'Aging well' must be a global priority, experts say -- ScienceDaily. Worldwide, life expectancy of older people continues to rise. By 2020, for the first time in history, the number of people aged 60 years and older will outnumber children younger than 5 years. By 2050, the world's population aged 60 years and older is expected to total 2 billion, up from 841 million today. 80% of these older people will be living in low-income and middle-income countries. The increase in longevity, especially in high-income countries (HICs), has been largely due to the decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease (stroke and ischaemic heart disease), mainly because of simple, cost-effective strategies to reduce tobacco use and high blood pressure, and improved coverage and effectiveness of health interventions.
This long-term burden of illness and diminished wellbeing affects patients, their families, health systems, and economies, and is forecast to accelerate. A series in The Lancet dedicated to aging can be found at: Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #73. With over 700,000 followers on the Wild Bird Trust Facebook page, the Wild Bird Revolution is accelerating towards our goal of 1 million Wild Bird Enthusiasts by the end of the year… We need your help to achieve this world-changing effort to celebrate the freedom and beauty of birds in the wild. Share your favorite wild bird photographs, invite your friends to join, and support global bird conservation by donating to the Wild Bird Trust. Our mission is to build a global community around the freedom and beauty of birds in the wild as ambassadors for the natural ecosystems that they depend upon.
They are the music, decoration and character of every terrestrial habitat on the planet and have been around since the dinosaurs. They are the witnesses and ambassadors of the awesome power of nature. We are in a day-and-age during which more bird species are threatened with extinction than ever before. See last week “Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #72″: Undiagnosed, undertreated Chagas disease emerging as U.S. public health threat -- ScienceDaily. Across a broad swath of the southern United States, residents face a tangible but mostly unrecognized risk of contracting Chagas disease -- a stealthy parasitic infection that can lead to severe heart disease and death -- according to new research presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Annual Meeting.
Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis) is typically spread to people through the feces of blood-sucking triatomine bugs sometimes called "kissing bugs" because they feed on people's faces during the night. The disease, which can also be spread through blood supply, affects 7 to 8 million people worldwide and can be cured -- if it is caught early. Often considered a problem only in Mexico, Central America and South America, Chagas disease is being seen in Texas and recognized at higher levels than previously believed, reported researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "We think of Chagas disease as a silent killer," Garcia said.
Climate, emerging diseases: Dangerous connections found -- ScienceDaily. Climate change may affect human health directly or indirectly. In addition to increased threats of storms, flooding, droughts, and heat waves, other health risks are being identified. In particular, new diseases are appearing, caused by infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, parasites) heretofore unknown or that are changing, especially under the effect of changes in the climate (change of host, vector, pathogenicity, or strain). These are so-called "emerging" or "re-emerging" infectious diseases, such as leishmaniasis, West Nile fever, etc.
According to the WHO, these diseases are causing one third of deaths around the world, and developing countries are on the front line. A difficult relationship to establish Several parameters may be behind this increased spread of pathogens and their hosts (vectors, reservoirs, etc.). Decreased rainfall rhymes with epidemic In light of the rainfall conditions in recent years, the researchers fear a potential new outbreak of Buruli ulcer in the region. A Fascinating Documentary on Crows, One of the World's Smartest Animals. A Stunning View Of Sunlit Seas On Titan. This is making me pine more and more for a dedicated Titan orbiter/lander mission. Flagged For real. NASA. Stop trying to get Mars to happen, it's not going to happen. I think they hired a few too many geologists and just turned the whole thing into a rock fetishist's dream. "Look at this rock formation.
Just because Titan's oceans aren't WATER doesn't make them less interesting than hunting the spectre of water on our dead ass neighbor. No, we need to send another probe to Maaaaaaaaaaaaaars! Considering the Huygens Probe barely lasted a few minutes on Titan, it's not exactly an easy target. There's also the matter of it being much, much farther away from Mars, meaning it requires a lot more fuel to get there. I wasn't claiming it would be easy or that it might not require improvements in various aspects of our technology. Citizen Science Tuesday: Smithsonian Bumblebee Project. Red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). Photo © Flickr user Jean-Jacques Boujot through a Creative Commons license. Citizen Science Tuesday connects you with opportunities to be a part of conservation science with outdoor projects around the world and online projects to try from the comfort of your own home.
