Everything you do—walking to your yoga class, making your favorite latte order, talking to your bestie, and just getting through the workday—happens thanks to your brain. Your brain is the control center for your entire body—it’s how you get shit done. So how can you take care of such a beautifully complex and integral part of your body and keep it in great shape for as long as possible?
Lara V. Marcuse, MD, a board-certified neurologist and codirector of the Mount Sinai Epilepsy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shares the one thing she does every day (or almost every day, because life gets busy, folks!) to keep her brain healthy. As a bonus? It’s fun.
Pick up a difficult new skill, even if you suck at it.
“I started playing piano in my mid-40s,” Dr. Marcuse tells SELF. It all started by chance when her son began taking lessons: “I took his lesson book on the sly one night before bed, and I was totally enthralled by it,” she says, though she admits she found the songs themselves hard to get into at first. “I’m a 1980s New York City club kid. I grew up on a steady diet of house music, and I never liked classical.” It’s been seven years since she first gave playing a Chopin piece a shot, and she hasn’t looked back since. “[Playing piano] helps me get into [the] nooks and crannies of myself—and into my spirit,” she says.
Taking up a hobby that’s unfamiliar and even difficult forces your brain to exercise new or rarely used neural pathways, and that can help prevent cognitive decline and even protect your brain against Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia that leads to memory loss and an inability to complete daily tasks. Keeping your brain active makes neural pathways strong—and the opposite is true if you’re not finding ways to engage your mind.
by Hazel Straub Father God, help me! I fully surrender and give you my heart, my will, for your will, and to let go of pride, stubbornness, resentment, offense, unbelief, and everything I substituted for a relationship with you, and humbly ask for your help. Father God, holy is your name. Change my heart, O […]
Scientists have figured out a way to mass-produce solar panels made out of a so-called miracle material that can massively boost their efficiency.
Perovskite has been hailed for its potential to revolutionize renewable energy, however, converting its record-breaking success in the lab into commercial solar panels has proved difficult due to durability and reliability issues.
A major study into possible production methods for the technology has now concluded that a vacuum-based approach could allow the next-generation solar panels to be manufactured on a commercial scale.
A team led by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US found that vacuum processes – used to make everything from smartphones to LEDs – held significant advantages over the solvent-based approach usually used to make lab-scale solar cells.
“Vacuum-based processes have proven themselves in the industry for many decades,” said Ulrich W. Paetzold, a professor at the Institute of Microstructure Technology and Light Technology Institute at KIT.
“Although they can decisively advance the commercialization of solar cells, they are heavily underrepresented.”
Solar cells that use a combination of perovskite and silicon have demonstrated vastly more potential to generate electricity from the Sun’s energy compared to traditional silicon cells.
Elon Musk made some striking predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and income at the inaugural AI Safety Summit in the U.K. in November.
The serial entrepreneur and CEO painted a utopian vision where AI renders traditional employment obsolete but provides an “age of abundance” through a system of “universal high income.”
“It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk told U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “You can have a job if you want to have a job or sort of personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.”
While admitting this prospect may not make “people comfortable,” Musk seemed optimistic about what he termed a “protopian” AI-driven future.
“I think everyone will have access to this magic genie, and you’re able to ask any question. It’ll be certainly bigger for education. It’ll be the best tutor,” he said. “And there will be no shortage of goods and services. It will be an age of abundance.”
Musk’s concept of “universal high income” appears to be an evolution of the universal basic income (UBI) idea supported by other tech leaders like Sam Altman.
“We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have a universal high income,” Musk said, though he did not explicitly define the difference. “In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler, an equalizer.” It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time Musk addressed the topic. In 2018, he posted on X: “Universal income will be necessary over time if AI takes over most human jobs.”
The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.
The interview was intended to be the debut episode of a new talk show in a partnership between Mr. Lemon and X, but Mr. Musk called off the deal a day after filming the hour-plus interview at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. The first episode of “The Don Lemon Show” was streamed on YouTube and posted to Mr. Lemon’s account on X.
In the interview, Mr. Musk said that earlier this month he was having breakfast at an unnamed friend’s home in Florida when Mr. Trump came by.
When asked what was discussed, Mr. Musk said that Mr. Trump did most of the talking and that the former president did not ask for money or a donation toward his campaign. Mr. Musk also said he would not lend Mr. Trump money to pay his legal bills.
