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Category Archives: Mind Building
Health24.com | Streetlights could be harming your teen’s sleep and mental health
- Too much light at night can negatively affect teens’ sleep patterns and moods
- Artificial light is also associated with mood and anxiety disorders
- A good night’s rest is important as adolescents continue to face increasing levels of academic and performance stress
New research is suggesting links between street lights, neon signs, and other forms of nighttime outside lighting and sleeplessness, and mood disorders among teens.
The study of more than 10 000 American kids aged 13 to 18 couldn’t prove cause and effect. However, it found that teens living in areas with high levels of artificial outdoor light at night went to bed about 29 minutes later, on average, and got 11 fewer minutes of sleep, compared to teens in areas with the lowest levels of outdoor nighttime light.
What’s more, greater levels of artificial light were also associated with increased risk of a teen developing a mood or anxiety disorder.
Complex network of influences
Specifically, teens exposed to higher levels of artificial light at night were more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder or specific phobia, according to researchers led by Diana Paksarian, a postdoctoral research fellow at the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
“Environmental light exposure is only one factor in a more complex network of influences on sleep and behaviour,” stressed study co-author Kathleen Merikangas, senior investigator and chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch at the NIMH. But she believes it could be “an important target for prevention and interventions in adolescent health”.
As the researchers explained in an institute news release, sleep and circadian rhythm disruptions are features of certain mental disorders, including bipolar disorder. So, disrupted sleep might be the link connecting artificial nighttime light exposures and mental health disorders – something that should be examined in future studies.
The study also found social disparities in exposure to artificial light. Teens in racial/ethnic minority groups, from immigrant families, or from families with lower incomes were more likely to live in areas with high levels of outdoor light at night, the research showed.
A vital aspect of brain health
Two psychiatric experts who read over the new findings agreed that more research is needed.
While “it remains unclear what the mechanism of action may be,” the link between nighttime light and teen mental well-being “merits further investigation,” said Dr Victor Fornari, vice-chair of child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York. “Limiting artificial nighttime light may have a beneficial impact on mood,” he theorised.
Brittany LeMonda is senior neuropsychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. She called the study “an interesting and timely article, as adolescents continue to face increasing levels of academic and performance stress”.
LeMonda said that “sleep is a vital aspect of brain health, physical health, cognitive health, and emotional, and is especially important during our formative adolescent years. We know that many adolescents do not get enough sleep, due to sleep latency, awakenings throughout the night, or early wake-up times.”
Simple interventions to reduce light
But there are easy solutions at hand, she added.
“The good news is that simple solutions – such as blackout curtains or using rooms not facing artificial light sources as bedrooms – could be positive and possibly simple interventions to reduce light, and hopefully improve sleep patterns and health outcomes,” LeMonda said.
The study was published online on 8 July in JAMA Psychiatry.
Image credit: iStock
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Coronavirus: R number ‘lower than thought’ before lockdown eased in England
A study of 120,000 volunteers in England also suggests those aged 18 to 24 were more likely to test positive.
Health24.com | Upping fruit, veggies and grain intake can cut your diabetes risk by 25%
- New studies found that increasing fruit, vegetable and wholegrain consumption can prevent type 2 diabetes
- For example, people with the highest levels of wholegrain consumption had a 29% lower rate of type 2 diabetes
- This conclusion is only observational as studies can’t prove cause and effect
Eating more fruits, vegetables and wholegrain foods could lower your risk of type 2 diabetes, two new studies suggest.
In one study, researchers looked at more than 9 700 people who developed type 2 diabetes and over 13 600 who didn’t. Participants were from eight European countries and part of a long-term cancer and nutrition study.
After adjusting for lifestyle, and social and dietary risk factors for diabetes, people with the highest levels of fruit and vegetable consumption were 50% less likely to develop diabetes than those with the lowest levels, the researchers found.
High levels of wholegrain
Every 66 grams a day (2.3 ounces) increase in total fruit and vegetable intake was associated with a 25% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Nita Forouhi, of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and colleagues calculated.
The other study included more than 158 000 US women and over 36 000 US men.
After adjusting for lifestyle and dietary risk factors for diabetes, people with the highest levels of wholegrain consumption had a 29% lower rate of type 2 diabetes than those with the lowest levels, the findings showed.
