Loneliness is a complex and usually unpleasant emotional response to isolation.Almost everyone experiences loneliness at some point in lives. 14~17% of adults over 65 are feel lonely, loneliness can increase the risk of poor health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, suicide and premature mortality.
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However, there is a study shows that loneliness can be the result of our built environments — the very homes we choose to live in. As a result, there is an antidote to loneliness, it’s an old way of living, but now tens of thousands of Danish people have been living in this connected way. This living style called cohousing.
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From the outside, cohousing looks no difference than any other small apartment building. Inside, the homes have traditional layout. All have living rooms and kitchens, bedrooms and baths, and there are nine of these homes around a central courtyard. The central courtyard makes this building become cohousing, since it creates social interactions that happen in and around that central courtyard. When people look across the courtyard, people can see each other. During every morning, neighbors can wave at each other furiously when they are making breakfasts.
The common house (which is the central courtyard) is the main point of cohousing. Since the common house creates the social interactions and promotes the community life.
Cohousing helps contribute to and elevate the spirit of community in each community. Although nothing can be perfect, you cannot be the best friends of every single person in a community. People always have differences and conflicts. But living in cohousing, people can intentional about relationships and motivate to resolve differences.
Most people are monophasic sleepers, meaning we get our sleep all in one large chunk of the day. While there are some cultures that set time during the day for sleep , such as a siesta in Mediterranean cultures, most people (try to) get 6-8 hours of sleep at night, to stay alert during the day. To adapt to the busy schedule of school or work, polyphasic sleep schedules have become more and more popular with whole communities dedicated to the odd sleeping pattern.
Polyphasic sleep refers to any sleep schedule where you get more than 2 phases of sleep in a day.
By segmenting sleeping phases, polyphasic sleepers are able to sleep for much less in total, sometimes only 3 hours a day. This leaves more time to be productive during the day. There is a transition period from monophasic to polyphasic that takes a lot of dedication to change, and most say their alertness drops significantly during this time. Those who have successfully transitioned say that in general, they are just as alert as they were with a monophasic schedule, and they no longer need to sleep for more than 6 hours a day. Despite the anecdotal benefits, most people fail to transition, or return back to a monophasic sleep schedule shortly after a successful transition.
Most people will find it hard to transition and stay in a polyphasic sleep schedule, simply because their work and social culture doesn’t allow it. With everyone else being monophasic sleepers, it gets difficult to stay connected to others. It also gets difficult to find a place at work to nap during the day.
Aside from the mental difficulties people face with a polyphasic sleep schedule, sleep professionals find it difficult to recommend polyphasic sleep to people. As Dr. Avidan, director of the Sleep Disorder Center at UCLA, says, “There is very little data—none whatsoever in the medical literature—of carefully designed clinical studies demonstrating that polyphasic sleep has any advantage in human sleep medicine.”
Sleep is not like a bank account, it takes a full night of sleep to recover from just 1 hour of lost sleep. By shifting sleep schedules, you also end up shifting a lot of physiological functions that can cause adverse consequences for your endocrine and metabolic systems.
Over the past decade, the world has witnessed numerous electronic devices coming to market. Billions of cell phones, laptops and tablets have been produced and all of these devices have become fixtures in people’s lives. With this rise in the usage of these devices, concerns also arose regarding the detrimental effects these devices. One of the problems brought up when discussing the problems with these devices is about their blue light emission.
Blue light is found in the visible spectrum of light between 400-450nm and has higher energy than other visible light, such as yellow light. Blue light emission today mainly comes from light emitting diodes or LEDs. The devices mentioned above all use LED screens that emit blue light. This exposure to blue light has been rumoured to cause a variety of health issues such as sleeping problems. More worryingly, however, blue light may shorten your lifespan.
Free photo of man looking at a cell phone screen in darkness from Needpix
In a study published last month, researchers showed that fruit flies that were exposed to blue light had a shorter lifespan than those who saw no blue light. The researchers divided the fruit flies into three groups: flies exposed to blue light for 12 hours, flies exposed to light with blue light filtered out for 12 hours and flies kept in complete darkness. They found that the flies exposed to blue light had reduced climbing ability compared to flies kept in the dark or those exposed to non-blue light. Additionally, these flies had higher brain neurodegeneration, which is the death of neurons. Furthermore, the flies exposed to blue light had significantly shorter lifespans compared to the other groups of flies. In this context, significance implies that these flies died sooner due to the blue light exposure rather than by chance or due to individual differences.
