James' World 2

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Few sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.

Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.

A lifelong adrenaline junkie who often operated out of sheer gall, Rose was long known to baseball officials as a fevered horse player with a network of unsavory associates and a rumored out-of-control gambling habit. During his nonpareil career as a player, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, he was warned repeatedly by major league officials to curtail his gambling, and in the late 1980s, Rose, then the Reds manager, was investigated by baseball to determine if any of his activity was illegal.

The report by the investigator, John Dowd, revealed that Rose had bet regularly with bookmakers on a variety of sports, and though Rose vehemently denied it, baseball included. In August 1989, he was banned from the game by the commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, and he was subsequently declared ineligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would otherwise have been a certainty.

One of the tawdrier episodes in baseball history and one of the most public — Rose’s farewell news conference was televised nationally — it was also, for Rose, monumentally costly. Not only did he lose his livelihood; he subsequently spent several months in jail for evasion of taxes related to his gambling income as well as his baseball memorabilia sales and autograph appearances. (For Giamatti, a former president of Yale who had served as baseball commissioner for only five months, the aftermath was far worse. A heavy smoker, he died at 51 a week after announcing his decision, the stress of the Rose case possibly contributing to the heart attack that killed him.)

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Pete Rose sliding into home during a Reds game against the Giants in 1972. Credit…Bettmann/Getty Image

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In June of 2021, Aaron James experienced a terrible accident while working as an electrical lineman. The 46-year-old military veteran and Arkansas resident lost much of the left side of his face—including his left eye—to severely disfiguring electrical burns that also destroyed his left arm.

Two years later, James received the first-ever partial face and whole-eye transplant, performed by surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York City. And now, more than a year after that, James has made a strong recovery with no evidence of tissue rejection, his medical team reported in a paper published on Monday in JAMA. He still lacks any vision in the transplanted eye, but the eye itself has maintained its shape and blood flow—and there is evidence of electrical activity in the retina in response to light.

Other researchers say the findings represent a step toward successful whole-eye transplants while illustrating the challenge of regenerating the optic nerve after a major injury.

“It’s a delightful surprise that the surgery has worked so well, that the patient is so happy, that the aesthetic or cosmetic outcome has worked so well. The eyeball itself has stayed alive and is able to stay in that space and can continue to contribute to the overall success of hemifacial transplant,” says Jeffrey Goldberg, a professor, and chair of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary on it that was published in the same issue of JAMA.

The lack of restored vision was not unexpected, Goldberg says, because preclinical studies in animals have shown the difficulty of regrowing an optic nerve. He notes that the surgical team’s technique of injecting the tissue surrounding the optic nerve with stem cells from James’s bone marrow has not been validated in animals and could pose a safety risk if the cells grew into a tumor. Fortunately, there is no evidence of this happening to date. Another risk was that if the donor eye’s optic nerve had regrown, it could have compromised the vision in James’s other eye because of the way input from the two eyes can interact in the brain. There is no sign of this complication either, however. This exciting first case helps lay the groundwork to push whole-eye transplant into a vision-restoring reality, Goldberg says.

Whole-eye transplants have long been a dream among doctors and scientists seeking to treat people with serious eye injuries or blindness. The first corneal transplant took place in 1905. But efforts to transplant an entire eye have been thwarted by the devilish difficulty of regrowing the optic nerve, which carries signals from the eye’s light-sensitive retina to the brain’s visual centers, where they are perceived as sight. While there had previously been limited success in efforts to regenerate the optic nerve in some animals, no one had succeeded in transplanting a whole eye into a human until now.

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It’s a question that’s been reverberating around TikTok as users flood the platform with videos of themselves balancing on shaking vibration plates, bodies quivering, often in an attempt to hawk the devices as the latest cure-all.

Their efforts have certainly made waves. Online searches for vibration plates — which look like a hybrid between a griddle and a trembling surfboard — have sharply increased since April, and products on TikTok Shop have racked up tens of thousands of sales.

People use them in different ways. Some focus on standing upright while the plate shakes them; others go further and engage in various exercises like squats or pushups.

The purported health benefits of whole-body vibration range from weight loss and increasing bone density to promoting lymphatic drainage, improving circulation, and beyond.

But what does the evidence actually say?

Do vibration plates have health benefits?

“It’s not a silver bullet, but it has its certain merits,” said Dr. Jörn Rittweger, head of the division of muscle and bone metabolism at the German Aerospace Center and a professor of space physiology at the University of Cologne in Germany.

He said the calorie-burning and cardiovascular benefits are similar to “brisk walking for the same amount of time.”