In terms of specific wholegrain foods, one or more servings a day of wholegrain cold breakfast cereal or dark bread was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes (19% and 21%, respectively) compared with less than one serving a month.
Results back up recommendations
Two or more servings a week compared with less than one serving a month was associated with a 21% lower risk for oatmeal, a 15% lower risk for added bran, and a 12% lower risk for brown rice and wheat germ.
The reductions in diabetes risk appeared to plateau at around two servings a day for total wholegrain intake, and at around half a serving a day for whole grain cereal and dark bread, according to Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues.
The studies can’t prove cause and effect. Still, both research teams said their results back up recommendations to increase fruit, vegetable and wholegrain consumption as part of a healthy diet to prevent type 2 diabetes.
The studies were published on 8 July in the BMJ.
Image credit: iStock
Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born
Nearly every country will see their populations fall as the world has fewer babies.
Do Partial Matches Still Tempt You?
A partial match is basically a 7 out of 10 (or lower) – where you get much of what you want, but at least one significant aspect is missing.
Partial matches include:
- Finding a relationship partner that you like and respect as a person but aren’t physically attracted to
- Getting a job that pays well but provides no sense of purpose or contribution
- Finding a cheap web host that provides incompetent support when you really need them
- Using a phone that works except that the screen is cracked
- Hanging out with friends you’ve known a long time but who are overly pessimistic and discouraging, especially when you want to do something ambitious
I’d say that the main areas where people fall for partial matches are jobs and relationships. That’s where people seem to get stuck most often.
A partial match isn’t something minor that you’ll get used to, like having to commute 15 minutes to a job when you really wanted 10 minutes or less. A partial match is missing some key aspect that you consider important and valuable. You’ll never be fully satisfied with a partial match. That cracked screen will always be present, and it’s always going to bug you to some extent.
Partial matches are obstacles to real satisfaction and appreciation.
Partial matches are also part of the scarcity phase of life. In order to accept a partial match, you must be unwilling (or think you’re unable) to create or acquire something better. This is a position of weakness. It stems from a mindset lacking in confidence.
Why would you keep using a cracked phone when you could replace it with a better one or get the screen repaired? That’s a solvable problem.
Why settle for a job that’s missing something important that matters to you when you could get a job (or start a business) that satisfies you properly? That’s a solvable problem too.
Why remain in a relationship that’s missing an important aspect that you care about? You won’t be satisfied with less. You can fix this too.
Partial matches aren’t necessarily easy to solve. It may take more work to find a solid match, but it’s at least possible. Moreover, making a genuine effort to keep looking for a real match is more satisfying than getting bogged down in a partial match. Real searching is more rewarding than settling.
Looking for a new phone feels better than using one with a cracked screen. Looking for aligned work or an aligned relationship feels better than showing up to a misaligned one. People start feeling better when they decide that it’s time to move on from the partial match, even before they find a real match.
It’s hard to engage in more looking unless you expect to succeed. And that’s really a decision. You must decide to move on from the temptation of partial matches and be done with them, at least in some important area of life.
The key step to making real progress here is to decide that you’re done wasting time and energy on partial matches. They don’t satisfy you. They just take up space in your life. They perpetuate scarcity-mindedness. They’re not going to magically turn into better solutions. The cracks won’t just disappear on their own.
As long as you’re still tempted by partial matches, you’ll continue to receive more of them, most likely cycling through more years of stuckness and dissatisfaction. At some point you’ll figure out that partial matches don’t provide the value you seek and never will, and you’ll decide that it’s time to be done with them. You’ll see them as unworthy investments of your time and energy.
When your partial match phase is over, your abundance phase can begin.
Health24.com | Proof that the coronavirus can infect lab-grown brain cells might make its effects felt long-term
- Researchers proved that the coronavirus can infect a lab-grown nervous system
- While it can replicate itself in neural tissue, more research is needed to asses possible neurological damage
- It could mean developing brains in babies and children could be susceptible to the virus in the long run
How easily can the coronavirus infect the nervous system?
This is a question that could help us find better treatment – and prevent neurological damage that might incur in developing brains.
In Wuhan, 36% of Covid-19 patients showed signs of neurological symptoms, including viral inflammation of the brain. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University wanted to understand these symptoms better, and published their findings in ALTEX: Alternatives to Animal Experimentation.
