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The Print
2 days ago
- Health
- The Print
COVID-19 pandemic may have aged your brain, even if you weren't infected, finds UK study
According to the researchers, however, these changes could be 'partially reversible' but the most significant aspect highlighted in the study was how much simply living through the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic affected brain health. Using brain scans from nearly 1,000 healthy adults from before and after the pandemic, researchers found signs of faster brain ageing, especially in older adults, men, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of these samples, those who were infected with COVID-19 also showed some decline in thinking speed and flexibility. But overall, the pandemic's stress alone did shift brain structure in all individuals whose scans were reviewed. New Delhi: A new study from the University of Nottingham has found that just living through the COVID-19 pandemic may have aged people's brains faster, even if they never got infected with the virus itself. The peer-reviewed study was published on 22 July in the journal Nature Communications and is based on data from the UK Biobank Study. It's a powerful reminder that our environment matters for our brain's growth. Read more here. Also Read: A UK health study has collected a whopping 100,000 full-body scans, and Neanderthals had 'family recipes' Spiders originally came from the sea? Next, we might have evidence that spiders could have originally been sea creatures. At least that is what a new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Current Biology on 22 July suggests, after researchers closely examined a preserved fossil from half a billion years ago. The fossil is called Mollisonia symmetrica, and it has a nervous system very similar to that of modern-day arachnids like spiders and scorpions. Until now, scientists thought these creatures only evolved once their ancestors moved onto land 400 million years ago and have remained the same ever since. But this new study flips that theory on its head, quite literally. It cites evidence of the brain of the fossil Mollisonia, which shows a reversed organisation—a signature trait seen in today's arachnids. This arrangement may have given them faster reflexes, better control, and precision, which are all traits modern-day spiders use to hunt and weave webs. The fossil places Mollisonia as a close relative of modern arachnids, meaning these creatures might have started evolving in the ocean long before they crept onto land. Read more here. Scientists genome sequence 100-yr-old Spanish Flu virus A 100-year-old lung sample from Switzerland helped scientists decode the deadliest flu in human history. A new peer-reviewed study by researchers from the Universities of Basel and Zurich published in BMC Biology Journal on 1 July sequenced the genome of the 1918 'Spanish flu' virus. They used preserved tissue from a young patient who died during the pandemic's first wave in Switzerland. The Spanish flu that spread across Europe and Asia in the 1910s is said to have killed between 20-100 million people. By decoding the genome, scientists now have insights into how this flu had already adapted to humans early on. They found three key mutations in the genome—two which helped the virus evade the human immune system, and one which boosted its ability to infect human cells. What makes this study stand out is also how they conducted the study. In viral flus, the genetic information rests in the RNA, not the DNA. The RNA is very quick to degrade but these scientists developed a method to recover ancient viral RNA. This technique could open the door to learning more from historic outbreaks. Read more here. Arctic winter is melting, and researchers have noticed it A group of scientists led by Dr James Bradley from Queen Mary University, London, published a commentary in Nature Communications on 21 July talking about the 'shockingly warm' winter conditions in the Arctic. The team described how they had geared up for winter Arctic fieldwork in Svalbard, wearing layers of thermal clothing, only to find themselves drenched in rain, standing on bare grass, and working without even needing gloves in what is supposed to be the middle of winter in February 2025. Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago located where the Arctic Ocean converges with the Atlantic Ocean. In the commentary, they raised alarms about melted snow pools, blooming vegetation, and rain replacing snow in the Arctic Circle during winters. Svalbard is heating up six to seven times faster than the global average, and the Arctic winter is no longer reliably frozen, said the team. These conditions not only disrupted their research but also raised safety concerns, like how to retreat from polar bears without their snowmobiles working. The team warns that winter warming in the Arctic is not a fluke but rather the new norm. The message sent by the commentary is clear: climate policy needs to catch up, and fast. Read more here. Also Read: A fiery side-effect of melting glaciers & paging Dr Droid for gallbladder surgery
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mirror
Terrifying mystery illness leaves patients 'like statues' - with brains still working