While Mr. Musk said he would not donate to any candidate, he said he would consider endorsing one in the final stretches of the race.
“I don’t know yet, I want to make a considered decision before the election,” he said and noted that he was leaning away from President Biden. “I’ve made no secret of that,” he added.
If Mr. Musk endorses a candidate, he said, he will make a detailed explanation for his choice.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mr. Musk was adamant that he does not abuse drugs, and spoke about his prescription for ketamine for a “negative chemical state.”
“If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” he said. He noted that 16-hour workdays were “normal” for him, and that he rarely took weekends off.
Mr. Musk appeared visibly annoyed by a direct line of questioning about his appearing to endorse an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X.
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Don Lemon, the former television anchor, said Elon Musk’s X had “wooed” him to provide content on the social media platform. Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press
We’re closer than ever to mapping the entire brain to the microscopic level. Hundreds of neuroscientists across the world recently characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types as part of the National Institute of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, publishing almost two dozen papers in four Science journals today. This super-focused attention to detail could unlock many mysteries surrounding that complex organ, such as what happened in our brains to distinguish us from other primates.
“This is the first large-scale, detailed description of all the different kinds of cells present in the human brain,” says Rebecca Hodge, an assistant investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle who co-authored multiple studies in the paper package. Her hope is that this brain atlas provides a community resource for scientists to explore how the wide variety of brain cells contribute to health and disease. This first suite of studies shows three main ways the brain map can be used for biology and medicine.
An evolving brain
A human brain atlas can teach us about our evolutionary history. One study published today in Science used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to measure the gene expression of individual brain cells in humans and five other primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas. In this method, scientists pull out individual cells from a piece of tissue, break them open to expose the genetic messengers inside, then use tags akin to tiny barcodes to identify that material. “This is the main technology used in some of these papers that are coming out, and it’s a technique that’s only been around for the past 10 years,” Hodge says. Getting this genetic profile allows researchers to group clusters of cells into specific types.
Our cells’ composition and organization is similar to those of our close relatives. However, the biggest differences seemed to occur in a brain region called the middle temporal gyrus, which is involved in processing semantic memory and language. Humans had higher numbers of projecting neurons in this area compared to other species. What’s more, the researchers highlighted a difference in gene expression that promoted synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of neurons to strengthen brain connections. This feature is an important component for learning and memory, and it might explain how humans developed complex cognitive skills.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a debilitating multisystem disorder from which adults rarely recover. Researchers have struggled to find changes in the body that underlie the illness, which often appears following an infection, partly because it may arise in different forms. Now, scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have completed perhaps the most comprehensive study of ME/CFS to date by examining a carefully selected group of participants. In the study, which was published today in Nature Communications, the researchers observed changes that reveal how the disease disrupts the immune and nervous systems.
In addition to having overwhelming fatigue, people with ME/CFS experience a range of other symptoms such as brain fog, hypersensitivity to light, and short-term memory loss. Medical professionals have historically dismissed the condition as a psychosomatic disorder by implying the disease lacks a physiological basis.
These dismissive views have held back ME/CFS research, and scientists have made little progress toward developing diagnostics and therapies and understanding the mechanism behind the condition. In recent years some progress has been made in accepting ME/CFS as a real physiological condition, in part because of the emergence of long COVID (a condition that, according to some studies, qualifies for an ME/CFS diagnosis about half of the time). But doubt over its legitimacy lingers. Alison Sbrana, a person with ME/CFS who was a participant in the new study, says that she would be shocked to meet someone with ME/CFS who hasn’t had their concerns brushed aside at some point.
Avindra Nath, a neurologist at NIH, set out to unravel the condition’s inner workings. First, his team had to carefully select a cohort of ME/CFS participants for the study because the condition has numerous forms that might not share the same physiological manifestations. The researchers focused on a subset of people with ME/CFS who had developed the condition following an infection (before the COVID pandemic). They homed in on this group by pursuing a rigorous selection process, and they only included participants whom a panel of five clinicians unanimously agreed met the criteria. Only 17 ME/CFS participants remained after the selection process, alongside 21 healthy volunteers. With its carefully selected cohort, Nath’s team employed a slew of tests to study several body systems.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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