The virus’s most popular gateway – ACE2 receptors – are found in certain neurons in the human body, which could make it susceptible to direct infection. Other types of coronaviruses are known to have a neuropathological effect on humans, but until know this hasn’t been officially proven with the SARS-CoV-2 strain yet.
The researchers ended up testing their theories on lab-grown mini-brains to see if the virus can attack neural tissue directly.
The virus managed to replicate itself in the mini-brain in 72 hours.
“Virus particles were found in the neuronal cell body extending into apparent neurite structures.” This means that the virus is able to invade neural tissue, giving it neurotropic features.
READ: Lab-grown mini-organs reveal the damage inflicted by Covid-19
Protection from the blood-brain-barrier
But the virus doesn’t attack the neural system in all positive cases – the blood-brain-barrier normally prevents viral entry, but this can be impaired when the body’s immunity is in distress.
This finding could also perhaps explain why the virus seems to cause a loss of taste and smell – a system controlled by our neural networks.
In the limited study time, however, the researchers saw no damage done to the mini-brain – just viral replication – but the lab-grown organ had no immune cells found in real human brains, thus neurological damage might still be possible.
“These experiments require repetition, including varied initial number of virus (MOI), analysis of neural pathology and functionality, inclusion of different donors of induced pluripotent stem cells of different genders, and extended time courses,” adds the authors.
ALSO READ: How Covid-19 can affect your brain in 3 stages
What it means for our children
The mini-brain is also a developing organ – much like a child’s – and there might be neurological disorders brewing in infected babies and children because their blood-brain-barrier isn’t fully developed yet. This could also mark a risk for babies still in the womb if their mother becomes infected.
“Clinical evidence cannot yet be expected, however, as most children at critical phases of embryo and fetal development are yet to be born and more subtle neurodevelopmental disorders often take time to manifest and diagnose after birth.
“It will be important to study whether brain infection occurs also in otherwise asymptomatic patients, especially children with possible long-term consequences.”
READ: Headache, dizziness before fever may signal Covid-19 and affect entire nervous system
Rise of organoids
Organoids – as these lab-grown organs are known – have increasingly become a vital method in fast-tracking Covid-19 understanding and possible treatment, especially as it lessens the need for animal testing.
Another recent study used lab-grown heart cells to also show how the coronavirus can infect one of our most vital organs – causing it to slowly stop beating.
It’s critical for scientists to better understand how this coronavrius attacks the various functions of the body in order to advise more effective treatment – and watch out for yet unknown consequences lurking in the future.
SEE: Brain scan of 25-year-old Covid-19 patient who suffered mild symptoms
Image credit: iStock
Road verges could be havens for pollinators
Better-managed road verges can help boost pollinating insects, new research shows.
Pollinators such as bees, butterflies and hoverflies benefit from the plants and flowers in road verges, which form a network of “corridors” that provide food and shelter.
While there are downsides of living by the road, including exposure to pollution and the risk of being hit by vehicles, the researchers found that the benefits for insects far outweigh the costs.
The team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, reviewed more than 140 studies.
They found that verges can be dramatically improved for pollinators by measures such as creating flower-rich verges, reducing mowing and limiting the impacts of street lighting.
“There is huge untapped potential to improve road verges for pollinators through management,” said lead author Ben Phillips, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“In many cases, this involves mowing less, and at the right times, to increase flowers and reduce the amount of pollinators, eggs and larvae killed.
“We can help pollinators further by reducing impacts of road pollution.
“This includes light pollution, which can be addressed by limiting how long streetlights are switched on for, as these confuse nocturnal insects.”
The study was a collaboration between the universities of Exeter, East Anglia and Cambridge, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the conservation charity Buglife, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
Andrew Whitehouse, from Buglife, said: “Buglife’s B-Lines initiative has identified the lack of connected wildflower-rich habitats as a major contributor to the decline in our pollinating insects.
“This new research shows the potential that road verges have to help to reverse insect declines.
“By making small changes to the management of our road verge network, local authorities and others involved in road verge management can make a significant difference to support nature’s recovery.”
Since writing the review, verges have undergone quite a transition due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
Claire Wallace, from the University of East Anglia, said: “There were lots of reports of road verges not being mown because councils and contractors weren’t operating as normal.
“This gave us a brief glimpse of the benefits of wilder verges for nature, with plants such as orchids popping up all over the place where they hadn’t been seen before.”