A bizarre epidemic swept across countries and claimed the lives of an estimated half a million people, leaving many survivors forever changed - and it remains one of the biggest medical mysteries in history For 11 years, a mysterious illness swept across the globe, sending sufferers into what seemed like a deep sleep - sometimes for months. The illness is estimated to have killed about a third of those who were affected, with another third suffering debilitating neurological symptoms if they survived - and some even becoming frozen, like statues, while their minds were totally active as normal. But many unanswered questions still surround encephalitis lethargica - which is also called epidemic encephalitis. The medical community has never reached a consensus about what definitely caused the illness, or why it seemed to suddenly disappear overnight, going from an epidemic that raged across borders to only a handful of cases ever appearing globally over decades. Urgent probe as 10 Brits die after agonising reaction to weight loss jabs 'I am a loo historian – you'll never guess what Tudors used to wipe their bums' Encephalitis lethargica (EL) was called the 'sleepy sickness', and from 1916 to 1927, the disease is estimated to have claimed 500,000 lives, and infected more than a million people. No group of people was safe from this disease: it could infect anyone, no matter their age, class, or gender. Patients often initially presented with flu-like symptoms - a cough, sore throat, or a fever - before rapidly becoming seriously ill. They would become extremely sleepy, start to experience double vision. This extreme lethargy sometimes saw people essentially comatose for weeks or months, but disturbingly, they were not actually asleep, though they seemed to be. Inside their minds, they were often awake and completely aware of what was going on around them, but unable to move or react. The disease also had the ability to cause profound changes in patients' personalities and behaviours - the variety of symptoms that came along with EL made it hard for doctors to understand what they were treating. It was only in 1917 that EL was officially described as a new disease, with doctors across Europe initially baffled at the range of neurological symptoms that patients were presenting. Dr. Constantin von Economo from the Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic of the University of Vienna was the one to give EL its name, but the medical community, whilst recognising the epidemic's existence, was no closer to learning what was causing it, or how to stop it. In 1918, the Spanish Flu pandemic was underway, and doctors speculated that EL, which often came on after flu-like symptoms, could be some kind of post-viral issue or that the conditions were linked. One third of EL sufferers would, after the acute face of extended 'sleep', recover, but another third died during this stage because of respiratory complications. Autopsies conducted on some patients who lost their lives in this phase of the illness showed that a small part of the base of the brain was inflamed. The final third of EL sufferers faced a lifetime of terrifying symptoms, that ranged from criminal levels of impulsivity to becoming like statues. This again, like the seeming sleep endured in the first phase of the illness, saw their minds remain completely active, but trapped with a frozen body. After initially recovering from the acute phase, patients would find themselves enduring personality changes - with their loved ones beginning to find them markedly different from who they were before the illness took hold. They would become disinterested in the world around them and struggle to concentrate, but things would be poised to rapidly get worse. Little did the victims of this haunting disease know, their brains were rapidly degenerating - in what is called post-encephalitic parkinsonism (PEP), and the damage could never be undone. This particularly impacted young people, who would find themselves becoming more unpredictable over the following decades of their lives. Children who caught the disease would become inconsiderate, exceptionally clingy, have poor concentration, and be restless. Initially, this could be manageable, albeit still a big job for parents to deal with, but as they grew up, they would become nigh on impossible to handle. "As they grew in strength, their incorrigible impulsiveness escalated in violence and they posed a danger to themselves and others," explains The Conversation."Errant behaviours included cruelty to anyone who crossed them; destructiveness; lying; and self-mutilation including, in one example, removal of eyes. "When they reached adolescence, these patients manifested inappropriate and excessive sexuality, including sexual assault without regard for age or gender." Strangely, the sufferers of EL would be remorseful when they did wrong, and understand that they should not have behaved that way, but they simply had no impulse control whatsoever, and tragically, the only thing that stopped their often violent or criminal behaviour would be the PEP - which slowly but surely took away their ability to move. Those cases who did not see their Parkinson's symptoms worsen would, however, often become hardened criminals: stealing, raping, and murdering with impunity - but perhaps without the mental ability to be truly responsible for their actions. But for those who saw the Parkinson's worsen, a tragic path awaited: the essential parts of human life would drift away from them. Sufferers would lose all willpower, though their minds would be active, they would have no ability to take action. Beauty became unrecognisable to them - though they could still acknowledge the technical ability of a great artist, they could no longer connect. They could recognise other people's pain and suffering, but could no longer feel sympathy for those around them. Their faces would be totally blank, like a mask. Their muscles became increasingly rigid, stopping them from moving, and they could no longer properly take part in the world - though all along their minds still were in working order in many ways. Trapped inside their bodies, and the ability to connect stripped from them, they would spend decades living inside institutions, with no treatment ever found that had long-term success. But then, in 1927, the disease practically vanished overnight. The number of those diagnosed or presenting with these complex symptoms rapidly decreased, and in the last 85 years, there have only been 80 recorded cases. However, researchers are still looking into encephalitis and this type of swelling of the brain, which can be an autoimmune response or occur after a virus. Many mysteries still surround EL itself - but until answers are found to why this terrifying illness took hold so quickly, and went away out of nowhere, its threat remains.