Another interesting result of this study was the inclusion of mutant flies without eyes in the study. These mutants also experienced brain damage, impaired movement and shorter lifespans when exposed to blue light compared to those not exposed to blue light. This suggests that blue light causes these effects by some mechanism other than retinal degradation. That mechanism, however, is unclear and more research is needed to determine how blue light causes these results.
In light of these results, it’s important to consider how to reduce blue light exposure. One way to reduce exposure would be to wear glasses that block blue light. These glasses have special lenses that filters out blue light and prevents it from hitting your eyes. Another way would be to turn to software. For example, twilight is an app you can download on your phone that automatically starts filtering out blue light after sunset to prevent interference with sleep. Similarly, PC and Mac users can also filter blue light by using the “Night Light” and “Night Shift” features found on their respective devices.
Free photo of glasses resting on a keyboard from Pixabay
Let’s face it, who doesn’t like a good bargain deal for clothing? No one enjoys going out of their way to pay a whopping sum of money just to keep in trend, and for those with that mentality, fast fashion is the way to go. However, behind all the glorious deals, that allow consumers to snag trending clothes at a reasonable price, comes a major cost to the environment.
The fast-fashion businesses has been booming especially in developed parts of the world, which raises eyebrows in concern for how sustainable practices are. Given the rate and magnitude at which these clothes are produced, it is at the same rate the unsold products are discarded and wasted. For example, these businesses claim their wasted, unsold merchandise is reportedly burned, thus further instigating the negative climate impact. And this does not even dive into the tragic details of production.
Certain synthetic materials such as polyester and nylon, not only have a lasting impact due to the stubborn nature of these materials being unable to biodegrade. These materials end up in marine ecosystems which affect the food chain from the bottom up which in turn have a ripple effect on larger mammals such as humans. There, we see the full circle coming together.
This raises concern whether fast-fashion culture needs to be stopped, and have more sustainable practices replacing it. The answer: it is complicated. Although it is a necessity to have more sustainable sources of clothing, the reality is that big giants such as: Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, these brands are not going to change if the consumer mind-set remains the same. As a matter of fact, the LA times reports that over 50% of adults under the age of 34 agreed they would make a switch to a more eco-friendly brand. Meanwhile, less the 40% of adults over the age of 50 had the same mindset. This is a tell tale sign that young people are the catalyst for the future. So, how would one go about making sustainable changes to their wardrobe? Check out Sedona’s take on how she made the switch!
Given this insight, thrift shopping is a possibility of creating a new business model that creates sustainable practices within our economy. Although this model is imperfect, and there is still some waste created, it is no where near the waste of fast-fashion businesses. Remember that improvement is better than staying stagnant, and remember that you have a lot more influence than you know.
“15% of Canadians have tried an e-cigarette.”(for more information click here) Teenagers and the youth (15 to 24 years) have the highest rates of trying vaping.
(The number of teens vaping has doubled in the past five years CREDIT: MARTINEDOUCET /ISTOCKPHOTO)
Behind the popularity, there are many consequences people may not know about. Although sometimes it called vapes, these devices do not produce water vapor, instead an aerosol. Aerosols contain many fine solid particles or liquid droplets that are created from e-liquid.
The main base of e-liquid is nicotine, propylene glycol and glycerin. Propylene glycol and glycerin are known as an important cause of bronchial irritation. Besides, we know very little about their safety for long-term inhalational exposure. “More than 500 people have been diagnosed with vaping-related breathing illnesses, but the cause remains unknown,” U.S. health officials said on 9.19.2019. (We’re still monitoring the relation and will update the content when more information is available.)
In addition, some e-cigarette manufacturers add alcohol in the e-liquids but without indication. The level of alcohol varied with recipes with different flavours, sometimes in high levels, and inhaling alcohol is known to have toxic effects on the brain. It puts people at high risk for alcohol poisoning and increase the possibility for alcohol addiction.