Ben Phillips said: “In Cornwall, however, it is really positive that the council has just changed its policy of mowing verges in urban areas eight times per year.
“Now they will only do this twice or three times a year, so this will be a big local change.”
The results of the work support an ongoing campaign by conservation charity Plantlife to save wildlife on road verges.
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Materials provided by University of Exeter. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
How our brains remain active during familiar, repetitive tasks
New research, based on earlier results in mice, suggests that our brains are never at rest, even when we are not learning anything about the world around us.
Our brains are often likened to computers, with learned skills and memories stored in the activity patterns of billions of nerve cells. However, new research shows that memories of specific events and experiences may never settle down. Instead, the activity patterns that store information can continually change, even when we are not learning anything new.
Why does this not cause the brain to forget what it has learned? The study, from the University of Cambridge, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University, reveals how the brain can reliably access stored information despite drastic changes in the brain signals that represent it.
The research, led by Dr Timothy O’Leary from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, shows that different parts of our brain may need to relearn and keep track of information in other parts of the brain as it moves around. Their study, published in the open access journal eLife, provides some of the first evidence that constant changes in neural activity are compatible with long term memories of learned skills.
The researchers came to this conclusion through modelling and analysis of data taken from an experiment in which mice were trained to associate a visual cue at the start of a 4.5-metre-long virtual reality maze with turning left or right at a T-junction, before navigating to a reward. The results of the 2017 study showed that single nerve cells in the brain continually changed the information they encoded about this learned task, even though the behaviour of the mice remained stable over time.
The experimental data consisted of activity patterns from hundreds of nerve cells recorded simultaneously in a part of the brain that controls and plans movement, recorded at a resolution that is not yet possible in humans.
“Finding coherent patterns in this large assembly of cells is challenging, much like trying to determine the behaviour of a swarm of insects by watching a random sample of individuals,” said O’Leary. “However, in some respects the brain itself needs to solve a similar task, because other brain areas need to extract and process information from this same population.”
Nerve cells connect to hundreds or even thousands of their neighbours and extract information by weighting and pooling it. This has a direct analogy with the methods used by pollsters in the run up to an election: survey results from multiple sources are collected and ‘weighted’ according to their consistency. In this way a steady pattern can emerge even when individual measurements vary wildly.
The Cambridge group used this principle to construct a decoding algorithm that extracted consistent, hidden patterns within the complex activity of hundreds of cells. They found two things. First, that there was indeed a consistent hidden pattern that could accurately predict the animal’s behaviour. Second, this consistent pattern itself gradually changes over time, but not so drastically that the decoding algorithm couldn’t keep up. This suggests that the brain continually modifies the internal code that relays information between different internal circuits.
Science fiction explores the possibility of transferring our memories and experiences into hardware devices directly from our brains. If future technology eventually allows us to upload and download our thoughts and memories, we may find that our brain cannot interpret its own activity patterns if they are replayed many years later. The concept of an apple — its colour, flavour, taste and the memories associated with it — may remain consistent, but the patterns of activity it evokes in the brain may change completely over time.
Such conundra will likely remain speculative for the immediate future, but experimental technology that achieves a limited version of such mind reading is already a reality, as this study shows. Brain-machine interfaces are a rapidly maturing technology, and human neural interfaces that can control prosthetics and external hardware have been in clinical use for over a decade. The work from the Cambridge group highlights a major open challenge in extracting reliable information from the brain.
“Even though we can now monitor brain activity and relate it directly to memories and experiences, the activity patterns themselves continually change over a period of several days,” said O’Leary, who is a Lecturer in Information Engineering and Medical Neuroscience. “Our study shows that in spite of this change, we can construct and maintain a relatively stable ‘dictionary’ to read out what an animal is thinking as it navigates a familiar environment.
“The work suggests that our brains are never at rest, even when we are not learning anything about the external world. This has major implications for our understanding of the brain and for brain-machine interfaces and neural prosthetics.”
Space to grow, or grow in space — how vertical farms could be ready to take-off
Vertical farms with their soil-free, computer-controlled environments may sound like sci-fi. But there is a growing environmental and economic case for them, according to new research laying out radical ways of putting food on our plates.
The interdisciplinary study combining biology and engineering sets down steps towards accelerating the growth of this branch of precision agriculture, including the use of aeroponics which uses nutrient-enriched aerosols in place of soil.