New York Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Movie About the Year America Went Fully Berserk
In the early days of Covid, people grasping for precedents started reading up on the Spanish flu, the calamitous pandemic that began in 1918 and is thought to have killed 50 million people worldwide. More Americans died of that novel pathogen than in all our country's 20th-century wars combined. But unlike those wars, it didn't leave much of a cultural mark. With only a few exceptions, like the novel 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider,' it barely made its way into art or collective memory. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I remember finding this puzzling. When it was finally over, it made perfect sense. Having slogged through something hideous, many of us were desperate to move on. There have been a few Covid novels, a handful of mostly forgettable movies, and one truly great contemporaneous comedy special, Bo Burnham's 'Inside.' But mostly, artists have avoided reckoning with the apocalyptic events of 2020, even as we're still trapped in their terrible aftermath. That's why I was so excited to see Ari Aster's new movie, 'Eddington,' the first film I know of to really capture what it was like to be alive during the year America cracked up. A director best known for his berserk horror movies — especially the lurid, hallucinatory 'Midsommar' — he's well suited to tackling the nightmare of our national descent. During the pandemic, Aster told me, 'I was in a state of anxiety and constant dread. I still am now. It's worse than it was, and that's sort of the state that I was in while I was writing the script and making the film.' As someone who's been living in a similar state for years, I appreciated the way 'Eddington' metabolized it into art. Such art might not be pleasant, but it can help us get our bearings in a world plagued by viral, political and epistemological catastrophes. 'I have felt desperate for more art about this moment, and I'm always excited when I encounter anything that's grappling with whatever's happening,' Aster said. I feel exactly the same way. Aster's movie takes place in the fictional small town of Eddington, N.M., in the spring of 2020. The first half of the movie is a dark comedy about the conflict between Eddington's beleaguered conservative sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and its slick, tech-optimist liberal mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. They live in a community convulsed by battles over mask mandates, rampant conspiracy theories and racial justice protests and, in the background, a fight over the building of an artificial intelligence data center by a company called solidgoldmagikarp. But after starting as a quasi-realistic social satire, 'Eddington' morphs into something far more surreal and violent, as if its characters' mounting hysteria is infecting the storytelling itself. 'Eddington' was controversial when it premiered at Cannes; some people reportedly walked out, though the ones who stayed gave it a long standing ovation. Its politics are slippery; panning it in Vogue, Radhika Seth called out the film's 'punchlines about Black Lives Matter rallies, antiracist rhetoric, notions of 'dismantling whiteness,' people listing their pronouns on Zoom and perceived political correctness gone too far.' I understand where Seth is coming from; I had a somewhat similar impression during the first part of the movie, before it takes a shocking turn. (Here is the place to stop reading if you want to avoid even vague spoilers.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Otago Daily Times
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Letters to the Editor: City costs, open letter, first responders
Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including the cost of a city, Sir Ian Taylor's open letter and praise for first responders. It costs what it costs, be honest about that In recent months, I have been involved with an issue that relates to present and future demands on Dunedin's infrastructure. At the same time, we are coming up to local body elections and I am seeing would-be and present members of council touting their wares, sometimes in impressive full-page advertisements. It looks as though some candidates are trying to ''blow each other out of the water'' with copious lashings of money, but the message I see implies huge confidence - accompanied by poverty of real understanding of what it takes to run a city with creaking infrastructure and a lack of money to meet present and future needs. My vote would go to any candidate who openly says that rates will need to increase because past councillors have tried to keep rates down to the detriment of necessary infrastructure work. A candidate who says that it's time to face reality and stop blathering about efficiency gains and making the dollar go further. The ''bottom line'', for the benefit of those candidates who are silly enough or duplicitous enough to imply that a local body can be run like a business, is that it costs what it costs and cost cutting, over many years, has left Dunedin's infrastructure unfit for purpose. Glen Morgan Halfway Bush Fear and loathing My thanks for Steve Braunias' weekend column which alerted me to Sir Ian Taylor's open letter (which I had missed when published). Freedom of speech is essential to democracy, no matter how much one may disagree with the opinion expressed. Well done the ODT for publishing what has proven to be a contentious opinion - judging by today's letters. I sympathise with Sir Ian's chagrin at the betrayal of his hopes in PM Ardern, but therein lies the danger of pinning one's hopes on a leader. Having emigrated from the UK because of the duplicity, barefaced lies and amorality of PM, Tony Blair - I was very concerned when we first heard that Ms Ardern had worked for Blair. Like Ardern, Blair came to power on a tidal wave of hope and dreams