E-cigarettes are technically simple devices. They look nothing like cigarettes, and come in various shapes, sizes and colours; at the same time, most of them are very portable. Compared with traditional cigarette, vape is not easy to spot by parents and teachers. However, e-cigarettes can expose teens to a lot of nicotine. The nicotine concentration in some single-used vapes is comparable as a full pack of cigarettes. Teens brain are very sensitive: even low levels of nicotine are very addictive for teen brains. As a result, the vape may lead the entire generation of youth to be nicotine-addicted.
If we want to protect our health and the health of our next generation, probably we should get out of the habit of automatically celebrating new technology ,and then get into the habit of looking at new things with a critical eye, knowing more fact about vapes may help us.
How does one capture a very delicate animal such as the jelly? The research conducted at Harvard University in Cambridge lead by Nina Sinatra has the answer.
They engineered a robot that mimics a human hand to capture delicate Jellies whose body is 95% water, slippery, and very soft. This robot, which they presented on August 28th, 2019, can capture a Jelly using its soft foamy fingers in a hug like motion. Before researchers were forced to use their own hands, which the jelly could slip from or use nets that could harm the incredibly delicate, and fragile tissue, or worse, robots made to capture other brittle sea animals such as sea cucumber would tear jellies apart.
The problem with capturing jellies without hurting them was an obstacle to fascinating scientific research. So far, Jellies have helped us learn vital information such as techniques to study microscopic organisms and macro-molecules with Green Fluorescence Tag microscopy. In this method, green fluorescence protein is extracted from jellies and used to dye parts of the cell and study vital information such as gene expression.
Jellies Have the potential to teach us far more, as they have many abilities that could be of assistance to us. For example, Jellies can reverse their aging process, and that is one of the things that humanity has been trying to reach since its beginning, leading to legends or stories such as “fountain of youth.”
Now this robot’s impressive structure can help open the door to opportunities that jellies hold for us. The machine incorporates a 3D printed palm that has the shape of a rectangular box with six fingers made of soft rubbery silicone attached. The fingers have a more rigid side made of nanofibers and channels of water that go through the fingers. When the jelly is in contact, the robot pumps water into the fingers, which causes them to bend on the more on, the stiffer side and close in the jelly.
This foamy robot is a step to further discoveries for a brighter future. The abilities of this robot can give scientists the opportunity to study more fragile and hard to capture marine animals. In addition, using robots similar to this to collect specimen can reduce potential harm to animals and make research more friendly.
It has become a common trend for businesses to ban plastic straws in order to “save the oceans’. The real question is, how much do straws affect our planet?
In a recent study, it has been estimated that between 4.8- 12.7 million tons of plastic waste has entered the ocean. With the knowledge of there being great amounts of plastic in the oceans, we can now consider the effects they have on the ocean.
According to the Ocean Conservancy organization, there was over 9.3 million kilograms of trash picked up through the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC). Out of the ten most picked up items in the ocean, plastic straws was ranked 6th, with over 600,000 straws being picked up. This is an excessive amount of plastic that isn’t necessary for most people. This effect would likely have detrimental impacts on the ecosystem.
The video called ‘Why plastic straws suck’, discusses some of the main problems with plastic straws that has the potential to have negative impacts. One problem with plastic straws is their size. They are often missed in modern recycling equipment and therefore end up in the trash.
Plastic in the ocean system as discussed in another study, has potential risk to marine animals, from being poisoned due to digestion of the debris and entanglement in the plastic. It’s a known fact that marine animals are essential to our ecosystem, so humans should try to protect them from plastic pollutants.
The ban of plastic straws has the potential to greatly reduce the top 6th plastic pollutant, therefore making a positive impact on the marine ecosystem. Eliminating straws has been shown to make a difference to our planet, but in order to ensure that we protect our planet, humans should focus on reducing all their wastes. There are many alternative options such as straw less lids, paper and metals straws are now a highly popular alternative to plastic straws. Humans should consider small steps they can take that will positively support the marine ecosystem and overall the planet itself.
