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Category Archives: Mind Building
Health24.com | How to help your teen use social media safely
Social media is now a key part of American youngsters’ lives, so parents need to provide guidance and rules to help them enjoy its benefits and protect them from potential dangers, experts say.
Social media can help kids connect and find others who share their interests and concerns, say specialists at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Health Network, which comprises more than 160 paediatricians.
Rules and privacy settings
But those benefits come with potential threats. Among them: cyberbullying and cyberstalking, exposure to inappropriate content, distraction from homework, social isolation, privacy issues, and anxiety caused by unrealistic comparisons with others.
While kids can have social media accounts starting at age 13, it’s best to keep them off social media for as long as possible, said Dr Bhavana Arora, medical director of the network.
When children do start using social media, parents should talk with them about rules and privacy settings. Parents who are unfamiliar with the sites or apps their children are using should learn about them.
Parents also need to lead by example, putting their phones aside and spending time with their kids, said Dr Jennifer Hartstein, whose practice is part of the network.
Never share passwords
“Be available, and create media-free spaces in your family life,” Hartstein said in a network news release. “Teenagers can get plenty of content online, but they need parents to give them values.”
As soon as teens open social media accounts, parents should “friend” them. This might be more difficult when they get older, Hartstein said.
Young people should never allow people they don’t know personally into their social media networks, and should never share passwords with anyone. Encourage them to think carefully before posting anything online.
Parents should review their children’s privacy settings, monitor their online activity, and talk to them about what they see to identify problems and find solutions together.
Image credit: iStock
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Coda waves reveal carbon dioxide storage plume
Pumping carbon dioxide into the ground to remove it from the atmosphere is one way to lower greenhouse gases, but keeping track of where that gas is, has been a difficult chore. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State and Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory are using previously ignored seismic waves to pinpoint and track the gas clouds.
“We usually don’t look at coda waves, we usually throw them out,” said Tieyuan Zhu, professor of geophysics, Penn State. “If we look at a carbon dioxide plume underground with P waves we don’t see any change in shape, but if we use the late-arriving waves, the coda waves, we see a change.”
P waves are the fastest seismic body waves that pass through the Earth after an earthquake or explosion. S waves are slower body waves. Coda waves come later and are disorganized, but they can reveal where gases are stored in the ground, because the combination of rock and gas alters the waves.
When carbon dioxide is stored underground, it is pumped over a mile deep into geological spaces and is usually over 150 degrees Fahrenheit and at high pressure. Ideally, researchers would like the gas to stay at that depth forever. Current monitoring methods are difficult, expensive and can only be done periodically. Tracking the plumes with coda waves also has the benefit of better estimation of the total amount of gas in the reservoir, rather than just a local region.
“Current technology is very expensive,” said Zhu. “We are looking for an economical method to monitor the gas.”
Standard monitoring now is done at six-month or yearly intervals. The researchers hope that by using permanent seismic sources and coda wave analysis they can monitor much more frequently — days or weeks.
“Our future experiments would test real-time monitoring systems,” said Zhu. “In that way, we could detect small changes in the gas plume. Chris Marone, professor of geosciences at Penn State, also is working on the project. Work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was carried out by staff scientists Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, and Thomas Daley.
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ALMA differentiates two birth cries from a single star
Astronomers have unveiled the enigmatic origins of two different gas streams from a baby star. Using ALMA, they found that the slow outflow and the high speed jet from a protostar have misaligned axes and that the former started to be ejected earlier than the latter. The origins of these two flows have been a mystery, but these observations provide telltale signs that these two streams were launched from different parts of the disk around the protostar.
Stars in the Universe have a wide range of masses, ranging from hundreds of times the mass of the Sun to less than a tenth of that of the Sun. To understand the origin of this variety, astronomers study the formation process of the stars, that is the aggregation of cosmic gas and dust.
Baby stars collect the gas with their gravitational pull, however, some of the material is ejected by the protostars. This ejected material forms a stellar birth cry which provides clues to understand the process of mass accumulation.
Yuko Matsushita, a graduate student at Kyushu University and her team used ALMA to observe the detailed structure of the birth cry from the baby star MMS5/OMC-3 and found two different gaseous flows: a slow outflow and a fast jet. There have been a handful of examples with two flows seen in radio waves, but MMS5/OMC-3 is exceptional.