It also matters how much exercise you’re already getting in. “If people don’t do anything” in terms of exercise, Rittweger said, “then the effects are moderate or even better. For the general public, if they’re exercising already, the effect is marginal or nonexistent.”

For example, Rittweger said he uses the device in the children’s rehabilitation unit to help ward off muscle atrophy in kids who can’t walk.

What about strengthening bones? Rittweger says the evidence is mixed. “The effects are probably not tremendous,” he said.

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Some users do exercises like squats while balancing on vibration plates. Others just focusing on staying upright. Claudia Chanhoi for NBC News

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On some days, worries can cloud the typically upbeat mood at the Synval Santos Day Center, a modest care facility for the elderly with Alzheimer’s disease, in Volta Redonda, the old steel town 60 miles west of Rio de Janeiro. But Danielle Freire knows just what to do.

Freire, a psychologist, and the center’s coordinator, takes the anguished “patron” (no “patients” here, please!) by the arm and coaxes her (8 of 10 clients are female) to the faux “bus stop” in an arbored patio. There, they sit, chat, and reminisce about childhood and the old days, until the panic subsides, as they wait for a bus that never comes. 

Years of trial and error have taught Freire’s team of 22 caretakers at Synval Santos how to manage sundown syndrome—a pique of late afternoon distress or the sudden urge to flee that is common to Alzheimer’s patients. Nimble intervention, one-on-one attention, patience, and a gentle sleight of hand is the routine for the facility’s 75 elderly patrons, who have moderate stage Alzheimer’s. (At the facility, which is part of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative’s Healthcare System Preparedness Program, patients come for the day and go home in the evenings.) 

“If you show concern, stay calm, and never argue,” Freire told me on a recent visit to the Center, “the stress passes, and even those anxious to flee soon forget their troubles.”

Brazil is a country the size of a continent, with staggering inequalities, where the wealthy enjoy world-class private health services and the poor languish at understaffed public hospitals. Synval Santos Day Center, however, is a rare exception in Latin America: a publicly financed and managed social service that works. 

The institution’s decade-long record of caring for those with Alzheimer’s is already a beacon for Brazil and elsewhere. Its success makes it a magnet for people from surrounding towns and even out of state. 

Volta Redonda, however, is atypical. It is one of just 106 towns among Brazil’s 5,568 municipalities to provide no-fee services—workshops, exercise, and cognitive calisthenics—for the elderly. The city boasts Brazil’s first and perhaps its only public center dedicated to Alzheimer’s. It’s much the same across Latin America, where the number of people with dementia is expected to soar from 7.8 million in 2013 to more than 27 million by 2050.

Many poor nations have islands of excellence in medicine and clinical care, but only for the well-off. Just 25 percent of Brazilians have private health insurance and access to top-tier treatment. In theory, Brazil’s Universal Health System (SUS, in Portuguese) tends to the other three-quarters through a nationwide network of free neighborhood clinics and hospitals. The system proved vital during the pandemic, treating COVID emergencies and administrating vaccines to millions, even as the central government downplayed the contagion and dismissed the advice of public-health experts.

But SUS is plagued by chronic underfunding, red tape, and patchy services that vary according to the agendas of local officials and national political class. 

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If sciatica symptoms prevent you from working, exercising, or performing daily tasks easily, try these 3 core exercises for sciatica and lower back pain. 

When you have sciatica, finding core exercises to build a stronger torso can be challenging — even some of the best abs exercises are off the table. That’s why Dr. Grant Elliot of Rehab Fix suggests these three exercises to help alleviate pain instead. 

I recommend performing these moves using one of the best yoga mats to ensure your back gets the most support possible. If you’ve already got the kit you need, check out each exercise below, the benefits, and how to perform them.

“Say goodbye to sciatica pain with our expert guidance on selecting the right core exercises,” says Dr. Elliott. “We understand the challenges that come with managing sciatica, and that’s why we’re here to provide you with safe and effective options. 

Our video walks you through three carefully chosen core exercises that are specifically designed to bring relief to those struggling with sciatica.”

Whether you struggle with a tight lower back and want to relieve tension, build core strength, or ease the trickier symptoms of sciatica, these tailored exercises are explained in the video below step by step, allowing you to incorporate them into your routine at your own pace. 

Before you get started, it’s worth briefly explaining why some core exercises aren’t working for you. Dr. Elliott says some exercises can push or pull against the sciatic nerve, which exacerbates symptoms in the lower back, glutes, or legs.

