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The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Teach university students to live in a polarised world
Two cheers for the Office for Students for supporting universities' role in defending legal dissent (English universities barred from enforcing blanket bans on student protests, 18 June). I would go further. All places of study should offer dialogue spaces so that shared deliberation becomes a core component of the educational experience. Students should be equipped with three skill sets for living in a polarised and disinformed culture. First: critical thinking – to evaluate ideas dispassionately, to deconstruct rhetoric and to expose how biases can deform thought. Second: dialogic engagement – to experience the value of listening to, and learning from, others who see the world differently. And third: constructive disagreement – to inquire into the life experiences and cultural factors that lead people to hold contrary positions. Participating in such deliberative environments would equip people to challenge ideologically motivated reasoning and elevate free speech into something more socially useful than the mere amplification of unquestioned received opinions. Simon Keyes Former professor of reconciliation and peacebuilding, University of Winchester Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Scottish Sun
22-04-2025
- Health
- Scottish Sun
I blamed my WiFi when family said I ‘froze' on FaceTime but I was delaying a terrifying diagnosis
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) LAUREN Freeman mistook her seizures for "WiFi issues" during video calls – until she realised it wasn't a tech glitch, but symptoms of a brain tumour. "I've always been a daydreamer, especially when I'm tired and being in my final year of uni, I thought that's all it was," the now 22-year-old primary school teacher said. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 6 Lauren Freeman had a brain tumour while studying primary education with QTS at the University of Winchester Credit: SWNS 6 Her symptoms started showing up during video calls with her boyfriend, J (pictured) Credit: SWNS 6 During FaceTime calls with her family and J she experienced vacant seizures Credit: SWNS Her symptoms began six months before her diagnosis, while she was studying primary education with QTS at the University of Winchester. During daily FaceTime calls with her family and boyfriend, JJ Morris, 22, a retail fixture technician, she experienced vacant seizures. She said: "J went to a different uni so I mostly saw him at the weekend and he had started noticing these little moments on FaceTime when I would blame it on Wi-Fi, and then he noticed them face-to-face where I went quiet. "I brushed it aside, but he was clearly worried." When she went home for Christmas, she brought it up with her family. She said: "I told them what J had noticed, and they said they'd seen something similar too - there was a time I froze on FaceTime, where I blamed it on connection issues afterwards. "They were supportive, and we booked a doctor's appointment straight away." An MRI scan at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge revealed she actually had a benign epidermoid tumour in her brain in June 2024. Benign epidermoid tumours in the brain are not typically deadly, according to The Brain Tumour Charity. They are non-cancerous growths made up of skin cells and usually grow very slowly. Man, 64, plays guitar while having a brain tumour However, their location and size can cause complications, such as pressure on surrounding brain tissue, which may lead to symptoms like seizures, headaches, or neurological issues. 'Brain tumours are indiscriminate' Lauren now takes daily medication to manage various ongoing symptoms, including seizures, déjà vu episodes, and prolonged auras - a type of long migraine. She said: "Despite my diagnosis, I'm able to live a normal life and I'm thankful to the medical team who has looked after me so well. "Brain tumours are more common than people might think. "I'm proud of myself for still graduating Uni with a first and getting to work a full-time job that I absolutely love. "It was a scary time, I didn't know what having a brain tumour meant but my family have been very encouraging as have my uni and the school I now work at." She is campaigning with the charity Brain Tumour Research to raise awareness of the disease by taking part in 200k In May, Your Way - a challenge where participants can cover the distance in any way they like. Lauren has already raised £700 for the charity. She said: "I want to use my own experience of the disease, to help other people. 6 An MRI scan revealed she had a benign epidermoid tumour in her brain Credit: SWNS 6 Lauren now takes daily medication to manage ongoing symptoms, including multiple types of seizures, déjà vu episode and migraines Credit: SWNS "We must invest in research into brain tumours so that people can have access to the best and most accurate treatments." Charlie Allsebrook, community development manager at Brain Tumour Research, said: "Lauren's story is a reminder that brain tumours are indiscriminate; they can affect anyone at any age. "The number of brain tumour diagnoses has increased by 11 per cent in the last decade, yet just 1 per cent of the national spend on cancer research has been allocated to brain tumours since records began in 2002. "It's with the support of people such as Lauren that will help us closer to finding a cure for all types of brain tumours. "Good luck to all taking on the month-long challenge." 6 'I'm proud of myself for still graduating Uni with a first and getting to work a full-time job that I absolutely love,' she says Credit: SWNS
The Sun
22-04-2025
- Health
- The Sun
I blamed my WiFi when family said I ‘froze' on FaceTime but I was delaying a terrifying diagnosis