“Measuring the Doppler shift of the radio waves, we can estimate the speed and lifetime of the gas flows,” said Matsushita, the lead author of the research paper that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal. “We found that the jet and outflow were launched 500 years and 1300 years ago, respectively. These gas streams are quite young.”
More interestingly, the team found that the axes of the two flows are misaligned by 17 degrees. The axis of the flows can be changed over long time periods due to the precession of the central star. But in this case, considering the extreme youth of the gas streams, researchers concluded that the misalignment is not due to precession but is related to the launching process.
There are two competing models for the formation mechanism of the protostellar outflows and jets. Some researchers assume that the two streams are formed independently in different parts of the gas disk around the central baby star, while others propose that the collocated jet is formed first, then it entrains the surrounding material to form the slower outflows. Despite extensive research, astronomers had not yet reached a conclusive answer.
A misalignment in the two flows could occur in the ‘independent model,’ but is difficult in the ‘entrainment model.’ Moreover, the team found that the outflow was ejected considerably earlier than the jet. This clearly backs the ‘independent model.’
“The observation well matches the result of my simulation,” said Masahiro Machida, a professor at Kyushu University. A decade ago, he performed pioneering simulation studies using a supercomputer operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. In the simulation, the wide-angle outflow is ejected from the outer area of the gaseous disk around a prototar, while the collimated jet is launched independently from the inner area of the disk. Machida continues, “An observed misalignment between the two gas streams may indicate that the disk around the protostar is warped.”
“ALMA’s high sensitivity and high angular resolution will enable us to find more and more young, energetic outflow-and-jet-systems like MMS 5/OMC-3,” said Satoko Takahashi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Joint ALMA Observatory and co-author of the paper. “They will provide clues to understand the driving mechanisms of outflows and jets. Moreover studying such objects will also tell us how the mass accretion and ejection processes work at the earliest stage of star formation.”
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Health24.com | Could diet sodas raise an older woman’s stroke risk?
Older women, beware: New research warns that drinking a lot of diet sodas or artificially sweetened fruit juices may increase your risk for stroke.
In a study that tracked nearly 82 000 postmenopausal women, those who drank two or more diet drinks per day saw their overall stroke risk rise by 23%, compared with those who consumed diet drinks less than once a week.
Only an association
Blocked arteries were often the main culprit, with heavy diet drink consumption linked to a 31% greater risk for an ischaemic stroke, which is triggered by a clot, the study findings showed.
Study author Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani acknowledged that an “association does not imply causation”. But she stressed that the findings held up even after taking into account the nutritional value of each participant’s overall diet.
So, “we can’t assume these diet drinks are harmless, particularly when consumed at high levels,” Mossavar-Rahmani said.
“The take-home message is that these findings give us pause,” she added. “We need to do more research on why we are seeing these associations. What are the scientific mechanisms? Is there something about the artificial sweeteners, for example, that affect the bacteria in the gut and lead to health issues?”
Mossavar-Rahmani is an associate professor in the department of epidemiology and population health’s division of health promotion and nutrition research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City.
The study authors pointed out that the American Heart Association (AHA) has recently underscored the lack of sufficient research into the cardiovascular impact of diet sodas. Until more work is done, the AHA says the jury remains out on whether artificially sweetened beverages do or do not hasten heart disease.
Variety of risk factors
Women in the latest study were between 50 and 79 when they first enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative trial between 1993 and 1998.
Investigators tracked the general health of all the enrollees for an average of nearly 12 years. During that time – at the three-year mark – all the women were asked to indicate how frequently they consumed diet sodas and diet fruit drinks over a three-month period.
The researchers did not take note of which brands of artificially sweetened drinks the women drank, and so did not know which artificial sweeteners were being consumed.
That said, nearly two-thirds of the women consumed diet sodas or drinks very infrequently, meaning less than once a week or never. Only about 5% were found to be “heavy” consumers of artificially sweetened drinks.
After taking into consideration a variety of stroke risk factors – including blood pressure status, smoking history and age – the study team concluded that heavy consumption of diet drinks did appear to be tied to cardiovascular risks in a number of ways.
For example, those women who drank two or more diet beverages a day saw their overall risk for developing heart disease increase by 29%. They were also 16% more likely to die prematurely from any cause.
Certain groups fared even worse: Among obese women and black women with no history of heart disease or diabetes, a diet drink habit pushed clot-driven stroke risk up by roughly twofold and fourfold, respectively, the researchers reported.
More research needed
Whether or not the findings would apply to either men or younger women remains unclear, the study authors noted.
