My daughter Karen has joined the publishing family with her first book! Good Luck!
Here’s what we’re reading today:
“The prizes at the 28th annual ceremony at Harvard University were being handed out by real Nobel laureates. The event featured a traditional paper airplane air raid and the premiere of “The Broken Heart Opera,” performed with the help of Harvard Medical School cardiologists.
The winners, who as usual journeyed to Massachusetts at their own expense, also received a cash prize of 10 trillion virtually worthless Zimbabwean dollars. Each was given 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech before an 8-year-old girl complained onstage: “Please stop. I’m bored.”
Ancient Connection between France and England
“Scientists have for centuries believed that England, Wales and Scotland were created by the merger of Avalonia and Laurentia more than 400 million years ago.
However, geologists based at the University of Plymouth now believe that a third land mass—Armorica—was also involved in the process.
The findings are published in Nature Communications and follow an extensive study of mineral properties at exposed rock features across Devon and Cornwall.
“Dietary fiber promotes the growth of good bacteria in the gut. When these bacteria digest fiber, they produce short-chain-fatty-acids (SCFAs), including butyrate, as byproducts.
“Butyrate is of interest because it has been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties on microglia and improve memory in mice when administered pharmacologically,” says Rodney Johnson, professor and head of the Department of Animal Sciences at U of I, and corresponding author on the Frontiers in Immunology study.”
“Their study, supported in part by the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics and published in the European Journal of Public Health, found that when the results from twelve studies were pooled together, infants and children were 29% percent less likely to have been prescribed antibiotics if they received probiotics as a daily health supplement. When the analysis was repeated with only the highest quality studies, this percentage increased to 53%.
The findings are very intriguing, the researchers say. “Given this finding, potentially one way to reduce the use of antibiotics is to use probiotics on a regular basis,” says the study’s senior investigator, Daniel Merenstein, MD, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine.”
“Rhythms that are pulse-based differ from those that are pattern-based, and are processed differently in the brain, Kraus says. Pulsed-based tasks are associated with fast-language-processing skills like recognizing syllables; pattern-based tasks engage slower processes, like hearing one voice in a noisy room. “It is the rhythm in speech that helps you fill in the gaps in noise,” she says. Drummers are especially good at this, and nearly all musicians are better than non-musicians. “Making music strengthens language.””
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