STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Use it or lose it applies to the brain, according to a study of more than 2,000 persons of Medicare-age living independently in the community. Mental exercise for high-functioning seniors slowed the expected decline in their thinking ability even five years after a brief intervention, researchers here reported. However, the effect of cognitive training on functional skills — the ability to handle everyday tasks — was less clear and less compelling, according to a report in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Compared with an untreated control group, cognitive training resulted in improved cognitive abilities specific to the abilities trained that continued five years after the initiation, said Sherry Willis, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University here, and colleagues. But when it came to the failure of cognitive training to transfer to activities of daily living, it is possible, Dr. Willis said, that the full extent of cognitive training on everyday activities would take longer than five years in a population that was highly functioning at enrollment. The controlled single-blind trial recruited 2,832 adults in six U.S. cities (mean age, 73.6; 26% black) who lived independently […]
LONDON — Body weight and obesity could be affected not only by what we eat but also by how it is digested in the gut, American scientists said on Wednesday. They have discovered that levels of two types of good microbes or bacteria in the gut that help to break down foods are different in obese and lean people and mice. The finding, reported in the science journal Nature, could lead to a better understanding of why some people may be prone to obesity and help find new ways of preventing or treating it. ‘Our gut microbial structure should be considered when understanding the elements that might regulate our energy balance and may predispose us to obesity,’ Jeffrey Gordon, of the Washington University of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, said in an interview. ‘There is something very startling about the amount of fat you have and the structure of your gut microbial community,’ he added. There are trillions of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, but two groups called the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes are the most dominant and their proportion varies in lean and obese mice and humans. The scientists found that the proportion […]
An air stewardess is claiming religious discrimination against an airline which she says banned her from taking the Bible to Saudi Arabia. The stewardess has been told by BMI that it is against the law of the insular Middle Eastern country to bring in religious books other than the Koran. The woman, who is understood to be a committed Christian, takes her bible everywhere she goes and is now set to take the airline to an industrial tribunal claiming discrimination on religious grounds. BMI, formerly British Midland Airways, said today it was merely following the Foreign Office advice that no non-Islamic materials or artefacts are allowed into the country. A spokesman from the airline said: ‘We issue advice to all our staff and passengers that these are the guidelines. ‘She is saying she wants to carry her bible with her. We are saying we can’t start designing rules around individuals when we’ve got several hundred members of staff. To take every personal preference into account would be impossible.’ On its web site the Foreign Office says of Saudi Arabia: ‘The importation and use of narcotics, alcohol, pork products and religious books, apart from the […]
WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he plans to expand the size of the U.S. military to deal with the long-term fight against terrorism, The Washington Post reported on its Web site. Bush, who gave an interview to the newspaper on Tuesday, said he had instructed new Defense Secretary Robert Gates to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces, the Post said. ‘I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines,’ Bush said according to the Post. ‘And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.’
LONDON — The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day where it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth. Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future. Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation. ‘If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,’ said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The idea will not surprise science fiction aficionados. It was widely explored by Dr Isaac Asimov, one of the foremost science fiction […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