The findings were published online in the journal Stroke.
Lona Sandon is programme director of the department of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
She agreed that more research is needed to further explore a possible diet drink-heart disease connection. But for now Sandon offered simple advice: diet or regular, sodas offer no nutritional value other than calories.
“If they replace other drinks, such as milk and 100% fruit or vegetable drinks, then these women miss out on valuable nutrition for protecting the heart and vascular system,” Sandon warned.
Safe and beneficial
“The nutrition you are missing because you are drinking artificially sweetened beverages instead may be the real problem,” she said.
A group representing the artificial sweetener industry offered another caveat about the findings – that many women who drink diet drinks are already struggling with weight issues.
“It is likely study subjects were already at a greater health risk and chose low-calorie sweetened beverages to manage their calorie and sugar intake as these products are proven safe and beneficial for those managing their weight and blood glucose levels,” said Robert Rankin, president of the Calorie Control Council.
“The contribution of reverse causality, meaning that individuals already at a greater risk of stroke and cardiovascular events chose low-calorie sweetened beverages, is very likely the cause of the associations presented by these researchers,” the council added in a statement.
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | 5 tips to prevent incontinence-associated dermatitis
Incontinence can have far-reaching effects on aspects of your daily life, like your self-esteem and normal routine. But, apart from that, it can also affect your skin.
Incontinence-associated dermatitis (IAD) is a term used to refer to inflammation of the skin caused by the frequent contact with urine (urinary incontinence) or stools (faecal incontinence).
The bacteria in urine or stools can gradually weaken the skin’s protective barrier. This leads to inflammation of the skin, which can cause a painful rash.
IAD is something caretakers and nurses are made aware of when they care for a bedridden patient with incontinence. But what about those who don’t experience incontinence to the extent that they require diapers and aren’t bedridden?
Even a tiny amount of urine can cause skin irritation. It is therefore important to watch out for any signs of dermatitis, which may include itching, burning, redness and a rash.
Here are five tips on how to prevent IAD:
1. Clean your skin as soon as urinary contact occurs
Urine that comes into contact with the skin weakens its protective barrier, and the longer urine stays in contact with the skin, the more likely it is that it will become irritated. Avoiding this is easier said than done as you don’t always have access to full washing facilities during the day. You can, however, pack the essentials in your work bag – ensure that you are fully stocked on unscented wet wipes and a barrier cream that will sooth, moisturise and fix the skin’s protective barrier.
If you are able to shower, wash with lukewarm – not hot – water and a gentle soap.
2. Maintain your skin’s pH level
To ensure a healthy skin, it’s important to maintain a slightly acidic pH level of 5.5. This helps to keep the skin’s acid mantle intact, allowing it to heal when damage occur. Soaps or shower gels that are too harsh or fragranced can strip the acid mantle. Use gentle, unscented soaps and lotions, especially around the areas that come into contact with urine and underwear.
3. Invest in absorbent pads
Products for urinary absorption are becoming more discreet and you shouldn’t feel embarrassed about using them. These will trap urine and minimise contact between urine and the skin. Use products that are specifically aimed at incontinence, as menstrual pads are not designed to absorb urine.
4. Choose underwear wisely
Wear clothes that will minimise friction on the skin. Natural, breathable fabrics such as cotton will also keep sweating at bay, which can worsen skin irritation.
5. Keep protecting the skin’s barrier
Use petroleum-based moisturisers or cream that contains zinc oxide to reduce any chafing, especially when you exercise. It’s important to keep the skin moisturised to maintain its protective barrier.
Image credit: iStock
Child supplements ‘mislead parents’ over vitamin D
Few children’s multivitamins give the recommended daily vitamin D dose, a study suggests.
Children ‘failed in first 1,000 days’, says MPs
A group of MPs wants a “revolution” in early years support, including more health visitor contacts.
New research casts doubt on cause of Angkor’s collapse
New University of Sydney research has revealed the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor underwent a gradual decline in occupation rather than an abrupt collapse.
Researchers have long debated the causes of Angkor’s demise in the 15th century. Historical explanations have emphasised the role of aggressive neighbouring states, and the abandonment of Angkor in 1431 A.D. has been portrayed as a catastrophic demographic collapse.
However, new scientific evidence shows that the intensity of land use within the economic and administrative centre of the city declined gradually more than 100 years before the supposed collapse, implying a very different end to the city.