LAUREN Freeman mistook her seizures for "WiFi issues" during video calls – until she realised it wasn't a tech glitch, but symptoms of a brain tumour. "I've always been a daydreamer, especially when I'm tired and being in my final year of uni, I thought that's all it was," the now 22-year-old primary school teacher said. 6 6 6 Her symptoms began six months before her diagnosis, while she was studying primary education with QTS at the University of Winchester. During daily FaceTime calls with her family and boyfriend, JJ Morris, 22, a retail fixture technician, she experienced vacant seizures. She said: "J went to a different uni so I mostly saw him at the weekend and he had started noticing these little moments on FaceTime when I would blame it on Wi-Fi, and then he noticed them face-to-face where I went quiet. "I brushed it aside, but he was clearly worried." When she went home for Christmas, she brought it up with her family. She said: "I told them what J had noticed, and they said they'd seen something similar too - there was a time I froze on FaceTime, where I blamed it on connection issues afterwards. "They were supportive, and we booked a doctor's appointment straight away." An MRI scan at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge revealed she actually had a benign epidermoid tumour in her brain in June 2024. Benign epidermoid tumours in the brain are not typically deadly, according to The Brain Tumour Charity. They are non-cancerous growths made up of skin cells and usually grow very slowly. Man, 64, plays guitar while having a brain tumour However, their location and size can cause complications, such as pressure on surrounding brain tissue, which may lead to symptoms like seizures, headaches, or neurological issues. 'Brain tumours are indiscriminate' Lauren now takes daily medication to manage various ongoing symptoms, including seizures, déjà vu episodes, and prolonged auras - a type of long migraine. She said: "Despite my diagnosis, I'm able to live a normal life and I'm thankful to the medical team who has looked after me so well. "Brain tumours are more common than people might think. "I'm proud of myself for still graduating Uni with a first and getting to work a full-time job that I absolutely love. "It was a scary time, I didn't know what having a brain tumour meant but my family have been very encouraging as have my uni and the school I now work at." She is campaigning with the charity Brain Tumour Research to raise awareness of the disease by taking part in 200k In May, Your Way - a challenge where participants can cover the distance in any way they like. Lauren has already raised £700 for the charity. She said: "I want to use my own experience of the disease, to help other people. 6 6 "We must invest in research into brain tumours so that people can have access to the best and most accurate treatments." Charlie Allsebrook, community development manager at Brain Tumour Research, said: "Lauren's story is a reminder that brain tumours are indiscriminate; they can affect anyone at any age. "The number of brain tumour diagnoses has increased by 11 per cent in the last decade, yet just 1 per cent of the national spend on cancer research has been allocated to brain tumours since records began in 2002. "It's with the support of people such as Lauren that will help us closer to finding a cure for all types of brain tumours. "Good luck to all taking on the month-long challenge." Symptoms of a benign brain tumour A benign brain tumour is a mass of cells that grows relatively slowly in the brain. Benign means it in not cancerous. Non-cancerous brain tumours tend to stay in one place and do not spread. Some slow-growing tumours may not cause any symptoms at first. When symptoms occur, it's because the tumour is putting pressure on the brain and preventing a specific area of the brain from working properly. As the tumour grows and increases pressure in the skull, you might experience: New, persistent headaches that are sometimes worse in the morning or when bending over or coughing Feeling sick all the time Drowsiness Vision problems, such as blurred or double vision, loss of part of your visual field and temporary vision loss Epileptic seizures that may affect the whole body, or you may just have a twitch in one area See a GP if you develop any of these symptoms. They'll examine you and ask about your symptoms. If they suspect you may have a tumour or are not sure what's causing your symptoms, they may refer you to a brain and nerve specialist for further investigation. Source: NHS
BBC News
14-04-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Eating walnuts could make your memory better, study finds
If you're feeling a bit sluggish then have you thought about eating walnuts for breakfast?A Hampshire academic designed the testing procedure for a study in which adults were asked to eat a walnut-rich breakfast or a calorie-matched lecturer Dr Adrian Whyte, who worked at the University of Reading when he did the work, contributed to the study which found 50g of walnuts mixed into muesli and yoghurt led to fast reaction times and better memory than the Claire Williams, from the University of Reading, who led the research, said it "helps strengthen the case for walnuts as brain food." The study, published in the Food & Function journal, used 32 adults between 18 and 30 who were tested four times a day over the course of the were asked to wear an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap fitted with electrodes to measure brain activity and were tested before breakfast and then two, four and six hours Whyte, who now works at the University of Winchester, said walnuts offer a rare combination of chemicals to help boost brain contain Omega 3 fatty acids and carry protein/peptides and flavonoids, which are known to boost memory and cognitive function."Other foods, notably fruits like blueberries, contain flavonoids but the particular array of chemicals in walnuts may work in a particularly synergistic fashion whereby the protein/peptides regulate the absorption of the Omega 3s which, in turn, regulate the absorption of the flavonoids," said Dr now studying the effect of cocoa on memory performance. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why can't we get enough of post-apocalyptic shows like 'Paradise,' 'Fallout,' and 'Silo'? Just look around you.