By Lisa Feldkamp, senior coordinator, new science audiences, The Nature Conservancy What Is The Smithsonian Bumblebee Project? An important key to understanding climate change and the problems facing pollinators is hiding in an unexpected place: the Smithsonian Entomology collections. Records of species distributions of bumblebees over space and time are waiting in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and could vastly improve scientific knowledge – if these records could be made more widely available to researchers.
That’s why the Smithsonian has introduced the Rapid Capture Pilot Project, which includes but is not limited to the Bumblebee Project. Why paper is a necessity. A few weeks ago the Finish Prime Minister suggested that the downgrading of his country’s sovereign debt was in large part caused by the actions of Apple Inc. The iPhone had mortally wounded Nokia while the iPad had inflicted serious damage on the Finnish paper industry. The fear, I suppose, was the Finish economy was finished. Similar stories abound, especially from young technologists and futurologists, many of whom seem to delight in the demise of anything older than they are. We have grown used to hearing about the end of traditional bookselling, the extinction of physical newspapers, the irrelevance of local libraries and even the death of cash.
Such ideas are hardly surprising. Technologies, companies and even sovereign states ebb and flow. Change, as they say, is the only constant and nobody should really mourn the death of 8-track cassette tapes, Letraset or the Finnish Socialist Workers Republic. Nokia itself started off in 1865 as a paper mill and later became a rubber company. Every Day is Halloween. Two days ago, documentary producer Laurie David joined us here at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) for a special screening of Fed Up, which explores the causes of the obesity crisis in America. Guess what? It’s Big Sugar’s fault. That’s an oversimplification, but not by much. When I asked her for a comment on Halloween and its super-sized candy promotion, she said, “Don’t get me started. Every day is Halloween in this country.” I kind of agreed. Laurie David: “Every day is Halloween.”
Karen Stillman at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) wrote about the frightening, Halloween-scale amount of sugar consumed by kids, especially boys in the 9-12 age range—every single day. It was almost four years ago (December 2010) that Congress approved and President Obama signed a child nutrition bill giving the secretary of agriculture authority to establish nutrition standards for foods sold in schools. Let’s spook them. Photos: Kate McCleary (top), Michael Milli (bottom). A Wild Ride: 50 Years of the US Wilderness Act. This article is brought to you by the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). Read our other articles on the National Geographic Voices blog featuring the work of our iLCP Fellow Photographers all around the world.
Fifty years ago, The Beatles made their debut in the United States along with Pop-Tarts, G.I. Joe, and the television series Bewitched. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. Cassius Clay won his first world heavyweight title and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. And the most powerful earthquake in U.S. history rocked south central Alaska. But two events in particular that occurred in 1964 have had profound impacts on my life: 1) on May 14, I was born; and 2) on September 3, the Wilderness Act became law. As the last of the baby boom generation, I am too young to have come of age in the tumultuous and history-making 1960s and early 1970s.
Today, at 50, my long-term relationship with wilderness has deepened. With Style And Silo, 'Modern Farmer' Melds Agrarian With Urban Hip. If you cover food and farming, as we do, you end up looking at farm magazines and agricultural web sites. This means you see lots of articles about corn prices and ads for farm equipment. Then, a couple of years ago, Modern Farmer appeared. It's a farm magazine like no other. It flaunts a look and attitude that sometimes make us laugh out loud. What self-respecting farm magazine would come up with headlines like "Inside the Mind of a Turkey," or "Farmer Claims Someone Drove a Combine Into His Field and Stole $18,000 Worth of Soybeans.
" This is the seventh in a series of conversations on The Salt where members of NPR's food team chat with intriguing people in the food world. Ann Marie Gardner, Modern Farmer's CEO and editor-in-chief, in Hudson, New York, the town that's her home and the magazine's as well. Itoggle caption Courtesy of Modern Farmer Ann Marie Gardner, Modern Farmer's CEO and editor-in-chief, in Hudson, New York, the town that's her home and the magazine's as well. From a London Alley to the White House. By Louisa Thomas| It was hard for Louisa Catherine Adams, the only first lady born outside the United States, to say where she came from. She began her life in a narrow alley in London, in 1775, but she was taught not to think of herself as British.
