasked these huge structural elements of racism that existed in this country for a long time. And we need to step up to those structural elements that determine the lives of so many people.
  • Well, this virus doesn't really care about that. And if you're going to do it, if you're going to exercise your liberty at my personal expense, then we can't control the pandemic. And the Europeans are looking at that and they're saying, "We don't want you bringing that into our shores."
  • We have to have the psychological armor to defend ourselves against the racism that's all around us, that's the first piece of advice.
  • The second piece of advice I give is that, you really can't plan your career. You have to take advantage of all the opportunities that you have before you. And I believe that at least in my own instance, what helped me a lot was that I wanted a certain level of autonomy and accountability. And when you do that, you get more responsibility because you are willing to go outside the lane of what most people do.
  • it's sort of humorous to me when people say to me, "I don't see color. I don't even notice that you're a Black man." Every minute of my life, I realize I'm a Black man. How they don't realize it is beyond me. But I really think it's important for young African Americans to have their own communities, to reinforce one another so that they can deal with that incoming.
  • My father Otis Frazier 's father, Richard Frazier , was born in 1861. And so I have only one generation between me and slavery, which is quite unusual for someone at this stage. And my father only had a third grade education and what passed for third grade education for an African American child in South Carolina, between 1906 to 1909. But he was self-taught. He had immaculate habits of speech and dress and behavior, and he was his own man. And he gave me the single most important piece of advice I've ever had when I was growing up in the inner city. And here it is, he would say to me, Kenny, what other people think about you is none of your damn business. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be
  • now I can see when you're running a company like Merck and Wall Street is criticizing you because you don't do what they want you to do, I can hear my father saying, you know what they think about you is none of your damn business.
  • And that is what it meant to be a man to me, was to get up every morning, go to work, take care of your family, take your family to church on Sunday and to make sure that your children understood the importance of education and opportunity. And so, while I was born in a really tough inner city neighborhood, I always tell people I had the good fortune to be born in my mother and my father's house. More my father, because my mother died when I was really young and I was raised by a father who was not sentimental about his children, but had high standards. And it helped me a lot to have to live up to my father's standards, which I'm still living up to.
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How 'Unconscious Bias' Can Trick Your Brain Into Trusting People (Even if You Shouldn't... - 0 views

  • oftentimes when we’re trying to decide whose judgment to trust, how people talk or present themselves has greater sway over our opinion than their actual knowledge or qualifications.
  • One such form, called the Halo Effect, is when we let someone’s positive attributes cloud our judgment to such a degree that we overlook their flaws
  • unconscious biases are difficult to overcome, being aware of them helps prevent them from having undue influence over your decision-making
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Brainless Creatures Can Do Some Incredibly Smart Things - 0 views

  • There's no denying that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other life on Earth. Our brains much more than our brawn account for our evolutionary successes—as well as our sometimes devastating impacts on the planet.
  • Depending on your definition, some basic hallmarks of intelligence—from decision-making to learning—can even be found in creatures that don't have brains at all.
  • These skills let slime molds do impressively well at some human tasks. When presented with bits of food arranged like the stops on Tokyo's rail system, branching slime molds come close to recreating the actual railway network. And in 2016, a team led by Macquarie University researcher Chris Reid showed that slime molds can solve the two-armed bandit problem—a decision-making test normally reserved for organisms with brains.
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  • they're facing the direction of next morning's sunrise, behavior that requires the plant to anticipate the future. What's more, young shoots of corn can “remember” the directions of light sources.
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Start a new (good) habit, kill an old (bad) one - CNN - 0 views