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Imagine you filmed a time-lapse video of a garden over the course of a year: you’d see details of flowers transitioning from day to night and season to season. Scientists would love to watch similar transitions on a molecular scale, but the intense light used to snap microscopic pictures of plants disrupts the processes biologists want to observe—especially at night. Writing in the journal Optica, physicist Duncan Ryan of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and his colleagues recently demonstrated a tool for imaging live plant tissues while exposing them to less light than they’d receive under the stars.

A technique called ghost imaging, first demonstrated in 1995, involves splitting a light source to create two different-wavelength photons at precisely the same time and location. The photons are entangled—a quantum phenomenon that allows researchers to infer information about one particle in a pair by measuring the other. Thus, a sample can be probed at one wavelength and imaged at another.

For plants, that means researchers can image the objects with visible-light photons and get knowledge about infrared photons that interact with water-rich molecules that are important to biological functions. To do so in the new study, the team directed a stream of infrared photons at a plant in a transparent box with a photon counter behind it while aiming the visible counterparts to those particles at an empty box at the same distance with a camera behind it. Each visible photon directed at the empty box hit a pixel and was detected in its precise location—a measurement that was much more precise than an infrared camera could achieve. Meanwhile, the infrared photons traveled to the plant box, but not all of them were counted: the plant absorbed some percentage of photons at a given spot. A computer logged the position of a pixel only when a photon hit both the camera and the counter simultaneously. This way, the researchers could construct an image of a leaf of the plant using photons that never touched it, essentially forming an infrared image on a visible camera. “It’s like a game of Battleship,” Ryan says.

Ghost imaging has proved successful in capturing pictures of simpler test designs. But for low-light-transmission samples such as plants, microscopic features often differ in absorption by just a few percent. The trick lies in an extremely sensitive detector developed at LANL that tracks the arrival of each infrared photon with trillionth-of-a-second precision—letting them map leaf tissues and peer into live plants’ nighttime activities. “We saw [leaf pores called] stomata closing as the plants reacted to darkness,” Ryan says.

Ghost imaging “creates possibilities for long-timescale dynamic imaging that does not damage live samples,” says laser spectroscopy and quantum optics researcher Audrey Eshun of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who calls the new investigation a “truly innovative study.”

Observations like these make it possible to track how plants use water and sunlight throughout their circadian cycle. “We’re watching plants react to their environment,” Ryan says, “and not to our observations of them.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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Mindfulness is everywhere. Everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to the US military has extolled the virtues of this ancient spiritual practice.

But what, exactly, is mindfulness? And can it help us deal with the stress of everyday life?

Or should we be skeptical about its secularization and commercialization?

A psychiatry researcher, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a practitioner-turned-scholar all have different answers.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness and meditation — two different but interconnected practices — are present in several ancient faiths, including Hinduism and Jainism.

But mindfulness, which dates back 2,500 years, is most commonly associated with Buddhism.

According to the Venerable Thubten Dondrub, a resident teacher at Adelaide’s Buddha House, the practice is about keeping your mind focused on an object — and that could be your breath or a “virtuous” thought.

“[It’s about asking] ‘Is my mind on the object or not? Is it fully on the object?'” he tells ABC Radio National’s Soul Search.

He says it’s also about abandoning negative behaviors and states of mind, such as anger.

Of course, this level of focus can be incredibly difficult to maintain.

Our brains naturally race at a million miles an hour, with ideas, memories, anxieties, and other thoughts constantly popping up.

But Ven Dondrub says to achieve mindfulness, you must keep reining your thoughts back in.

“If my mind keeps wandering off the topic — the object of meditation — then I’m not going to get anywhere,” he says.

“I can be sitting … so-called meditating for an hour, but most of the time my mind’s everywhere. It’s not all that beneficial.”

It should be noted that ‘mind wandering’ can also be constructive. It’s thought to play a role in generating new ideas, planning goals and helping unlock creativity.

So don’t feel deterred if you start off trying to be mindful, but your mind ends up wandering instead.

What are the benefits?

The physiological and psychological benefits of mindfulness have been studied for decades.

American professor and scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn is a leading figure in this field.

In 1979, he pioneered an eight-week program known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) for people living with chronic pain.

The course drew on Dr Kabat-Zinn’s experience with Zen meditation and yoga, and it offered a secular, rather than spiritual, version of mindfulness.

Multiple studies have shown MBSR can reduce experiences of anxiety, depression, and stress among participants, and increase levels of self-compassion.

This is something that Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar has long been fascinated by, ever since a physical therapist recommended she try yoga.

“After two or three classes, it really had a profound impact on me,” she says.

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Is mindfulness simply awareness? Or something deeper?  (Pexels: Karolina Grabowska)

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