Post-apocalyptic TV shows are all the rage right now. "Paradise," "Fallout," and "Silo," all set in bunkers, have been renewed. In turbulent times, audiences like fantacizing about a fresh start. R.E.M. once sang: "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." For buzzy bunker-based TV shows like "Paradise," "Fallout," and "Silo," the apocalypse is just the start of a new adventure — and audiences can't get enough. "Paradise" got people talking after the twist in the first episode that it's set in a small town inside a bunker following a catastrophic event. "Fallout" hit 100 million viewers on Prime Video last October and has a 94% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, with a second season in production. And Apple TV+ subscribers have spent 417 million minutes watching "Silo," which is returning for third and fourth seasons. Over the decades, the apocalypse in TV and film has come in different flavors. The aftermath of nuclear disaster was the focus of movies like 1984's "Threads," 2009's "The Road," and 2014's "How I Live Now," while 2011's "The Walking Dead," 2021's "Y: The Last Man," and 2023's "The Last of Us" explored zombies and pandemics. Now, there's a taste for bunker-based sci-fi shows. "Fallout" follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman who ventures out of the nuclear bunker where she has always lived to find her father. Meanwhile in "Paradise" and "Silo," bunkers are the backdrop to murder mysteries linked to the causes of their respective apocalypses. Matthew Leggatt, a senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Winchester, UK, told Business Insider that the state of geopolitics likely partly explains the success of post-apocalyptic shows. He pointed to President Donald Trump's "game of nuclear chicken" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term, and noted the Doomsday Clock, which monitors the threat of human extinction, moved to 89 seconds to midnight in January — the closest it has been since it was created in 1947. Such shows "use disaster as a platform to imagine a world where the problems of today — economic, social, and climatic — are resolved by wiping away the present in one single stroke," he said. This ties in with the biblical definition of the "apocalypse," which implies salvation from God, he said. "This is echoed, to some extent, in these shows which see small communities emerge and come together in the face of disaster," Leggatt, host of the "Utopian and Dystopian Fictions" podcast, said. "While these shows can be bleak, dark, and violent they can also offer hope in the form of a fresh start. The writers behind these projects use bunkers as a way of developing their characters further so that they're driven to look for hope in escaping to the outside world," he said. Robert Yeates, an associate professor of American literature at Okayama University, Japan, and the author of "American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction," told BI that bunkers are a "pressure cooker for intense human dramas" in TV and film. By presenting characters with "newly unexplored frontiers" in the ruins of the old world, audiences can too consider how they might survive an apocalypse. Audiences are also lured in by the "mysteries" bunkers might contain, like who built them, and why, Yeates said. Colin Furze, a YouTuber and inventor who constructed a bunker in his garden to promote a comedy series about a comet hitting Earth, told BI that his 14 million subscribers "love the idea of something being there that you can't see" and it provides a form of escapism. His 2020 video tour of his bunker has 43 million views. The bunker is complete with a mini-workshop, a bed, sofa, flat-screen TV, and his inventions like a flamethrower-guitar. He also built a separate underground garage under his house, which a contractor estimated would add £500,000 ($640,832) to the value of the property. That's small fry compared to Mark Zuckerberg's 4,500-square-foot underground "shelter" in his Hawaii compound, which he denied is "some kind of doomsday bunker." Al Corbi, the president of the bunker company Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments, told CNN that his customers request things like indoor bowling alleys, swimming pools, and shooting ranges. "We've seen a lot more of a focus on entertainment. If you're going to be able to survive underground, we want you to be having fun," he said. That element of fun was big reason why Furze built his bunker. "Essentially, when I was a kid, I used to make underground dens. I used to live next door to a quarry. We used to go up there digging holes, covering them over making these little bases under the ground. And I've always been fascinated by that," he said. But for Yeates, our obsession with the bunkers and the apocalypse can be distilled into one central idea: we're "desperate" to know how the world could be transformed. "The bunker suggests we intend to stay put, bide our time, and eventually reemerge to salvage whatever life we can from the ruins above," he said. Read the original article on Business Insider