  • Habits -- actions performed with little conscious thought and often unwittingly triggered by external cues -- are powerful influences on behavior and can be our greatest allies for positive change. But because they are so difficult to break, habits are also frequent saboteurs of personal progress.
  • The first thing to identify for yourself is the habit you want to work on, whether it's starting a new (good) one or ending an old (bad) one. That's a minor distinction, by the way. Eating healthier is eating less junk. Exercising more is being less sedentary. One is often the inverse of another.
  • We know what many of the most common areas of improvement are, at least when it comes to making resolutions. People want to lose weight, eat better, be more mindful, spend money more wisely, sleep better and improve relationships. By eliminating bad habits and starting new ones, you can succeed in most of these areas.
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  • We like to think we have free will in every situation, but many of our actions are predictably triggered by external situations. And if those events are part of your daily or weekly routine, our Pavlovian tendencies become ingrained. Pajamas are on: Time to floss and brush. Cup of coffee in hand: Time to dunk a doughnut. Beer finished: Let's have a cigarette. But triggers can also be feelings, such as stress or boredom.
  • One helpful checklist frequently used for goal-setting is the acronym SMART, created by economic theorist Peter Drucker. Effective resolutions, research has shown, are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
  • The consensus among these books is that the most effective way to adopt a habit is to replace a bad one with a better one. Dean's metaphor is to think of habits as well-worn rivers of action that flow out of the predictable path of your routine. Often, the most effective way to stop it flowing in harmful directions is not by damming it but by diverting it. For example, many people stop smoking by chewing gum.
  • And another pro tip of habit-making (or replacing) is accountability. Tell other people. Share on social media (unless social media is the habit you're changing). Ask your friends and family to support the effort. Getting others involved, or even just aware, makes it harder for you to give it up. And others' support can be inspiring and helpful.
  • But I'll give the last word to the wise Ben Franklin, whose advice would make all these books unnecessary. " 'Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them," he wrote.
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'Life or death still possible': 31 days at my dad's virtual bedside - CNN - 0 views