Carried out by the John Innes Centre, the University of Bristol and the aeroponic technology provider LettUs Grow, the study identifies future research areas needed to accelerate the sustainable growth of vertical farming using aeroponic systems.
Dr Antony Dodd, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and senior author of the study, says: “By bringing fundamental biological insights into the context of the physics of growing plants in an aerosol, we can help the vertical farming business become more productive more quickly, while producing healthier food with less environmental impact.”
Jack Farmer, Chief Scientific Officer at LettUs Grow and one of the authors of the study, adds: “Climate change is only going to increase the demand for this technology. Projected changes in regional weather patterns and water availability are likely to impact agricultural productivity soon. Vertical farming offers the ability to grow high value nutritious crops in a climate resilient manner all year round, proving a reliable income stream for growers.”
Vertical farming is a type of indoor agriculture where crops are cultivated in stacked systems with water, lighting and nutrient sources carefully controlled.
It is part of a rapidly growing sector supported by artificial intelligence in which machines are taught to manage day to day horticultural tasks. The industry is set to grow annually by 21% by 2025 according to one commercial forecast (Grand View Research, 2019).
Green benefits include better use of space because vertical farms can be sited in urban locations, fewer food miles, isolation from pathogens, reduction in soil degradation and nutrient and water recapturing and recycling.
Vertical farms also allow product consistency, price stabilization, and cultivation at latitudes incompatible with certain crops such as the desert or arctic.
“Vertical systems allow us to extend the latitude range on which crops can be grown on the planet, from the deserts of Dubai to the 4-hour winter days of Iceland. In fact, if you were growing crops on Mars you would need to use this kind of technology because there is no soil,” says Dr Dodd.
The study, which appears in the journal New Phytologist, lays out seven steps — strategic areas of future research needed to underpin increased productivity and sustainability of aeroponic vertical farms.
These seek to understand:
Why aeroponic cultivation can be more productive than hydroponic or soil cultivation.
The relationship between aeroponic cultivation and 24-hour circadian rhythms of plants.
Root development of a range of crops in aeroponic conditions.
The relationship between aerosol droplet size and deposition and plant performance.
How we can establish frameworks for comparing vertical farming technologies for a range of crops.
How aeroponic methods affect microbial interactions with plant roots.
The nature of recycling of root exudates (fluids secreted by the roots of plants) within the nutrient solutions of closed aeroponic systems.
The report argues that a driver of technological innovation in vertical farms is minimizing operation costs whilst maximizing productivity — and that investment in fundamental biological research has a significant role.
Dr Dodd’s research area covers circadian rhythms — biological clocks which align plant physiology and molecular processes to the day to day cycle of light and dark. He recently completed a year-long Royal Society Industry Fellowship with LettUs Grow.
This involved combining Dr Dodd’s expertise in circadian rhythms and plant physiology with the work of LettUs Grow’s team of biologists and engineers to design optimal aeroponic cultivation regimens. This is a key area of investigation as these molecular internal timers will perform differently in vertical farms.
Aeroponic platforms are often used to grow high value crops such as salads, pak choi, herbs, small brassica crops, pea shoots and bean shoots. LettUs Grow are also working on growth regimens for fruiting and rooting crops such as strawberries and carrots, as well as aeroponic propagation of trees for both fruit and forestry.
John Innes Centre researchers have bred a line of broccoli adapted to grow indoors for a major supermarket and one of the aims of research will be to test how we can genetically tune more crops to grow in the controlled space of vertical farms.
Bethany Eldridge, a researcher at the University of Bristol studying root-environment interactions and first author of the study adds: “Given that 80% of agricultural land worldwide is reported to have moderate or severe erosion, the ability to grow crops in a soilless system with minimal fertilizers and pesticides is advantageous because it provides an opportunity to grow crops in areas facing soil erosion or other environmental issues such as algal blooms in local water bodies that may have been driven by traditional, soil-based, agriculture.”
Lilly Manzoni, Head of Research and Development at LettUs Grow and one the authors of the study says, “This paper is unique because it is broader than a typical plant research paper, it combines the expertise of engineers, aerosol scientists, plant biologists and horticulturalists. The wonderful thing about controlled environment agriculture and aeroponics is that it is truly interdisciplinary.”
The study Getting to the Roots of Aeroponic Indoor Farming appears in the New Phytologist journal.