which in due course he turned to dross. Though internationally acclaimed, Blair is loathed by the average Brit. Mark Twain: ''History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme''. Hugh O'Neill Dunedin Short term'ism Re Sir Ian Taylor's letter. We seem to have short memories around Covid-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Ardern's Labour government had, out the blue, an impossible scenario presented of a pandemic of such proportions that had not been seen since the Spanish Flu in 1918-19 which in a world population at the time of 1.8 billion killed an estimated 20 to 60 million people. Equate that in 2020 with a population of 8.2 billion: you do the maths. The very hard decision to go to restrictions of immigration and then lockdowns could not have been easy. To say that Ms Ardern had some kind of ulterior motive is plainly untrue. Sweden did not use lockdowns and as a consequence with of population or 10 million people had 23,800 deaths. New Zealand, with 5 million people, 3000 deaths. How many New Zealanders are alive today because of Ardern's government response? Let's stop the Jacinda witch hunt please. Ian Davie Careys Bay Pithy observation An open letter to Sir Ian Taylor (ODT 9.7.25). Dear Sir Ian. Let it go. Max Reid Mornington First responders in our small towns praised Our small community was shocked at the loss of the Roxburgh Town Hall and Entertainment Centre earlier this year. It was a massive job for the firefighters and others involved. Now, in the space of four weeks, there have been four vehicle accidents around Roxburgh, with three of them being fatalities. We want to extend our sympathies to the families involved. This has been very sad and we presume very hard emotionally on the personnel who attended these incidents. Thank you to Hato Hone St John, firefighters from Roxburgh and Millers Flat, police, traffic management, and others who assisted at the scenes. We are so grateful for the rapid response from the volunteers that make up the Roxburgh and Millers Flat brigades. When the siren wails, it's only a matter of a few minutes before the truck is on its way. Our community has taken a hit, but it is pleasing to know of the rebuilding plans for the Town Hall. However, three lives have been lost in accidents, and they can never be replaced. Think about that next time you are driving. Ruth and David Clarke Roxburgh Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@
Chicago Tribune
10-07-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Waukegan Proud Award given to 108-year-old woman; ‘It's unbelievable what (she) was able to do in her life'
Willabelle Jackson, a Waukegan resident since 2018, broke a lot of barriers as a single Black woman on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s, becoming an entrepreneur and a landlord in her mid-20s. Now 108, Jackson takes life easier than she did when she was operating a laundry business, living in one unit of her South Side six-flat and renting out the other five units, as well as playing in national Bridge tournaments. Born during World War I, she survived the time of the Spanish Flu, started building a small business empire during World War II and came through the coronavirus pandemic unscathed. She also found time to travel, which her granddaughter, Debra Foulkes, credits with her longevity. 'It was family, her everyday life and Arkansas water,' Foulkes said. 'Grandmother would go (to Hot Springs) every year for a month taking sitz baths, drinking the water, taking steam baths, massages (and) manicures. She had the water shipped home.' Jackson was honored with the Waukegan Proud Award by Mayor Sam Cunningham on Thursday at her home, the Terrace Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Waukegan, for her life of achievement and longevity. She turned 108 on March 2. 'It's unbelievable what Mrs. Jackson was able to do in her life,' Cunningham said of the oldest person he has ever met. 'She accomplished all of this at a time when it was almost impossible, being both a woman and being Black.' Cunningham was not the only person fetting Jackson. Lake County Sheriff John Idleburg gave her a proclamation from the county, and U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Highland Park, brought an official letter from Washington, D.C. 'All these barriers she broke were done at a time when it was nearly impossible,' Schneider said. 'She didn't just break those barriers, she charged through them for the rest of us.' Born March 2, 1917, in Montgomery, Alabama, Foulkes said Jackson moved to Chicago with her family when she was 3 as part of the Great Migration, bringing many Black people from the southern U.S. to the northern states. She graduated from Hyde Park High School. Foulkes said Jackson helped family members and others move from the South to Chicago. Johnny Ramsey, Jackson's brother-in-law and a resident of Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, said moving north was a necessity then. 'Birmingham was racist,' Ramsey said. 'You couldn't accomplish anything there. Chicago was a good place to be.' Graduating high school in the midst of the Depression, Foulkes said many Black people did not put their money in banks either because they were unwelcome or they were afraid. It turned out to be a good thing. 'We didn't lose our money,' Foulkes said of her family. 'It wasn't in the bank. We kept it somewhere else.' Starting her laundry business, Foulkes said her grandmother invested her profits in real estate, buying a six-unit apartment in the 6600 block of Cottage Grove Avenue. 'Willabelle (Jackson) valued family unity, helping many siblings migrate north and offering them support,' Foulkes said. At a time when women could not own property or operate a business on their own, Foulkes said her grandmother signed her name using her initials, W.F., before her last name. She was single during her early entrepreneurial years before marrying Charles Jackson in 1957.