  • The attending physician at the intensive care unit had called that morning and asked whether they should include a Do Not Resuscitate order in my dad's chart. They had asked before. I had been indecisive. A successful resuscitation would extend his life. But it might also lead to brain damage.
  • "If it continues in this direction," he told me, "we're talking about a single-digit chance of survival."
  • I suspected that my father had a will and a health care directive inside the house. I put on my mask but couldn't find a clean pair of latex gloves in my duffel bag. It was cold in the backyard. I had a pair of leather gloves. I put those on and entered my childhood home for the first time in weeks. My mother barely registered my presence. She was crying on the couch.
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  • I was relieved -- we wouldn't have to make what felt like an impossible decision -- but then I kept reading. My father had noted that he did not want to be supported by a ventilator or hooked up to a feeding tube for any length of time. He had been connected to both for nearly two weeks.
  • There was grief on her face, but also curiosity. What had finally gotten to her younger son, the one who so rarely showed emotion during his father's hospitalization?
  • I called the hospital and approved the DNR. They told me his status was still dire. I called my dad's closest friends and started preparing them for the worst.
  • My father's lungs showed no signs of progress. The double pneumonia they diagnosed days before was worsening. His kidneys were failing. Dialysis was required but would put a strain on his blood pressure, which was already dangerously low. There was a special form of dialysis designed for delicate situations like this -- continuous veno-venous hemofiltration -- but it wasn't available at Lawrence
  • The morning after I searched for my father's health directive and drafted his obituary, I woke up and tried to turn on my laptop. It wouldn't start. When it eventually booted up, it asked if I wanted to restore an unsaved document. No, I thought, let's see what happens today.
  • It was the same doctor as yesterday, the one who asked about the DNR. "Look, your dad is on a ventilator. That's a form of life support. He's experiencing kidney failure and requires dialysis. His situation is still very acute. He was in good health before the Covid, but his kidney, heart, and lungs are 69 years old. It's tough for them to recover. But the numbers from today are undeniably better than yesterday. There's been an improvement at almost every level. Your dad is a tough guy."
  • One of my close friends, a nurse practitioner, would help me understand all the terminology and its implications. He was treating Covid patients at an ICU upstate. At the end of our calls I'd ask him how he was doing. "We ran out of gowns," he told me one day. "My ICU is out of ventilators -- we're diverting people to Albany," he said another time.
  • "There's a difference between good intentions and good outcomes," I explained to her. She would wave me away and pick up. Inevitably the call would bring her tears. I stewed on the porch. My brother, uncle and I would spend hours trying to ease her mind and pacify her anxiety. Any inquiry or outreach was like sticking a finger in the open wound of her anguish.
  • I called my friend, the nurse practitioner, and gave him the latest update. He seemed upset. "You OK, dude?" "A nurse from my hospital died," he explained.
  • The nurses and doctors who took care of my father -- first for four days at NewYork-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital, then for nearly a month at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia -- were always empathetic, straightforward and willing to trust me with complicated details.
  • About a week after writing -- then refusing to recover -- my father's obituary, his condition was continuing to improve.
  • "He's only improving," I told her, "because of the life-saving care you guys have given him. The whole city is in awe of you. They should have a parade for you down the Canyon of Heroes."
  • Covid-19 was new and largely unstudied. Maybe one of these seemingly odd treatments would work.
  • "Yesterday was a stumble, but we're getting back on course," I emailed the group. "We always knew this recovery wasn't going to be a straight line. It's important to remain resilient and optimistic even when there are temporary setbacks."
  • "Oh Lou, I've been waiting for your call. I have such good news. They are planning to extubate him tomorrow. They are going to take your father off the ventilator!" She was practically screaming with excitement. I was speechless.
  • I had been withholding certain information from my family and friends during this whole ordeal. My dad had developed a blood clot two weeks into his hospitalization. Clots are extremely dangerous, of course, but it was small and in a relatively manageable location.
  • I called my brother and told him about the plan to get my father off the ventilator. Since there were a number of contingencies, we debated telling my mother. She was living and dying with every update.
  • My father's breathing was labored on the morning they were planning to extubate. They delayed the procedure a day. That next morning, April 16, a doctor called. I was in the shower and rushed out to answer my cell. He said they were doing the extubation within the hour. What do we want to do if the extubation fails?
  • "It went as well as we could have hoped for," the doctor said. "His vitals are stable and he's breathing well. He's resting now." She explained that my father was disoriented and it probably wasn't a great idea to speak with him that day. Whatever, I thought, I'll speak with him when he gets home. He had been on a ventilator for 28 days.
  • I called the doctor later in the day. She told me my dad seemed distressed. He was trying to speak, but his vocal cords were too swollen. "It's so frustrating," she told me. "I don't know what he wants to tell me."
  • "Each facility has their own Covid rules," she explained. "I'll send you over a list." On the list was the nursing home where my grandfather had died several years before. My father had visited him every day.
  • I called the step-down unit where he had been the past three days. They transferred me to his nurse. "He's doing better, love. We took him off the pressor and his blood pressure is in a good range. His heart rate is good. He's breathing fine. The doctors decided he didn't need to go back to the ICU. He's ok."
  • "I've repeatedly said that recovery isn't a straight line. ... Yesterday we managed the roller coaster ride as a family. My brother, uncle and I were with my mother the entire day. We never lost hope or confidence in my dad's medical care and ultimate recovery. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a blinking one. Right now, it shines again."
  • I drove back to my mom's house. I scanned the block for my brother's car. He had not arrived. I parked. I have to wait for him and then tell my mother, brother and uncle all at once, right? Should I call my wife first? Should I call my dad's best friend?
  • I called my wife. I called my dad's best friend. I called the guys he grew up with. I called his former colleagues. I began every conversation the same way, "This is that call." I listened to each of them yell and cry and ask if I was serious. Then I said I had to make another call.
  • I wrote about my father's career. How he got his law degree at night school and became a prosecutor at the city, state, and federal level. How he convicted mobsters, drug dealers, and those who abused power.
  • I wrote about my dad's volunteer work -- at the Special Olympics, at an organization he founded that helps police families with special needs, and at just about any Italian-American group that needed a lawyer. He was so proud of his Italian-American heritage. He loathed the mafioso caricatures and stereotypes found on TV -- he wrote countless op-eds attacking those -- but he revered the old-school virtues he associated with his Italian-American upbringing: loyalty, humility, hard work, dedication to family.
  • He was a Covid patient for 31 days. It was a painful experience, but ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter how a man dies. It matters how he lives.
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FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
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  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
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MSG in Chinese restaurants isn't unhealthy -- you're just racist, activists say - CNN - 0 views

