Click the link below the picture

.

Remember the line from that old folk song?

If living were a thing that money could buy

You know the rich would live and the poor would die.

Sadly, there’s little “if” about it. On average, the poor live less healthy lives and are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as the rich. That’s true for many well-documented reasons, including less healthy diets with too much processed food, polluted neighborhoods, and a lot more toxic stress. In recent years, however, researchers have added one more factor to this mix: it turns out that the poor, as well as socially disadvantaged racial minorities, sleep much less well on average than the rich, which can take a major toll on their physical and mental health.

“We used to think that sleep problems were limited to Type A professionals, and they certainly aren’t immune, but low-income individuals and racial minorities are actually at greatest risk,” says Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation, who co-authored an analysis of socioeconomic disparities in sleep and health in the 2020 Annual Review of Public Health.

Inadequate sleep among low-income adults and racial minorities contributes to higher rates of illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and dementia, both of which are more common among these groups, Troxel and her co-authors point out. One study they cite attributes more than half of the differences in health outcomes between whites and Blacks, for example, to differences in quantity or quality of sleep. You might think of this as the great sleep divide.

.

C.J. Burton / Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

May 2021. The 212-foot-tall rocket, the core stage and final major piece of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS), arrives at Kennedy Space Center. Assembly begins within the towering, iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, which hasn’t seen a human-rated deep-space rocket since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago.

But the SLS isn’t an all-new ride; it’s got some familiar parts. Mounted at the bottom of the center stage are four RS-25 engines supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Originally designed in the 1970s, the engines are seasoned, upgraded veterans, with 25 previous Space Shuttle flights among them. The most poignant of the four is engine number 2060, used on July 8, 2011, to launch the shuttle’s final mission, STS-135.

Doug Bradley was at Kennedy Space Center during that final launch, working as a chief engineer for Rocketdyne. “I’ve been to many flights, but it was different for 135,” Bradley tells Popular Mechanics. “It was electric. It was a very emotional flight.”

The grounding of the Space Shuttle left Rocketdyne with a backlog of 16 unused RS-25 engines, which the company mothballed. “For us, it was a bit sad to have engines in the stable that could fly dozens of times more,” says Bradley.

Now with the title of Chief Engineer of Advanced Space and Launch at Aerojet Rocketdyne, Bradley is overseeing the rebirth of the RS-25 engine. (A 2013 merger with Aerojet led to the company’s current two-word name.) And it’s quite a comeback: SLS is the custom-built, off-planet ride for NASA’s Artemis program, a multiyear campaign to return humans to the lunar surface and later to land people on Mars. That puts the RS-25, originally created with slide rules and graph paper, at the foundation of 21st-century human exploration of the solar system.

“It’s very gratifying to see those engines resurrected,” Bradley says. “And what’s better than going to the moon and Mars?”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Anyone who has ever tried to teach a child to tie their shoes knows how long it can take for them to get it right—and how frustrated they may feel in the meantime. But eventually, there comes that moment when it clicks. And it’s in that moment when their failures turn to successes and their perseverance pays off, that a little confidence in their own ability is built.

Some kids are born naturally confident in themselves, but for others, confidence is a muscle that needs to be strengthened over time. Here are some ways parents can help instill more confidence in their kids—and maybe even in themselves.

Be an example when you learn something new

The saying goes, “Fake it ‘till you make it.” And that expression can actually apply to setting an example for your kids when you are learning something new. Child Mind Institute suggests that it’s okay to acknowledge your own anxiety when mastering a new skill—but project enthusiasm as you grasp it. Similarly, Psychology Today adds that parents should keep any negative comments to yourself and treat yourself with grace and kindness. You wouldn’t say anything mean to your kids when they struggle or make a mistake, so don’t speak that way about yourself either.

.

Photo: Rawpixel.com (Shutterstock)

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________