Associate Professor Dan Penny from the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences examined sediment drill-cores extracted from the moat surrounding Angkor Thom, the last and largest of Angkor’s walled citadels.
“Changes in land use leave tell-tale traces in sedimentary deposits that can be measured. Measuring these traces in drill-cores allows us to reconstruct what people were doing in the landscape over long periods of time,” Associate Professor Penny said.
In a new study published in PNAS, Associate Professor Penny and co-authors show that evidence for forest disturbance, soil erosion and burning all declined in the first decades of the 14th century, suggesting a sustained decline in land-use in the commercial and administrative heart of the ancient city. By the end of the 14th century, the moat was covered in floating swamp vegetation, which indicates that it was no longer being maintained.
The findings suggest Angkor’s demise was not a catastrophic collapse caused by the Ayutthayan invasion or by infrastructural failure, but a gradual demographic shift by the urban elite.
“Our study suggests the inhabitants didn’t leave Angkor because the infrastructure failed, rather the infrastructure failed (or was not maintained or repaired) because the urban elite had already left,” said Associate Professor Penny.
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Ancient rocks provide clues to Earth’s early history
Oxygen in the form of the oxygen molecule (O2), produced by plants and vital for animals, is thankfully abundant in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Researchers studying the history of O2 on Earth, however, know that it was relatively scarce for much of our planet’s 4.6 billion-year existence.
So when and where did O2 begin to build up on Earth?
By studying ancient rocks, researchers have determined that sometime between 2.5 and 2.3 billion years ago, Earth underwent what scientists call the “Great Oxidation Event” or “GOE” for short. O2 first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere at this time and has been present ever since.
Through numerous studies in this field of research, however, evidence has emerged that there were minor amounts of O2 in small areas of Earth’s ancient shallow oceans before the GOE. And in a study published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience, a research team led by scientists at Arizona State University (ASU) has provided compelling evidence for significant ocean oxygenation before the GOE, on a larger scale and to greater depths than previously recognized.
For this study, the team targeted a set of 2.5 billion-year-old marine sedimentary rocks from Western Australia known as the Mt. McRae Shale. “These rocks were perfect for our study because they were shown previously to have been deposited during an anomalous oxygenation episode before the Great Oxidation Event,” says lead author Chadlin Ostrander of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
Shales are sedimentary rocks that were, at some time in Earth’s past, deposited on the sea floor of ancient oceans. In some cases, these shales contain the chemical fingerprints of the ancient oceans they were deposited in.
For this research, Ostrander dissolved shale samples and separated elements of interest in a clean lab, then measured isotopic compositions on a mass spectrometer. This process was completed with the help of co-authors Sune Nielsen at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Massachusetts); Jeremy Owens at Florida State University; Brian Kendall at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada); scientists Gwyneth Gordon and Stephen Romaniello of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration; and Ariel Anbar of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and School of Molecular Sciences. Data collection took over a year and utilized facilities at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Florida State University, and ASU.
Using mass spectrometers, the team measured the thallium and molybdenum isotope compositions of the Mt. McRae Shale. This was the first time both isotope systems had been measured in the same set of shale samples. As hypothesized, a predictable thallium and molybdenum isotope pattern emerged, indicating that manganese oxide minerals were being buried in the sea floor over large regions of the ancient ocean. For this burial to occur, O2 needed to have been present all the way down to the sea floor 2.5 billion-years-ago.
These findings improve scientists’ understanding of Earth’s ocean oxygenation history. Accumulation of O2 was probably not restricted to small portions of the surface ocean prior to the GOE. More likely, O2 accumulation extended over large regions of the ocean and extended far into the ocean’s depths. In some of these areas, O2 accumulation seems to have even extended all the way down to the sea floor.
“Our discovery forces us to re-think the initial oxygenation of Earth,” states Ostrander. “Many lines of evidence suggest that O2 started to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere after about 2.5 billion years ago during the GOE. However, it is now apparent that Earth’s initial oxygenation is a story rooted in the ocean. O2 probably accumulated in Earth’s oceans — to significant levels, according to our data — well before doing so in the atmosphere.”
“Now that we know when and where O2 began to build up, the next question is why” says ASU President’s Professor and co-author Anbar. “We think that bacteria that produce O2 were thriving in the oceans long before O2 began to build up in the atmosphere. What changed to cause that build-up? That’s what we’re working on next.”
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Materials provided by Arizona State University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