  • If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.
  • Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.
  • First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.
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  • As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.
  • Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.
  • Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.
  • Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."
  • "You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."
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Having Trouble Dealing With Negative Feedback? Don't Be So Quick to React | Mental Floss - 0 views

  • No one likes receiving negative feedback, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle it.
  • That’s because criticism, however constructive it may be, often challenges the image we have of ourselves.
  • Pay attention to the facts you’ve received rather than your emotional response to it, and compartmentalize the feedback by incorporating only what’s useful to you.
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Tech-averse Supreme Court could be forced into modern era - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The coronavirus pandemic is forcing all courts to alter their procedures, but the US Supreme Court, imbued with an archaic, insular air and a majority of justices over age 65, will face a distinct challenge to keep operating and provide public access to proceedings.
  • The virus is bound to force Supreme Court justices into new territory. They may open their operations in more modern ways. Or, if they move in the opposite direction and shun any high-tech alternative, they might postpone all previously scheduled March and April oral argument sessions, a total 20 disputes, until next summer or fall.
  • This very practical dilemma comes as the justices already have one of the most substantively difficult slate of cases in years, testing abortion rights, anti-bias protections for LGBTQ workers, and the Trump administration's plan for deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. (Those cases have already been argued, and the justices are drafting opinions to be released later this spring.)
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  • If they are weighing a more sophisticated audio or visual connection -- to each other, and to the public -- the justices have the support of an on-site technology team and young law clerks, four per chamber. At the other end of the spectrum, they might weigh canceling the remaining argument sessions and resolve the cases based only on the written briefs filed. Those lengthy filings are more comprehensive than lawyers' presentations in hour-long oral sessions.
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Reading is fundamental -- to the family's happiness - CNN - 0 views

  • The value of reading to our kids -- for them and us -- is reinforced by the growing body of research on the topic. Just last week, a meta-analysis of 19 studies published in the journal Pediatrics found that reading aloud was significantly beneficial to children and their parents.In most of the studies -- which involved more than 3,000 families -- the parents were assessed as well as their kids, and reading aloud appeared to strengthen parents' feelings of competence, improve the quality of their relationships with their children and even reduce parental stress or depression.
  • mproving a child's reading skills and cognitive ability is important to their success in school, work and life. "If you are going to get anywhere in life," Roald Dahl is credited with saying, "you have to read a lot of books."The conversations children have around themes and ideas in books help them make sense of the world. And it's a joyful way to connect and be close with your kid. While reading in bed, my daughters and I lie next to each other, sometimes leaning into one other. We laugh and are surprised together and have deep conversations sparked by the novels. It's as high a quality as quality time gets.
  • Turning book reading into a ritual is as simple as repetition paired with a certain time or situation. Reading to kids just before bed is popular because routine makes for easier bedtimes as well -- a twofer!
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What this sunny, religious town in California teaches us about living longer - CNN - 0 views