The image of “music brain”. Retrieved from https://www.redbubble.com/people/enjoy riot/works/21210285-music-brain?p=poster
Music isn’t music until your brain makes it so. Sounds can be noise in one context and music in another. We can determine whether one person is speaking or singing. According to the “speech-to-song illusion“, if you pull out a phrase from a spoken sentence and repeats it over and over again, our brain will interpret them in a way that makes it sounds musical. Then, if you listen to the entire sentence again, it will sound as if the person suddenly start to sing when he/she gets to the repeated part, but the sounds reaching the ear are the same in all those cases. So, what is changed in our brain?
The vast majority of people love some kind of music. This characteristic of music, the fact that it’s universally loved but highly subjective, has ensured that it continues to baffle us.
Do we actually need music in our life?
We all need certain things to survive and reproduce: food, water, sex, etc. Human brains have evolved in such a way that when we don’t have those things, we seek them out. They become enjoyable, and we define them as “biological reinforcers.” However, music is just a bunch of sounds strung together, it doesn’t provide us with the essential nutrients; it doesn’t bind to our neurons the way drugs do; nor it doesn’t ensure that our genes live on although that might be debatable. So why have we chosen to devote our valuable energy and resources to its production and possession? A research study by Honning et al., suggest three theories regarding the musical sound evolution:
Music as sexual display: human music, as in birds and other animals, is an effective display of intelligence and/or strength that can be used to attract a mate.
Music to soothe infants: some parents communicate in a musical way with their babies, cooing at them in lullaby speech and singing them to sleep. It could help forge parent-child bonds and allowed us to teach our helpless young in the time before they could speak.
Music for the group: music is a useful tool for social communication between adults and helped strengthen group identities.
Although music is not directly important for our survival but instead, it plays a mediating role as a technological advancement that served many useful purposes and positive impacts that we kept it close to us which make us feel good and pleasurable.
What happens to our brain when we listen to music?
When people listen to the music they enjoy, our brain generates similar patterns of activity and would likely enhance the creative ability regardless of one’s genre preference. A study conducted by Wilkins et al., evaluated brain networks from 21 young adults with the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to iconic musical selections on their favourite song, the music genre they like and dislike. As a result, the researchers found that a person’s preferred musical piece would likely enhance the connection across the default mode network (DMN)between different regions of the brains.
An fMRI image of brain activity when people listen to the type of music they like, dislike and their favourite. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/srep06130/figures/2
The DMN is associated with support of inner functional brain states, such as the introspection, self-awareness, mind-wandering and possibly imagination. When the DMN is activated, the brain region involved in goal-oriented activity, called the cognitive-executive network (CEN), is shut down. Contrary to DMN, the cognitive-executive network is most active during cognitive tasks including attention and working memory. With that being said, the enhancement of connection across DMN causes the release of dopamine, a type of neurotransmitter that released when we feel pleasure that associated with rewards such as food, drugs and sex. Due to the release of dopamine, our brain encourages us to keep listening to music. Surprisingly, in other word, it is basically the brain telling us whether or not we should listen to music.
Another study by Halassa et al. studied how to switch between these two modes of brain network on mice. As a result, patients suffer from certain brain disorders found to involve trouble with either activating one of the mode or switching between the two. Moreover, the researchers suggest that people with autism that have difficulties with DMN activity could possibly be treated with music therapy.
Image of “music therapy”. Retrieved from https://www.mskcc.org/experience/patient-support/activities/music-therapy
There are still many ambiguous questions on the connection between music and mental states. Using the information from current and future studies, we can address issues that individuals have regarding the mechanism of music in our brain and the therapeutic elements beneficial to mental health. Furthermore, scientifically designed music and neurotechnology can facilitate positive changes in brain chemistry, function and structure through the simple practice of listening.
We are at the point where our world is so heavily dependent on plastics we can’t function without them. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that according to Statista, the world’s plastic production was a whopping 348 million tons in 2017. So why talk about plastics? Well let’s find out.
It’s very difficult to ignore the number of climate change movements happening all around the world recently; the effects of global warming has been evident over the past decade and it’s crucial to discuss the biggest contributing factor that can be seen in the video below: greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases are gases in our atmosphere that trap heat and overtime, make the earth a gigantic oven. The more greenhouse gases we have, the warmer our earth will get and more severe damage done to different environments and their ecosystems. Some common greenhouses people may be familiar with are: carbon dioxide, methane and water. To bring it all together, the number one source of greenhouse emissions is the human activity of burning fossil fuels.
