A lot folks refer to momentary memory lapses as “senior moments.” But the truth is that senior moments can start as early as your 20s.
Memory lapses start in our 20s, though people don’t typically notice or fret about them until their 50s. In a study published last year in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, psychologists asked about 2,000 participants to solve puzzles, identify patterns and remember words and details from stories, among other memory tests. The top performers were 22 years old; researchers saw a notable decline in the ability to make rapid comparisons, remember unrelated information and detect relationships by age 27. A weakening memory can usually be detected by around age 37, according to the study. The good news was that people’s vocabulary and general knowledge increase until at least age 60.
I wonder if our memories for certain bits of information take a hit due to the increasing amount of data we face via online networks, etc. I tackled that topic over in my new blog: I Can’t Read Anything Longer than This Headline.
Think we’ve got some serious fans in the United States? Soccer fans are so serious about their teams that they often celebrate by having a ton of sex. How can we be so sure about that fact? Well, just look at the number of babies being born in Catalonia nine months after Barcelona took home top prize in Spain’s La Liga.
Fans being fans, some celebrated with a few pints of their favorite adult beverage, others engaged in another favorite adult activity — sex.
On Thursday, Reuters reported the maternity wards at hospitals in the capital of Catalonia have been jammed after an increase in births of almost 50 percent. COMRadio’s survey of area hospitals found that births this week and those expected soon are more than 45 percent above the average.
Gives new meaning to the phrase Soccer Moms.
At least now I can blame my sex life on how bad the Warriors have been playing.
I think I finally understand why out State of the Union speeches always seem a little boring. Argentina’s president gives televised advice about such topics as eating pork to improve one’s sex life.
Argentina’s president recommended pork as an alternative to Viagra Wednesday, saying she spent a satisfying weekend with her husband after eating barbecued pork.
“I’ve just been told something I didn't know; that eating pork improves your sex life … I'd say it's a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry.
We might have to rethink pork’s status as the other white meat.
Dan Buettner studies Blue Zones, areas where people tend to have the longest lifespans. In this article and video he explains some of the things he’s discovered.
We found that all five Blue Zones possessed the same nine lifestyle characteristics. Among them: a low-meat, plant-based diet (all of them ate a lot of beans) and a ritual of “downshifting” each day. They experience the same stresses we do — kids, health, finances — but they managed it through daily prayer, meditation, ancestor veneration or city-wide happy hours (like the Sardinians).
The secret to longevity, as I see it, has less to do with diet, or even exercise, and more to do with the environment in which a person lives: social and physical. What do I mean by this? They live rewardingly inconvenient lives. They walk to the store and to their friends’ homes and they live in houses set up with opportunities to move mindlessly. They do their own yard work, hand-knead their own bread dough, and, in the case of Okinawa, get up and down off the floor several dozen times a day.
There’s more, but you probably want to walk around the block a couples times before reading it.
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself writing more “health” posts that relate to the influence of the realtime/social web on our lives. I decided that topic is worthy of a blog all its own. For me, it’s a return to my roots. I was a tech blogger back during the first internet boom. I was (and probably am) as addicted to the web as anyone.
And now I offer.
Tweetage Wasteland - Confessions of an Internet Superhero.
The Fonz used to tell people to sit on it. Well, his directive may have done more harm than he knew.
Early research suggests that sitting too much can be a danger to your health. And that might hold true even for those who exercise regularly.
Motion is lotion.
Another study has confirmed that several cups of coffee a day can significantly curb the risk of diabetes. Interestingly, the same trend holds for people who drink tea or even decaf.
Here’s a study I’d like to see done. What happens when someone just drinks a few cups of really hot water a day? Any chance that’s an element connected to all the health benefits associated with coffee consumption?
According to a recent report, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who are considered nearsighted.
Researchers tapped into a wide-ranging health survey to rate vision in the population in the early 1970s and roughly 30 years later. They compared eyesight information for more than 4,400 people tested in 1971 and 1972 with data from another set of 8,300 people tested from 1999 to 2004.
This broad survey showed that 25 percent of those examined in the early 1970s were deemed to be nearsighted, compared with 42 percent examined three decades later, the researchers report in the December Archives of Ophthalmology. That’s an increase of 66 percent.
This may not seem too important to a generation that rarely looks beyond the iPhone in their hand.
Buying green and local products is one of those things that makes you a better person, right? Right?
Um, maybe not.
There’s also the risk that these lifestyle choices will make us complacent, sapping the drive to call senators and chain ourselves to coal plants. Tweaking your shopping list, the argument goes, is at best woefully insufficient and maybe even counterproductive.
But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.
According to an analysis by the New York Times, millions of Americans are drinking water that (at least at times) is contaminated.
More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data…
Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.
In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.
How many illnesses have been caused by this dirty water? No one knows for sure.
But scientific research indicates that as many as 19 million Americans may become ill each year due to just the parasites, viruses and bacteria in drinking water. Certain types of cancer — such as breast and prostate cancer — have risen over the past 30 years, and research indicates they are likely tied to pollutants like those found in drinking water.
Incredibly disturbing story. Looks like newspapers are still good for something, eh?