  • Spanish for "beautiful hill," Loma Linda, California is nestled between mountain peaks in the middle of the San Bernardino Valley. The city is known as an epicenter of health and wellness, with more than 900 physicians on the campus of Loma Linda University and Medical Center.
  • Experts say that's because Loma Linda has one of the highest concentrations of Seventh-day Adventists in the world. The religion mandates a healthy lifestyle and a life of service to the church and community, which contributes to their longevity.
  • 'I never had stress'"As far as I am concerned, stress is a manufactured thing," Dr. Ellsworth Wareham told CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in 2015 as part of a Vital Signs special on blue zones. Read MoreWareham was 100 years old at the time and still mowed his front yard.
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  • "I could do open heart surgery right now. My hands are steady, my eyes are good," Wareham said. "My blood pressure is 117. I have noticed no deterioration in my mental ability with my age. If you gave me something to memorize, I would memorize it now just as quickly as when I was 20."
  • Wareham passed away last year, at the age of 104. Like 10% of the Adventist community, Wareham was a vegan. Another 30% are lacto-ovo vegetarians who eat dairy and eggs, while another 8% eat fish but not other meat. Vegetarianism is so prevalent that no meat can be purchased at the cafeterias at the university and medical center.
  • Other key factors to longevity: Only 1% of the Seventh-day Adventist community in the study smokes. Little to no alcohol is consumed. Daily exercise out in the fresh air of nature is the norm. The church advocates a life of service, so dedication to volunteering, humanitarian and mission work is typical, which contributes to a sense of community.
  • "The bulk of evidence suggests that changing a few simple lifestyle factors can have a profound difference in the risk of major diseases and the likelihood of living a long life," Orlich said. "The body has an amazing ability to, um, you know, heal itself to some degree.
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Just one night of poor sleep can boost Alzheimer's proteins | Science News - 0 views

  • Healthy adults built up Alzheimer’s-associated proteins in their cerebral spinal fluid when prevented from getting slow-wave sleep, the deepest stage of sleep, researchers report July 10 in Brain. Just one night of deep-sleep disruption was enough to increase the amount of amyloid-beta, a protein that clumps into brain cell‒killing plaques in people with Alzheimer’s. People in the study who slept poorly for a week also had more of a protein called tau in their spinal fluid than they did when well rested. Tau snarls itself into tangles inside brain cells of people with the disease.
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Viking Rok runestone may allude to cold climate crisis fears - CNN - 0 views

  • A huge 9th-century stone monument in Sweden may have been erected by Vikings who feared a repeat of a cold climate crisis that took place more than 300 years earlier, according to a new study.
  • A new interdisciplinary study by scholars from Swedish universities has concluded that the inscription is about anxiety triggered by a son's death and fears of a new cold climate crisis.
  • The study was based on archaeological research on a cold climate catastrophe from the years 536 to 550, which affected Scandinavia. The crisis took hold after a series of volcanic events and led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger and mass extinctions. It is also estimated that the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula fell by 50% or more.
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  • "Before the Rok runestone was erected, a number of events occurred which must have seemed extremely ominous," said Bo Graslund, professor in archaeology at Uppsala University, one of the authors of the paper. "A powerful solar storm colored the sky in dramatic shades of red, crop yields suffered from an extremely cold summer, and later a solar eclipse occurred just after sunrise."
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Australia fires: Smoke will make 'full circuit' around the world, NASA scientists warn ... - 0 views

  • Smoke from fires in Australia is expected to make at least one "full circuit" around the globe and return to the skies over the country, scientists from NASA have warned.
  • Studying smoke plumes from late December, the space agency said that the smoke had traveled "halfway across Earth" and affected air quality in other countries. Australia is being ravaged by the worst wildfires seen in decades, with large swaths of the country devastated since the fire season began in late July.
  • At least 28 people have died nationwide, and in the state of New South Wales (NSW) alone, more than 3,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged. State and federal authorities are struggling to contain the massive blazes.
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  • By January 8, the smoke had traveled "halfway around Earth," NASA said, crossing South America to cause hazy skies and creating colorful sunrises and sunsets.
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Biden says Democrats have 'had enough debates' after Sanders commits to April showdown ... - 0 views

  • oe Biden said Wednesday that Democrats have "had enough" debates, suggesting he is unwilling to have another one-on-one showdown with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
  • "If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders communications director Mike Casca said Tuesday.
  • "I think we need a good debate as to where we go, not only just now but in the future," Sanders told Cooper. "And to my mind, if there's anything that this unexpected moment in American history should teach us, we've got to rethink the basic structures of American society, and that is guaranteed health care to all as a human right, creating an economy that provides for all people not just the wealthy."
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  • But the pandemic has led some states to push their primaries into June, opening up the possibility that it could take more than two months for a candidate to cross the threshold needed to clinch the nomination.
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When You Fear Making the "Wrong" Decision - 0 views