Industries commonly use what we call petroleum-based plastics when creating products. Petroleum-based plastics are typically made from carbon atoms and do not degrade naturally. Although some petroleum-based plastics are “recycled”, the reality is that this process also isn’t very efficient. A study done in 2017 by Roland Geyer stated that while 9% of the plastic produced was being recycled and 79% were sitting in landfills or natural environments, 12% was being incinerated. This is one way petroleum-based plastics contribute to burning of fossil fuels and release carbon dioxide into the air.
So why does this matter?
There are alternatives to using plastics! In fact, there are many that are being researched. Bioplastics, or often referred to as bio-based plastics, are ones that are made not from petroleum but from plants or other biological materials. These release significantly less greenhouse gases into the air as opposed to petroleum-based plastics.
Image: Pixabay
Common sources of bioplastics are plants like corn or sugarcanes where they extract sugars to change into polylactic acids (PLA) or microorganisms which produce polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA). These chemicals are then made into polymers, which are long chains after going through chemical reactions.
However, the full transition to bioplastics face some challenges. These bioplastics are not cost-efficient at the moment, especially to industries that are looking to profit. Petroleum-based plastics are much more affordable for production and usage but bioplastics, being a relatively new industry, are not fully developed which increases the cost of production. There are also concerns whether bioplastics can cause more harm than good environmentally because they are still relatively new.
But give it some time, resources and support then the bioplastic research will develop more and more until it becomes flawless. A recent study done in 2019 by Mohammad Asif Ali shows progress with bioplastics as he explained a new mechanism to create higher performance plastics. Nothing starts off perfect, and the research on bioplastics is definitely not an exception.
With summer long gone, you may be thinking: “There’s barely any sun! What’s the point?” Researchshows that the summer staple may actually be necessary all year round.
UV Radiation
To appreciate sunscreen, we must first understand what exactly it’s protecting us from. The sun emits high-energy ultraviolet (UV) radiation on to the Earth’s surface. UV rays are present even in the rainiest of days: essentially, you are exposed to UV radiation the moment that you step outside your home. Think about how many times you’ve been outside in your lifetime: all that time counts as exposure to UV radiation! Multiplestudies have linked long-term UV radiation exposure to an increased risk of melanoma skin cancer.
There are three types of UV radiation: UVA, UVB, and UVC. Since UVC rays do not reach the Earth’s surface, they are unable to cause direct skin damage.
UVA accounts for 95% of the UV radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface. It can penetrate into the dermis layer of the skin and result to premature skin aging (e.g. fine lines and wrinkles, hyperpigmentation). UVA can also generate free radicals that are known to cause DNA damage, and may increase the risk of melanoma. A study found that these free radicals can also destroy the skin barrier (which includes collagen) thus lead to the loss of skin elasticity.
UVB is responsible for the other 5% of UV radiation: this type of UV mainly affects the epidermis skin layer. UVB increases the skin’s melanin production: it’s what allows you to achieve that sun-kissed glow, or sunburns if you tan for too long. UVB has also been linked to causing direct DNA damage and skin cancer.
Sunscreen contains inorganic and organic chemicals that work together to block UVA and UVB rays. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide are the main inorganic compounds formulated into today’s sunscreens. These compounds work mainly by reflecting UV radiation, but some are able to absorb and dissipate the UV rays. Organic compounds, such as avobenzone, contain bonds that can absorb the photons of UV light and release its energy as heat. Some of these compounds may break down as they absorb more UV light; this explains why sunscreen reapplication is encouraged.
Hopefully, you’ve shopped for sunscreen before and stumbled upon terms like “Broad-spectrum”, “SPF”, and “PA+++”. What exactly do these mean? To put it simply, these terms refer to the level of protection provided by sunscreen. “Broad-spectrum” refers to a sunscreen that blocks both UVA and UVB radiation. Its sun protection factor (SPF) describes its ability to protect from UVB, while its protection grade (PA) indicates its ability to protect from UVA.
The perception of sunscreen only being necessary in the summer needs some changing. In a way, sunscreen allows for a graceful aging process, and more importantly, protect us from skin cancer. The sun and its UV rays are present year round after all, so we should aim to stay protected accordingly.