Her mother, Catherine, was English; her father, Joshua Johnson, was a merchant from Maryland and an American patriot. When she was 3, after the American Revolution broke out, and when it was hard for a man like Joshua to remain solvent and safe in London, the Johnsons moved to Nantes, and Louisa’s earliest memories were in French. When she was 8, the family returned to England. She was told that she was American, but she was raised as English girls of her class were raised: for parties, for prettiness, for a husband. Her mother was happy with the match: If Joshua wanted their daughter to marry an American, how could Louisa do better than the son of the vice president of the United States?
Louisa had learned these lessons, but incompletely. Incredible New Artifacts Found In 2,000-Year-Old Mexican Tunnel. One interesting thing about this find is that The Temple of the Plumed Serpent (later known as Quetzalcoatl) is at the south edge of the central plaza area of Teotihuacan, away from the iconic Pyramid of the Sun (which is an amazing site and a tiring climb that is well worth it). It is the main feature of what is called The Ciudadela (The Citadel), which is considered to be where the royals and elite resided, so there is a good likelihood that if it leads to a tomb, it is a royal tomb. It's an absolutely gorgeous building btw. Flagged. Wild about Eating Wildly. Because of Ava Chin, I now photograph weeds and mushrooms that pop up after a rain.
Her memoir, Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal, has inspired me to ask, before I put on gardening gloves and tear something out by its roots, “But can I eat this?” As the The New York Times’ former “Urban Forager” columnist, Chin has been writing enthusiastically about her hunts for wild edibles for years, and Eating Wildly rounds up those tales and weaves them with personal stories. While we scan meadows and roadsides and trees with her to find her bounties, she tells us about her childhood in Queens, her challenging single mother, her devoted Chinese grandparents, and her plight as a single, 30-something woman for whom it’s much more difficult to uncover a loving partner than, say, prized morel mushrooms.
Her foraging adventures take us to most of New York’s boroughs as she digs up delectables in Staten Island, Ditmas Park, Fort Greene, and Flushing. Food: The hidden goop and gunge in what we eat. Many of our foods contain ingredients that seem like they come from dystopian science fiction, says Veronique Greenwood. Why are they there? In dystopian fiction, future food is often something else in disguise. Normal-looking burgers, cakes, or other foods are secretly moulded algae or vat-protein of some ilk, the idea being that we've run out of space or money to feed ourselves the usual way. In reality, this mass-produced food filler is already here. And it's not because we've outstripped our ability to grow or raise other sources of nutrition. There are a variety of food ingredients that could fall into this category, from gelatins to sausage meat slurries. Another future food – one that's wider spread yet perhaps less well-known – is made of soybeans.
After millennia of use in Asia, the soybean arrived late in the West. From a nutritional perspective, it's not a bad addition to ground beef and other meat products. It really is the future food of science fiction. Map Your Recipe - Where Does Your Favorite Food Come From? Last fall I shared a neat mapping tool called Map Your Recipe. Map Your Recipe allows you to enter a recipe to find out where the vegetables in that recipe were first domesticated. This week the developer of Map Your Recipe informed that the site has been updated to include etymology and current crop producers. To see your favorite recipe mapped for you, enter your list of ingredients then click "submit recipe. " If you don't have a recipe handy, you can try Map Your Recipe with one of the sample recipes listed on the site. Applications for Education As Thanksgiving in U.S. approaches next month, Map Your Recipe could be a fun tool to have students use to see where their favorite Thanksgiving foods originally came from.
To extend the activity you could have students use The History of Harvest to see the process that takes place to get food their dining room tables. Possible alternative to antibiotics -- ScienceDaily. Four timely facts about our biological clocks -- ScienceDaily. Step towards blood test for many cancer types -- ScienceDaily. In autoimmune diseases affecting millions, researchers pinpoint genetic risks, cellular culprits -- ScienceDaily.
What do American babies eat? A lot depends on Mom's socioeconomic background -- ScienceDaily.