  • “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
  • mind resists all attempts to make any kind of decision at all.
  • immobilized, unable to push through the debilitating fear.
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  • I realized that the issue isn’t about being afraid to go to Korea. The real issue is that I have an overall fear of making the “wrong” decisions in my life.
  • Understand that there are no “wrong” decisions.
  • Listening closely to my fears about Korea made me aware of some pretty negative beliefs I held about myself and doubts I had in my abilities.
  • Make peace with your emotions.
  • I’m hearing the messages my mind, body, and spirit are trying to tell me because I’ve made a conscious decision to listen
  • It really takes the pressure off if you understand that every experience you have, whether you characterize it as “good” or “bad,” is exactly the experience you need to have at that moment. Some choices may lead to more painful lessons than others, but nothing hurts like living in fear.
  • Intuition can use fear to help you grow.
  • Fear is often described as a psychological response to a perceived threat.
  • It only makes sense to avoid things that can potentially harm you.
  • many of us have developed fear from negative experiences in our past.
  • We have built a protective fence around our emotional scars, and learned to ward off anybody or anything that triggers an unconscious fear.
  • The next time you feel fear, embrace it, examine it, and if guided to do so, move boldly toward it.
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'Outlandish' competition seeks the brain's source of consciousness | Science | AAAS - 0 views

  • Brain scientists can watch neurons fire and communicate. They can map how brain regions light up during sensation, decision-making, and speech. What they can't explain is how all this activity gives rise to consciousness.
  • But understanding consciousness has become increasingly important for researchers seeking to communicate with locked-in patients, determine whether artificial intelligence systems can become conscious, or explore whether animals experience consciousness the way humans do.
  • The GWT says the brain's prefrontal cortex, which controls higher order cognitive processes like decision-making, acts as a central computer that collects and prioritizes information from sensory input. It then broadcasts the information to other parts of the brain that carry out tasks.
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  • The project has drawn criticism, mostly because it includes the IIT. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., says the theory is too philosophical—attempting to explain why consciousness exists, rather than how the brain determines whether a stimulus is worthy of conscious attention—to be directly testable.
  • Despite his misgivings about the project's prospect for a decisive answer, Seth says it will spark discussion and collaboration among scientific rivals. "That itself is to be applauded," he says
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Is Pain a Construct of the Mind? - Scientific American - 0 views

  • Clear Lake found that Rogers could recruit an abnormally high number of muscle fibers. But was this ability because of a freak genetic mutation? Another possibility, which Rogers thinks is more likely, is the way he processes pain when he strains those muscles.
  • What if, instead of superpowered muscles, Rogers has a normal—though extremely well exercised—body, and his abilities arise because he can withstand more pain than most mere mortals?
  • Rogers reasons that, unlike in the dentist's office—where he has no control over the pain that is inflicted on him—he has direct executive control over pain that he inflicts on himself. “I know it's coming, I have an idea of what to expect and I can decide to ignore it,” he says. Confronted with severe pain, most people fear that they will damage their body permanently if they persist, so they stop well before they are in real danger, Rogers explains.
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  • Maybe Rogers's muscle cells are normal, and he experiences pain as most of us do but chooses to disregard it when he feels in command.
  • An illusion is a perception that does not match the physical reality. Is pain, then, as with illusions, a mind construct that some people can decide to turn off? As you will see in the studies that follow, pain varies as a function of mood, attentiveness and circumstances, lending support to the theory that pain is an emotion.
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    During practice, my coaches always say that I need to overcome pain but I never knew how. I found this article interesting because it says that pain is an emotion. I have never thought that pain could even be close to an emotion. It is interesting how the world's strongest man can just ignore the pain and keep doing these incredible feats. Controlling one's pain must either be a skill or just a natural-born gift. Like in TOK, we must practice skills such as controlling our emotions. If pain is an emotion, then theoretically, I could control it. I am going to test this out in my life and see if I can control my own pain during exercise.
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